[Fr.] Francis Shaw, S.J.

Life
1907-1970 [Francis Joseph Shaw]; b. 16 January, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath; son of merchant in a leading family firm; suffered ill-health from childhood; ed. Mullingar CBS and Terenure College; became novice at Jesuit seminary of Tullabeg, Sept.1924; grad. UCD in Celtic studies, 1929 - inspired by Fr. Lambert Matthew at Rathfarnham Castle [SJ residence]; studied under Eoin MacNeill; winner of Mansion House post-grad. funding and received travelling scholarship; grad. MA in Celtic Studies, 1931; studied philosophy at Ignatius Kolleg, Valkenburg, (Netherlands [Holland]), 1930-32, studying under Eoin MacNeill and Osborn Bergin; also studied under Rudolf Thurneysen, at Bonn Univ., but returned home in ill health;

denounced Nazism in National Student, comparing Irish-language enthusiasts in spirit with that movement; issued edition of Aisling Oengusso (1934); prepared for priesthood in theological studies at Milltown and ord. 31 July 1939; became a professed Jesuit, 24 Dec. 1945, living at Leeson St. Jesuit house, 1940 until his death; served as Superior, 1945--51; and consultor of the Jesuit Province, 1947-49; appt. Professor of Early and Middle Irish, UCD, 1941, in succession to D. A. Binchy; member of Board of DIAS; strenuously opposed T. F. O'Rahilly's theory of two St. Patricks; lamented the dilution of Irish tradtional devotion by American popular culture and criticised Gone with the Wind in a pamphlet of 1942;

appt. Dean of Faculty of Celtic Studies, 1964-70; served interim as President of UCD on death of Michael Tierney but did not seek election; gained wider fame and notoreity with an article initialling entitled “Cast a Cold Eye’ and written as ’prelude to the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the 1916 Rising’, which was rejected by the then Studies editor, Fr. Burke Savage but circulated in typescript before appearing in Studies in Summer 1972 (then under new editorship); in it he imputed blasphemy to the leaders of the 1916 Rising in timing their action for Easter, with associated symbolic speeches and writings identifying the patriotic rebel with the sacrificial Christ - particularly castigating the four papers on physical force separatism and blood-sacrifice published by Patrick Pearse, 1915-16;

he also wrore about the inadequate attention made to Petrie, O’Curry and Johann Kasper Zeuss as fit heroes of Irish nationalism in place of more romantic figures and supporeted Edmund Curtis, Edward John Gwynn and Douglas Hyde - all Protestant contributors to Irish cultural studies; his political stance was shaped on that of his father, a Home Ruler and supporter of John Redmond and by his reverence for Eoin MacNeill, whom he described in a Studies essay afterwards included in the collection on MacNeill edited by F. X. Martin and John Francis Byrne (1977). d. 23 Dec. 1970.

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Commentary
David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester UP 1988): ‘During the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, in 196, the contradictions between past and present became apparent as the tall, near-blind figure of De Valera endorsed the aims of 1916 as synonymous with those of the State from a platform shared with the dynamo of the new policy, Seam Lemass. Had Father Francis Shaw’s article “The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge” (Shaw, 1972, pp.113-52) been published in 1966, as intended, the reassessment of economic nationalism would have bene shortly followed by that of nationalism tout-court. As it was, the article was held back by the editors of Studies, who feared that it spublication would strike a sour note on the anniversary of the Rising. Father Shaw’s article was not published until 1972 [...; p.140.]

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1996), pp.211-12: ‘What troubled Hogan [err for J. J. Horgan] and Father Shaw in the 1916 writings was their unapologetic invocation of Wolfe Tone and, by extension, the “godless” anti-Catholic rebels of the French Revolution. Father Shaw, [211] citing clerical alw, bjects to Pearse’s description of the Jacobin Tone as a prophet. (See further under Quotations, infra.)

Patrick Maume, ‘Fr Francis Shaw and the Historiography of Easter 1916’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review (2014), pp.530–51: Maume ’suggests that Shaw’s attitude to 1916 was shaped both by a European Catholic critique of revolutionary nationalism as a pseudo-religion, leading to idolatry of the state and thence to Nazi or communist totalitarianism, and by a more inchoate tradition of Irish Catholic “Whiggery”, which saw the fulfilment of Irish identity in the creation of a clerically-guided Burkean elite, to preside over an immemorially faithful and naturally deferential Catholic people. (p.530; available at JSTOR - online; accessed 20.11.2021.)

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Quotations
W. B. Yeats: Shaw writes that Yeats’s supposedly Irish inspiration found its basis in a pseudo-Oriental dream-world, far removed from anything properly called Celtic, and based on “much mutual borrowing and uninspired imitation’.” Fr. Shaw also took issue with Leavis’s view that Yeats’s Irishness made his dream-world “something more than private, personal and literary” and conferred on it “an external validation” (New Bearings in English Poetry, Faber 1932, p.34) - denouncing the poet for turning upstanding Irish heroes into effeminate dreamers and Anglicised lotus-eaters. Shaw goes on to assert that Yeats poetry did not express ‘national character and feeling’.

