Say Nope to the Pope: performance and resistance in the creative interventions during the 2018 papal visit to Ireland

ABSTRACT

In September 1979, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, made a historic pastoral visit to Ireland where he celebrated an open-air mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to an estimated 1,250,000 people, a third of the country’s population. In August 2018, Pope Francis returned to Ireland, though the second papal visit was met with a series of protests and a lower-than-expected turn-out at the public mass in Phoenix Park. In the intervening years Ireland underwent broad social changes and the credibility of the Catholic Church, once the bedrock of morality in Ireland, was eroded by scandals revealing the depths of clerical sex abuse and abuse in Catholic-run institutions. This article considers the creative protests and interventionist actions that marked the 2018 Papal visit, using Judith Butler’s Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) to think through these public actions. Focusing specifically on Say Nope to the Pope and the associated events of Stand 4 Truth, it explores these public performances of protest grounded in solidarity and resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative activism
• performance
• Catholic Church
• Ireland
• protests

Introduction

In September 1979, the newly elected head of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, made a historic pastoral visit to Ireland, the first pontiff to do so. The pope celebrated an open-air papal mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park with an estimated 1,250,000 people in attendance, a third of the country’s population at that time. At a youth mass in Galway, he proclaimed to an exuberant crowd: “Young People of Ireland – I Love You!” Thirty-nine years later, in August 2018, when Pope Francis returned, with decidedly less fanfare, the second papal visit was marked by protests, public outrage and a significantly lower than expected turnout for the papal mass with only 151,875 people as compared to the projected 485,000 person event capacity. In the intervening years, Ireland underwent broad social changes such as the legalisation of birth control, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and constitutional referendums on divorce, marriage equality, and abortion. The credibility of the Catholic Church, once the bedrock of morality in Ireland, crumbled as the depths of clerical sex abuse and abuse in Catholic-run institutions were revealed.

This article explores the public protests and creative interventions that accompanied the 2018 papal visit, understanding them as performances of solidarity and resistance that engaged politics, aesthetics, and embodiment. Protest is performative, for it is “both an act and an enactment.”¹ In the overlap between politics and art, Elspeth Tilley identifies “creative activism” as: “anything that uses the tools of art to try to move us closer to a more ethical world.”² The creative activism of those who protested the State-funded papal visit saw this as an opportunity for further calls for social justice, imagining a more ethical and just Irish society. This article contextualises the public protests and creative interventions by outlining the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland from 1979 to 2018 with reference to significant events that shifted public opinion and key cultural moments that drew public awareness to the power dynamics of injustices against some people in Ireland. I analyse the interventionist Say Nope to the Pope action, focusing on the dynamics of absence and visibility. I examine the creative activism of the Stand 4 Truth event with reference to the gathering itself, Grace Dyas’s spoken word performance I Believe You Before You Open Your Mouth and the silent march to the Seán McDermott Street Magdalene Laundry. This article reads these protests as both a compelling and urgent moment in recent Irish history.

Theoretical framework

This article adopts an interdisciplinary methodological approach to analysing the creative activism responding to the 2018 papal visit, offering a critical analysis of the gestures and events, informed by performance studies and visual culture. It is underpinned by a theoretical framework drawn from Judith Butler’s Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) on public performativity enabling an understanding of how these protests functioned during the papal visit. Expanding on her original theory of performativity to encompass the political performative, Butler states that people assembling in physical or virtual public spaces “exercise a plural and performative right to appear …”³ Political performativity is embodied and includes “Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence …”⁴ For Butler the public assembly of a crowd gathered in protest “embodies the insight that this is a social condition both shared and unjust.” Teasing out the dynamics of the interventions, I consider how Say Nope to the Pope contested existing power relationships while public commentary in media and online attempted to delegitimise the protest. I explore Stand 4 Truth as a performative public assembly that made specific demands for truth, justice, and love. Examining I Believe You Before You Open Your Mouth, I draw upon Mona Lilja’s ideas about resisting bodies. I consider the bodily dimensions of affect in the silent march to the Seán McDermott Street Laundry and how it engaged Clara Fischer’s “affective vulnerability.” As both a participant in and witness to this creative activism discussed in this article, I situate my embodied witnessing of emotion and affect to understand these performances of protest. In witnessing socially engaged performance, a “politically engaged embodied act of meaning making,” the witness becomes “part of the complex, diffuse, and powerful social function of engaged performance.”⁵ Emotion offers a way to witness the performative in the political holding the potential to “reconfigure the norms of visibility through which the political understands itself.”⁶ Affective witnessing is both embodied and social, foregrounding emotion, affect, and the relationality between bodies.⁷ In doing so, it engages with these protests, while also capturing these events to “be witnessed in other times and places,” extending their power beyond that which occurred on the day.⁸

The shifting power of the Catholic Church in the late 20th and early 21st century

In order to understand the interventions of the papal protests, I contextualise them against the shifting power of the Catholic Church at the end of the 20^th century. The Republic of Ireland, since the foundation of the Irish State (1922), was considered a Catholic country, with Catholicism being a defining element in Irish national identity. The Catholic Church wielded huge power as the primary institution largely responsible for the provision of services of social welfare and health including education, hospitals, industrial schools, and reformatory institutions, some of which had pre-dated Irish independence, with the State delegating its responsibilities for its citizens to the Church. The Constitution of Ireland (1937), drafted with input from the powerful Archbishop John McQuaid, recognised the Catholic Church as the protectorate of the faith of the nation, a section removed by popular referendum in 1972. When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, his visit was concerned with peace and reconciliation, specifically the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and spiritual renewal, responding to the growing disengagement of younger generations.⁹ The national census figures between the two papal visits illustrate the shifting status of Catholicism in Ireland. The 1981 census figures recorded that 93.1% of the population identified as “Catholic” with only 1.1% “no religion,” while the 2016 census figures indicated 84.2% “Catholic” and 9.8% “no religion,” with the most recent 2022 census figures recording further development of this trend with decreases to 69% “Catholic” and an increase to 14% as “no religion.”¹⁰

