The Angelus: Devotional Television,Changing Times

Introduction

A traditional call to prayer associated with the Virgin Mary, the ringing of the Angelus bell synchronizes remote Christian worship. For centuries, parish church bells across Catholic Europe rang the tripartite strike pattern of the Angelus daily at dawn, noon, and twilight. The sound of the bells told those in earshot that it was time to pause in their labors and recite a special prayer. Perhaps the most famous evocation of this shared cultural experience is the 1859 painting by Jean-Francois Millet showing French peasants bowing their heads in the fields upon hearing the chimes. Alain Corbin’s superb history, Village Bells (1998), examines the culture of bell-ringing at the time of Millet’s painting. The Angelus chime’s meaning, as he shows, extended beyond the simple function of spiritual summoning. It took shape within broader societal struggles, most notably between secular and religious authorities. In the 21st century, the chime continues to serve as a vehicle for ideological conflict. In March 2020, for example, a columnist for a conservative Catholic periodical called The Remnant asserted (incorrectly) that the Angelus originated as a call to arms against the Ottoman Empire (de Mattei 2020; Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The Angelus, Jean-Francois Millet, 1859. Salvador Dali was obsessed with this painting, convinced it depicted parents praying over a dead child.

Like all church bells, the Angelus is a form of mass communication. Over the course of the 20th century, media in predominantly Catholic countries have broadcast the distinctive peal at one or more of the designated times. Franco’s Spain inaugurated its Angelus broadcast in 1950 (Kenny 2015); Radio Maria, an international Catholic broadcaster, relays the bells three times daily in the Philippines and in many Latin American countries. In Italy, the Pope recites the Angelus prayer on the state television network every Sunday at noon. In Ireland, Irish public service broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) rings the Angelus on radio at noon and 6 pm. A fixture of RTÉ Radio since 1950, the Angelus is as much a signature of the Irish soundscape as the on-air reading of obituary announcements, studded with antiquated phrases (“reposing at home. . .”).

Since 1962, the Angelus has been a staple of RTÉ television as well, airing between 18:00 and 18:01 daily (Savage 2010, 170–5). Perhaps because its primary content is aural, there seems to have been little concern for the broadcast’s visual track in its first thirty years on television. Until the mid-1990s, the accompanying image was one of several rotating selections, always an Old Master rendering, sometimes the Annunciation of Mary, sometimes a Madonna and Child. In my observations at least, people tend to remember these paintings as unengaging, monochromatic images. In 1998 the Angelus changed dramatically. RTÉ contracted with Kairos Communications, an Irish production company focusing on Catholic content, to produce moving image material for the broadcast. Kairos continues to produce the Angelus. In the beginning, its varying one-minute sequences, structured by slow fades and dissolves, offered the viewer a hypnotic drift between inspirational images of nature, church architecture, and tableaux-like scenes of ordinary people in modern life, pausing as they sip tea or light a candle. Although the visual style and content have evolved since, the aim of the sequence remains consistent: to signify or encourage contemplation.

This article explores the meaning and wider significance of the changes in the Angelus’ visual track over the years, focusing specifically on the period just before the transition to moving images in 1998. This transition is documented in the papers of Dermod McCarthy, former Director of Religious Programmes, held in the document archives at RTÉ in Donnybrook, Dublin. The files are filled with correspondence, including internal memoranda and letters from viewers, other clerics, and creative workers. They also contain a raft of newspaper clippings on the subject of the Angelus, many with atrocious headlines playing on the theme of the bell: “For Whom does the Angelus Toll” (Kerrigan 1998), and “High Noon for the Angelus” (Coogan 1998). These clippings are mostly from 1998, although it should be noted that Irish newspaper columnists and cultural commentators have made the appeal and meaning of the Angelus an evergreen controversy since at least the 1970s. Why hasn’t it been abolished as a violation of religious freedoms (Irish Times 1974; McDonald 1986)? Isn’t it okay despite its religious origins (Kenny 2015; O’Faolain 1995)? Should it be allowed to interrupt current affairs programming (Kinlay 1986; Myers 1979)? Does it accurately represent modern Irishness (McCarthy 2010; Molloy 1998)? Is it triggering for abuse victims (Reddit 2019)? Why is it so weird (Reddit 2020a, 2020b)? There seems no end to the stream of position-taking it provokes in Irish culture. Fiction writers. filmmakers, and poets have also found a rich resource in the Angelus; the broadcast of the bells, or the bells themselves, feature in a number of literary and cinematic works (see, for example, Binchy 1991; Dorcey 1991; Lynch 1992; McCormack 2016; O’Neill 2001; Weir 2002). And parodists, unsurprisingly, have found the Angelus to be fertile ground. (An online search for the phrase “Angelus spoof” will yield a representative sample.)

