Canon Sheehan’s Campaign for a Catholic Culture

Abstract

Canon Sheehan wrote ten articles during the 1880s, which contain the themes and concerns of the novels he was later to write. His first publication in 1881 was an attack on the educational policies of the British government and of the educational authorities of Ireland. The Intermediate Education Act of 1878 he believed was ‘if not directly levelled at the subversion of the religious beliefs of the vast masses of Irish students’, then it at least relegated religious studies into the background.⁷⁰ The article, ‘Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools’, appeared in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1881. It was, he tells us, the keynote of all his later teaching.⁷¹