“Herein lies wisdom, beauty and increase; Without this folly, age and cold decay”

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 11

I

In King Lear, Shakespeare sets the scene for what will be his anatomy of a society descending into moral chaos by having his Duke of Gloucester speak of his illegitimate son with casual contempt. The Duke of Kent asks Gloucester, “Is not this your son, my lord,” pointing to Edmund, to which the father replies: “His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am braz’d to it.” Kent shows the awkwardness such an avowal causes by admitting “I cannot conceive you,” after which Gloucester has his punning answer ready: “Sir, this young fellow’s mother could, whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.” Gloucester then goes further and discloses to Kent that “though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.” Thus, in the first few minutes of this greatest of his plays Shakespeare encapsulates the ruin he set himself to dramatize by having marriage and motherhood—two pillars of any proper Christian order—roundly demeaned.

I thought of this opening today when news came over the wires that Ireland—surely a country that has known a good deal of moral chaos in the last few years—rejected its political class’s call for the removal of references to motherhood and marriage in its constitution. The Family Amendment would have removed the clause in the constitution upholding the primacy of marriage and family to society and legally redefined “family” as “founded on marriage or on other durable relationships,” while the Care Amendment would have removed the clause reaffirming that the “state recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

In a historic landslide, the Irish rejected the Family Referendum by 67.7 percent and the Care Referendum by 73.9 percent. The Care Amendment result yielded the highest percentage of No votes of any referendum held in Ireland. County Donegal, God bless it, delivered the biggest No vote of all the country’s counties, with over 80 percent of voters rejecting the government amendments. Senator Ronan Muller summed up the vote nicely when he wrote: “Faced with secretly drawn-up proposals to dilute the significance of marriage for family life, and to dishonour women and motherhood by removing the only direct reference to their interests [in the constitution], and observing the ruthless way in which debate on these proposals was suppressed in the Dáil and Seanad, the people have—I think it is fair to say—snapped back. They weren’t confused. They knew what they were voting for. They didn’t like it. And they rejected it massively.”

The view of the political class, slavishly rubberstamped by the country’s media, was that such clauses should be removed because they are “sexist” and insufficiently “inclusive,” as though marriage, motherhood, and the propagation of new life were somehow secondary to the anti-life dictates of the new world order. The pro-life Irish journalist John Waters exposed the government’s cynical wiles when he charged it with deploying “the same old ‘progressive’ bait to lead people to perdition . . . stripping them of their rights as human persons, in the guise of progress.” That the Irish people voted to retain the life-affirming clauses, despite the considerable pressure put upon them to excise them, shows that there is something about such deep unbiddable realities that not even the hirelings surrounding Taoiseach Leo Varadkar or the editors of the Irish Times can expel.

Ireland would “take a step backwards” if its constitution were not changed to remove a reference extolling women’s “duties in the home,” Varadkar had said ahead of the vote, which was pointedly scheduled to take place on International Women’s Day. After the vote, however, he was constrained to admit: “Clearly we got it wrong. While the old adage is that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, I think when you lose by this kind of margin, there are a lot of people who got this wrong and I am certainly one of them.” Before it went down to defeat, the referendum was expected to confirm Ireland’s evolution from a conservative, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country in which divorce and abortion were illegal, to an increasingly progressive, agnostic society. According to the Central Statistics Office, the proportion of Catholic residents had fallen from 94.9 percent in 1961 to 69 percent in 2022. While Irish voters legalized divorce in a 1995 referendum, embraced same-sex marriage in a 2015 vote, and repealed the abortion ban in 2018, they were not ready to put marriage on a par with such a legal absurdity as “other durable relationships” or allow the constitution to blot out the dignity of women in the home.

