Catholic & Protestant Church interiors

tabbey wrote: »

It is only RC churches in Ireland which fail to honour their war dead. This is because of the anti-British sentiment which haunted Ireland from 1918 onwards.

French and Belgians do not have that problem so rightly commemorate their dead in catholic churches.

Might have something to do with the fact that it was not Irelands war...

Ursus Horribilis wrote: »

There's a BBC series called Churches - How to Read Them which is pretty interesting. The fourth episode is about the Reformation and about 15 minutes in, he talks about how they destroyed stained glass windows, broke screens etc.

I vaguely remember an RTE(?) series on church architecture during the 1980's, can't think for the life of me what it was called. It had very haunting music played during the end credits.


One thing, what's with the Marian fixation in RC churches and RC monuments in general?

tabbey wrote: »

It is only RC churches in Ireland which fail to honour their war dead. This is because of the anti-British sentiment which haunted Ireland from 1918 onwards.

French and Belgians do not have that problem so rightly commemorate their dead in catholic churches.

You’re missing the big factor, which is that the C of I generally adheres to the Lutheran idea that praying for the dead is vain, whereas the RCs hold praying for the dead to be a holy and a wholesome thing. This profoundly affects how each church addresses the issue.

There’s a human need to deal with death, and while Anglicans (and Lutherans) don’t pray for the dead (what would be the point, they have been judged already?) they do remember the dead before God. A pretty fine distinction, you may think, but there you go. One of the ways they remember the dead is by erecting memorials in churches. Go into any English country church and you’ll find the walls festooned with plaques erected to the memory of (a) members of notable local families, and (b) former clerics or other people heavily involved with the parish. A few of these, particularly those from the notable local families, will have served the defence forces and may have died in service, and if so this will be mentioned, but mostly not.

Whereas Catholics pray for the dead, rather than erecting memorials to them - they arrange for masses, or mentions in masses, particularly at anniversary time. You’ll usually only find a memorial to a someone in a Catholic church if (a) he’s actually buried in the church, which is rare, or (b) he has paid for, e.g. a stained-glass window or an item of church furniture, in which case he may be mentioned as a benefactor on a nearby plaque. (Note that in this case he may not be dead, or may not have been dead when the plaque was erected.)

OK. With the Anglican tradition of memorial monuments to the dead, it wasn’t a big stretch when the community experienced communal grief, as in response to the Great War, to erect communal memorials to local people who had died in the war, or to members of a local regiment, or whatever. These memorials (if they listed names, which they didn’t always) would list everybody, whether or not a member of the parish, whether or not Anglican. This is natural and Christian, and it also reflects the tradition self-conception of the Anglican church as the national church, with a responsibility and role to the nation, including the non-Anglican part of it. Obviously this wasn’t quite as strong in Ireland as in England, with the Cof I having been destablished more than forty years before the Great War. But, still.

It’s unfair to say that Catholic churches don’t have war memorials because it was anti-British. They generally don’t have war memorials to the IRA, either, or to the Defence Forces of the state. Memorials to the dead are simply not part of the tradition of the Irish Catholic church, because (a) they didn’t need them - they could pray for the dead instead - and (b) they never - or, at least, not after the Reformation - filled the role that English churches did (and that the CofI did to some extent) of supporting and being connected with local landowning families.

Plus, yes, the Irish Catholic church, while it has often sought to influence the state, also maintains some distance from the state. It’s extremely rare, for instance, to see the national flag displayed in an Irish Catholic church, whereas it’s quite common to see that in Catholic churches in other countries. The Catholic church in Australia has special services and liturgies for secular, political holidays - Anzac Day, Australia Day, Remembrance Day - and the same is true in other countries, but I have never seen that in Ireland. And so forth. This may be a relic of the Irish Catholic church’s “outsider” status in British days; it may also reflect a wariness of becoming embroiled in political or party controversy; or it may reflect a distaste for anything which smacks of submission to or endorsement of the state. Whatever the reason, the phenomenon is undeniable.

Avatar MIA wrote: »

Think this thread has lost its way...

bit like the Protestant Church :pac::P

How so? It may have lost numbers, but is still thriving - in this neck of the woods anyway.

One of the best things about digging with the wrong foot is the lack of the confession box; I would be a complete heathen by now if we had them.

They do make great movie props though - below is a scene from the 1970 movie "Underground" shot inside St.Aidans Cathedral in Enniscorthy.



Left to right: Robert Goulet, Carl Duering, Joachim Hansen.

Now that's what I call going off topic.!

Couple of points:

There's no question on religion in the French census (what with the State being laïque and all) but there is of course other social research on the subject, which shows that about 50% of the population claim a Catholic affiliation, about 4% other Christian, about 5% Muslim and about 1% Jewish. Religious practice is harder to measure, and partly depends on your definition of "practice", but certainly regular church attendance is well below these figures. But that's pretty typical for Europe.

As regards weddings, a church wedding isn't an alternative to the mairie; it's an addition; you have to get married in the mairie; you can have a subsequent religious (or non-religious) ceremony if you wish, but this has no legal significance. The number of Catholic church weddings is about 50% of the number of mairie weddings every year; when we discount those who can't have a church wedding (e.g. because they are remarrying after divorce, or because neither of the couple is a Christian) it seems that the substantial majority of those who can choose a church wedding, do. So this isn't really the preserve of the aristocratic remnant.

As regards schools, the state schools are a largely religion-free zone, but the State also funds private schools, nearly all Catholic, provided they teach the state curriculum. They do charge fees, but are fairly affordable and about 20% of high school students attend these schools - a minority, clearly, but not a trivial minority.

The laïcité of the State notwithstanding, the French make a distinction between the republic, which is laïque, and the French nation/French culture/French society, which is diverse and pluralist, but historically has a distinctive connection with Catholicism. Catholicism is seen as the characteristically French religion in much the way that Anglicanism is in England, Presbyterianism in Scotland, Orthodoxy in Russia, and this does give the Catholic church in France a social/cultural significance which is more than it would have simply as the largest of a number of non-established churches.

Pedroeibar is quite right to say that the state-sponsored memorialisation scheme for the French dead of the Great War did not involve the churches; this of course is because of the tradition of laïcité, so it's not an example of the church distancing itself from the state; more the other way around. Something similar was true in Italy, which although an overwhelmingly Catholic country was at the time at odds with the papacy. (They had a bit of unfinished business over the seizure of the Papal States.) During the war itself, and during the 1920s when monuments were being erected, the two were at odds and, once again, this resulted in not many war memorials being located in churches. From the late 1920s onwards war memorialisation efforts became increasing politicised by the Fascist government,and this made them increasingly controversial and therefore even less likely to be associated with churches.

What this suggests is that, overall, the question of whether war memorials will be located in churches isn't mainly driven by the attitudes of the churches. It's driven first and foremost by the bodies erecting the memorials, which are mostly state or political bodies. With Anglicanism's traditionally close, and traditionally somewhat subservient, relationship with the state, locating monuments in Anglican churches was relatively unproblematic, although in Ireland it did acquire a certain political significance, given what was going on here in the 1920s.