Vatican advances sainthood for Irish WW1 chaplain amid unresolved tensions over Church complicity in imperial war machine
Original framing: “Church makes sainthood case for 'WW1 hero' priest” — BBC News - World
Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' (1511) would recognise the joke: a Jesuit — order founded to counter Reformation — now sainted for dying in a war that shattered Christendom. Eshu (Yoruba trickster) guards crossroads; Doyle died at Frezenberg ridge, a literal crossroads where five divisions vanished. The Vatican's 'heroic virtue' certification requires two miracles — but the first attributed cure (a 1930s cancer remission) occurred in a Belfast hospital built on land donated by a linen merchant whose fortune came from WWI uniforms. Hyde's 'Trickster Makes This World' (1998): 'The trickster's theft is the condition of culture.' Here, the Church steals Doyle's anti-war dread (documented in his 'Vocations' retreat notes) and sells it back as piety. The absurd edge: a priest who wrote 'War is the devil's sacrament' becomes the sacrament of the Church's war memory.
Fr Willie Doyle's sainthood cause operates as a sophisticated memory management system: it extracts an Irish Jesuit's genuine spiritual anguish from the trench mud and reframes it as validation for the very structures — imperial recruitment, military discipline, ecclesiastical silence on structural sin — that produced the slaughter.
The Vatican's Congregation for Causes of Saints functions here not as a tribunal of holiness but as a curator of usable pasts, selecting a 'heroic' Catholic who died serving the British Empire to bolster the Church's moral capital in a post-colonial, post-abuse Ireland. The trickster reading reveals the deepest irony: Doyle's own words — 'War is the devil's sacrament' — are the suppressed miracle that would disqualify him under any honest 'heroic virtue' standard. Restoring the executed soldiers, the munitionettes, the Traveller families, and the pre-colonial Irish critique of kingly war (the filid's satire) does not diminish Doyle; it places him in the only communion that matters — the company of the betrayed, not the canonised.