Trinity

This fall I am taking a three-month sabbatical to Ireland—an immensely exciting prospect—but to keep my feet grounded in the suffering of my Irish ancestors I decided to pick up a new copy of Trinity [1975] by Leon Uris. Trinity was a remarkably popular novel in the 1970’s, running 21 weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List in 1975 and 14 weeks in 1976. What is equally remarkable about its popularity is its size [my new copy runs to 1034 pages], its complexity [multiple family narratives], and the sufferings of the Catholic Irish in the nineteenth century in their struggle for independence from England.
 
I read this work in my 20’s, and many personalities and events have remained with me over the next half-century, enough so that I made an exception and included Leon Uris in my “Catholic Novelist” blog stream. Uris [1924-2003] was in fact Jewish and many of his novels centered upon the establishment of the State of Israel after World War II and the bitter struggles to establish that nation. Perhaps Uris saw in nineteenth century Ireland something of the sufferings and determination of the new Jewish nation of the twentieth century. The ongoing violence between Israel and Hamas, which we have witnessed with grim hearts over the past eight months, is a present-day reminder that many around the world feel their cultural and political existences in danger of eradication. Such is Trinity.
 
Ireland has had massive influence upon the Western or Roman Catholic Church. If you know little about its impact—Irish monks invented the rite of repeatable personal confession with absolution we use today, for example—I would add to your summer reading list How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe [1995]. Historians do debate the extravagance of the claim, but no one denies that Ireland was one of the Church’s anchors throughout history. It is little wonder then that England, which had broken from Rome under Henry VIII, was eager to suppress Irish faith and independence, though it took much of the sixteenth century to do so.
 
For the sake of brevity, I would describe the next three Irish centuries in this way: a small but powerful English aristocracy in the province of Ulster governed the bulk of the Island, Catholics, for the convenience of the English crown. The economy was managed to farm desirable meat and produce for English tastes, leaving the Catholic populace to live off single crop ventures requiring backbreaking labor. In the mid-nineteenth century, the staple of the Irish table, the potato, was struck with a fungus, causing mass starvation. “The Potato Famine” [1845-1849] had multiple effects upon Irish living. There was a significant decline in population due to death and, increasingly, emigration, which continued until well into the twentieth century. Relocation to the United States had begun earlier than the famine. In her The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 [1997] historian Carol Sheriff describes the contribution of Irish laborers who arrived in sizeable numbers to complete the Albany to Buffalo dig. [Later, many Irish Americans served with distinction for the Union cause in the Civil War.] The famine, a political and agricultural crisis engineered to demoralize and depopulate Catholics, gave birth to a small but deeply committed generation of young people who could no longer endure watching their fathers grow prematurely old while farming rocky landscapes.
 
Trinity is the story of one such family, the Larkin family, over a stretch of time from about 1885 to 1916. Uris embraces three generations of experience by opening his epic with the funeral of old Kilty Larkin, the father of the clan. Kilty had lived through demanding times, and we hear the vivid tales of the famine, for example, as he lay dying with two younger generations of Larkins in attendance. The funeral itself reminded me of the opening of “The Godfather” epic where we meet the entire Corleone family at Connie’s wedding. In Trinity we meet the Larkins in Kilty’s funeral and observe how they grieve, what they believe, and the role of church and country in their small Irish town. With Kilty’s death, for example, the mantle of familial leadership passes to his son, Tomas, a giant of a man who hates England, to be sure, but despises the Catholic pastor, too. Uris suggests that some priests—and certainly some bishops—curried favor with England by pouring pastoral water on the smoldering embers of Catholic and patriotic resentments.
 
Tomas’s wife and her women friends are devout Catholics, buttressed by tales and practices to ward off evil spirits. His oldest son, Conor, will carry the story most of the way. As a teenager Conor did not attend school, to assist his father Tomas with their meager farm. But his younger neighbor and sidekick, Seamus O’Neill, had the good fortune of schooling, with a dedicated literature instructor who takes a healthy interest in both Seamus and his older friend Conor. The latter learns to read, and later in the book we find Conor devouring the likes of Karl Marx in his analysis of how his fellow Irishmen might attain their rights and dignity.
 