The persistence of the Angelus in public discourse and culture suggests that its history on Irish television is closely indexed to the cultural history of the nation. This is interesting, or at least curious, considering that the Angelus is television you’re not supposed to watch. You should be praying, or meditating, instead. Or so one would think. As it happens, the document archives at RTÉ offer plenty of rich evidence that people have always watched the Angelus closely, and that they feel a personal stake in its modes of representation. What becomes apparent in the extant files is the way changing social contexts shaped how viewers, producers, and commentators saw and interpreted the images of the Angelus.

It is fortunate for the researcher that the 1990s are well represented in the archive. For (at least) three reasons, this was a momentous decade in the history of the postcolonial Irish state. Firstly, these years saw the dawning of the “Celtic Tiger,” a period of great economic growth. Ireland’s employment numbers doubled between 1988 and 2008, when the financial crisis hit (Ó Riain 2014, 4). Secondly, the peace process in Northern Ireland was moving rapidly, with some tragic interruptions, toward its culmination in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which involved an unprecedented power sharing arrangement between unionists and nationalists. And thirdly, the status of the Catholic Church in Irish public culture began a precipitous decline. Then and in subsequent decades, people challenged Church authority as never before, demanding accountability for acts and institutions of clerical abuse carried out with the assent of the state. At the turn of the 21st century, an ongoing process of truth-telling, inquiry, and protest would expose Holy Catholic Ireland as a massive “shame industrial complex” (Hogan 2019). The ensuing grassroots rejection of punitive religious moralism, and the embrace of secular values, seems a very abrupt transition for a country identified for over a millennium with devout Christianity.

The changes in economy, culture, and state wrought by the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement were undoubtedly necessary for such a seismic-scale social change to take place. But peace and economic security do not breed liberalization by themselves. Equally crucial were the skilled and persistent labors of journalists and documentarists, most notably Mary Raftery and Louis Lentin, whose exposés of the Church-State gulag run by religious aired on RTÉ in the 1990s (Lentin 1996; Raftery 1999; see also Raftery 2002). ¹

There is little evidence of these momentous historical forces in the tranquil image repertoire of the Angelus. And yet, as I’ll explain, its visual track—simultaneously essential for and subordinate to the audio—is central to the meaning of the chimes, and the experience of non-worldly absorption, within Irish media and public life. For the sake of clarity, it’s important to first establish what exactly the Angelus is: It is a call to prayer, not the reciting of a prayer. This difference mattered to the Church, from a doctrinal standpoint. As one RTÉ historian noted in reference to the radio version, to lead viewers through a prayer such as the Rosary required total attention to the sound and image. A broadcast of the Rosary would therefore render passively blasphemous anyone within earshot of the prayer who chose not to pray (Gorham 1967). The specific prayer associated with the Angelus bell honors the Annunciation, an event the New Testament recounts as the day the virgin Mary learns from an angel that she will become the mother of God. When saying the prayer, you are supposed to mark the momentousness of the occasion not only in words but also in gesture. Upon reaching the phrase “and the word was made flesh,” it is customary to genuflect (momentarily take a knee) or touch the chest. This bodily movement signifies Jesus Christ’s moment of incarnation in Mary’s womb.

As Cormack (2005) points out, contemporary viewers encountering the Angelus aren’t likely to know the words to the prayer (to say nothing of the gesture). Many people think of it simply as a time check, although audience research indicates widespread appreciation for the moment of contemplation it provides (Catholic News Agency 2018). Writing in 2005, toward the end of the Celtic Tiger, Cormack (2005) shrewdly characterized the Angelus as an ambivalent object in the Irish cultural repertoire, imperiled by its status as a religious holdover in a rapidly secularizing culture. The contradictions of modern Irish life were made visible, she shows, in the idealized scenes of craft and contemplation accompanying the bell. These images negotiate collective national representation by managing, in Cormack’s words, “the disjuncture between depicted themes and everyday life, and between content and medium.” The Angelus, she concludes, “generates at best, a wistful nostalgia for the social world it calls forth” (Cormack 2005, 286).

