Frank McCourt, in his childhood memoir Angela's Ashes, portrays his experiences as a series of oppressive forces working on him and against his freedom, almost as if the culture in which he was raised was created precisely to oppress its children. The attitude of the author toward his entire childhood might be summed up by the following passage from the first page of the book:
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than any ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood (11).
What saves McCourt's childhood from complete misery, and what saves the book from being oppressive itself, is represented in the line "the happy childhood is hardly worth your while." The Irish spirit, the down-to-earth sense of humor, the plucky refusal to stay down are the elements of the main character which symbolize that people's essential love of life, despite oppressive cultural forces. This study will specifically examine the role of religion in that culture, its oppressive nature from the perspective of Frank as a boy, and his and his people's complex and contradictory relationship with their God and their religion.
Essentially, that relationship can be called one of both acceptance and resistance, both respect and ridicule. On the first page of the book, McCourt refers to the misery imposed upon his childhood in part by Irish Catholicism, to "pompous priests" and the "Feast of the Circumcision" (11). He acknowledges that the Irish do attend church, but suggests that it is in part because of the weather:
The rain drove us into the church--our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of...