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Television & New Media
2021, Vol. 22(1) 12 –31
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476420976120
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Article
The Angelus: Devotional
Television, Changing Times
Anna McCarthy1
Abstract
The ringing of the Angelus, a Catholic call to prayer, is a staple of Irish state television
broadcasting, occurring at 6 o’clock every evening. Over the years, the image track
accompanying the bell has changed, transitioning from still to moving images and
incorporating an increasingly secular pictorial repertoire. Although the Angelus is
TV you are not supposed to watch, the document archives at Radió Teleifís Éireann
offer plenty of rich evidence that people have always watched the Angelus closely,
that they feel a personal stake in its modes of representation, and that they approach
religious images as statements about religion and the Church.
Keywords
religious media, theocracy, secularization, reception studies, media archives, the
Angelus
Introduction
A traditional call to prayer associated with the Virgin Mary, the ringing of the Angelus
bell synchronizes remote Christian worship. For centuries, parish church bells across
Catholic Europe rang the tripartite strike pattern of the Angelus daily at dawn, noon,
and twilight. The sound of the bells told those in earshot that it was time to pause in
their labors and recite a special prayer. Perhaps the most famous evocation of this
shared cultural experience is the 1859 painting by Jean-Francois Millet showing
French peasants bowing their heads in the fields upon hearing the chimes. Alain
Corbin’s superb history, Village Bells (1998), examines the culture of bell-ringing at
the time of Millet’s painting. The Angelus chime’s meaning, as he shows, extended
beyond the simple function of spiritual summoning. It took shape within broader
1New York University, New York, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Anna McCarthy, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies, 721
Broadway, 6th floor, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Email: am81@nyu.edu
976120TVNXXX10.1177/1527476420976120Television & New MediaMcCarthy
research-article2020
McCarthy 13
societal struggles, most notably between secular and religious authorities. In the 21st
century, the chime continues to serve as a vehicle for ideological conflict. In March
2020, for example, a columnist for a conservative Catholic periodical called The
Remnant asserted (incorrectly) that the Angelus originated as a call to arms against the
Ottoman Empire (de Mattei 2020; Figure 1).
Like all church bells, the Angelus is a form of mass communication. Over the
course of the 20th century, media in predominantly Catholic countries have broadcast
the distinctive peal at one or more of the designated times. Franco’s Spain inaugurated
its Angelus broadcast in 1950 (Kenny 2015); Radio Maria, an international Catholic
broadcaster, relays the bells three times daily in the Philippines and in many Latin
American countries. In Italy, the Pope recites the Angelus prayer on the state television
network every Sunday at noon. In Ireland, Irish public service broadcaster Raidió
Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) rings the Angelus on radio at noon and 6 pm. A fixture of RTÉ
Radio since 1950, the Angelus is as much a signature of the Irish soundscape as the
on-air reading of obituary announcements, studded with antiquated phrases (“reposing
at home. . .”).
Since 1962, the Angelus has been a staple of RTÉ television as well, airing between
18:00 and 18:01 daily (Savage 2010, 170–5). Perhaps because its primary content is
aural, there seems to have been little concern for the broadcast’s visual track in its first
thirty years on television. Until the mid-1990s, the accompanying image was one
of several rotating selections, always an Old Master rendering, sometimes the
Annunciation of Mary, sometimes a Madonna and Child. In my observations at least,
Figure 1. The Angelus, Jean-Francois Millet, 1859. Salvador Dali was obsessed with this
painting, convinced it depicted parents praying over a dead child.
14 Television & New Media 22(1)
people tend to remember these paintings as unengaging, monochromatic images. In
1998 the Angelus changed dramatically. RTÉ contracted with Kairos Communications,
an Irish production company focusing on Catholic content, to produce moving image
material for the broadcast. Kairos continues to produce the Angelus. In the beginning,
its varying one-minute sequences, structured by slow fades and dissolves, offered the
viewer a hypnotic drift between inspirational images of nature, church architecture,
and tableaux-like scenes of ordinary people in modern life, pausing as they sip tea or
light a candle. Although the visual style and content have evolved since, the aim of the
sequence remains consistent: to signify or encourage contemplation.
This article explores the meaning and wider significance of the changes in the
Angelus’ visual track over the years, focusing specifically on the period just before the
transition to moving images in 1998. This transition is documented in the papers of
Dermod McCarthy, former Director of Religious Programmes, held in the document
archives at RTÉ in Donnybrook, Dublin. The files are filled with correspondence,
including internal memoranda and letters from viewers, other clerics, and creative
workers. They also contain a raft of newspaper clippings on the subject of the Angelus,
many with atrocious headlines playing on the theme of the bell: “For Whom does the
Angelus Toll” (Kerrigan 1998), and “High Noon for the Angelus” (Coogan 1998).