There are a number of factors contributing to the decline of Catholicism in the late 20^th century including Ireland’s entry into the European Union, the relative lateness with which Ireland experienced secularisation as compared to its European counterparts as well as the decline in religious vocation.¹¹ Ireland underwent rapid transformation from the high rates of unemployment and emigration in the 1980s to the prosperity of the “Celtic Tiger” period in the 1990s, when it transitioned from being one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of its richest. Ireland shifted more in line with other European countries with the election of President Mary Robinson (1990), the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1993), and the legalisation of divorce (1996). The extreme economic growth redirected people’s social behaviours towards consumption-related activities away from religious activities accounting for declining Church attendance from 1988 to 2005.¹² Although Polish, Filipino, Nigerian, and Lithuanian migrant communities contributed to a renewal of the Catholic Church in Ireland, on the whole, the relationship between the Church and Irish society remained one of a cultural and historical presence rather than a deeper religious commitment.¹³

The Catholic doctrines on sexual morality strongly opposed contraception, divorce, and abortion, as to permit them would lead to widespread moral decay. Such was the role of Catholic Church in Irish society that State social policy was dominated by Catholic ethos in areas of healthcare, education, and social services.¹⁴ While it appeared there were changing attitudes on contraception, with it being first legalised for bona fide family planning for married couples, signed into law only a few weeks before the papal visit (1979), and later condoms becoming available over the counter for over 18s (1985), this was perhaps not as straightforward as a liberalisation of societal attitudes. The timing of Pope John Paul II’s visit, hardly coincidental, sought to reinforce “Ireland’s distinctive moral code.”¹⁵ Abortion was already long prohibited under the Offences Against the Person Act (1861), but fearing the liberalisation and secularisation happening elsewhere, conservatives pre-emptively inserted the 8th Amendment (1983) into the constitution, making abortion access nearly impossible without further referenda. Reflecting on this and the failed 1985 divorce referendum, it was the Catholic laity that sought to defend traditional Catholic values for as Daithi Ó Corráin writes: “In both campaigns, lay Catholic conservatives, emboldened by the papal injunction to adhere strictly to Church teachings, took the lead rather than the bishops.”¹⁶ The public controversies around the dismissal of teacher Eileen Flynn from her job for having a child outside marriage (1982); the death of Ann Lovett (1983), a 15-year-old girl who died giving birth in the Granard town grotto to the Virgin Mary; and the Kerry Babies Case (1984), in which a young mother Joanne Hayes was wrongly accused of double infanticide, demonstrated that Ireland was a harsh place for those who transgressed the strict boundaries of Catholic-imposed morality. Yet in the early 1990s, two scandals involving high profile priests Bishop Eamon Casey and Father Michael Cleary, both who fathered children, demonstrated emerging cracks in the Church’s unassailable moral authority. In 1994, a Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition government collapsed over the Attorney General’s failure to extradite Father Brendan Smyth, who fled to the Republic of Ireland after he was arrested for child sex abuse in Northern Ireland. By the mid to late 1990s institutional and clerical abuse scandals linked to the Catholic Church undermined the moral credibility of the Church.

In October 1992, musician Sinéad O’Connor sparked international outrage when she tore in half a picture of Pope John Paul II during a live appearance on the American television show Saturday Night Live. Concluding an acapella version of Bob Marley’s War, O’Connor said: “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil” and, to the dismay of those watching, destroyed the photograph. Facing fierce media condemnation, O’Connor defended her action explaining:

But they’ve been told lies, and they have to face the truth. […] There’s no way to tell people this truth without having them be poff. The fact is that people are asleep. They need a short, sharp shock. They need that to make them stand up and listen.¹⁷

The “truth” referenced here were the numerous and systemic injustices and abuse committed by Catholic-run institutions in Ireland. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford describes O’Connor’s gesture as located at the intersection of culture, politics, community activism, and art, existing on a “textual, cultural, and political continuum.”¹⁸ That particular photograph of the pope from the 1979 Irish Papal visit belonged to the artist’s mother and for O’Connor it represented “lies and liars and abuse.”¹⁹ Furthermore, in openly referencing her own experiences of abuse, O’Connor participated in the practice of “speaking truth to power” and used her status as public figure to call out the power dynamics between the moral authority of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and those who had been wronged by the Church.

Run by female religious congregations with little or no regulation from the State, Magdalene Laundries were punitive and carceral institutions where women and girls were sent to work in forced labour like laundries and other for-profit enterprises.²⁰ The Seán McDermott Street Laundry, the last of such laundries, closed in 1996. Mother and Baby Homes were related institutions where unmarried women and girls were confined during pregnancy to give birth and through which they were separated from their children, with most being forcibly adopted.²¹ Described as “coercive confinement,” O’Donnell and O’Sullivan identify that while the purpose of these institutions and others like industrial schools, reformatory schools, and mental hospitals were for “the welfare and reform of their inhabitants,” these were experienced as “degrading, stigmatising and punitive places from which easy egress was not possible.”²² The efforts of activists and advocacy organisations like Magdalen Memorial Committee, Justice for Magdalenes, Adoption Rights Alliance, and CLANN have meant that more has become publicly known about these institutions.

