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Religion and Nation: The Architecture and Symbolism of Irish Identity in the Post-war British Catholic Church

This book chapter explores the tension between the status of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain as of largely immigrant origin – especially as of Irish origin – and the desire of the Church to achieve an acceptable and establishment status for its members by limiting expressions of Irish identity in favour of signs of Britishness. The research draws on studies of Catholic education which demonstrate how Irishness was marginalised elsewhere by Church authorities, and uses detailed historical analysis of several case study church buildings to show the interplay between Irishness and Britishness in operation in the creation of church architecture and its accompanying symbolic programmes. Primary research included work in church archives in Birmingham, London and Liverpool. The essay was written in order to test how well this argument could be worked out through the evidence, as part of Proctor’s larger research project on Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain from 1955 to 1975. The research for this book chapter was partly funded by a research grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Architecture, and led to Proctor’s award in 2011 of a major AHRC Research Grant for a monograph on the subject to be published in 2013. The essay was first presented as a conference paper at the second Theoretical Currents conference at Nottingham Trent University in 2010, after which it was invited for publication along with a selection of other papers by the conference organisers in an edited book, Nationalism and Architecture, published by Ashgate. The book seeks to present the current state of the discipline on this important subject; Proctor's essay sits alongside others on Irish architecture, and has thematic connections to others in the collection through such aspects as ritual in relation to identity, symbolic building materials and iconography.