ABSTRACT
The statistics of church-going are one gauge of the secularity of a society; it is more difficult to show the limits set to secularity by the strength and substance of popular religious culture. In Ireland, ‘religion was a matter of choosing between one appalling vulgarity and another’, declares Iris Murdoch of popular Protestantism and Catholicism, while allowing that popular Catholicism was the ‘gaudier, more vital and more primitive’ of the two. The musical accompaniments of this sort of occasion were of a piece with the agitation of the participants. Good religious use was made of the lying-in-state that preceded the funerals of Irish girls of special piety. The poor would bring rosaries and medals to be sanctified by contact with the hands and throat of the corpse, which was placed ‘amidst lights and flowers, with a wreath of roses on her brow, and a crucifix on her breast’.