These clippings are mostly from 1998, although it should be noted that Irish newspa-
per columnists and cultural commentators have made the appeal and meaning of the
Angelus an evergreen controversy since at least the 1970s. Why hasn’t it been abol-
ished as a violation of religious freedoms (Irish Times 1974; McDonald 1986)? Isn’t it
okay despite its religious origins (Kenny 2015; O’Faolain 1995)? Should it be allowed
to interrupt current affairs programming (Kinlay 1986; Myers 1979)? Does it accu-
rately represent modern Irishness (McCarthy 2010; Molloy 1998)? Is it triggering for
abuse victims (Reddit 2019)? Why is it so weird (Reddit 2020a, 2020b)? There seems
no end to the stream of position-taking it provokes in Irish culture. Fiction writers.
filmmakers, and poets have also found a rich resource in the Angelus; the broadcast of
the bells, or the bells themselves, feature in a number of literary and cinematic works
(see, for example, Binchy 1991; Dorcey 1991; Lynch 1992; McCormack 2016; O’Neill
2001; Weir 2002). And parodists, unsurprisingly, have found the Angelus to be fertile
ground. (An online search for the phrase “Angelus spoof” will yield a representative
sample.)
The persistence of the Angelus in public discourse and culture suggests that its his-
tory on Irish television is closely indexed to the cultural history of the nation. This is
interesting, or at least curious, considering that the Angelus is television you’re not
supposed to watch. You should be praying, or meditating, instead. Or so one would
think. As it happens, the document archives at RTÉ offer plenty of rich evidence that
people have always watched the Angelus closely, and that they feel a personal stake in
its modes of representation. What becomes apparent in the extant files is the way
changing social contexts shaped how viewers, producers, and commentators saw and
interpreted the images of the Angelus.
It is fortunate for the researcher that the 1990s are well represented in the archive.
For (at least) three reasons, this was a momentous decade in the history of the
McCarthy 15
postcolonial Irish state. Firstly, these years saw the dawning of the “Celtic Tiger,” a
period of great economic growth. Ireland’s employment numbers doubled between
1988 and 2008, when the financial crisis hit (Ó Riain 2014, 4). Secondly, the peace
process in Northern Ireland was moving rapidly, with some tragic interruptions, toward
its culmination in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which involved an unprecedented
power sharing arrangement between unionists and nationalists. And thirdly, the status
of the Catholic Church in Irish public culture began a precipitous decline. Then and in
subsequent decades, people challenged Church authority as never before, demanding
accountability for acts and institutions of clerical abuse carried out with the assent of
the state. At the turn of the 21st century, an ongoing process of truth-telling, inquiry,
and protest would expose Holy Catholic Ireland as a massive “shame industrial com-
plex” (Hogan 2019). The ensuing grassroots rejection of punitive religious moralism,
and the embrace of secular values, seems a very abrupt transition for a country identi-
fied for over a millennium with devout Christianity.
The changes in economy, culture, and state wrought by the Celtic Tiger and the
Good Friday Agreement were undoubtedly necessary for such a seismic-scale social
change to take place. But peace and economic security do not breed liberalization by
themselves. Equally crucial were the skilled and persistent labors of journalists and
documentarists, most notably Mary Raftery and Louis Lentin, whose exposés of the
Church-State gulag run by religious aired on RTÉ in the 1990s (Lentin 1996; Raftery
1999; see also Raftery 2002).1
There is little evidence of these momentous historical forces in the tranquil image
repertoire of the Angelus. And yet, as I’ll explain, its visual track—simultaneously
essential for and subordinate to the audio—is central to the meaning of the chimes, and
the experience of non-worldly absorption, within Irish media and public life. For the
sake of clarity, it’s important to first establish what exactly the Angelus is: It is a call
to prayer, not the reciting of a prayer. This difference mattered to the Church, from a
doctrinal standpoint. As one RTÉ historian noted in reference to the radio version, to
lead viewers through a prayer such as the Rosary required total attention to the sound
and image. A broadcast of the Rosary would therefore render passively blasphemous
anyone within earshot of the prayer who chose not to pray (Gorham 1967). The spe-
cific prayer associated with the Angelus bell honors the Annunciation, an event the
New Testament recounts as the day the virgin Mary learns from an angel that she will
become the mother of God. When saying the prayer, you are supposed to mark the
momentousness of the occasion not only in words but also in gesture. Upon reaching
the phrase “and the word was made flesh,” it is customary to genuflect (momentarily
take a knee) or touch the chest. This bodily movement signifies Jesus Christ’s moment
of incarnation in Mary’s womb.
