People interested in the “Catholic Moment” threads (see here and subsequently here) may be interested to read Russell Shorto’s long NYT Magazine piece from 2011 about the relationship between Church and State in Ireland, in the aftermath of the abuse scandals. (And people who aren’t, keep reading this post … I’m going to get to “Downton Abbey” in a moment.) From Shorto’s report:

Over the course of the 20th century, Station Island became a symbol of the way that Catholicism rooted itself in the Irish nation. Politics at the beginning of the century centered on two debates: British rule and religion. There were those — like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most holy trinity.”

Thus the 20th-century image of “Irishness” came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church. The archbishops of Dublin became something like grand inquisitors, wielding great power. The church’s heavy influence on Irish society kept the wider world at bay for a surprisingly long time. Eamon Maher told me that in the 1970s, his parents found it profoundly disorienting when the evening recitation of the rosary suddenly had to compete with American shows like “Dallas,” and “the world of wealth, flash cars and extramarital affairs.” Contraception was illegal in Ireland as recently as 1980, and until 1985 condoms were available only with a prescription.

As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country’s structure. In 1977, Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him “that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way” and that he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, “In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”

According to Abbot Hederman, the hierarchy of the church in Ireland believed that the nation had a special role as a kind of citadel of Catholicism: “Ireland was meant to be the purest country that ever existed, upholding the Catholic ideal of no sex except in marriage and then only for procreation. And the priest was to be the purest of the pure. It’s not difficult to understand how the whole system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact was a complete culture. Because you had people with no understanding of their sexuality, of what sexuality even was, and they were in complete power.”

I’m not the first to observe that for a show set in a world in which people are grouped by their inherited privilege or ineluctable servitude, the popularity of “Downton Abbey” seems paradoxical in these times of Occupy protests and presidential candidates who aren’t concerned about the very poor and who pay less in taxes proportionally than does Warren Buffett’s secretary. Clearly, something about this show appeals to our deepest desires, granting us the cake-having and cake-eating satisfaction of indulging in a fantasy of a bygone era that we’re actually thankful is gone.