Probing television documentaries like Dear Daughter (1996), Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), States of Fear (1999), Suffer the Little Children (1999), Stolen Lives (1999), Suing the Pope (2002), and Cardinal Sins (2002) laid bare the injustices perpetrated by religious orders and Catholic laity in residential institutions and Magdalene Laundries including sexual, physical, and psychological abuses, with many individuals publicly detailing their own harrowing experiences. James M. Smith discusses the cultural significance of these stories:

… give force to a history that Irish society traditionally prefers not to acknowledge, and they break the culturally imposed closed ranks and silence typically accompanying such sensitive issues as rape, incest, illegitimacy, and domestic, physical, and sexual abuse.²³

Likewise, the BBC’s documentary Suing the Pope (2002), that centred the experiences of abuse survivor Colm O’Gorman and the institutional failings by Diocese of Ferns, initiated events that resulted in the establishment of the Ferns Inquiry.²⁴ Independent research commissioned by the Irish Catholic bishops, which in part examined the impact of reports of clerical child sex abuse on the general public, noted that Suing the Pope, airing half-way through data collection, was a turning point in “public understanding of who was responsible for abuse, both in terms of occurrence and management.”²⁵ Moreover, the media’s unyielding reporting of the abuse scandals contributed to the decline of the institutional Church.²⁶ Donnelly and Inglis identify the growth of the media and its reporting of such abuse as connected to the increased critical reflection and intense scrutiny of religious institutions.²⁷ Sinéad O’Connor’s protest gesture and the revealing television documentaries situate consciousness-raising to shift public opinion on the role of the Catholic Church in Irish society.

The turn of the 21st century saw a series of State inquiries into abuse in different dioceses and institutions across Ireland, the findings of which were made public in the Ferns Report (2005), the Murphy Report (2009), the Ryan Report (2009), and the Cloyne Report (2011), along with the later Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation (2021). The failures by the Catholic Church detailed in the Ferns Report amounted to:

a culture of secrecy, fear of causing scandal and the lack of understanding about the dynamics of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church had prevented clergy in the past from identifying and passing on information about child sexual abuse …²⁸

The public’s reaction to these reports ensured that discussions of abuse continued to circulate in the public domain.²⁹ The mismanagement of abuse claims by Church authorities demonstrated “an extraordinary absence of guidance or direction from Pope John Paul II for the bishops at the time” on such matters.³⁰ The Residential Institutions Redress Act (2002) established a Redress Scheme for survivors of some institutional abuse but attached a “gagging clause,” the condition that those who received compensation were prohibited from disclosing the details of that abuse. The official apologies on behalf of the Irish State including Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s apology to the survivors of Child Abuse (1999), President Mary McAleese’s apology to the survivors of Child Abuse (2009), Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s apology to women incarcerated in the Magdalene Institutions (2013), and Taoiseach Michael Martin’s apology to survivors of Mother and Baby Homes (2021) indicated the State’s acknowledgement of its failure to protect its citizens. On the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland Tom Inglis writes:

It was not just that these abuses took place under the watch of the Church, and that it was the very power of the Church in Irish society that enable priests and brothers to molest, abuse and rape children; it was also, of course, that in its response it became evident that the Church was more interested in protecting and maintaining its power than in protecting and compensating the innocent.³¹

This waning institutional power alongside economic, social, and cultural changes, combined with decades of feminist and queer activism, contributed to the success of the Marriage Equality referendum (2016) and the Repeal of the 8th Amendment (2018).

Since the 1970s, Irish feminist and LGBTQ activism scrutinised structural and systemic inequalities and challenged hegemonic norms, accounting for the status of gender and sexuality in Irish society.³² Feminists called for women’s and reproductive rights, raised consciousness about male violence against women and employed feminist pedagogies aimed at dismantling the political, economic, and social impact of patriarchy.³³ The cultural production of queer and feminist artists and writers critiqued and subverted patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony and imagined alternative futures. Transgressive public actions have long since been a feature of such activism for example the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s Contraception Train (1971) when feminists openly flouted the law to import illegal contraception from Belfast to Dublin. In 1980, the concrete base of the Papal Cross, erected for the mass in Phoenix Park (1979), was graffitied with a feminist symbol and the words “if men got pregnant contraception and abortion would be sacraments” in red gloss paint.³⁴ This action was publicly denounced by media and women’s health organisations, with journalist Mary Kenny, an IWLM member, labelling it as “blasphemy,” declaring “if grown women are going to behave like teenage football hooligans, then they must be treated like football hooligans and severely suppressed.”³⁵ Such response foreshadows the diverging opinions on what actions and interventions constitute legitimate expressions of protest.

During the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, gay and bisexual men were subjected to pathological discourses. This, combined with the Irish government’s delayed response and belated public health campaigns, meant that activist organisations led the way in vital support and sexual health education for the gay community.³⁶ In June 1988, the street performer The Diceman (Thom McGinty) enacted in front of Dáil Éireann what Tina O’Toole characterises as an act of public mourning at the pride week lesbian and gay kiss-in.³⁷ Wearing a white sheet covered with red blood and holding a sign that read, “What’s another queer? Murdered men, suspended sentence,” his actions referred to the pivotal homophobic murders of Declan Flynn (1982), the catalyst for the first Irish pride march, and Charles Self (1982) and to the stigmatisation of the queer body during this time. This subversive protest, like the “die-in” actions staged by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), resisted silencing and erasure, particularly important in a country where homosexuality remained criminalised until 1993.

Feminist activists, committed doctors, and sexual health organisations undertook creative actions in the 1980s and 1990s such as the Irish Family Planning Association selling condoms in the Virgin Megastore and the Condom Sense campaign forcing further liberalisation of the extremely limited access to contraception.³⁸ Irish student activism campaigned for both women’s and gay rights, educating and mobilised politically for increased access to contraception, decriminalisation of homosexuality, and advocating for abortion rights, including openly distributing abortion information in defiance of highly restrictive laws.³⁹ The Women’s Coalition Group staged SisterShip (1992), journey from Ireland to England with activists and their children recreating abortion seekers travel.⁴⁰ Art activists Speaking of IMELDA’s interruption of “Dissonant Voices of the Irish Diaspora” (2014), an event organised by Irish Catholic priests, highlighted the inhumanity of Ireland’s anti-abortion laws.⁴¹ Their “knicker bombing” of Taoiseach Enda Kenny with “knickers for choice” at a political fundraiser in London (2014), shared widely on social media, was a daring intervention. During Strike for Repeal (8 March 2017), a strike assembly of 10,000 people, blockaded the O’Connell Street bridge, disrupting traffic for several hours demanding abortion access. The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment held A Day of Testimonies (Project Arts Centre, 2017) featuring visual art, films, photography, and performances voicing the lived experiences of the reality of the restrictions on abortion in Ireland. The many creative artistic and political interventions, alongside legal challenges and public protests, driven by dedicated activists culminated in the successful Repeal of the 8th Amendment in May 2018.