II

James Joyce certainly understood these matters well enough when he had his character Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses (1922) encounter one of his more unpromising students: “Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, date shaped, recent and damp as a snail’s bed.” When the boy opens his book and admits to not knowing how to do his sums, Stephen can only think: “Futility.” But then he thinks again and discovers a truth the ruling class of Ireland have sorely forgotten. For all his seeming futility, Sargent hardly merits dismissing. Why? “[S]omeone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot; a squashed boneless snail.” For his mother, the boy’s vulnerability is not an obstacle, it is the essence of what makes him lovable. Sargent’s mother, in other words, knows what Angelo says to Isabella with such terse sagacity in Measure for Measure: “We are all frail.” And this is precisely why Sargent’s mother “had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own.”

For the skeptical Stephen, whom we encounter during the early pages of the novel questioning every aspect of life and art, this naturally prompts a fundamental question. “Was that then real? The only true thing in life?” And Stephen’s answer is a stinging rebuke to the political ideologues within Ireland today who would trivialize motherhood. “Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive,” Stephen says to himself, which is to say, the love a mother bears for her son and the love a son bears for his mother—this is indeed a truth that cannot be denied, a truth Stephen’s friend Cranly had echoed in Joyce’s previous novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916.): There, Cranly says, “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about how she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real.” And having arrived at this existential epiphany himself, Stephen realizes, with the grace of fellow-feeling, the grace of love, something rarely present in those who live only for the acquisition and retention of power, “Like him was I, those sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends before me.”

That Joyce should have written with such tenderness of the primordial bond between mother and child was characteristic. Like Shakespeare, who refers to “Wife and child” in Macbeth as constituting “precious motives . . . strong knots of love,” Joyce based all his writing on the foundations of family. As all who knew him knew well, he was devoted to his own family. On this score, his biographer Richard Ellmann was eloquent. “In whatever he did, his two profound interests—his family and his writings—kept their place. These passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave his work its sympathy and humanity: the intensity of the second raised his life to dignity and high dedication.” In “Ecce Puer” (1932), the poet in Joyce wrote movingly of the birth of his grandson and the death of his father with a telling allusion to King Lear, not to mention the Catholic faith that he could never entirely repudiate.

Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle The living lies.

May love and mercy Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed On the glass;

The world that was not Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone. O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

One can also see the family man in Joyce in something he wrote about his daughter Lucia, who suffered from devastating schizophrenia: “It is terrible to think of a vessel of election as the prey of impulses beyond its control and of natures beneath its comprehension and, fervently as I desire her cure, I ask myself what then will happen when and if she finally withdraws her regard from the lightning-lit reverie of her own clairvoyance and turns it upon that battered cabman’s face, the world.” To expect the Irish political class to understand such familial solicitude is doubtless asking too much, but it is heartwarming to know that the Irish themselves understand it. As for the hapless Leo Varadkar, we can only hope that he comes round to Benedict’s view of marriage and motherhood in Much Ado About Nothing: “The world must be peopled.”

III

The critics of the clauses in the constitution often charge that their framers—Ireland’s longest-standing Taoiseach Eamon De Valera (1885-1975) and then-President of Blackrock College Fr. Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), who would go on to become Primate of All Ireland—were not only reactionary but misogynistic men. While it is true that they did not know their own mothers, growing up essentially motherless, it is not true that they were somehow hostile to women. On the contrary, they put the clauses honoring motherhood in the constitution precisely because they recognized how essential mothers and motherhood are to the life of any stable social order. In this regard, they understood what Pope John Paul II understood so brilliantly when he wrote in Redemptoris Mater (1987):

It can be said that motherhood in the order of grace preserves the analogy with what in the order of nature characterizes the union between mother and child. In the light of this fact it becomes easier to understand why in Christ’s testament on Golgotha his Mother’s new motherhood is expressed in the singular, in reference to one man: “Behold your son.”

What is striking about Karol Józef Wojtyła’s testimony to the significance of Mary’s motherhood in the Church is that he, too, grew up without his mother: she died when he was nine years old. Yet, like De Valera and McQuaid, he had a profound appreciation for the power of motherhood. For the Polish pope, “these same words [“Behold your son”] fully show the reason for the Marian dimension of the life of Christ’s disciples. This is true not only of John, who at that hour stood at the foot of the Cross together with his Master’s Mother, but it is also true of every disciple of Christ, of every Christian.” Why?