See further quotations under James Connolly [q.v.], J. Crofton Croker [q.v.], Sean Ó Suilleabháin [q.v.], Patrick Pearse [q.v.], and Wolfe Tone [q.v.]

W. B. Yeats: ‘The fact of the matter is that while Mr. Yeats went to [S. J.] O’Grady and Lady Gregory for his heroes, he went to the “Brahmin philosopher” and Madame Blavatsky for his inspiration. Is it not a little surprising to find “the great fountain of Gaelic Ireland” pouring forth, by some strange perversion, a pure stream of Oriental philosophy?’ (In Studies, March 1934, pp.25-41, and June 1934, pp.260-78. quoted in Roy Foster, ‘When the Newspapers have Forgotten Me ...’, in Yeats Annual 12, Macmillan, 1996, p.173.) [Check date.]

Patriot Christs: ‘Objectively the equation of the patriot with Christ is in conflict with the whole Christian tradition, and, indeed, with the explicit teaching of Christ.’ (Studies, Summer 1972, p.123; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.211.)

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References
Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge UP / RIA 2004; digitised 2009) - entry of Fr. Shaw by Patrick Maume: ‘Shaw attributed the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century to the efforts of ideologues to force common humanity into utopian projects. His scepticism of state power was influenced by contemporary catholic social thought, and he saw Irish identity as essentially catholic; but, though this forms a subtext in his 1963 article on the essentially Roman nature of early Irish spirituality and his analysis of the “Celtic twilight” of W. B. Yeats  as owing more to Macpherson’s Ossian (mediated through Arnold and Renan), the rhetorical inflation of Standish James O’Grady, and ‘the charlatan Blavatsky and Brahman philosophers’ than to the authentic past as revealed by Celtic scholarship, Shaw was not a bigot. Throughout his career he lauded protestant scholars such as Edmund Curtis, Edward John Gwynn, and Douglas Hyde; he admired Pope John XXIII and welcomed his attempt to open the catholic church to the world.’

Further: ‘In 1966 Shaw had concluded his essay by hoping that recent moves towards north-south reconciliation indicated that both parts of Ireland, north and south, as well as Ireland and Britain, might recognise their commonalities and join in preserving the best in their cultures from American commercial cosmopolitanism. The essay's publication six years later, at the height of the Northern Ireland troubles, coincided with intensive debate (associated with such figures as Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008)) about whether traditional Irish nationalist self-images had contributed to the conflict in Northern Ireland and threatened to unleash similar conflict in the Republic; this context gave the essay an explosive impact. An Irish Times editorial (11 September 1972) noted that Shaw's view of Pearse as a destructive ideologue comparable to Rosenberg raised awkward questions about numerous eulogies of Pearse as a model Christian patriot: 'Has every other cleric been wrong and only Father Shaw been right?' The Jesuits were accused by Cruise O'Brien of opportunism in suppressing Shaw's piece until it became convenient to distance the catholic church from militant nationalism (New York Review of Books, 25 January 1973), and by an Irish Press editorialist (1 September 1972) of re-enacting previous clericalist betrayals of Irish nationalism: 'The name of Pearse will easily survive this modern Shavian broadside. / Shaw’s essay has been subjected to extensive critique (Lyons, Lee, Ó Snodaigh) over its failures to place Pearse in context and to address the place of Irish protestants and unionists in Irish nationality; its dismissive attitude to republicanism and socialism; and its over-simplistic view that pre-1916 Ireland was a democracy. (Shaw also unduly minimises the political differences between Redmond and MacNeill.) It is still, however, regularly cited in debates about the relationship between nationalism and Irish historiography [...]’ (Maume, op. cit., 2009 - available online; accessed 23.10.2024.)

Notes
Namesake: Fr. Francis Shaw, S.J. (1881-1924), served in the British Expeditionary Force in WWI and was stationed at No.17 Casualty Clearing Station, France; later posted to Bombay (c/o Archbishop’s House), and to Mesopotamia, where he suffered malaria and dysentery. Shaw was formerly an orphan in the guardianship of one Fr. Fogarty (afterwards bishop of Killaloe). He was educated by the Christian Brothers and at St. Vincent’s, Castleknock before studying Engineering at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which he quitted in order to join the Jesuit novitiate in 1902. In that capacity he philosophy at Jersey and Stoneyhurst and later acted as Prefect and Master at Clongowes Wood, 1909-13. He taught at Mungret College (Limerick) after the war. In 1924 he died of cancer [ aetat 43]. He is credited with silencing British officers who disparaged the men of the Dublin Rising in 1916 [‘an icy frightened silence followed’]; also noted the number of Irish priests in Mesopotamia: ‘Mesopotamia is, of course, full of Irish priests... At Basra I went to Mass on 2nd February with a Father Farrell from Westmeath to the Syrian and Chalden Catholic Churches. ... An odd bit of news gets into our local press, The Baghdad Times.’ (See Flickr > JesuitIreland, ‘by Irish Jesuits’ - online; with photo port. in uniform, dated 24 Aug. 1916.)

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