As Cormack (2005) points out, contemporary viewers encountering the Angelus
aren’t likely to know the words to the prayer (to say nothing of the gesture). Many
people think of it simply as a time check, although audience research indicates wide-
spread appreciation for the moment of contemplation it provides (Catholic News
Agency 2018). Writing in 2005, toward the end of the Celtic Tiger, Cormack (2005)
shrewdly characterized the Angelus as an ambivalent object in the Irish cultural
16 Television & New Media 22(1)
repertoire, imperiled by its status as a religious holdover in a rapidly secularizing
culture. The contradictions of modern Irish life were made visible, she shows, in the
idealized scenes of craft and contemplation accompanying the bell. These images
negotiate collective national representation by managing, in Cormack’s words, “the
disjuncture between depicted themes and everyday life, and between content and
medium.” The Angelus, she concludes, “generates at best, a wistful nostalgia for the
social world it calls forth” (Cormack 2005, 286).
And yet now, fifteen years later, the attachment to the Angelus seems stronger than
ever. In 2018, Irish voters cast their ballots in a referendum amending the Irish consti-
tution to decriminalize blasphemy. RTÉ’s exit polls included the question of whether
the Angelus should be retained on TV. The answer, overwhelmingly, was yes. One
interviewee remarked, “To the person of faith, it’s a moment of grace; to the person
without faith, it’s a moment of peace. What’s not to like” (Catholic News Agency
2018)? Such statements abide no contradiction between the affirmation of a Catholic
ritual and the rapid secularization of a nation state that was until recently a form of
“constitutional theocracy” (Hirschl 2010). Writing of the pre-television Angelus,
Robert Savage (2010, 170) has observed that “the ease with which the Angelus made
its way into the daily programming of Raidió Éireann underscores the very comfort-
able relationship between Raidió Éireann and the Catholic Church”. Still, as this rela-
tionship evolved, it changed. The consumer economy of the Celtic Tiger meant that the
Irish television market became more competitive. Production values rose and religion
was increasingly sidelined. This worldliness is reflected in the progressive decentering
of Catholic iconography in the Angelus image track—the virgin Mary has not made an
appearance in decades. Marian imagery persists only obliquely, as in a recent, tightly
edited sequence showing a blacksmith forging a rose with hammer and tongs.2 In the
21st century, RTÉ regularly promotes the chime’s interfaith appeal, and emphasizes
the non-sectarian nature of its address by broadcasting the Angelus on Good Friday, a
day on which Catholic church bells are traditionally silent.
Still, certain adjustments have remained non-negotiable, most notably, the option
of changing the time of broadcast. From its inception in radio, at the insistence of
Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the Angelus has aired exactly on the hour. This
was a complex technological challenge for the postcolonial state broadcaster. In the
beginning, to ensure horological accuracy, there were two timekeeping mechanisms:
one in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, where the bell rang, and another at the General Post
Office, then home of the State radio facilities. McQuaid’s mandate forced a tight
regime of timekeeping upon the new medium’s schedule, adding a lot of pressure.
Without the Angelus, the flow of TV programming could tolerate a degree of drift;
because of the bell, everything had to line up with 6 pm (Savage 2010, 170–1).
McQuaid’s insistence on the exact timing made the Angelus bell into a religion-
tinged equivalent of “the pips”—an hourly time signal on the BBC, synchronized to
Greenwich Mean time.
This inflexible temporality precipitated a crisis around the Angelus at RTÉ in
1998, the year TV3 (an entirely commercial, advertising-funded channel) was
founded. The timing of the bell had always been a point of contention between the
McCarthy 17
director of Religious Programmes and RTÉ news editors. For decades the news
department complained that the Angelus was a prompt for viewers to turn to the BBC
for the headlines. With the emergence of TV3, the problem of losing news audiences
to the competition became even more serious. RTÉ management considered dropping
it altogether. But word of this proposal leaked, public outcry ensued, and RTÉ execu-
tives backtracked. Indeed, this moment was something of a victory for Religious
Programmes, which successfully blocked the rescheduling of the Angelus one minute
earlier so that the news could start at six. As Dermod McCarthy explained when I
interviewed him in 2015: “If you do that, then it is no longer the Angelus.”
In the intervening years, RTÉ has devised some 21st century solutions to its prob-
lem of losing viewers for the news. Now, in the twenty minutes prior to the Angelus,
you can watch the news twice: first, as subtitled and signed news for the deaf, and then
again in the Irish language, with advertisements wedged in between. The full national
news broadcast starts at 6.01 pm, at which point you already know the headlines and
you’ve even had the opportunity to practice your Irish.
