James Joyce's quarrel with Catholicism.

Abstract

James Joyce divorced himself from the Catholic Church for two major reasons: 1) he felt the Church deprived him of his individuality; 2) he thought this deprivation aided in the creation of what he viewed as a decadent society. The Church of Joyce's day demanded absolute obedience and total subjection of self to the powers above, both spiritual and temporal, and frowned on any acts of overt individuality within its massive community. Joyce attempted to battle this stifling atmosphere through his depiction of priests and assorted beleaguered individuals in The Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The priests depicted in these works are invariably incompetent and usually unable to communicate with their people in any meaningful way. Joyce saw these parish priests as the primary catalysts in the deterioration of Irish society. By binding their minds to the edicts of their Church, by becoming essentially passive creatures, Joyce thought they had degraded themselves and so were inadequate for the tasks they had to perform. The smugness they displayed in propagating their narrower minded views upset Joyce immensely. By limiting themselves to a Church-oriented view of the world, the priests betrayed a large part of the Irish populace. Lacking real direction and living in untested virtue, the Irish easily fell prey to sino This lack of real leadership and moral fiber can be documented in Stephen Deda1us' painful backsliding in Portrait, as well as in other se1ectionso Ultimately. Joyce sees the Irish people as a largely unprincipled. unthinking group, cursed by their priests, a people susceptible to becoming "du11witted loyal serfs." (Portrait, 181) Serfdom was not for Joyceo His total focus in life was toward the becoming of an individual and attempting to understand life completely, in opposition to the Church's ideal of humble serVitude. By virtue of this desire to be free, Joyce simply could not fit into the Catholic family.