Kearns, Gerry (2023) The Catholic Footprint in Victorian Dublin. Journal of Victorian Culture, 28 (4). pp. 566-572. ISSN 1355-5502

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Abstract

Religions make their mark in cities already bearing the legacies of earlier spiritual encodings, decodings and re-codings. We might describe these marks as a sort of footprint. The Catholic footprint, then, would, in the manner of the urban figure-ground relation, include the churches, schools, hospitals or other edifices that comprise the mission of the Catholic Church.1 It would extend to various street- and place-names that, for many people, have Catholic associations. Less tangible but still evident, the Catholic footprint in a city might include land owned by the Church, and the control that this allows over urban development. All senses might register the Catholic footprint. Candles and incense are most intense within the walls of a church, but even they are occasionally carried in procession into city streets. Bells call the faithful to mass or, as with the Angelus, to other religious observance. The footprint extends to the realm of memory and cities are replete with religious relics, from graveyards to sites where once stood religious institutions, or where in time past sacred matters transpired. Some of these sites are invested with commemorative practice and in this way become places of public memory.2 Others are more covert, haunted by histories of state-perpetrated violence or under the erasure of active state suppression, they serve as a spectral trace of injury and elision.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Religions; Coding; decoding; relics;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	18714
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad018
Depositing User:	Gerry Kearns
Date Deposited:	04 Jul 2024 14:36
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Victorian Culture
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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