Sacred or Sacrilege?

          

              Reading the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I noticed the strict respect with which Stephen Dedalus and his classmates regard the priests and the Catholic order in general.  Of course this story takes place in the late 19^th century and such respect was expected and demanded of students, but the reverence and even fear that Dedalus feels towards the priests at his school left an impression on me.

            While gossiping with his classmates in the schoolyard, when Stephen hears that Simon Moonan, Tusker Boyle, and some other classmates might have drunk the altar wine, Stephen is taken aback. Using stream of consciousness narration, Joyce describes what Stephen is feeling by writing, “A faint sickness of awe made him feel weak. How could they have done that? . . . [The sacristy] was a holy place” (35). Stephen regards Catholicism and everything even remotely pertaining to God with great reverence. With his upbringing, Stephen has come to see these relatively small desecrations as unthinkable sins, as he ponders how they boys could have committed such an act. Even thinking about such a crime makes Stephen feel sick.

However, later on while the boys are gossiping, when Stephen hears that Moonan and his crew may have stolen the monstrance in order to sell it, his reaction is a bit different: “it was a strange sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it” (41). Although initially he is still shocked that they had the nerve to steal something holy, he temporarily loses his inhibitions as the crime gives him an excitement he has not yet experienced. Does he see this offence as not purely evil? Does it really excite him and lure him?

Noticing the difference in Joyce’s attitude toward the Catholic Church, between his innocent and absolute respect in chapter 1 of Portrait and his general disdain for Catholicism in Dubliners, would it be fair to speculate that this series of desecrations of the Church by classmates and the sort of murky and secular politics at home changed his pious approach to God to a more indifferent and temporal one?