Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

eflect the number of practicing Catholics, only those who were baptized, and they
become especially problematic when one considers the inclusion of apostates such as
Joyce.
In any event, the Catholic Church retained an inordinate amount of power within
Irish culture during Joyce's life. As the spiritual and social center of Irish culture, the
Church also maintained numerous powers often associated with more temporal
institutions. The cultural critic and philosopher Michel Foucault defined such
omnipresence of institutionalized power as "the multiplicity of force relations immanent
of the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their organization" (Foucault,
History 92). The byproducts of these force relations are the "terminal forms" of power:
those institutions, such as church and state, which dominate a culture, resulting in the
subservience of the citizens of a given state (Foucault, History 92). In Ireland, the
"terminal forms" of power- -the byproducts of the "multiplicity of forces " -were primarily
the British colonial powers and the Roman Catholic Church. Stephen Dedalus clearly
reveals this dual subserviency in the "Telemachus" episode of Ulysses: "I am a servant
of two masters, an English and an Italian. . . The imperial British state and the holy
Roman catholic and apostolic church" (1.218). While the colonial government
controlled the physical freedom and actions of the populace, the Catholic Church,
through its strict dogma and high visibility, controlled those elements which most
essentially define a culture: the vision and belief of the people. In short, because of the
power inherent in its institutional and spiritual authority, the Church controlled the Irish
consciousness through its multivalent representatives: an intricate blend of Catholic
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