And yet now, fifteen years later, the attachment to the Angelus seems stronger than ever. In 2018, Irish voters cast their ballots in a referendum amending the Irish constitution to decriminalize blasphemy. RTÉ’s exit polls included the question of whether the Angelus should be retained on TV. The answer, overwhelmingly, was yes. One interviewee remarked, “To the person of faith, it’s a moment of grace; to the person without faith, it’s a moment of peace. What’s not to like” (Catholic News Agency 2018)? Such statements abide no contradiction between the affirmation of a Catholic ritual and the rapid secularization of a nation state that was until recently a form of “constitutional theocracy” (Hirschl 2010). Writing of the pre-television Angelus, Robert Savage (2010, 170) has observed that “the ease with which the Angelus made its way into the daily programming of Raidió Éireann underscores the very comfortable relationship between Raidió Éireann and the Catholic Church”. Still, as this relationship evolved, it changed. The consumer economy of the Celtic Tiger meant that the Irish television market became more competitive. Production values rose and religion was increasingly sidelined. This worldliness is reflected in the progressive decentering of Catholic iconography in the Angelus image track—the virgin Mary has not made an appearance in decades. Marian imagery persists only obliquely, as in a recent, tightly edited sequence showing a blacksmith forging a rose with hammer and tongs. ² In the 21st century, RTÉ regularly promotes the chime’s interfaith appeal, and emphasizes the non-sectarian nature of its address by broadcasting the Angelus on Good Friday, a day on which Catholic church bells are traditionally silent.

Still, certain adjustments have remained non-negotiable, most notably, the option of changing the time of broadcast. From its inception in radio, at the insistence of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the Angelus has aired exactly on the hour. This was a complex technological challenge for the postcolonial state broadcaster. In the beginning, to ensure horological accuracy, there were two timekeeping mechanisms: one in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, where the bell rang, and another at the General Post Office, then home of the State radio facilities. McQuaid’s mandate forced a tight regime of timekeeping upon the new medium’s schedule, adding a lot of pressure. Without the Angelus, the flow of TV programming could tolerate a degree of drift; because of the bell, everything had to line up with 6 pm (Savage 2010, 170–1). McQuaid’s insistence on the exact timing made the Angelus bell into a religion-tinged equivalent of “the pips”—an hourly time signal on the BBC, synchronized to Greenwich Mean time.

This inflexible temporality precipitated a crisis around the Angelus at RTÉ in 1998, the year TV3 (an entirely commercial, advertising-funded channel) was founded. The timing of the bell had always been a point of contention between the director of Religious Programmes and RTÉ news editors. For decades the news department complained that the Angelus was a prompt for viewers to turn to the BBC for the headlines. With the emergence of TV3, the problem of losing news audiences to the competition became even more serious. RTÉ management considered dropping it altogether. But word of this proposal leaked, public outcry ensued, and RTÉ executives backtracked. Indeed, this moment was something of a victory for Religious Programmes, which successfully blocked the rescheduling of the Angelus one minute earlier so that the news could start at six. As Dermod McCarthy explained when I interviewed him in 2015: “If you do that, then it is no longer the Angelus.”

In the intervening years, RTÉ has devised some 21st century solutions to its problem of losing viewers for the news. Now, in the twenty minutes prior to the Angelus, you can watch the news twice: first, as subtitled and signed news for the deaf, and then again in the Irish language, with advertisements wedged in between. The full national news broadcast starts at 6.01 pm, at which point you already know the headlines and you’ve even had the opportunity to practice your Irish.

The broadcast system’s capacity to adapt to the inflexible timing of the Angelus should not overshadow the important cultural work that debates over the chime’s cancellation performed in 1998. As Cormack notes, these debates largely pivoted on the question of whether the Angelus was a useful touchstone for modern Irish identity (Cormack 2005, 272, 279, 282). We can expand the frame further, and see the struggle over its transmission time as part of a wider modern struggle between secular and clerical authority, waged in the idiom of time: control over community time, national time, and all the fictive forms of coterminous collective time that broadcasting promises. Viewed within a longue durée, the internal dispute over the Angelus at RTÉ is the direct descendent of the provincial turf wars Corbin chronicled in Village Bells. As he details, rural priests and mayors treated control over the timing of the bell and the duration of its strike patterns as a way of proclaiming dominion over country people (Corbin 1998, 120–140).