While such political activism and creative actions provide the context for the performative protests discussed within this article, it also cannot be understated that in the wake of the Marriage Equality and Repeal victories, there was a palpable sense of a progressive new Ireland and the opportunity to harness the momentum of change. Yet, Irish society still grapples with the legacies of the above detailed injustices and it remains that Ireland has not fully separated Church from State, evident in the minimal divestment of religious school patronage, the remaining issues concerning the new maternity hospital ownership and lack of meaningful redress for institutional survivors. Given the landslide victory of Repeal, the timing of Pope Francis’s visit, when the majority electorate voted in favour of abortion, rejecting a major facet of Catholic morality, represents a compelling moment in recent Irish history.

Say Nope to the Pope

The 2018 Papal Mass occurred during the ninth World Meeting of the Families, a Catholic celebration and gathering of the Catholic laity held in Dublin from 21–26 August 2018. The mass was a free but ticketed event held on the grounds of the large public Phoenix Park, with tickets available online in advance. The event’s maximum capacity was 485,000 and it completely booked out weeks in advance. For crowd management, the National Transport Authority made public transportation within Dublin free for mass attendees. While there still appeared to be a draw for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the televised images of a much smaller crowd on the day told a different story. The Office of Public Works managed the event, providing an official count of 131,875 pedestrians with a further estimated 20,000 attendees who travelled by vehicle, bringing the total number to 151,875. Where then were the remaining 333,125 people with reserved tickets?

When tickets were released online in June, word circulated about Say Nope to the Pope, a public gesture where people booked tickets with the intention of deliberately not attending the event. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar labelled this as: “mean spirited, petty and not an official form of protest,” though he failed to elaborate on what constituted valid protest.⁴² Organisers of the Facebook group, Say Nope to the Pope, challenged this criticism asserting: “As Irish citizens, we were all entitled to a ticket to the papal mass if we wished. The taxpayer was funding this visit regardless of their faith …”⁴³ On the Australian current affairs television programme, The Project, Max Krzyanowski, a Say Nope to the Pope organiser, demanded the Vatican archives be opened to reveal the depth of knowledge the church authorities had on child sex abuse perpetrated within the Church. Calling on the organisation to “open the purse strings,” he noted that the Irish taxpayer had paid out 1.5 billion euros in survivor restitution and compensation, critiquing the paltry by comparison contribution of religious congregations, far less than had been anticipated. Identifying the purpose of this protest as “the healing of the vulnerable,” thus linked the Catholic Church’s acknowledgement of responsibility with the potential to contribute to survivor healing.⁴⁴

Say Nope to the Pope styled itself as a silent and peaceful protest, although discord arose with claims that people who booked the tickets were actively trying to prevent others from practicing their faith, or that some evaded the 12-ticket limit and block booked large numbers of tickets using fake names including Jesus Christ. There was broad condemnation from politicians, Tánaiste Micheál Martin hoped:

reports of people trying to get hold of hundreds of tickets, in order to block people from going, to the main events, are untrue, if such actions did occur they would be petty, they would be intolerant, and certainly the opposite of progressive.⁴⁵

Senator David Norris called it: “Extremely mean minded, I don’t agree with it at all, I have issues with the Vatican, but the way to deal with it is in a dignified manner, and not this kind of attempt to wreck the visit.”⁴⁶ Senator Jerry Buttimer labelled “the attempts to deny people to see Pope Francis is pathetic, it’s actually wrong.”⁴⁷ The protest was discredited as a denial of rights and protestors were cast as disrespectful, undermining “the right of ordinary families to go to Mass with the Holy Father, showing little respect for the right to religious freedom.”⁴⁸ An online poll by the Journal.ie found 71% “believed it was wrong to bin tickets for the Pope’s visit to the Phoenix Park.”⁴⁹ Yet charges of intolerance are perhaps a bit hypocritical in a country where secularisation remains unfinished. Presently, the Catholic Church is the patron of 89% of primary schools.⁵⁰ The “baptism barrier” that entitled state-funded Catholic schools to prioritise admission of Catholic children was only removed in October 2018, and while the transfer of patronage from the Catholic Church to non-religious governing patrons is underway, progress has stagnated.⁵¹

While activists initially spread the word through social media using the #Nopetothepope hashtag, the response from media drew further attention to the protest, potentially feeding further engagement with it. RTÉ Radio 1 chat show Joe Duffy’s Livelive featured a protester claiming to have blocked booked up to 700 tickets with callers angrily denouncing his actions. The Irish Post reported comments from the then public Say Nope to the Pope Facebook page: “A lot of older people won’t get another chance to see the Pope and your petty actions have denied them that chance. That’s other people’s parents and grandparents.”⁵² Comments like this assumed the protest was the work of the younger generation, rather than people of all ages. An article in the Irish Mirror described the action as: “Anti-Pope protesters are trying to stop people seeing him by ordering thousands of tickets for his visit.”⁵³ Framing the protest as a small number of petty individuals ordering a large number of tickets, attempted to delegitimise it as the work of a few bad actors. But for one woman, who booked a ticket for herself and one in the name of her birth mother, from whom she was separated from in a Mother and Baby institution, this was a valid protest:

There are no channels of protest within the church. The church is not interested in feedback. It’s not an organisation where you can fill in a questionnaire on its service. They do things their way and they’re really not interested in what you think about it.⁵⁴

A World Meeting of the Families spokesperson commented they “were aware of the boycott” and “robust systems” validated bookings.⁵⁵ However, on the day those systems were clearly not robust enough to impede this protest action. Describing it as a “boycott” draws an interesting parallel to the origin of the word which dates back to Ireland’s 1870s agricultural crisis when it became synonymous with a particular protest strategy. Enacted by Say Nope to the Pope, its meaning to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with a person or organisations to express disapproval, resonated deeply.

