The Sign of The Cross - Reviews
Though Ireland's special relationship to Catholicism is not the subject of Colm Toibin's account of his pilgrimage through Catholic Europe, it provides ``The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe'' with an emotional and intellectual starting point as well as an overall context. Toibin, an Irish journalist and novelist (``The South'' and ``The Heather Blazing''), begins this observant, at times evocative travelogue at home in Enniscorthy, a small town in County Wexford, in the southeast corner of Ireland. There he ponders the relationship between his emerging sense of self as a child and the rituals of the Catholic faith, embodied in the mid-19th century cathedral that dominates the town. More loyal to Rome than most of Catholic Europe, Irish Catholicism still retains elements of its earlier history of Celtic separateness. Something of its original pagan wildness can be seen in Toibin's account of the yearly pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick, a steep, stony mountain set in the bleak boglands of County Mayo. TRACES ROMAN EMPIRE But Toibin ranges far beyond his native soil -- to Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and, nearer to home, Scotland and England, as he traces the outlines of the old Roman Empire, observing the workings of the equally extraordinary structure, the Catholic Church, that replaced it. It is a system of beliefs that manages to appeal to intellectual Germans, left-wing Spaniards and Eastern European peasants -- a miracle of adaptability, considering the supposed rigidity of its central tenets. But in the end he returns to his starting point, and the tangled history of Catholicism in Ireland. Toibin's hometown cathedral was partly built with subscriptions form the local Catholic middle- class donors in 1846. ``The cathedral is the beginning of real, imaginable time,'' Toibin writes, not only for him, but in a profound sense for the town itself. Between the 17th and mid-19th centuries, Irish Catholicism was an outlaw religion, driven from the public world by the Penal Laws, which England imposed, and which prevented Irish Catholics from acquiring the means to rise above their lowly station as a conquered and disenfranchised people. The building of Catholic churches had been stopped. Their re-emergence meant that Catholics had reclaimed the public sphere and their historical traditions as they struggled to establish a sense of national identity. For the Irish Catholic, national identity remains intertwined with religion to this day. In the course of this odyssey that takes Toibin back to his starting point, as all such voyages do, Toibin describes encounters at shrines and processions and masses with charm, in an understandable style that conveys the author's curiosity, skepticism and good-humored inquisitiveness about what he sees. But after all his far journeying, he is most struck by the strangeness of Catholicism -- not in Croatia or Ukraine -- but in Ireland's neighbor and former conqueror, England. DEVOTION TO SAINTS Meeting with a no-nonsense junior minister in the English Conservative government who is a convert to Catholicism, he asks her about her devotion to the saints (a crucial part of Catholic worship). ``They don't get a look in,'' she replies in a brisk manner. One certainly can't imagine this lady crawling on her hands and knees up the slopes of Croagh Patrick in an Irish drizzle, Toibin says, or kneeling before a shrine to the Madonna in the blazing heat of an Italian noon. And yet, she is a Catholic, and that complex system answers to her needs at some level. As anyone who was raised a Catholic knows, it is exhilarating to feel at home, say, in an Italian village, though you come from a far country, speaking a different language, simply because you understand the emotive symbols all around you. Their shrine is your shrine. Toibin's account of his pilgrimage encapsulates a bemused sense of wonder at this universality, with all its contradictions and paradoxes.
Copyright © San Francisco Chronicle
|