The Angelus devotion is bound up in daily rhythms of work and rest, and it is worth asking whether this specific quality of the rite allowed such conflicts to flourish. To understand better this temporal specificity, it helps to compare it to the ringing of the altar bell in the Catholic Mass. This chime marks the onset of Christ’s transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the sacred process in which a thin edible wafer and a chalice of (alcohol-free) wine transform metaphysically into the flesh of Jesus Christ. As in the Angelus, the ringing of the altar bell is associated with specific words, here the Words of Institution, which the priest celebrating the Eucharist must utter in order to consecrate the communion offerings (“Take this, all of you, and eat it. . .”).

Like the bodily gesture of the Angelus prayer, the altar bell marks the spontaneous generation of human flesh, understood at least since Thomas Aquinas as a transformation not in appearance but substance (ST III q. 75). But the ritual of the Eucharist organizes agency and participation in an entirely different structure than the Angelus devotion. The Eucharistic sacrament must be presided over, conjured even, by priestly authority. In the Angelus, by contrast, the duty of acknowledging Christ’s implantation in Mary’s womb lies with the ordinary worshiper. Similarly, although both rituals involve a bell, it’s not the same kind of bell, and its role is different in each. The altar bell doesn’t peal; it jingles. It is a closed-circuit message addressing only those in its immediate vicinity (i.e., the participants in the Eucharist).

The relation of the altar bell to time is also different. It alerts communicants to the emergence of a sacramental timeline, branching off from the ordinary unspooling of the experiential present. This is the temporality of transubstantiation, which William Spanos (1965, 3) evocatively describes as a ritual in which “Christ’s assumption of flesh absorbs time into the eternal order.” In contrast with this extraordinary structuring of time, the Angelus achieves coherence as a ritual via its synchronization with human time. Clock time. It hails members of the parish not as a flock of souls but as a working population. In this respect it is humble and mundane, occupying a position on the boundary between sacred and secular, its timing set by the rhythms of working life and not the “eternal order.”

The Angelus in the Archives

McCarthy may have held that the timing of the Angelus was unchangeable, but under his direction its image track became fluid and adaptive. This attention to the aesthetic dimensions of the Angelus broadcast reflects the cultural sensibility McCarthy brought to religious programming. McCarthy, an ordained priest, participated in the Salzburg Seminar, an international cultural and intellectual meeting ground with its roots in American Cold War cultural diplomacy. By the time he was appointed head of religious programming, he was a seasoned television producer, keen to support Irish artists and musicians. Under McCarthy, the Angelus bell became an instrument of faith sufficiently capacious to accommodate non-sectarian worship. When he answered critics of the institution of the bell, McCarthy always emphasized the ways that the bell made itself available to all listeners, regardless of creed. Gary Byrnes, editor of a glossy magazine called Six, decried the Angelus as a sectarian symbol, inappropriate for a public service broadcaster to air because it was offensive to the State’s Protestant minority. McCarthy’s reply to this claim bore a tone of exasperation. He wrote that the Angelus was a call to prayer comparable to the sound of the Muezzin in Muslim countries, and that its pre-reformation ethos made it impossible to be sectarian: “The Angelus is in fact an acknowledgment of the incarnation of Christ, a doctrine commonly believed and held by all Christian denominations” (McCarthy 1998a).

But this was 1998, and only a month or so before the Good Friday Agreement would put an end to the era of sectarian and political violence known as the Troubles, forging a new all-Ireland vision of the future. It seems uncoincidental that this would be the year the Angelus imagery changed, replacing still images of the Virgin Mary with the current format: a nonsectarian, if not multifaith, montage of ordinary people produced by Kairos Communications. Here is how McCarthy described these sequences to RTÉ’s information officer, shortly before they aired:

RTÉ has introduced a new format for the Angelus. “This. . .short devotional programme will continue on the RTÉ 1 schedule in a style which is both more televisual and more inclusive.

