A note on Fr Charles O'Daly - Fermanagh chaplain to the Bandera
Early political opinions of one of the clerics who went to Spain with O'Duffy.
In
Oracles of God, The Roman Catholic Church and Irish Politics 1922-37, by Patrick Murray, University College Dublin Press, Dublin, 1999, p294, there is the following reference.
It is one of the many ironies of the period between 1922 and 1937 that the Free State Constitution, formulated by an administration warmly endorsed and sustained by the bishops of Ireland, afforded no recognition to distinctively Catholic values or concerns, or even broadly Christian ones.. It is perhaps odd that the leadership of the Church in the twenties acquiesced in this position without venturing public criticism or protest. It is another irony that the political heirs to the anathematised Republicans should have given the state a constitution with so pervasively Catholic a colouring as the 1937 one. Isolated
clerical voices deplored the secular, even pagan, character of the 1922 constitution. Patrick Daly, PP Castlepollard,
Co. Westmeath, wondered at a 'Godless Constitution for a Christian land' [Freeman's Journal, 27th September 1922, he was later PP in Enniskillen and led 7 men out to Spain where he served as a priest to the Irish Brigade.]