A survey conducted by Gladys Ganiel approximately a month after Francis’s visit found 80% of respondents had not attended events. Ganiel noted: “Thus, apart from practising Catholics, indifference outweighed indignation about abuse as a reason for not attending, although abuse is still the second most significant factor.”⁵⁶ Turpin describes an apathy amongst a portion of people who still continue to identify as Catholic but for whom Catholicism is largely irrelevant to their everyday lives. He observed that what Say Nope to the Pope “failed to realize was that it had never really been necessary to artificially drive down the number of attendees. While some had said nope, a larger number had already decided ‘meh.’”⁵⁷ While indifference might account for poor engagement across the multiple papal visit events, it seems unlikely that indifferent Catholics would make the effort of booking tickets. It remains a possibility that the majority of those empty spaces at the papal mass were those who clearly wanted to signal their opposition.

Visibility was important for Say Nope to the Pope, for the gaps in the crowd at the Papal mass demarcated the absent bodies of those the Church has wronged. Their absences and their refusals to participate in the State-funded pomp and circumstance of the Papal visit registered not only their disapproval but also visually asserted both to people present at the Papal mass on the day, and to television audiences worldwide, that the large numbers in Irish society no longer maintained nor tolerated the societal status quo. Hayward and Komarova write: “protest is a performative act of public communication that aims to contest the existing power relations and ‘the rules of the game’ that may be dictated by those in positions of authority.”⁵⁸ In the case of the Papal Mass, the authority was not only the hierarchy of the Catholic Church but also the Irish government hosting the State-funded visit. The “rules of the game” were the expectations that those who wanted to avail of a ticket to attend, would do so, and those who did not wish to attend, would not. In attempting to delegitimise this action as valid protest, the politicians and the media made clear that booking tickets to deliberately not attend contested existing power relations. Those involved with Say Nope to the Pope knew that the visibility surrounding the mass was critical; packed attendance would signal that the Irish were faithful Church followers, while absence functioned as a performative act of public communication that conveyed the refusal to participate.⁵⁹ Subversively, some who had tickets to the papal mass used them to take free public transportation to the alternative Stand 4 Truth event.

Stand 4 Truth

On 26 August 2018 at 3pm, a crowd of 5,000 people gathered on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, outside the Garden of Remembrance to stand in solidarity with clerical and institutional abuse survivors. The Stand 4 Truth event was put together by a small group of dedicated organisers including Colm O’Gorman, then executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, Clare O’Connor, Gary Dunne, Grace Dyas and others, all of whom are activists, and artists or creative directors that work closely with different communities. It began from a tweet sent weeks earlier by O’Gorman in response to the papal visit, growing into an event that featured contributions from O’Gorman, musicians Liam Ó Maonlaí, Brian Kennedy, Róisín O’Reilly, Susie Q, Lankum, Mary Black, Róisín O, Hozier, the Villagers, writer Marian Keyes, poet Sarah Clancy, theatre-maker Grace Dyas, and artist Will St. Leger. For the organisers, the purpose of this gathering was not a protest against the Papal visit but to create space for survivors that felt excluded by the main events.⁶⁰ It is clear, however, that each person attended with their own reasons, which might have been personal, political, in solidarity with others or a combination of all of those. The symbolism in timing the event to coincide exactly with the papal mass not only offered an alternative to the mass but can be understood as a type of protest because it was a collective public action that made specific demands (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Stand 4 Truth Event, 26, August 2018, Photograph: William Murphy/Infomatique (CC BY-SA 2.0).

For Judith Butler, the performativity of a public assembly transmits the “indexical force of the body” that appears in public visible to the media, when it acts in concert with other bodies, it asserts specific demands of what it is these bodies require whether that be employment, shelter, or healthcare.⁶¹ Survivors gathered behind advocacy group banners, while some came holding their own homemade placards such “Survivors First,” “Hey Pope Francis You’re Outta Chances,” “Pope Protects Paedophile Priests,” “No More Silence! The Truth is Out” and “Compassion and Compensation Now.” One person held a poster of Sinéad O’Connor tearing up the Pope’s picture bearing the words “No Gods, No Masters, Stand for Truth,” demonstrating that O’Connor’s action continued to have contemporary resonance. Pre-printed posters were handed out with yellow lettering “Truth, Justice, Love” against a bright blue background. The simple yet effective aesthetic of these posters conveyed in images broadcast through mainstream media depicted the collective bodies of this crowd unified behind this message, specifically it was these bodies that demanded truth, justice, and love. Butler writes that when bodies congregate in public space expressing indignation and insisting on their plural existence, they make broader demands “to be recognized, to be valued, they are exercising a right to appear, to exercise freedom and they are demanding a livable life.”⁶² Two nights before Stand 4 Truth, colour images of high-profile survivors and journalists who worked with survivors to break major stories of abuse with the hashtag #Stand4Truth were projected onto buildings throughout the city like the seat of the Archdiocese of Dublin, St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, the Department of Education and Skills and the former Department of Justice.⁶³ Projecting the bodies of these people onto the buildings of the institutions of the State served two purposes. First, it creatively drew mainstream media attention for Stand 4 Truth when the primary focus, particularly of the State broadcaster RTÉ, was the papal visit and enabled local and international news coverage of the event itself. Second, projecting the images onto the buildings owned by the Irish State and the Catholic Church insisted on the visibility of these bodies, their right to appear in public and to make demands for truth, justice and love, things which arguably contribute to what Butler terms as a liveable life. The scale of the larger-than-life projections, onto the surfaces of these buildings, articulated the fraught tension between individuals and institutions.