The same bell peals the Angelus as before. Instead of a static icon or painting, the images portray steeples and bell-towers of both recent and ancient Irish church buildings while a number of people of varying gender and ages pause to pray at the sound of the bell.

This new version is the televisual equivalent of the famous painting The Angelus by Millet. It depicts a farming couple pausing from their work in a field as a distant church bell peals the Angelus. RTÉ plans to vary the images to match the seasons of the year, but the same theme will remain–a church bell calling all people to prayer, whether it be the Angelus prayer or another prayer of their choice. (McCarthy 1998b)

“Both televisual and more inclusive”—as this language and the closing sentence suggest, the moving image Angelus works to strike a balance between the secular and the multifaith.

The transition to moving images strengthened the association between the Angelus and work, because it called attention to the Angelus itself as the product of craft. Each sequence seeks to embody the ideal of the one-minute film to be a perfect gem. Viewers who shared favorable opinions made it clear that they appreciated the unusual pacing and staging. One man wrote:

Not being religious myself, I was never able to relate to the former showing of a religious icon. However, the new universal format is very moving and provides a suitable short interlude for anyone, religious or not, to take stock. I like the way the people look up from their activities when they hear the bell. This, and the background to the National Anthem at the end of the day, are among the best things RTÉ does. (Sowby 1998)

The file of viewer correspondence regarding this change does not seem to have retained the negative reactions, although they did exist. As McCarthy wrote to a friend,

I have had the complete spectrum of opinion ranging from complimentary–like yours–to unbelievable for ‘taking Our Lady off the television’! I wish some people could have their eyes opened to the realities of life in the cut-throat world of public service versus commercial television!” (McCarthy 1998c)

With the Kairos Angelus films, McCarthy shepherded in a form of religious visuality that displayed an unusually high level of experimentation. Compare the fluid, associative, enigmatic imagery of the Angelus with the static, predictable quality of a broadcast mass. My sampling of masses broadcast from 1966 onwards, archived at RTÉ, suggests that the visual set ups and editing patterns have remained relatively unchanged. ³ There is usually one overhead frontal view of the altar from the choir loft, and another, closer view from the side aisle. Shots of the congregation are sparse, and editing patterns languid: imagine organ music over a slow zoom into a stained-glass window, a statue, or a flower arrangement, dissolving to a wide shot of the altar with the crucifix behind. The high point, often, is the awkward choreography of Communion; some skill at the switcher is required to avoid the sight of someone chewing the Host.

Of course, televised Mass is formulaic because Mass is formulaic, and so is church architecture. Columns and statues limit the options for producers who must set up four cameras without blocking sightlines or interfering in the flow of traffic near the altar. Yet McCarthy nevertheless managed to make one significant aesthetic change in RTÉ’s mass broadcasts: once he took over, music became increasingly important in the masses RTÉ taped for the air. Similarly, McCarthy’s professional and artistic skills as a producer led to experiments with the still image in the domain of the Angelus even before the switch to the Kairos-produced sequences. Soon after he arrived at RTÉ, McCarthy began seeking out paintings by Irish artists to display as the Angelus bell chimed (Kew 2020; McCarthy 2017). One painting in particular made an impression on viewers, and a number wrote in offering their thoughts. It was a Zulu Madonna and Child painted by expatriated South African artist Tony Kew (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

The RTÉ archives contain many positive viewer responses to the use of Tony Kew’s Aboriginal Madonna, n.d., to accompany the Angelus bell in 1998. Unfortunately, the only reproduction of the image is archived in a clipping file.

McCarthy had used Kew’s work already, in a short program on the Troubles, and he chose Kew’s Madonna as a replacement for the Old Masters (Kew 2020). The painting aired during the Angelus Bell in February and March of 1998. The responses retained in the archive are all positive. One viewer wrote asking where he could find a copy of the painting, describing it at a level of detail that suggests great scrutiny:

The painting I want is most certainly an African woman dressed in vivid blue material carrying her child and it is the contrast of this woman and child against the backdrop of raw African scenery with which I am very familiar that sets this Angelus illustration unmistakably apart from any other RTÉ have screened. Unfortunately, no title to the picture or mention of the artist’s name was made otherwise tracing it would have been much easier. However, such was the contrast between this and normal Angelus illustrations that it was remarked on by several people who often gave no recognition of the fact that the Angelus was even on. (Rylands 1998)

This was by no means the only praising letter; it was clear that the Zulu Madonna was a huge hit.

