From Emmit Larkin’s “devotional revolution” in Ireland (1850 – 1880) to the present day marks a sharp decline in the hold of institutional Catholicism over that country’s life and literary imagination. “Not quite dead and gone,” as Patrick Hannon puts it of Catholicism in Ireland, “but certainly looking poorly” (“Catholic Ireland?” The Furrow, 2016). While traditional Irish Catholicism has waned, spiritual self-identification and practice remain relatively high; in 2017, for instance, a Barna study of Irish youth aged 14-25 found that 41% engaged in prayer on their own. As the title of a 2025 article by Gladys Ganiel in Current History puts it, “Ireland Is Post-Catholic, But Religion Still Matters.”

This panel proposes to study how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish literature shaped and responded to an Ireland after Catholicism, building on and modifying recent work in Irish Studies, including Andrew J. Auge’s A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism (2013) and Gary Wade’s Seamus Heaney and Catholicism (2025), which have begun to outline a post-Catholic Irish poetics. While Auge and Wade study a process of selective Catholic inheritance in Irish poetry, participants on this panel range across prose works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to track the emergence of new spiritual formations in Irish fiction after the waning of Catholicism.

Annabel Barry in “Kate O’Brien’s Catholicizing of Protestant Poetry in The Land of Spices” explores a post-Catholic spiritualism in Kate O’Brien’s 1941 girls’ convent school novel, one among the first to represent Ireland’s emergent Catholic middle class. Barry identifies surprisingly salient educational scenes that center highly mediated encounters with early modern Protestant devotional and elegiac poetry. Yet, Barry contends, while critics have noticed O’Brien’s patterning of The Land of Spices after James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), they have not noticed her oblique citation of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), routed through allusions to John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1637), the poem Stephen’s students memorize in “Nestor.” Recontextualizing Milton through a Catholic modernist like Joyce, O’Brien signals her catholicizing—or universalizing—of Protestant poetry. Barry shows how O’Brien desacralizes Protestant literature to recuperate it as a resistant force against education’s instrumentalization by patriarchal Catholic nationalism in newly postcolonial Ireland, for a post-Catholic universal spiritualism.

In “Paul Lynch’s Pagan Prophet Song,” Jack Dudley points to a tension between the Catholic vocabulary of fall and redemption in Lynch’s 2023 Booker-prize-winning novel and the historical cycles of nationalist violence the novel narrates, finding beneath this surface a spiritual atavism reaching back to a pagan, pre-Catholic Irish religious imaginary. Catholic theology provided a teleological course to history, but Lynch’s pre-Catholic spiritual forces point instead to cycles, movements between flourishing and violent death. This contemporary novelization of cyclical history carries forward the critique of a linear, progressive modernity from W. B. Yeats’s occult, cyclical time in “The Second Coming” (1920) and A Vision (1925) as well as Joyce’s cyclical, Irish-myth shaped Finnegans Wake (1939) but sets it amid the post-nationalist pretenses of twenty-first-century Dublin. In doing so, Lynch uses pre-Catholic Celtic pagan chthonic and oceanic powers, enigmatic sacred animals, and images of darkness linked with Donn, a Celtic god of the dead, to explore a post-Catholic, pagan spiritual world, one that makes better sense of the seemingly endless repetitions of our time.

Finally, Ellen Scheible’s “Writing about Trauma through Spiritual Complexity: A Case for Sally Rooney” considers how James Joyce’s literary spirituality (and spiritualism in modernism in general) shapes contemporary Irish fiction, particularly the work of Sally Rooney. The literary realism that empowers Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) drove Joyce’s approach to spiritual diversity in modern Ireland, one that hinges on a rejection of Catholicism alongside an embrace of secular and polytheistic beliefs. The realism of modernist texts like Dubliners exposes societal gaps in religious sectarianism less through the aesthetics of artistic prose and more through the absence of commentary and explanation. Just as Dubliners offers a glimpse of a modern Ireland that was paralyzed by the monotheism of a repressive Catholicism, Sally Rooney’s fiction embraces an incomplete understanding of a "new" Catholicism as the current status of the Irish nation, challenging Ireland’s more recent embrace of progressive secularism as a signifier of achieved modernity.

Each panelist will present an 18-minute paper, allowing time for audience conversation. Our panelists represent a range of positions: graduate student (Barry), mid-career scholar (Dudley), and established and well-known authority in Irish Studies (Scheible), along with a presider who is also an established authority in Irish Studies (Liam Lanigan), with gender parity in two women and two men.