The Redeemer entrusts his mother to the disciple, and at the same time he gives her to him as his mother. Mary’s motherhood, which becomes man’s inheritance, is a gift: a gift which Christ himself makes personally to every individual. The Redeemer entrusts Mary to John because he entrusts John to Mary. At the foot of the Cross there begins that special entrusting of humanity to the Mother of Christ, which in the history of the Church has been practiced and expressed in different ways. The same Apostle and Evangelist, after reporting the words addressed by Jesus on the Cross to his Mother and to himself, adds: “And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (Jn. 19:27). This statement certainly means that the role of son was attributed to the disciple and that he assumed responsibility for the Mother of his beloved Master. And since Mary was given as a mother to him personally, the statement indicates, even though indirectly, everything expressed by the intimate relationship of a child with its mother. And all of this can be included in the word “entrusting.” Such entrusting is the response to a person’s love, and in particular to the love of a mother.

Critics of De Valera and McQuaid might not enter into what John Paul II is saying in this meditation on the vitality of the Blessed Mother in the life of Christian discipleship, but it should arrest anyone interested in the future of Catholic Ireland.

The Marian dimension of the life of a disciple of Christ is expressed in a special way precisely through this filial entrusting to the Mother of Christ, which began with the testament of the Redeemer on Golgotha. Entrusting himself to Mary in a filial manner, the Christian, like the Apostle John, “welcomes” the Mother of Christ “into his own home” and brings her into everything that makes up his inner life, that is to say into his human and Christian “I”: he “took her to his own home.” Thus the Christian seeks to be taken into that “maternal charity” with which the Redeemer’s Mother “cares for the brethren of her Son,” in whose birth and development she cooperates in the measure of the gift proper to each one through the power of Christ’s Spirit. Thus also is exercised that motherhood in the Spirit which became Mary’s role at the foot of the Cross and in the Upper Room.

Will the Irish welcome the Mother of God back into their homes now that they have refused to allow their political class to take mothers out of their constitution? No one captured the stakes of that holy hospitality better than the pope for whom the “Mother of the Redeemer, gate of heaven, star of the sea” meant so much, especially where he speaks of how:

This filial relationship, this self-entrusting of a child to its mother, not only has its beginning in Christ but can also be said to be definitively directed towards him. Mary can be said to continue to say to each individual the words which she spoke at Cana in Galilee: “Do whatever he tells you.” For he, Christ, is the one Mediator between God and mankind; he is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6); it is he whom the Father has given to the world, so that man “should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). The Virgin of Nazareth became the first “witness” of this saving love of the Father, and she also wishes to remain its humble handmaid always and everywhere. For every Christian, for every human being, Mary is the one who first “believed,” and precisely with her faith as Spouse and Mother she wishes to act upon all those who entrust themselves to her as her children. And it is well known that the more her children persevere and progress in this attitude, the nearer Mary leads them to the “unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8). And to the same degree they recognize more and more clearly the dignity of man in all its fullness and the definitive meaning of his vocation, for “Christ . . . fully reveals man to man himself.”

IV

Laoise De Brún, founder of The Countess—an advocacy group for women and children—told reporters at Dublin Castle that the referendum result was a “huge victory for the people of Ireland and it’s the first nail in the coffin for this ideologically captured government.” Yes, of course, but the death of progressive Ireland will mean nothing if it does not give rise to the revival of Catholic Ireland.

* * * * *

Postscript: On March 20, 2024, scarcely two weeks after this essay was written, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadker of the Fine Gael Party unexpectedly resigned. “I know this will come as a surprise to many people and a disappointment to some, but I hope you will understand my decision,” Mr. Varadkar told a news conference outside Leinster House in Dublin. “I know that others will—how shall I put it?—cope with the news just fine.” As to who will succeed Varadker, readers should keep an eye peeled on whom the Irish bookies see as Ireland’s next taoiseach as the race for his successor takes shape. God bless Ireland!

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Original Bio:

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of What the Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews, which Andrew Roberts, the bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, called “beautiful,” “brave,” and “wise.”