For Dermod McCarthy, the praise must have been gratifying; 1998 was his sixth year as Editor of Religious Programs, but his involvement with the network dated back to the 1960s, when he was in the production team for Radharc (1962–1996). A highly regarded documentary series, Radharc was produced by a group of Dublin parish priests charged by Archbishop McQuaid with the responsibility of making the Catholic Church’s cultural contribution to Ireland’s new medium. McCarthy’s production sensibility was not always appreciated by McQuaid, who took offense at two of his Radharc episodes. One, entitled “Are Nuns Human?” targeted the Church’s failure to advance the status of women after the reforms of The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Another, on folk superstition (Pishogues) is a fascinating ethnographic document, although to McQuaid it came close to dignifying paganism. By way of punishment, McQuaid removed McCarthy from Radharc, making him parish priest of Athy, the farthest-flung parish in the Archdiocese, for a year or two (McCarthy 2015).

When McCarthy was appointed as RTÉ’s Religious Programs Editor, the emerging public backlash against the Catholic Church must have made the job difficult. Irish people were at last ready to acknowledge the massive archipelago of Church-run institutions that had warehoused surplus and vulnerable populations for use as slave labor since before the founding of the modern state, and afterwards with its sanction and patronage. Many thousands of children, people with physical and mental disabilities, unmarried women, victims of incest, and social outcasts passed through the system. The institutions comprising it had many names: “industrial schools,” “mother and baby homes,” Magdalene Asylums—the latter notoriously cruel establishments where so-called fallen women were imprisoned and set to work in church-run laundries (Hogan 2019; Milotte 1997; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999; Smith 2007). The system was well known about but only rarely discussed publicly for decades (for a good overview of the evidence that people knew, see Dwyer 2014).

All of this changed in the 1990s. In 1992, Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of the pope on U.S. television, a protest against Church silence over clerical abuse. In 1994, missteps and delays in the arrest of Brendan Smyth, a fugitive pedophile priest, contributed to the collapse of a Fianna Faíl-Labour Party coalition government. This came one year after construction workers discovered a mass grave with the bodies of over a hundred and fifty inmates on the site of a Magdalene Asylum run by the Sisters of Charity. Uncensored reporting on these and several other high-profile incidents, alongside the investigative journalism of Lentin and Raftery on RTÉ, created a discursive space in which Irish people might begin to reckon with and acknowledge generations of clerico-carceral trauma.

This context had no direct bearing on McCarthy’s decision to use the work of contemporary Irish artists for the Angelus visual track. However, once inaugurated, the practice would—perhaps inevitably—expose RTÉ’s religious programs department to the mood of the times. Kew’s Zulu Madonna opened the Religious Programs mailbox not only to viewer appreciations, but also to contributions by viewers who, inspired by Kew, sent in their own renderings of religious themes, or images they’d come across and thought could accompany the chimes. There is no record of which, if any, of the submissions contained in RTÉ’s files actually aired (with the exception of subsequent submissions by Kew himself, discussed below). Many viewers seem habitually to have sent in Christmas cards depicting Annunciations or the Madonna and Child, but original works by Irish artists also feature prominently in the collection. The most striking ones say more than they perhaps intend—about the relationship between individuals and the state, about the culture of Catholicism, and about the idea of a multicultural, interfaith Ireland.

Consider the variation on the Annunciation painted by a nun, Sister Marcella McNally, who had lived much of her life in Nigeria (“M. McC.” 1998). I suppose what struck me about this work first was the strange echo of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus I thought I saw in it (Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 3.

This undated Annunciation painting by Sr. Marcella McNally, M.S.H.R. is a striking composition. Its fluid forms and vivid rendering of figures identify it as the work of a skilled artist. There is no record in the RTÉ archive indicating when, or whether, it aired during the Angelus, although it was submitted for consideration.

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Figure 4.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, 1920. Sister McNally’s Annunciation painting (Figure 3) shares certain compositional features with this work. However, McNally pairs the Angel’s blessing gesture with Mary’s outstretched, laboring hand, creating a parity between terrestrial and divine that places the Messianic on a human scale and identifies divinity with women’s work. Klee’s figure carries bleaker connotations. Naming it the Angel of History, Walter Benjamin saw in it a hopeless vision of historical consciousness, as a form of hindsight formed in – and obscured and distanced by – the ever-increasing pile of destruction wrought by humanity.

