‘Joe’s No Saint’ – urban Catholicism in mid-20th-century Ireland.

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In one of my earliest blogs on this site I wrote about two of John D.Sheridan’s novels from the 1940s, and I mentioned this long poem in passing. I was reminded of it again recently when, in my research into Catholic writing in mid-20th-century Ireland (as part of my ongoing Alice Curtayne project), I re-read Neil Kevin’s I Remember Karrigeen. His vivid, loving descriptions of a thinly-disguised Templemore in the early twentieth century sent me down another rabbit hole to read Liam Maher’s scholarly biography of the author, I Remember Neil Kevin (1990).

Neil Kevin (who was a priest and a professor of English literature in Maynooth seminary/university) wrote his MA thesis in the 1930s on Matthew Arnold, and John D.Sheridan also held an M.A. in English literature, from UCD, where he was taught by Timothy Corcoran SJ. Liam Maher was initially taught by Kevin in Maynooth, but finished his education in UCD, where he did an MA on John Millington Synge. Sheridan and Maher wrote or edited school textbooks for the Educational Company of Ireland and Folens, respectively, so anybody who went to school in Ireland in the 1940s, 50s or 60s came under the influence of these men, who had been in turn influenced by Neil Kevin, Timothy Corcoran and other priests, men of deep rather than broad scholarship, who were nonetheless capable of flashes of independence. When a ‘prominent ecclesiastic’ (probably Archbishop McQuaid) objected to something literary critic Terence de Vere White published in serial form in the newspaper in the late 1940s, prior to its appearing in a book, his publishers were all for excising the ‘offending’ material, but Neil Kevin – to whom he wrote for advice – told him not to change a word.

John D.Sheridan belonged a world where Catholicism reigned supreme but where literary scholarship offered the best chance of, if not outright dissent, then a certain freedom of thought. In his novels and essays he is not afraid to deplore clericalism, hypocrisy and other excesses of the Catholic Ireland of his day. A highly intelligent and well-read Catholic, he knew that goodness and by association, holiness, consisted of more than practise and devotion. That is why I am critical of his famous poem, ‘Joe’s No Saint’.

The poem appeared in a collection published in 1949, which went into several editions. I have ‘attached’ it here at the top of this blog, a little uneasy about the legality of doing this; if it doesn’t open you can google it. The poem’s narrator is talking about his workmate Joe. They work at a bench together in some workshop or factory in Dublin city. When I read the poem first I formed the impression that they were working in the CIE depot, because Conyngham Road is mentioned by the narrator as being on his way to work, but that just means he’s coming in that way from Islandbridge or Chapelizod or Palmerston. The man the poem is about, Joe, comes from Upper Whitehall on the north side, and gets a 7.30 bus to O’Connell Bridge from Gaeltacht Park, where he has heard 7 o’clock Mass and received Communion. We know this because the poem’s narrator sees him ‘munching his bread and cheese/when I’m getting into my dungarees.’ Fasting from the night before was a precondition for receiving Communion until Vatican 2, so Joe takes his breakfast on the hoof with a flask of tea. Work starts at 8, so the workplace must be somewhere within walking distance of O’Connell Bridge, the destination of Joe’s bus.

Joe’s claims to sanctity – or, properly speaking, his workmate’s claims for sanctity on Joe’s behalf, which take the form of a denial of such sanctity – are based solely on this daily Mass-going. He is, according to his friend, bad-tempered on a regular basis (‘Days he’d bite the nose off his mother’) and fond of more than one pint (‘And when I call for a pint of plain/Joe’s not slow with ‘the same again’). He isn’t particularly charitable – gives ‘the odd bob to the poor and needy’, that’s about it. So Joe doesn’t represent himself as a religious person, doesn’t talk about religion or the Gospel of anything like that. But he ‘gets’ Mass every working day, getting up half an hour earlier to do so.

The narrator, on the other hand, sees himself as an indifferent Catholic. He goes to his weekly Confraternity ( a religious organization for worship and preaching), says a few prayers on the bus on his way into work, and owns a rosary beads, although they get ‘an easier time than they should’. It goes without saying that he goes to Mass every Sunday – he couldn’t be in the Confraternity otherwise. In most other Catholic countries in Europe in the 1940s and ’50s a working man going to weekly Mass would have been seen as unusually devout. In Ireland this was the bare minimum – for urban Catholics anyway. Joe’s everyday Massgoing was only possible in an urban environment. Rural churches had weekday Masses,of course, but usually only one – they wouldn’t have had the congregants for more than one, and getting to Sunday Mass, not to mind daily Mass, was difficult enough for most rural-dwellers before cars and public transport. City and even suburban churches, had at least two and sometimes more daily Masses. Urban Catholic practice is well-described in Sile de Cleir’s book.

Getting back to the poem, the narrator concludes by hoping that when his time comes St Peter will let him into Heaven on the strength that he worked at a bench alongside Joe. Of himself he says ‘I don’t do much harm and I don’t do much good’. But he hasn’t told us that Joe does much good either.

Those of us born in the 1950s and ’60s can remember very good people who went to Mass daily, but we can also remember bad-tempered and violent elders who thought self-denial, ‘prayer’ and rigid adherence to daily practice let them off the hook for kindness and self-control. ‘Joe’s No Saint’ is beguiling in its rhythms and images, but it exemplifies a lot that was downright bad about twentieth-century Irish Catholicism. It is also disappointing that a Catholic intellectual of Sheridan’s stature, a man with all the resources of literature and learning at his disposal – a man who corresponded warmly with a banned novelist like Maura Laverty – couldn’t envisage a more all-round form of ‘sanctity’ for the working man.

John D.Sheridan, Joe’s No Saint and other poems (Dublin: Gill 1949).

__________’We’re not dead yet’ in John A.O’Brien (ed.) The Vanishing Irish (London: W.H.Allen 1954). In this essay Sheridan criticises over-emphasis on clerical and religious vocations to the detriment of marriage.

Neil Kevin, I Remember Karrigeen (London: Burns, Oates and Washburne 1944).

Liam Maher, I Remember Neil Kevin (Roscrea 1990).

Sile de Cleir, Popular Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland: locality, identity and culture (London: Bloomsbury 2017).

Letter from John D.Sheridan to Maura Laverty in Laverty’s papers in the National Library.