The broadcast system’s capacity to adapt to the inflexible timing of the Angelus
should not overshadow the important cultural work that debates over the chime’s can-
cellation performed in 1998. As Cormack notes, these debates largely pivoted on the
question of whether the Angelus was a useful touchstone for modern Irish identity
(Cormack 2005, 272, 279, 282). We can expand the frame further, and see the struggle
over its transmission time as part of a wider modern struggle between secular and
clerical authority, waged in the idiom of time: control over community time, national
time, and all the fictive forms of coterminous collective time that broadcasting prom-
ises. Viewed within a longue durée, the internal dispute over the Angelus at RTÉ is the
direct descendent of the provincial turf wars Corbin chronicled in Village Bells. As he
details, rural priests and mayors treated control over the timing of the bell and the
duration of its strike patterns as a way of proclaiming dominion over country people
(Corbin 1998, 120–140).
The Angelus devotion is bound up in daily rhythms of work and rest, and it is worth
asking whether this specific quality of the rite allowed such conflicts to flourish. To
understand better this temporal specificity, it helps to compare it to the ringing of the
altar bell in the Catholic Mass. This chime marks the onset of Christ’s transubstantia-
tion in the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the sacred process in which a thin edible
wafer and a chalice of (alcohol-free) wine transform metaphysically into the flesh of
Jesus Christ. As in the Angelus, the ringing of the altar bell is associated with specific
words, here the Words of Institution, which the priest celebrating the Eucharist must
utter in order to consecrate the communion offerings (“Take this, all of you, and eat
it. . .”).
Like the bodily gesture of the Angelus prayer, the altar bell marks the spontaneous
generation of human flesh, understood at least since Thomas Aquinas as a transforma-
tion not in appearance but substance (ST III q. 75). But the ritual of the Eucharist
organizes agency and participation in an entirely different structure than the Angelus
devotion. The Eucharistic sacrament must be presided over, conjured even, by priestly
authority. In the Angelus, by contrast, the duty of acknowledging Christ’s implantation
in Mary’s womb lies with the ordinary worshiper. Similarly, although both rituals
18 Television & New Media 22(1)
involve a bell, it’s not the same kind of bell, and its role is different in each. The altar
bell doesn’t peal; it jingles. It is a closed-circuit message addressing only those in its
immediate vicinity (i.e., the participants in the Eucharist).
The relation of the altar bell to time is also different. It alerts communicants to the
emergence of a sacramental timeline, branching off from the ordinary unspooling of
the experiential present. This is the temporality of transubstantiation, which William
Spanos (1965, 3) evocatively describes as a ritual in which “Christ’s assumption of
flesh absorbs time into the eternal order.” In contrast with this extraordinary structur-
ing of time, the Angelus achieves coherence as a ritual via its synchronization with
human time. Clock time. It hails members of the parish not as a flock of souls but as a
working population. In this respect it is humble and mundane, occupying a position on
the boundary between sacred and secular, its timing set by the rhythms of working life
and not the “eternal order.”
The Angelus in the Archives
McCarthy may have held that the timing of the Angelus was unchangeable, but under
his direction its image track became fluid and adaptive. This attention to the aesthetic
dimensions of the Angelus broadcast reflects the cultural sensibility McCarthy brought
to religious programming. McCarthy, an ordained priest, participated in the Salzburg
Seminar, an international cultural and intellectual meeting ground with its roots in
American Cold War cultural diplomacy. By the time he was appointed head of reli-
gious programming, he was a seasoned television producer, keen to support Irish art-
ists and musicians. Under McCarthy, the Angelus bell became an instrument of faith
sufficiently capacious to accommodate non-sectarian worship. When he answered
critics of the institution of the bell, McCarthy always emphasized the ways that the
bell made itself available to all listeners, regardless of creed. Gary Byrnes, editor of a
glossy magazine called Six, decried the Angelus as a sectarian symbol, inappropriate
for a public service broadcaster to air because it was offensive to the State’s Protestant
minority. McCarthy’s reply to this claim bore a tone of exasperation. He wrote that the
Angelus was a call to prayer comparable to the sound of the Muezzin in Muslim coun-
tries, and that its pre-reformation ethos made it impossible to be sectarian: “The
Angelus is in fact an acknowledgment of the incarnation of Christ, a doctrine com-
monly believed and held by all Christian denominations” (McCarthy 1998a).
But this was 1998, and only a month or so before the Good Friday Agreement
would put an end to the era of sectarian and political violence known as the Troubles,
forging a new all-Ireland vision of the future. It seems uncoincidental that this would
be the year the Angelus imagery changed, replacing still images of the Virgin Mary
with the current format: a nonsectarian, if not multifaith, montage of ordinary people
produced by Kairos Communications. Here is how McCarthy described these
sequences to RTÉ’s information officer, shortly before they aired:
RTÉ has introduced a new format for the Angelus. “This. . .short devotional programme
will continue on the RTÉ 1 schedule in a style which is both more televisual and more
inclusive.
McCarthy 19
The same bell peals the Angelus as before. Instead of a static icon or painting, the images
portray steeples and bell-towers of both recent and ancient Irish church buildings while a
number of people of varying gender and ages pause to pray at the sound of the bell.
