Ciaran devane biography for kids

&#; This is a paper I presented at the National Meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Where Does The Church End And The State Begin?

In , Richard S. Devane, () a Jesuit priest, social reformer and political activist, wrote an article on ‘Indecent Literature’ for the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. In this article, Devane addressed what he saw as the need for the censorship of print publications in the Irish Free State. He placed this in a broader context of contemporary reforms in other areas of sexual morality, such as prostitution, age of consent laws, and the legal status of illegitimate children. Devane said the issue of “indecent literature” must be addressed using “our new-won powers” but also “according to Irish ideals and Catholic standards”; in other words Church and State were melded in his conception, and he drew on his own experiences as a social-reforming priest; but where Devane had lead a vigilance committee in Limerick in the previous decade that pressured Catholic shop-owners to boycott certain publications, he felt that such approaches would not work in larger and more religiously diverse cities like Cork or Dublin. Thus he argued that the State has to step in, what he called “the necessity of falling back upon the law”.^[1]

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