"Say Nothing", "Angela's Ashes", and my Boston Catholic Childhood

I'm finally old enough to miss it.

Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe - a Bostonian with Irish roots - wrote that many Bostonians act “more Irish than the Irish” and feel an intense connection to Ireland, even if they have never visited.¹ This sentiment sums up my childhood and adolescence well.

Nick Kane via Unsplash

I gained my Irish Catholic bona fides by way of my paternal grandfather. My maternal grandmother was also Irish, but her parents had settled in New York instead of Boston.²

Grandpa McDonald’s relatives left Ireland from around 1850 to 1910, then settled in and around Boston. I was born Kelly McDonald, a name so Irish that nobody could mistake my heritage.

I ultimately grew up an hour north of Boston in Manchester, New Hampshire. Manchester locals often boast that the city has more members of the Irish diaspora than any other city in the United States - yes, including Boston! True or not, mine felt like a Boston Catholic childhood, complete with a confessor named Monsignor Hannigan and Sisters who taught us old Irish ditties.

Back when Catholicism still thrived in Ireland, New England imported many priests and religious sisters from the area.³ Most were in their late sixties at the youngest by the time I was a child, but the “old country” influence remained, complete with stories about peat bogs and lonely country roads where tiny babies were born and received last rites before surviving against all odds.

Like many Catholics from my hometown, which was within the Archdiocese of Boston, I was raised with a deep love of Ireland and Irish cultural symbols. However, I lacked a strong foundation in Irish history. I gained this later, but when I first read Angela’s Ashes at sixteen I was shamefully ignorant of Irish history.

I was riveted by McCourt’s story from its infamous opening lines - “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”⁴ Early on, one of McCourt’s relatives sizes up McCourt’s father and is not impressed. She says, “We have morals in Limerick, you know, morals. We’re not like jackrabbits from Antrim, a place crawling with Presbyterians.”⁵ As someone who grew up hearing vague allusions to the ways of Protestants from the mouths of older Catholics, I had to laugh.⁶

I should note that Angela’s Ashes is not exactly a historical document, and many Irish people feel it was written to appeal to American audiences and their stereotypes about Ireland.⁷ Still, Angela’s Ashes taught me that the cheerful shamrock-laden portrayals of Ireland I knew as a child were misinformed.

As I learned, Irish people suffered severe persecution under British rule that resulted in a famine that is often treated as a natural event.⁸ Equally shocking was the campaign of violent ethnic and religious persecution committed against Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland that lasted well into the 1990s. This was one of the most important insights I gained from reading Say Nothing, which is ostensibly about a murder committed by the IRA but is in many respects a survey of modern Irish history. Keefe describes the summer of 1969 in Belfast as follows:⁹

Loyalist gangs started moving systemically through…Catholic enclaves, breaking windows and tossing petrol bombs inside…[n]early two thousand families fled their homes in Belfast that summer, the overwhelming majority of them Catholic.

Reading such descriptions, one understands the disconnect between the impression I had of Ireland as a child in Catholic Boston and the truth of Irish history. I now understand why the Boston Catholic subculture seems so strange and even offensive to the Irish. It’s startling to think that my own ancestors were, in part, driven from their native country by an effort to destroy their heritage, and I wish I had grown up knowing more about the erasure of the Irish language and the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Jason York via Unsplash

I remember my Grandpa McDonald telling me about his childhood and the Irish Boston of the 1960s. My father was driving us over the Amoskeag Bridge, the green glow of street lamps reflecting on the water. Grandpa was talking about Whitey Bulger, the infamous gangster who once ruled Boston’s underworld. He was discussing a young woman Whitey had “allegedly” killed, one who had turned up in a shallow grave beside a river much like the one passing beneath us.

My grandfather never romanticized Whitey, because anyone who grew up poor near Boston in those days knew how merciless the Irish mob was and how pernicious violence is. But I was a middle-class kid, and I was briefly enchanted with the idea of this strange underworld, a confederation of Catholics who somehow operated above and below the law. I found that many of my peers were like me as I grew up, fascinated by stories of a bygone Boston and ignorant of the perils of an impoverished childhood.

Much is different for the better in Boston now. Southie, once an epicenter of mob violence and racism,¹⁰ is practically a poster child for gentrification.¹¹ Neighborhoods that my grandparents described in hushed, fearful tones now teem with tony apartments. But no change ever comes without a cost, and the poor have largely been driven out of these sections in Boston, sometimes despite generations of family history in the area.

And there’s also the fact that the Boston Irish subculture I knew when I was young is disappearing.¹² This culture certainly had its problems, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for it to vanish altogether. It’s strange to think that hardscrabble Catholic Boston will soon be mostly a memory. Even with the new wave of Catholic orthodoxy that has grown in the past few years, many esoteric cultural practices that my great-grandparents and grandparents knew are never coming back.