This new version is the televisual equivalent of the famous painting The Angelus by
Millet. It depicts a farming couple pausing from their work in a field as a distant church
bell peals the Angelus. RTÉ plans to vary the images to match the seasons of the year, but
the same theme will remain–a church bell calling all people to prayer, whether it be the
Angelus prayer or another prayer of their choice. (McCarthy 1998b)
“Both televisual and more inclusive”—as this language and the closing sentence sug-
gest, the moving image Angelus works to strike a balance between the secular and the
multifaith.
The transition to moving images strengthened the association between the Angelus
and work, because it called attention to the Angelus itself as the product of craft. Each
sequence seeks to embody the ideal of the one-minute film to be a perfect gem. Viewers
who shared favorable opinions made it clear that they appreciated the unusual pacing
and staging. One man wrote:
Not being religious myself, I was never able to relate to the former showing of a religious
icon. However, the new universal format is very moving and provides a suitable short
interlude for anyone, religious or not, to take stock. I like the way the people look up from
their activities when they hear the bell. This, and the background to the National Anthem
at the end of the day, are among the best things RTÉ does. (Sowby 1998)
The file of viewer correspondence regarding this change does not seem to have
retained the negative reactions, although they did exist. As McCarthy wrote to a friend,
I have had the complete spectrum of opinion ranging from complimentary–like yours–to
unbelievable for ‘taking Our Lady off the television’! I wish some people could have
their eyes opened to the realities of life in the cut-throat world of public service versus
commercial television!” (McCarthy 1998c)
With the Kairos Angelus films, McCarthy shepherded in a form of religious visu-
ality that displayed an unusually high level of experimentation. Compare the fluid,
associative, enigmatic imagery of the Angelus with the static, predictable quality of a
broadcast mass. My sampling of masses broadcast from 1966 onwards, archived at
RTÉ, suggests that the visual set ups and editing patterns have remained relatively
unchanged.3 There is usually one overhead frontal view of the altar from the choir
loft, and another, closer view from the side aisle. Shots of the congregation are sparse,
and editing patterns languid: imagine organ music over a slow zoom into a stained-
glass window, a statue, or a flower arrangement, dissolving to a wide shot of the altar
with the crucifix behind. The high point, often, is the awkward choreography of
Communion; some skill at the switcher is required to avoid the sight of someone
chewing the Host.
20 Television & New Media 22(1)
Of course, televised Mass is formulaic because Mass is formulaic, and so is church
architecture. Columns and statues limit the options for producers who must set up four
cameras without blocking sightlines or interfering in the flow of traffic near the altar.
Yet McCarthy nevertheless managed to make one significant aesthetic change in
RTÉ’s mass broadcasts: once he took over, music became increasingly important in
the masses RTÉ taped for the air. Similarly, McCarthy’s professional and artistic skills
as a producer led to experiments with the still image in the domain of the Angelus even
before the switch to the Kairos-produced sequences. Soon after he arrived at RTÉ,
McCarthy began seeking out paintings by Irish artists to display as the Angelus bell
chimed (Kew 2020; McCarthy 2017). One painting in particular made an impression
on viewers, and a number wrote in offering their thoughts. It was a Zulu Madonna and
Child painted by expatriated South African artist Tony Kew (Figure 2).
McCarthy had used Kew’s work already, in a short program on the Troubles, and he
chose Kew’s Madonna as a replacement for the Old Masters (Kew 2020). The painting
aired during the Angelus Bell in February and March of 1998. The responses retained
in the archive are all positive. One viewer wrote asking where he could find a copy of
the painting, describing it at a level of detail that suggests great scrutiny:
The painting I want is most certainly an African woman dressed in vivid blue material
carrying her child and it is the contrast of this woman and child against the backdrop of
raw African scenery with which I am very familiar that sets this Angelus illustration
unmistakably apart from any other RTÉ have screened. Unfortunately, no title to the
Figure 2. The RTÉ archives contain many positive viewer responses to the use of Tony
Kew’s Aboriginal Madonna, n.d., to accompany the Angelus bell in 1998. Unfortunately, the
only reproduction of the image is archived in a clipping file.
McCarthy 21
picture or mention of the artist’s name was made otherwise tracing it would have been
much easier. However, such was the contrast between this and normal Angelus illustrations
that it was remarked on by several people who often gave no recognition of the fact that
the Angelus was even on. (Rylands 1998)
This was by no means the only praising letter; it was clear that the Zulu Madonna was
a huge hit.
