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“Voices of the World”: National Identity and Musical Space at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress

The thirty-first Eucharistic Congress marked the formal debut of the newly independent Irish Free State on the world stage. The weeklong Congress—lasting from Monday, 20 June 1932, to the final Pontifical Mass at Phoenix Park on Sunday, 26 June—hosted an estimated one million pilgrims from at least thirty-two countries. Because it functioned as a political as well as a religious gathering, it was a nation-building exercise drawing on mass public ritual and display that put forward an image of a newly formed Irish nation unified under the banner of Catholicism. Many events throughout the week incorporated music, making the Congress exemplary of how composition functions as a vehicle for communal-identity formation. This process was complicated, however. Despite Harry White’s assertion that music in modern Ireland was conscripted and limited by its close associations with nationalism—with the Free State “incapable of responding to music other than as a potent signifier (or agent) of nationalist culture”—an exploration of the Eucharistic Congress’s deployment of that art form