ABSTRACT
Irish Catholic writers have often found it hard to escape their religious formation. Their attempts to harness or to exorcize it, even before the meltdown precipitated by recent revelations about clerical abuse and its cover-ups, have created a memorably negative profile for Catholicism in modern Irish literature. The pervasive presence of his Catholic past in Seamus Heaney's writing is obvious. The symbolic world of Catholicism, then, saturates Heaney's imagination. Glancing references in his later writing and his book-length interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll reveal that when young he was devout, relishing the liturgy, serving Mass, making the pilgrimage to Lough Derg three times, volunteering as an undergraduate to go to Lourdes as a stretcher bearer for the sick, absorbing it all. But Catholicism in Northern Ireland was more than an imaginative resource, a storehouse of images. The Catholics of Heaney's generation were the first beneficiaries of the Butler Education Act and a long-term shift in the social geography of Britain.