For Dermod McCarthy, the praise must have been gratifying; 1998 was his sixth
year as Editor of Religious Programs, but his involvement with the network dated
back to the 1960s, when he was in the production team for Radharc (1962–1996). A
highly regarded documentary series, Radharc was produced by a group of Dublin
parish priests charged by Archbishop McQuaid with the responsibility of making the
Catholic Church’s cultural contribution to Ireland’s new medium. McCarthy’s pro-
duction sensibility was not always appreciated by McQuaid, who took offense at two
of his Radharc episodes. One, entitled “Are Nuns Human?” targeted the Church’s
failure to advance the status of women after the reforms of The Second Vatican
Council (Vatican II). Another, on folk superstition (Pishogues) is a fascinating eth-
nographic document, although to McQuaid it came close to dignifying paganism. By
way of punishment, McQuaid removed McCarthy from Radharc, making him parish
priest of Athy, the farthest-flung parish in the Archdiocese, for a year or two
(McCarthy 2015).
When McCarthy was appointed as RTÉ’s Religious Programs Editor, the emerging
public backlash against the Catholic Church must have made the job difficult. Irish
people were at last ready to acknowledge the massive archipelago of Church-run insti-
tutions that had warehoused surplus and vulnerable populations for use as slave labor
since before the founding of the modern state, and afterwards with its sanction and
patronage. Many thousands of children, people with physical and mental disabilities,
unmarried women, victims of incest, and social outcasts passed through the system.
The institutions comprising it had many names: “industrial schools,” “mother and
baby homes,” Magdalene Asylums—the latter notoriously cruel establishments where
so-called fallen women were imprisoned and set to work in church-run laundries
(Hogan 2019; Milotte 1997; Raftery and O’Sullivan 1999; Smith 2007). The system
was well known about but only rarely discussed publicly for decades (for a good over-
view of the evidence that people knew, see Dwyer 2014).
All of this changed in the 1990s. In 1992, Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of
the pope on U.S. television, a protest against Church silence over clerical abuse. In
1994, missteps and delays in the arrest of Brendan Smyth, a fugitive pedophile priest,
contributed to the collapse of a Fianna Faíl-Labour Party coalition government. This
came one year after construction workers discovered a mass grave with the bodies of
over a hundred and fifty inmates on the site of a Magdalene Asylum run by the Sisters
of Charity. Uncensored reporting on these and several other high-profile incidents,
alongside the investigative journalism of Lentin and Raftery on RTÉ, created a discur-
sive space in which Irish people might begin to reckon with and acknowledge genera-
tions of clerico-carceral trauma.
22 Television & New Media 22(1)
This context had no direct bearing on McCarthy’s decision to use the work of con-
temporary Irish artists for the Angelus visual track. However, once inaugurated, the
practice would—perhaps inevitably—expose RTÉ’s religious programs department to
the mood of the times. Kew’s Zulu Madonna opened the Religious Programs mailbox
not only to viewer appreciations, but also to contributions by viewers who, inspired by
Kew, sent in their own renderings of religious themes, or images they’d come across
and thought could accompany the chimes. There is no record of which, if any, of the
submissions contained in RTÉ’s files actually aired (with the exception of subsequent
submissions by Kew himself, discussed below). Many viewers seem habitually to
have sent in Christmas cards depicting Annunciations or the Madonna and Child, but
original works by Irish artists also feature prominently in the collection. The most
striking ones say more than they perhaps intend—about the relationship between indi-
viduals and the state, about the culture of Catholicism, and about the idea of a multi-
cultural, interfaith Ireland.
Consider the variation on the Annunciation painted by a nun, Sister Marcella
McNally, who had lived much of her life in Nigeria (“M. McC.” 1998). I suppose what
struck me about this work first was the strange echo of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus I
thought I saw in it (Figures 3 and 4).
The resonance between the two paintings emerges from the gestures, the winged
figures, the yellow palette, and the predominance of the sideways glance. But
McNally’s jewel tones domesticate and give color to her divine beings. The Virgin
Mary is an olive-skinned woman looking quizzically at the Afro-haired Angel who has
Figure 3. This undated Annunciation painting by Sr. Marcella McNally, M.S.H.R. is a striking
composition. Its fluid forms and vivid rendering of figures identify it as the work of a skilled
artist. There is no record in the RTÉ archive indicating when, or whether, it aired during the
Angelus, although it was submitted for consideration.
McCarthy 23
interrupted her work with the spindle. Walter Benjamin interpreted Klee’s totemic
Angel as a helpless figure, the angel of history blown backward into the future by the
mounting rubble of human wreckage (Benjamin 1969; Werckmeister 1996). In con-
trast, Sister Marcella’s angel exists on a human scale and enters the temporality of
human labor. The painting adapts elements of classical annunciation paintings, such as
the spindle, giving its main figures more warmth and life than a pallid Renaissance
Madonna. This Virgin’s smile is bemused—a natural reaction, when you think of it,
given that a stranger has just interrupted her work with the news that she is pregnant
with a deity.