Like his father, Conor had little use for the Church. Had he known how the local pastor ruined his parents’ marriage, this novel might have taken a different road. The one true joy of Tomas Larkin’s life was his wife, and the couple enjoyed a ravenous and imaginative sex life together. On one occasion his wife Finola enters the confessional and confided to the pastor—who bore a years’ long hatred of Tomas—that she enjoyed the pleasures of the bed. The priest—in a way that would be considered abusive today—demanded that she identify every detail of their conjugal life, in part to pleasure himself and in part to inflict the greatest pain on his adversary’s life. He instructs Finola that the only way she will save her soul is by living chastely, without sexual intimacy. Tomas, already a stout drinker, thus turned to the other comfort of his life and began his downward spiral.
 
Conor, for his part, gradually moves from farming to the forge and artistic iron working, relocating north to Ulster and the watchful eye of his personal Protestant clients, the Hubbles, and his factory owner, who recruits Conor for his company’s rugby team. Uris provides lengthy portraits of the rich business aristocracy of Northern Ireland and the workers’ conditions in the factories, highlighted by a massive industrial fire that kills many. Even though the English Parliament itself was making its first ginger forays into its “two-Ireland” problem, Conor’s intimacy with his employers and their methods, on the one hand, and his growing position of power among underground Irish republicans on the other hardens his radicalism.
 
Conor engages in several powerful love affairs with women his intellectual equal, women prepared to leave their lives and engage in his cause. Conor, who knows the dangers that face him if his cause is discovered by authorities, is highly reluctant over the years to put them in danger’s paths. He intuits that he will not live to a ripe old age, and in this he is correct. As a trusted agent for his Protestant employer, Conor develops an ingenious method of smuggling guns on his company’s rail line to small Irish republican units in preparation for an armed insurrection.
 
While the reader has some idea of the book’s climax, the courage and drama of Conor and his comrades is gripping through the final sentence. In the novel’s epilogue, Conor and his senior comrade lie in state in Dublin’s City Hall, and then are borne in a procession of 100,000 of his compatriots to the burial sites of earlier Irish heroes Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. The novel portrays these events in1915. The famous “Easter Monday Uprising” did break out one year later, in 1916, leading eventually to Ireland’s becoming a self-governing republic.
 
FINAL THOUGHTS
 
Leon Uris concludes his epilogue with this thought: “When all of this was done, a republic eventually came to pass but the sorrows and the troubles have never left that tragic, lovely land. For you see, in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over.” [p. 1034] Uris lived until 2003, long enough to witness “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland which extended into the twenty-first century. The highly popular NETFLIX comedy series, “Derry Girls,” is set amidst the social struggles of the late 1990’s.
 
The problem with aging is the gradual realization that all the hopes we harbored in our youthful years are not going to be fulfilled in our lifetimes. I am a baby boomer, and I guess we rode the wave of postwar [World War II] prosperity to the conclusion that all war, hunger, hate, and disease would be corralled in our lifetime. Many of us Catholics felt the same way about the Church, that after the final session of Vatican II [1965] we would have a “better church,” though precisely what and how this would happen was never truly discussed. As a church guitarist myself in those days, I must admit that most, if not all, of our music back then proclaimed that the Kingdom would arrive so long as we were awake and shaking our tambourines in “community,” whatever the psychological meaning of that term.
 
Now, in my late 70’s, I have become more realistic about the power of original sin and the need for salvific grace as I prepare to seek the one perfect kingdom, the one Jesus described to Pontius Pilate as “not of this world.” The treatment of the Irish by the English reflected the thinking of oppressors who believed themselves to be messiahs of this world. While only Catholicism makes the public claim of infallibility, most of us on the planet live as if we own the wisdom behind that claim to divine power, individually and collectively, when it is in truth the life of the Holy Spirit. How much human interaction—personal, political, economic, military—can we honestly say is borne of the Spirit? Truly little, I fear.
 
The Gospels are clear that passage into the eternal kingdom depends exclusively upon the practical charity and love that pours from our hearts, meaning that so long as we breathe, we do what we can to love one another in this imperfect kingdom. I am lucky enough to enjoy good health, and I try to remember each day that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” But what strength I have must be put to service, in a humble, servant’s mode. Uris’s closing thought that “the past is happening over and over” must be nuanced; it cannot be interpreted to mean that charity, prayer, and good works are a waste of time. On the contrary, there is a timelessness to the sacrifices of Conor Larkin’s generation, as there is in ours. Mother Teresa’s words, which came from the depths of a ministry to the broken poor and dying, told a reporter “We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.”