I’m actually the perfect example of this. If my grandpa changed our family’s destiny by establishing his family an hour north of Boston, my decision to move to D.C. removed me from my Irish Catholic roots completely.

It’s not until you leave a place that you realize there’s a shared language in people who grew up there and whose ancestors grew up there. I remember when it seemed like all my friends’ siblings were named Brigid or Michael or Brian and when St. Patrick’s day was practically a week-long solemnity. Everyone was at least a sliver Irish and we all shared stories about where our families came from, and nearly every house seemed to have the lace doilies and curtains that I still associate with Irish grannies.

More than that, I remember the Irish songs and poems we recited so easily, the words that everybody knew. When my husband and I baptized our son, my brother bought him a carved wooden box with the classic Irish blessing inscribed on the front. I was struck, when I read it, by how much I missed it all.

I never had the chance to ask my grandpa much about Ireland, but I do wonder what he would have thought about his granddaughter being so curious about it. I also what he would have thought about my love for Catholicism.

Already by the 1970s, when my grandparents were young, a slow drift away from traditional Catholic praxis had started. This was due in part to the Church’s own malfeasance, which the Boston Globe Spotlight team exposed in shocking fashion shortly before my First Communion in 2002.¹³

That was an awful time for this sliver of the planet where I lived, this niche subculture that thought we knew ourselves so well. Nobody in my family was particularly devout by 2002. Still, those who were still attending Mass fell away or converted, including my grandparents. The tenure of Cardinal Law as archbishop seemed to mark a final shift away from culturally ingrained Catholicism in the Boston area.

But those of us in the Catholic world know that traditionalism is returning. The crowds at Masses may be small, but they are passionate in new ways.¹⁴

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever live near Boston again. It doesn’t seem likely for the time being, though life can change in an instant. I can’t imagine my kids thumbing credulously through Angela’s Ashes or straightening their backs while an elderly person tells them about their childhood in the old country. Things are different here. But then again, the place I knew is not the same.

1. Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing, (New York: Doubleday, 2019) Chapter 30.

2. As an aside, do any other Americans with Irish roots find that NYC Irish culture and Boston Irish culture are very different?

3. Lizette Alvarez, “Once an Exporter of Priests, Ireland Now Has Too Few,” The New York Times, (July 11, 2004) https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/world/once-an-exporter-of-priests-ireland-now-has-too-few.html#:~:text=For%20centuries%2C%20Ireland%20mass%2Dproduced,in%20a%20thick%20Irish%20brogue.

4. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes, (New York: Scribner, 1996) Chapter 1.

5. Id.

6. I could write an entire essay about the way Catholics in the U.S. view Protestants, but suffice it to say that my grandparents felt that Protestants not only hated Catholics but sought to exclude them from every avenue of elite American life. I think these sentiments are harder to understand nowadays. Even still, my middle-aged relatives have expressed before how deeply they distrust religiously observant Protestants, especially those of the charismatic variety. Some have expressed that they would never allow their child to attend a school, for instance, that was run by any Protestant church, because they would mistreat Catholics.

7. “When “Angela’s Ashes” appeared in print in 1996, McCourt’s depiction of his childhood in the slums of Limerick was a punch to the solar plexus of Irish respectability. The Celtic Tiger was then just rising with its promise of a new economically prosperous Ireland and was not amused by McCourt’s stories.” Nick Hayes, “Ireland and Frank McCourt: a painful struggle continues,” MinnPost, (August 3, 2009), https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2009/08/ireland-and-frank-mccourt-painful-struggle-continues/#:~:text=When%20“Angela's%20Ashes”%20appeared%20in,not%20amused%20by%20McCourt's%20stories.

8. Christopher J. Murphy, DID THE IRISH “POTATO FAMINE” CONSTITUTE A GENOCIDE?, New York State Order of Ancient Hiberians, https://www.nyaoh.com/nys-aoh-history-journal/did-the-irish-potato-famine-constitute-a-genocide

9. Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing, (New York: Doubleday, 2019) Chapter 3.

10. The National Park Service, “Anti-Busing Protest at Dorchester Heights,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/protest-at-dhm.htm.

11. Justine Hoffher, Boston.com, “A Southie native reflects on his changing Boston neighborhood, touches a nerve”, (July 1, 2015), https://www.boston.com/real-estate/real-estate-news/2015/07/01/a-southie-native-reflects-on-his-changing-boston-neighborhood-touches-a-nerve/

12. The Catholic Church is In Trouble in Places Where it Used to Dominate

13. Michael Rezendes, “Church allowed abuse by priest for years”, The Boston Globe, (Jan 6, 2002) https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/special-reports/2002/01/06/church-allowed-abuse-priest-for-years/cSHfGkTIrAT25qKGvBuDNM/story.html

14. Madeleine Kearns, “How Catholicism Got Cool,” The Free Press, (June 4, 2025 ) https://substack.com/home/post/p-165134188.