The Fallen Sex Revisited: Imperfect Celibacy in Mary Rose Callaghan’s A Bit of a Scandal

Abstract

On an international scale and for nearly a century, the projection of Irish cultural difference rested chiefly on the island’s unique attachment to religion. In the Republic, debates about the grip of Catholic discourses upon the articulation of post-colonial and nationalist consciousness have taken place across the broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (Kenny; Fuller Irish Catholicism and ‘New Ireland’; Inglis Global Ireland, Moral Monopoly and ‘Religious Field’; Ferriter). Critics, artists and authors have widely stressed the imbrications of the Catholic Church and the State for the enactment of legislation and political sovereignty, thus raising troubling questions about the extent of Ireland’s theocratic status. Yet, there is an added dimension of the monopoly of the Church in Ireland that is equally engaging, and it has to do with the collision between the institutional power artefacts of Catholicism and the personal encounters people have with them. The tension is by no means exclusive to Ireland, or the Catholic Church, but it is certainly quite apparent in this case, on account of the idiosyncrasy mentioned above and the contemporary transformation of religiosity and the secularization drive that the island has experienced in the past decades, which have all resulted in the decline in people’s interest in organized religion.¹

The author wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for the writing of this essay (Research Project FEM2010-18142).