The resonance between the two paintings emerges from the gestures, the winged figures, the yellow palette, and the predominance of the sideways glance. But McNally’s jewel tones domesticate and give color to her divine beings. The Virgin Mary is an olive-skinned woman looking quizzically at the Afro-haired Angel who has interrupted her work with the spindle. Walter Benjamin interpreted Klee’s totemic Angel as a helpless figure, the angel of history blown backward into the future by the mounting rubble of human wreckage (Benjamin 1969; Werckmeister 1996). In contrast, Sister Marcella’s angel exists on a human scale and enters the temporality of human labor. The painting adapts elements of classical annunciation paintings, such as the spindle, giving its main figures more warmth and life than a pallid Renaissance Madonna. This Virgin’s smile is bemused—a natural reaction, when you think of it, given that a stranger has just interrupted her work with the news that she is pregnant with a deity.

This image is a reminder of the degree to which multicultural life and intercultural exchange was a normative fact of life among certain religious orders. I say this with the awareness that there is a danger in romanticizing missionary work, while also acknowledging that missionary orders themselves undoubtedly romanticized Africa and Africans. Orders like McNally’s Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary were not involved in the administration of Ireland’s Clerico-Carceral Continuum, although their mid-twentieth century reports on African mission work are laden with paracolonial, paternalist touches. “The key to the heart of the African lies in tiny hands,” proclaims the title of a 1955 article on Holy Rosary schools in Nigeria. (Stanislaus 1955). Still, if nothing else, McNally’s joyful, beautiful artwork points to a wellspring of enthusiasm for multiculturalism at a time when Ireland was not a particularly multicultural society. It makes sense that today, the order to which McNally belonged champions progressive causes and advocates social justice (Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary 2015).

A different sense of this period as one of great social change comes out in another image from the archive of viewer submissions. This is a Madonna and Child painted as indigenous Australians, submitted as a possible Angelus selection by a woman who, with her husband, had lived for thirty-five years in Australia before returning in the late 1990s to retire in the border county of Donegal (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Inspired by the broadcast of Tony Kew’s Zulu Madonna, a viewer from Donegal submitted for broadcast consideration this postcard reproduction of a Madonna and Child painted as First Nation Australians.

The painting, reproduced on a postcard from a visitor center on Aboriginal land, is by Karel Kupka, a French-Czech artist known for his portraits of First Nation Australians (Rothwell 2007). The author’s married name may be of Ulster Protestant origin, and she takes the time to point out in the letter that she herself comes from Derry, a majority Catholic city on the other side of the UK border (Ellis 1998). The possibility that this letter writer was in a “mixed” marriage may explain, aside from the perennial employment problem, why she and her husband felt the need to leave Ireland for decades. If this is the case, then perhaps her impulse to share this image with the nation, via the Angelus, compares to Sister McNally’s vision of the Virgin Mary—a vision born from the cosmopolitanism of missionaries and emigrants. We might even read this as part of an emigrant narrative of reconciliation with a homeland in which religious tolerance might have eased but where racial intolerance was on the rise (see Joseph 2020; Rolston and Shannon 2002 for an excellent bibliography on racism and Ireland, see Lentin and McVeigh 2006). ⁴

A few submissions in the Angelus files speak, if only indirectly, to the widening public outcry surrounding the extent of Church denial on its carceral institutions. Consider the fifteenth century painting entitled Magdalen Reading, submitted by a viewer for consideration in August, 1997 (Dowling 1997). The spelling is not the same, but the word Magdalen conjures the figure of the Magdalene—women who worked for their lives as slave labor in laundries serving Irish commercial and state entities. Without evidence, we can only speculate whether the viewer who sent this in had the Magdalene Laundries in mind. But it’s not impossible to conceive that it is a form of indirect communication, perhaps even a version of the “hidden transcript” through which people covertly express conflicts with authority (Scott 1990). This same year Ben Lander, a Swedish transplant to Ireland, published the book Irish Voices Irish Lives. Among the twelve individuals profiled in the book was poet and activist Pat Tierney. When he gave the interview, Tierney, a survivor of the industrial school system and a person living with AIDS, spoke about the need to bring justice against the orders that ran the Magdalene Laundries, and mentioned a memorial he was planning for victims of the system. Tierney died shortly before the book came out, his suicide in a Dublin churchyard receiving news coverage when it happened, and again when the book was released. The following year the British Channel Four would release Sex in a Cold Climate, its damning documentary on the Magdalene laundries. Given such timing, there may well be a message embedded in this submission of a painting of Mary Magdalen for national broadcasting. Still, we cannot know what that message would be. Much as one might want the submission to express resistance to clerical authority, it could equally be a zealot’s effort to remind indecent female viewers of their sin.

