29 - Religion

Summary

When in 1959 Richard Ellmann opened his biography with the statement ‘We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries’, he could not have known how much some of his readers were still part of the culture in which Joyce's books had been written. The world had changed, changed utterly, in the Second World War, but in the field of the religion in which Joyce grew up, these changes would only register a few years after the first edition of Ellmann's book. The start of Vatican II in 1962 marked the beginning of the Catholic Church's long-awaited coming to terms with modernity. Although this was probably good news for Catholics, one effect of this belated modernisation was certainly that the world described in Joyce's works became much more alien to Catholic readers. For these readers, passages in ‘The Sisters’, in Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in some chapters of Ulysses may well be as strange today as they always were for non-Catholic readers. When we want to read Joyce's works in their context, we must be aware that this particular religious past is even more of a foreign country than we might imagine.

When Joyce refers to the rites, traditions or doctrines of the Catholic Church, he is writing of the Church which, like the boy in ‘The Sisters’, he himself grew up in, and not of the Catholic Church of Pope Benedict XVI.