In this essay the author
examines the world of Catholic ritual in Limerick
city in the second quarter of the twentieth century. While Catholicism in Limerick during this period could certainly be seen, in
anthropological terms, as a ‘religion of control’, the evidence gleaned from
ethnographic interviews suggests that the experience of devotional ritual was
rather more complex. Between 1926 and 1961 the population of Limerick
city increased by more than a quarter, while its public housing provision
improved dramatically from the mid-1930s. The essay shows how, against a
background of change and modernisation, devotional rituals – and particularly
the Redemptorist Archconfraternity which had as many as 10,000 members in 1960 –
played an important part in the development of local identities and in the
cultural construction of a sense of place in the newer areas of the city. The
organisation of rituals heightened the importance of locality, while their
content and surrounding discourse linked them to Irish and international
Catholicism as well as to metaphysical and spiritual realms. In this sense, the
evidence allows us to see how people’s experience of ritual in context helps to
highlight its unique power to create and recreate coherent cultural worlds.