In the case of another submission for the Angelus broadcast, there is little doubt that the status of women in the Church motivated the choice of image. South Africa-born Tony Kew was then in his fifties and beginning a second career as a painter. He had recently arrived in Ireland from Canada, where he had worked for several decades as an illustrator. After the screening of Zulu Madonna, he submitted two more paintings for consideration. These submissions reflected what would become a signature theme in Kew’s now decades-long body of work—the church’s treatment of women. As he became more well known as an Irish artist, this would draw some controversy (Wicklow People 2007; Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Tony Kew’s signature theme is the female figure. He cites Sinead O’Connor as an inspiration, and his paintings share with O’Connor’s work in this period an interest in using the trappings of religion to critique patriarchy. This rhomboid painting of a shawled woman bearing the suffering world in her arms was not chosen as an accompaniment to the Angelus, no doubt because of the ambiguity of its meanings.

In one of the paintings Kew sent to RTÉ, a diamond shaped canvas, a stern-but-serene woman supports a wounded, earth-bound man in her arms—the image suggesting the disproportionate burdens life places upon women. Notably, its female figure is clad as the Virgin Mary, but the image is not conventionally devotional. The other painting Kew submitted was shocking to encounter in the archive, devoid of context. An allegorical image of innocence, it shows a pubescent girl in a white leotard who looks defiantly at the viewer. Her stance is ambiguous: is her arm clasped protectively around her body? Or is she standing hand on hip? It is difficult to tell, because the foreground of the image consists of a gauzy curtain or veil, slightly parted (Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

This painting by Tony Kew allegorizes coming of age and hints at child sexuality. It was not selected for the Angelus broadcast.

I spoke to Kew about these works in June 2020, and he remembered them well. When I told him I was surprised to encounter the second one in the archive because it seemed rather “edgy” for the Angelus, he agreed, speaking with the equanimity of someone who is used to people having an uncertain response to his work. He told me that he’d chosen to submit these paintings because, as an emerging artist, he wanted to put his most provocative material out there. The decision, in the end, was not motivated by any particular sense of the period’s revelations around clerical abuse, but rather from professional ambition, although Kew did admit to a general and lifelong “personal clerical suspicion.” Whatever else it might say, that Kew would consider a work with hints of child sexuality an appropriate accompaniment for the Angelus indicates his status as a newcomer to Ireland from liberal Canada. Unfamiliar with the tradition of the Angelus, he had immediately been struck by its strangeness when he first watched Irish television—as many outsiders are.

All of these examples suggest, in different ways, that the Angelus is something of a projection, an image in which we see what we want to see. For each individual, the submitted image bears a personal meaning that connects them with the nation—a meaning that might range from reconciliation, to intercultural friendship, to artistic exposure. There are other examples of viewer-made works in the RTÉ files, although the ones discussed above are the ones that seem most telling in relation to their place and time, and mine. Unfortunately, the files pertaining to relations between Kairos, producer of the moving image Angelus, and RTÉ are yet to be located in the archives, although there is no doubt that they would make for a fascinating follow up to the historical account I’ve sketched in the foregoing. Although these viewer-submitted paintings did not air, they testify to the potency of the Angelus as a source of creative energy, as well as a locus of devotion. Indeed, in the historical wreckage that is 2020, the Angelus retains its relevance; in the early months of the Covid-19 epidemic a short memorial video entitled Ireland Remembers aired on RTÉ every night before the Angelus. Perhaps, as the 21st century throws us backward into the future, the time is ripe for people to start making their own devotional imagery for the daily broadcast, and perhaps even writing their own prayers.