Stand 4 Truth united the bodies of the assembled public in collective resistance as an act of solidarity. Colm O’Gorman tweeted:

What happens to one of us happens to all of us …Today we respond to [the impact of abuse] with love. The most powerful way we can do that is by standing for the truth of what happened, standing for the truth that it matters now, by standing for the truth that it matters tomorrow and the day after and the day after and the day after.⁶⁴

The people that attended the Stand 4 Truth protest did so precisely because elsewhere across town others gathered for the mass which upheld the papal authority. For many, as the leader of the Catholic Church, the authority of the pope is symbolic of a system of patriarchy and oppression. In Phoenix Park, a collective body of believers gathered to share the Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion. Outside the Garden of Remembrance, people also gathered in communion, but one that was a collective act of sharing of thoughts and emotions. Of the Papal Mass it was noted: “In lieu of a public apology to abuse survivors in Ireland, the Pope instead prayed to God for forgiveness during Mass at the Phoenix Park.”⁶⁵ When people who attended Stand 4 Truth shared their impressions on social media, one Twitter user described it as: “sincere appropriate. Prayer of a different kind.”⁶⁶ Butler argues that public assembly of a crowd gathered in protest “embodies the insight that this is a social condition both shared and unjust,” therefore, the assembly of bodies at Stand 4 Truth enacted what Butler describes as a “provisional and plural form of coexistence that constitutes a distinct ethical and social alternative to ‘responsibilisation’.”⁶⁷ We were a public assembly, witnesses to the public performances, cultural interventions that called for social justice, we actively moved our bodies in unison on the street while maintaining silence, and we were participants in an art installation. The bodies present were individual survivors, families of survivors, advocacy groups representing survivors, those who stood in solidarity with survivors, people who identified as Catholic, those who rejected what the Catholic Church represented, and people who made demands of our government and wider political establishment for greater secularisation of Irish society, particularly in areas of education and healthcare. Collectively, as our bodies simultaneously assembled on a public street with shared, multiple, and intersecting purposes, we joined together in unison demanding truth, justice, and love for survivors.

Grace Dyas: I believe you before you open your mouth

The spoken-word performance I believe you before you open your mouth (2018) by artist and activist Grace Dyas, co-founder of THEATREclub, was one of several performances for the gathered Stand 4 Truth crowd. Dressed all in black, Dyas was calm, yet persistent when she asked us: “Stay … stay present and stay connected …” This called those witnessing to be in the moment and to stay connected to the feelings that each had brought with them to this event, drawing awareness to the emotions that circulated amongst us. This performance centred on a conversation with residential school survivor Christine Buckley (1946–2014), the first Black person to speak out about the abuse she encountered by the religious organisations tasked with her care. Louis Lentin’s documentary Dear daughter (1996) focused on Buckley as it detailed the physical and psychological abuse of children by the Sisters of Mercy in the 1950s and 1960s at St. Vincent’s Industrial School, an orphanage at Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin. She later co-founded the Aislinn Centre, an organisation for survivors. Dyas invoked Buckley’s words when fellow survivors reached out for support: “Before you open your mouth, I believe you. I believe you. I believe every word you are about to tell me.” For many who tried to speak up or tell the truth about their experiences, they were shut down or dismissed by people in power, either disbelieved or shamed into silence for fear of upsetting the optics of respectability. This takes on powerful meaning with respect to lack of transparency of Mother and Baby Homes Commission and its discounting of nearly 500 survivor testimonies. Derek Goldman asserts that “socially engaged performances foreground the audience’s conscious act of witnessing, a transference of accountability to acknowledge that something substantive has occurred in which all those present are now implicated, and that can never be unseen.”⁶⁸ The repetition of “I believe you” was not only an affirmation of individual credibility but invoked in the presence of the assembled bodies, and it manifested a collective response of witnessing from the people gathered at Stand 4 Truth (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Grace Dyas, I Believe You Before You Open Your Mouth, 26, August 2018, Photograph: William Murphy/Infomatique (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Reassuring the crowd that: “You were doing the best you could with the tools you had,” conjured up the different coping mechanisms of people who have experienced trauma ongoing. Dyas’s acknowledgement: “There’s a part of you that is very well, and there’s a part of you that needs to recover,” spoke not only directly to survivors but also more broadly to the public assembly, referencing the fracturing of the relationship between Church and State. It conveyed that recovery is complex and holds a range of meanings. She ruminated:

Because … for many Irish people it wasn’t the abuse that was the hardest part. It was the abuse and the not being believed, the abuse and the lies, the abuse and the cover up, the abuse and burying and the digging and the burying.

The related actions of digging and burying highlighted the harms caused by the suppression of the truth. In Dyas’s play We Don’t Know What is Buried Here (2018), two Magdalene ghosts dig to discover secrets, but consequently bury more than they reveal. The physical action of digging and burying also related directly to the unmarked graves that women and children were buried in, referencing, in part, historian Catherine Corless’s highly publicised discovery of the remains of 796 infants and children in an unmarked grave in a sceptic tank in Tuam, Co. Galway (2014) at the grounds of the Bons Secours Mother and Baby Home, a site where people held a vigil in remembrance during the papal mass.

Dyas’s socially engaged theatre excavates the other silences in Irish social history, like the stigma of addiction in Heroin (2010), The Family (2012), and History (2013), and the silences of abortion in Not at Home (2017) with Emma Fraser. Emer O’Toole argues that the “explicitly political and social aims” of THEATREclub’s work, and by extension Dyas’s solo work with disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities, tell marginalised stories imperative to be heard by wider society, imparting “a sense of responsibility for oppression in Irish society,” fusing art with social and political intent.⁶⁹ This fusion, evident in I believe you before you open your mouth, contributed to creative activism’s generative overlap between art and politics. Powerfully, Dyas acknowledged “Ireland is a different Ireland from 1979 – today, here would have been unimaginable then,” the unimaginable “here” was the physical gathering of 5000 people, on the street, occupying public space, instead of attending the Papal mass. Politically, socially and culturally, it wouldn’t have been possible in 1979 for a public assembly to stand against the abuses perpetrated within and covered up by the Catholic Church. Dyas’s performance was an invitation to imagine the previously unimaginable, projecting a shared imagined future.