This image is a reminder of the degree to which multicultural life and intercultural
exchange was a normative fact of life among certain religious orders. I say this with
the awareness that there is a danger in romanticizing missionary work, while also
Figure 4. Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, 1920. Sister McNally’s Annunciation painting (Figure 3)
shares certain compositional features with this work. However, McNally pairs the Angel’s blessing
gesture with Mary’s outstretched, laboring hand, creating a parity between terrestrial and divine
that places the Messianic on a human scale and identifies divinity with women’s work. Klee’s
figure carries bleaker connotations. Naming it the Angel of History, Walter Benjamin saw in it a
hopeless vision of historical consciousness, as a form of hindsight formed in – and obscured and
distanced by – the ever-increasing pile of destruction wrought by humanity.
24 Television & New Media 22(1)
acknowledging that missionary orders themselves undoubtedly romanticized Africa
and Africans. Orders like McNally’s Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary were not
involved in the administration of Ireland’s Clerico-Carceral Continuum, although
their mid-twentieth century reports on African mission work are laden with paracolo-
nial, paternalist touches. “The key to the heart of the African lies in tiny hands,”
proclaims the title of a 1955 article on Holy Rosary schools in Nigeria. (Stanislaus
1955). Still, if nothing else, McNally’s joyful, beautiful artwork points to a well-
spring of enthusiasm for multiculturalism at a time when Ireland was not a particu-
larly multicultural society. It makes sense that today, the order to which McNally
belonged champions progressive causes and advocates social justice (Missionary
Sisters of the Holy Rosary 2015).
A different sense of this period as one of great social change comes out in another
image from the archive of viewer submissions. This is a Madonna and Child painted
as indigenous Australians, submitted as a possible Angelus selection by a woman who,
with her husband, had lived for thirty-five years in Australia before returning in the
late 1990s to retire in the border county of Donegal (Figure 5).
The painting, reproduced on a postcard from a visitor center on Aboriginal land, is
by Karel Kupka, a French-Czech artist known for his portraits of First Nation
Australians (Rothwell 2007). The author’s married name may be of Ulster Protestant
origin, and she takes the time to point out in the letter that she herself comes from
Derry, a majority Catholic city on the other side of the UK border (Ellis 1998). The
possibility that this letter writer was in a “mixed” marriage may explain, aside from
the perennial employment problem, why she and her husband felt the need to leave
Ireland for decades. If this is the case, then perhaps her impulse to share this image
with the nation, via the Angelus, compares to Sister McNally’s vision of the Virgin
Mary—a vision born from the cosmopolitanism of missionaries and emigrants. We
might even read this as part of an emigrant narrative of reconciliation with a homeland
in which religious tolerance might have eased but where racial intolerance was on the
rise (see Joseph 2020; Rolston and Shannon 2002 for an excellent bibliography on
racism and Ireland, see Lentin and McVeigh 2006).4
A few submissions in the Angelus files speak, if only indirectly, to the widening
public outcry surrounding the extent of Church denial on its carceral institutions.
Consider the fifteenth century painting entitled Magdalen Reading, submitted by a
viewer for consideration in August, 1997 (Dowling 1997). The spelling is not the
same, but the word Magdalen conjures the figure of the Magdalene—women who
worked for their lives as slave labor in laundries serving Irish commercial and state
entities. Without evidence, we can only speculate whether the viewer who sent this in
had the Magdalene Laundries in mind. But it’s not impossible to conceive that it is a
form of indirect communication, perhaps even a version of the “hidden transcript”
through which people covertly express conflicts with authority (Scott 1990). This
same year Ben Lander, a Swedish transplant to Ireland, published the book Irish Voices
Irish Lives. Among the twelve individuals profiled in the book was poet and activist
Pat Tierney. When he gave the interview, Tierney, a survivor of the industrial school
system and a person living with AIDS, spoke about the need to bring justice against
McCarthy 25
the orders that ran the Magdalene Laundries, and mentioned a memorial he was plan-
ning for victims of the system. Tierney died shortly before the book came out, his
suicide in a Dublin churchyard receiving news coverage when it happened, and again
when the book was released. The following year the British Channel Four would
release Sex in a Cold Climate, its damning documentary on the Magdalene laundries.
Given such timing, there may well be a message embedded in this submission of a
painting of Mary Magdalen for national broadcasting. Still, we cannot know what that
message would be. Much as one might want the submission to express resistance to
clerical authority, it could equally be a zealot’s effort to remind indecent female view-
ers of their sin.
In the case of another submission for the Angelus broadcast, there is little doubt that
the status of women in the Church motivated the choice of image. South Africa-born
Tony Kew was then in his fifties and beginning a second career as a painter. He had
recently arrived in Ireland from Canada, where he had worked for several decades as
Figure 5. Inspired by the broadcast of Tony Kew’s Zulu Madonna, a viewer from Donegal
submitted for broadcast consideration this postcard reproduction of a Madonna and Child
painted as First Nation Australians.
