Bog Myrtle & Peat

They took a small herd of galloway cattle out to graze at Tory Island off the coast of Donegal. A priest was ready to bless the beasts when they arrived, and I read about it on the internet afterwards. The article explained how cows would improve the grassland habitat for corncrakes, and galloways were the best bet for all the reasons I know too well. At first glance, it seemed like the priest was mentioned as an afterthought, providing a little local colour to an already interesting story. I would have done the same myself if I had written the piece; discussions around conservation are often so heavily based on ecological theory that it’s valuable to remember that people matter too. That’s why even the most ardent rewilders have begun to use words like “heritage” and “community” in their proposals. What at first seemed like a profoundly misanthropic approach to conservation has come to accept that human stories cannot be erased, and now there’s often talk of people and jobs as part of conservation.

I have no authority to write about the Republic of Ireland. All I can do is react to what I find there, acknowledging that my travels in a Catholic country are largely an attempt to reflect and unpick my own hard-wired Presbyterianism. But in this case, I recognise that the priest on Tory Island was more than merely window-dressing. He was working, and his blessings were relevant to the people around him, even as Catholicism’s reach is fading in the west. I’ve been trained to say that blessings and rituals are all just “silly”. That’s what a Protestant upbringing will do, but I’m beginning to realise that if I roll with that initial surge of rejection and let it wash past me, a blizzard of more interesting questions arises.

In the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Patrick in Armagh, there’s a statue of St. Oliver Plunkett. Studying his hagiography, I learned that he was a seventeenth century Catholic archbishop who was hung, drawn and quartered for his Faith at Tyburn in 1681. He was the last martyr to be executed in England, and while his body parts were dispersed across Europe as relics for the next two and a half centuries, the man himself was beatified in 1920. For a long time, St. Oliver Plunkett’s head was kept on display as a relic in Armagh before it was moved to Drogheda. For curiosity’s sake, I was sorry not to see it. But instead of the literal bodypart, there’s now a bronze statue of the man himself at St Patrick’s.

Beside the statue is a notice which provides a little more context. It closes with a suggestion that visitors seeking a blessing from St Oliver Plunkett should consider walking three times around the plinth before rubbing his toe and making a prayer. Sure enough, the statue has a prominently exposed toe which glows dimly from the buffing effect of numerous rubs. Even as I sat nearby for an hour to stare at the stunningly beautiful cathedral interior, four people came and walked around the statue to rub its toe. Observance completed, every single of one of those people smiled or nodded to me and went back to their lives in the warm afternoon.

Southern Scotland is like an international headquarters for Puritanism. I never went to church much as a child, but what I know of religion is based upon the pursuit of ascetic minimalism. Within this straitjacket, the lights and brightness of modernity are interpreted as a steady, regressive slump towards darkness and the End of Days. When you look back to the History of the Church in Scotland, you find not only a strategic destruction of history, but also a steadfast rejection of what’s here and now. The focus is unerringly upon God as Creator, alongside a studied rejection of God’s Creation. That’s a top level, hard-line reading you might find in John Knox’s notebook, but in a thousand ways, it percolates down through the centuries to the modern lowlander, who regards their Faith as a constrictive, entirely abstract pattern of thought, lacking almost any physical manifestation.

Having escaped the urge to ascribe any sense of value judgement in the case of St Oliver Plunkett, I was deeply impressed by the discovery of that statue. I’m just not used to the physical apparatus of religion. As part of a powerful “creation myth” in Southern Scotland, we cherish the memory of hardline Covenanters who abandoned their churches and praised God in the hills, establishing extreme hardship as a religious virtue. That has resounded across the moors ever since, and there’s a certain school of modern Presbyterianism which regards a service held in the comfort of a church as sinfully lavish. These people (who are almost entirely men) would consider sleet and a high wind to be the sweetest and most appropriate accompaniment to prayer. Reflected against this, my head spins to find beautiful and compelling Catholic churches which are packed to the rafters with prayer equipment and the tools of worship. The buildings themselves are richly ornamented, comfortable places which are like a magnet for interested switherers like me.

But more than this, I was stunned to realise that the statue of St Oliver Plunkett was only installed in the Cathedral during 2019. It’s basically new, and yet it has been completely absorbed into the canon with no greater or less value for its modernity. I’m always slightly surprised by modern beatifications, but that’s only because my patchy understanding of Christian saints is largely confined to a short list of people who lived a thousand years ago or more (and who were either killed by unfeeling tyrants or assisted by magical otters). In my imagination, there’s little overlap between ancient folkloric figures and real people from documented history, so it takes a degree of readjustment to accept that both are equally ripe for sainthood.

What’s more, this statue of St Oliver Plunkett was invested with specific significance by the current Archbishop Eamon Martin. That’s what made it valuable, and in a timeframe so recent that I can even tell you what I was doing on the day it was consecrated. It all seemed to communicate a sense that the Roman Catholic faith is deliberately engaged in the process of sustaining itself; a machine that’s still running; a story still writing itself. Perhaps that also helps to explain how a priest was involved in the blessing of those cows on Tory Island, even at a time when Ireland seems to be moving away from Catholicism. Measure that dynamism against my own Presbyterian credo that within the confines of a darkening world, nothing will ever change until Judgement Day. It’s not surprising that I peer so intently through this knothole in the fence.

None of this is groundbreaking stuff. It’s obvious that the boundary lines and divisors which lie between Catholicism and Protestantism go further than I could perceive from a single afternoon in Armagh. But perhaps the point of this note is only to mark that sense of openness which has become steadily more valuable to me over the past few months. Access to religion is often couched in binary terms, and the price of admission is Belief. Unless you’re willing to buy into that central, solitary precept, the implication is that you cannot have access to any of the associated intrigue. But I don’t believe in God, and I’m glad that doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation.

Picture: Inside Armagh Cathedral, 4/8/22