Deeply affective, Dyas’s performance drew upon the emotions and affects that were circulated between the bodies of those present at the Stand 4 Truth event. Mona Lilja, taking up Butler’s ideas about the dynamics of linguistic and bodily performativity located in the resisting bodies of public assemblies, argues that embodied and coordinated actions of resistance attach additional cultural meaning beyond that which is spoken. For Lilja “affects are created and exist within the encounter, while emotions constitute the subjective reaction arising from affects.”⁷⁰ Emotions are relational, circulating between people they “create subjective reactions, motivations and various resisting practices.”⁷¹ During Dyas’s performance, the air felt heavy, laden with affect. As I surveyed the crowd around me, I witnessed people moved to tears while registering my own bodily reactions, senses tingling, a lump of emotion forming in my throat. This affective witnessing produced feelings of resistance and solidarity manifested in the collectivity present that day.

The silent march to the Seán McDermott Street Laundry

After the performances concluded, the crowd marched respectfully in total silence to the Seán McDermott Street Laundry. While this action recalled other marches, silent protests or indeed the particular aesthetics and performativity of a solemn, religious procession, it powerfully echoed an earlier silent march by the Survivors of Institutional Abuse Support (SOIAI) in solidary with survivors to Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, in response to the Ryan Report (2009).⁷² Katie B. Howard writes there is a bodily dimension to political action of people gathered that is charged with affect.⁷³ When affect unites the ethical and political, it impels “ordinary people to participate in collective action,” enabling them “to act on feelings of responsibility.”⁷⁴ The day before the Papal mass, the Papal motorcade through Dublin stopped at the Our Lady of Lourdes Church, the location of the shrine of the Venerable Matt Talbot (1856–1925), a reformed alcoholic and pious Catholic known for his physical mortification of the flesh. A sense of indignation resonated with the crowd that the Pope had not acknowledged the laundry, despite being directly across the street from the church. It is estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 women were incarcerated in such institutions, though it is difficult to say with certainty as these institutions were unregulated by the Irish state and some religious orders failed to supply requested records to the State inquiry. When the bodies of the crowd occupied and moved through Dublin’s public spaces, the very spaces where women held in laundries were absented from, the act of walking and observing silence in unison called out the inadequate responses by government and Church authorities and bore witness to those incarcerated in these institutions, asserting a profoundly powerful presence. This silence was intense and palpable, with one participant remarking “I’ve never felt silence like that.”⁷⁵

This march, on this public streetscape, recalled the rare archival photograph from the mid-1960s of a Corpus Christi religious procession of women leaving the Seán McDermott Street laundry with gardaí stationed on either side. In Church and State (2019), artist Breda Lynch inverted this archival image utilising a cyanotype photographic printing process, with the negative and positive cyanotype placed side by side as a diptych symbolising the bodies of women oppressed by the two institutions. Similarly, Array Collective’s print series An Immaculate Business Proposal (2023) investigates the entanglement of these two institutions considering the manipulation of bodies through the architecture of control. The entwined institutions continue to be an ongoing point of friction regarding public education and public healthcare, illustrated by the concerns of the “Our Maternity Hospital” campaign against Church ownership of the public hospital. Comprised of members of the public and some parliamentarians, they oppose the relocation and construction of the National Maternity Hospital on grounds owned by the Catholic Church. Reflecting on their concerted efforts for justice for those previously incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries, the Justice for Magdalene Campaign (JFMC) has argued that despite the different forms of knowledge they have produced about the relationship between Church and State, the Irish establishment continues to suppress “unsettling knowledge” which they define as “the kind of knowledge that challenges the status quo of those who govern, and the foundations of respectability and control of knowledge on which they assume and enact their superior power.”⁷⁶ That abuses and injustices were known but unknowable meant that the Irish establishment “deploy[ed] strategies of ignorance to render justice unimaginable and therefore unattainable.”⁷⁷

When gathered at the Seán McDermott Street Laundry, some survivors offered testimonies, highlighting “connections between all forms of institutional, gender-based, clerical and care-related abuses, and between the injustices of the past and the silencing and neglect permeating the present.”⁷⁸ This draws upon “affective vulnerability,” what Clara Fischer describes as how people negotiate the public/private divide strategically telling difficult private stories, rejecting imposed societal shame, enabling people to empathise and publicly call out the shameful failure of the State. Fischer notes this is both “an important campaign tool and a means of resistance.”⁷⁹ During the Marriage Equality (2016) and the Repeal of the 8^th Amendment (2018) referendum campaigns, when people broke silences around their experiences of discrimination, sexuality, reproductive healthcare, and shame, it also prompted others to their own share personal stories, contributing to further destigmatisation of these issues.⁸⁰ Understandably then, affect and emotion play a vital role in practices of resistance. Lilja notes public assembly and gatherings can strengthen this resistance: “The more that emotions circulate, the more intense they become. Gatherings then, where people meet and talk about emotion-laden issues, tend to intensify emotions as they circulate.”⁸¹ For survivors to draw upon affective vulnerability to speak truth to power, affectively witnessed by a crowd that marched in respectful silence in solidarity, to a place of coercive containment, offered such an example of the resistance that this creative activism deployed.