26 Television & New Media 22(1)
an illustrator. After the screening of Zulu Madonna, he submitted two more paintings
for consideration. These submissions reflected what would become a signature theme
in Kew’s now decades-long body of work—the church’s treatment of women. As he
became more well known as an Irish artist, this would draw some controversy (Wicklow
People 2007; Figure 6).
In one of the paintings Kew sent to RTÉ, a diamond shaped canvas, a stern-but-
serene woman supports a wounded, earth-bound man in her arms—the image suggest-
ing the disproportionate burdens life places upon women. Notably, its female figure is
clad as the Virgin Mary, but the image is not conventionally devotional. The other
painting Kew submitted was shocking to encounter in the archive, devoid of context.
An allegorical image of innocence, it shows a pubescent girl in a white leotard who
looks defiantly at the viewer. Her stance is ambiguous: is her arm clasped protectively
around her body? Or is she standing hand on hip? It is difficult to tell, because the
foreground of the image consists of a gauzy curtain or veil, slightly parted (Figure 7).
I spoke to Kew about these works in June 2020, and he remembered them well.
When I told him I was surprised to encounter the second one in the archive because it
seemed rather “edgy” for the Angelus, he agreed, speaking with the equanimity of
someone who is used to people having an uncertain response to his work. He told me
that he’d chosen to submit these paintings because, as an emerging artist, he wanted to
Figure 6. Tony Kew’s signature theme is the female figure. He cites Sinead O’Connor as an
inspiration, and his paintings share with O’Connor’s work in this period an interest in using
the trappings of religion to critique patriarchy. This rhomboid painting of a shawled woman
bearing the suffering world in her arms was not chosen as an accompaniment to the Angelus,
no doubt because of the ambiguity of its meanings.
McCarthy 27
put his most provocative material out there. The decision, in the end, was not moti-
vated by any particular sense of the period’s revelations around clerical abuse, but
rather from professional ambition, although Kew did admit to a general and lifelong
“personal clerical suspicion.” Whatever else it might say, that Kew would consider a
work with hints of child sexuality an appropriate accompaniment for the Angelus indi-
cates his status as a newcomer to Ireland from liberal Canada. Unfamiliar with the
tradition of the Angelus, he had immediately been struck by its strangeness when he
first watched Irish television—as many outsiders are.
All of these examples suggest, in different ways, that the Angelus is something of a
projection, an image in which we see what we want to see. For each individual, the
submitted image bears a personal meaning that connects them with the nation—a
meaning that might range from reconciliation, to intercultural friendship, to artistic
exposure. There are other examples of viewer-made works in the RTÉ files, although
the ones discussed above are the ones that seem most telling in relation to their place
and time, and mine. Unfortunately, the files pertaining to relations between Kairos,
producer of the moving image Angelus, and RTÉ are yet to be located in the archives,
although there is no doubt that they would make for a fascinating follow up to the
historical account I’ve sketched in the foregoing. Although these viewer-submitted
paintings did not air, they testify to the potency of the Angelus as a source of creative
energy, as well as a locus of devotion. Indeed, in the historical wreckage that is 2020,
the Angelus retains its relevance; in the early months of the Covid-19 epidemic a short
memorial video entitled Ireland Remembers aired on RTÉ every night before the
Angelus. Perhaps, as the 21st century throws us backward into the future, the time is
Figure 7. This painting by Tony Kew allegorizes coming of age and hints at child sexuality.
It was not selected for the Angelus broadcast.
28 Television & New Media 22(1)
ripe for people to start making their own devotional imagery for the daily broadcast,
and perhaps even writing their own prayers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1. Mary Raftery’s death in 2012 was an extraordinary loss for Irish journalism. Her papers
have been deposited in the archives of Dublin City University Library, and will undoubt-
edly prove invaluable to historians researching this period in Irish history. I am grateful to
David Meehan, Associate Director of Special Collections and Archives, O’Reilly Library,
for taking the time to discuss the collection with me.
2. The rose is traditionally associated with Mary, referred to in Marian devotions as “the
mystic rose” or “the rose without thorns.” Part of a craft-based cycle of Angelus videos
introduced in 2015, this sequence finds its contemplative mood in the display of an artisan
at work. In addition to the blacksmith, there are sequences with a topiarist, a bookbinder,
and others. Producer: Kairos Communications.
3. I base this observation on a sampling of masses broadcast on RTÉ from 1966 onwards,
currently housed in the RTÉ archives.
4. I am grateful to Marcus Free for pointing me toward these resources, and for his keen edito-
rial eye.
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Author Biography
Anna McCarthy is Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies at NYU.
