Community, family and religion as factors behind Irish Catholic endurance during the First World War

The process of controlling disempowerment in wartime has attracted considerable attention. Both religion and superstition are widely acknowledged to have shaped the psychological abilities of combatants seeking to control the fundamentally disempowering conditions of military service, as well as helping civilians stay the course when separated from those who joined up. This article adopts a cultural historical approach to develop the thesis that religious belief bolstered endurance in the Great War. It explores how different properties of Catholicism assisted the mental coping strategies, motivation, and stamina of Irish Catholic chaplains and combatants serving with the British and Imperial Forces, as well as their families. Catholicism was well-suited to enabling endurance through the malleability of its belief structures, a strong devotional material culture, and the internationalism of the institution itself that had for centuries fostered strong networks of the faithful. Many of these elements intersected with local, national and fraternal connections, boosting morale and motivation whilst also helping individuals manage their emotions in times of great uncertainty. The concept of the family is especially important when thinking about endurance. Chaplains provided peace of mind to troops and anxious families, in a sense acting in loco parentis in the dysfunctional circumstances of war, while kinship networks, brotherhood and communities made through the medium of faith were remade in extraordinary times across the civilian-combatant divide, subverting boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘front’. A strictly confessional approach to investigating a majority national grouping reveals elements of endurance that were peculiar to Irish Catholics, helping to explain why large numbers of people, in the absence of conscription and amidst a constitutional revolution, continued to endure the war until its conclusion. However, the findings also reveal that the coping strategies adopted by many people bore similarities to how Catholics elsewhere across combatant nations coped with the war, suggesting the Irish Catholic ‘war experience’ was less exceptional than it may seem. Similarities and differences are highlighted between how Irish Catholics, members of other Christian denominations, as well as the faithless attempted to gain control over their fates or the fates of loved ones. But the centrality of faith to mediating uncertainty between home and front, and the importance of the chaplain as divine mediator, demonstrate religiously specific processes were at play in controlling the uncontrollable.