Conclusion

The actions and interventions that surrounded Pope Francis’s 2018 visit to Ireland should not be read in isolation but can be considered part of the larger efforts by feminist and queer activists to draw attention to socio-political issues, stand in solidarity with the marginalised in Irish society, and provoke social change. The Catholic Church’s moral authority in Ireland in the late 20^th century was eroded due in part to the revelations of the depths of clerical abuse and injustices against women and children in church-run institutions. Key cultural moments like Sinéad O’Connor’s destruction of the Pope’s picture and the silence-breaking television documentaries like Dear Daughter, States of Fear, and Suing the Pope prompted increased public scrutiny of the Catholic Church and its role in Irish society. If, as Tilley suggests, creative activism proposes “what alternative futures might result if we changed our ways of seeing, thinking, and being, now,” then the creative interventionist actions of Say Nope to the Pope and the Stand 4 Truth event imagined an Ireland that prioritises survivor justice and healing, bears responsibility for the injustices and harms, one that stands for truth and that cares for all its peoples.⁸² Colm O’Gorman’s words: “We’re here to stand for truth. We’re here to stand and affirm what we know, and to talk about who we are, and who we will be” are a testament to these alternative imagined futures.⁸³ The creative activism of the papal protests focused awareness on specific issues of clerical sex abuse and church-run institutional abuse and the dynamics of power, held space for survivors and the wider community to join together collectively and activated affective witnessing, channelling emotions and affect to imagine a more just society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. McGarry et al., “Aesthetics of Global Protest,” 16.

2. Tilley, “Undefining Creative Activism,” 24.

3. Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly, 11.

4. Ibid., 18.

5. Goldman, “From Spectating to Witnessing.”

6. Howard, “The Apparitions of Emotion.”

7. Richardson and Schankweiler, “Affective Witnessing,” 3.

8. Ibid., 1.

9. Ó Corráin, “Why did Pope John Paul II,” 473.

10. Census Figures 1981, 2016, 2022.

11. Stolz and Tanner, “Theory of Religious-Secular Competition,” 315; and Conway, “Catholic Sociology in Ireland.”

12. Hirschle, “From Religious to Consumption-Related Routine Activities,” 686.

13. Keogh, “Catholic Church in Ireland”; and Conway, “Irish Catholicism,” 143.

14. Inglis, Moral Monopoly, 64.

15. Girvin, “An Irish Solution,” 2.

16. Ó Corráin, “Why did Pope John Paul II,” 483.

17. Simpson and O’Connor, “People Need a Shock.”

18. Butler Cullingford, “Seamus and Sinead,” 61.

19. O’Connor, Rememberings, 177.

20. O’Rourke et al., CLANN: Ireland’s Unmarried Mothers, 13.

21. Ibid.

22. O’Donnell and O’Sullivan, “Coercive Confinement,” 2.

23. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, 88.

24. Power and Scanlon, Dark Secrets of Childhood, 91.

25. Breen, “Suing the Pope,” 88.

26. Ganiel, “Pope Francis versus Mary McAleese,” 457.

27. Donnelly and Inglis, “The Media and the Catholic Church,” 4.

28. Keenan, Child Sex Abuse, 11.

29. Ibid., 16.

30. Ibid., 51.

31. Inglis, “Church and Culture,” 23.

32. McDonagh, “Abortion and Gay Rights in Ireland,” 5.

33. McDonald et al., “Campainging for Choice,” 133–136.

34. “Cross Slogan Horrific,” Irish Press, September 6, 1980.

35. Kenny, “Cowardly,” 15.

36. Kelly, Contraception and Modern Ireland, 295.

37. O’Toole, “The Diceman’s Queer Performance,” 176.

38. Enright and Cloatre, “Transforming Illegality,” 262.

39. Conlon, “Irish Student Movement.”

40. Fitzpatrick, “Turning the Tide.”

41. Walsh, “Performances of Autonomy,” 38.

42. McGarry, “Say Nope to the Pope.”

43. Sherwood, “Say Nope to Pope.”

44. The Project, “Say Nope to the Pope.”

45. @rtepolitics 4.35 pm June 27, 2018. https://x.com/rtepolitics/status/1011996408814145536?s=20.

46. 7.31 pm Twitter @RTEPolitics June 27, 2018.

47. Ibid.

48. Gately, “WMoF not Fazed.”

49. Ibid.

50. O’Farrell, “Religious Education,” 3.

51. Ibid., 5.

52. Lonergan, “Say Nope to The Pope.”

53. O’Brien, “Pope Ireland Visit 2018.”

54. See note 43 above.

55. O’Neill, “Protestors Grab Pope Tickets.”

56. Ganiel, “Pope Francis versus Mary McAleese,” 455.

57. Turpin, Unholy Catholic Ireland, 93.

58. Hayward, “Use of Visibility in Contentious Events,” 63.

59. Ibid.

60. Little, “Pope Asks for Forgiveness,” 2018.

61. Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly, 9–10.

62. Ibid., 26.

63. The images were of Mary Raftery, Marie Collins, Christine Buckley, Colm O’Gorman, and Andrew Madden. While it is unknown if permission was sought for these projections, it is unlikely that the Archdiocese of Dublin would grant permission for an action.

64. Holland, “Protest Over Cleric Abuse.”

65. McGettrick et al., Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, 191.

66. Tweet @StephaniesBRegan 08.53 August 27, 2018.

67. Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly, 15.

68. See note 5 above.

69. O’Toole, “THEATREclub’s Ireland Trilogy,” 364.

70. Lilja, “Dangerous Bodies,” 346.

71. Ibid.

72. Evers, “Christine Buckley.”

73. Howard, “The Apparitions of Emotion,” 112.

74. Ibid., 118.

75. Lyne, “Pope Visit Ireland 2018.”

76. McGettrick et al., Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries, 113.

77. Ibid., 114.

78. Ibid., 191.

79. Fischer, “Feminists Redrawing Public and Private,” 1004.

80. McDonald et al., “Campaigning for Choice,” 139.

81. Lilja, “Dangerous Bodies,” 350.

82. See note 2 above.

83. Ryan, “Stand for Truth.”