Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 17

BURKE'S CATHOLIC CONSERVATISM

evil; it is impossible, for Burke. Any radical
reforms contrary to divine providence and
God's will not only cause evil and destruction; they simply will not work in the long
run and, indeed, will make the situations
they claim to improve much worse.

urke brought traditional Catholic social
teaching, derived from St. Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas, to the modern
era, providing a conservatism based on the
Christian understanding of human nature,
society, and history. Unlike some later Catholic social thought, which compromised with
modern secular ideology (most extremely in
liberation theology, which adopted a Marxist
perspective), Burke adhered to the Catholic
theology and political thought that had
guided the Church for centuries.
Most scholars have not acknowledged this
underlying Catholicism in Burke because
of his outward allegiance to the established
Church of England, membership in which
was required, at this time, to be able to attend
college, enter the professions, and serve in
Parliament. But it was not surprising that
Burke concealed any explicit Catholicism, as
the Irish had learned to conceal their religion
from the English for a hundred years because
of the harsh Penal Laws against Irish Catholics. Since the virtual outlawing of their
Church under Cromwell, Irish Catholics
had had to conceal their faith, conceal their
churches, conceal their clergy, conceal their
property, and conceal their native political
communities for fear of persecution; exclusion from education, work, and worship;
confiscation of property; and imprisonment,
torture, and death. Such deception is common in all occupied and oppressed countries, and Burke's subterfuge was considered
acceptable in eighteenth-century Ireland, as
it was employed to help his oppressed Irish
brethren.

Edmund Burke has long been considered
"the first" modern conservative (as the title
of Jesse Norman's new biography reveals);
but except for common references to his
favorable views of religion generally, little
has been recognized of the theological, and
especially Catholic, foundations of that
conservatism.
Burke came from "Old English" IrishNorman families on both sides: Catholics
for hundreds of years and socially, politically, and religiously prominent in Ireland.3
His mother, Mary Nagle, came from a
noble Irish family in County Cork and was
a practicing Roman Catholic all her life.
Her ancestry included Richard Nagle, the
attorney general to the Catholic king James
II, and Nano Nagel, the eighteenth-century
foundress of the Presentation Order of Nuns,
closely aligned with the Augustinian Friars,
who kept the church alive during the persecutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. During his life Edmund Burke
supported this religious order financially.4
His father, Richard, was from a similarly
old, established Anglo-Irish family, prominent in County Galway and Dublin. He
converted to the Anglican Protestant church
to be able to attend college and enter the
legal profession. So Edmund was raised, at
least nominally, in the established Church
of England.5
Burke was born into an eighteenth-century
Ireland that had been conquered and occupied by the Protestant British, and he lived
under the harsh Penal Laws. Conversion
to the established church was not always
regarded as apostasy, especially if it led to
positions that could help the oppressed Irish
Catholics. As Burke biographer Conor Cruise
O'Brien put it: "Conversion helped to maintain the Catholic propertied interest . . . [and]
converts were not fully absorbed into the
established order." Indeed, Richard Burke
17

Modern Age - Summer 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2014