The time following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by Dáil Éireann on January 7 was tumultuous. Bitter divisions were to emerge between the pro-treaty and anti-treaty sides that would eventually lead to an attempted coup d'état. In the Irish Civil War, which followed, the Irish Catholic bishops would support the government.

"From its origins, the Free State government had carefully lined up the Roman Catholic hierarchy on its side, consulting bishops on constitutional matters, and receiving, in return, powerful support during the edgy days of the Civil War, when a joint pastoral branded the IRA Irregulars as murderers," said the Irish-born Oxford historian RF Foster.

The new constitution, adopted on October 25, 1922 (it wouldn’t become operative until December 6, 1922), was a secular document. And as historian Joe Lee has said, it "had no sectarian bias". But what if it had another form of "bias"?

There was never the slightest chance that even a modified form of Gallicanism would find a foothold in Ireland, no more than it would in Poland, two intensely Catholic countries known for their fidelity to the pope. 

But what if — being mindful of how Daniel O'Connell's campaign for Catholic Emancipation here at home triumphed in 1829 — the leaders of the newly-independent Ireland had built a Gallican dimension in to the 1922 constitution?

Or what if — more pertinently — Rome's reaction to the Plan of Campaign in April 1888 had created an even bigger crisis in Ireland? The papal rescript stirred up new levels of agitation. 

"This at once produced an immense outburst of feeling in Ireland," FSL Lyons said. 

"The Catholic members of the parliamentary party went out of their way to denounce interference by the Holy See 'with the Irish people in the management of their political affairs'.”

More realistically, what if the Irish bishops, in reacting to Pope Leo XIII’s 'rescript', issued from Rome condemning the Plan of Campaign and the planned boycott, had taken an even sterner line with Rome, as envisaged in speeches by leaders of the plan, particularly John Dillon?

"In speech after speech, Dillon laid down the basis for what he conceived to be the proper relationship between Church and state in a Catholic country, giving his views lapidary expression on a memorable occasion at Drogheda a few weeks after the rescript had been published," wrote FSL Lyons.

In Drogheda, John Dillon said this: "Are we to be free men in Ireland, or are we to conduct our public affairs at the bidding of any man who lives outside Ireland? 

"We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our friends in England, we owe it to the ancient traditions of our country, we owe it to our Protestant fellow countrymen, who expect they are about to share with us a free Ireland, that it will not be an Ireland that will conduct its affairs at the bidding of any body of cardinals.

"That is the principle of Irish liberty, and I say, without fear, that if tomorrow, in asserting the freedom of Ireland, we were to exchange for servitude in Westminster servitude to . . . any body of cardinals in Rome, then I would say goodbye for ever to the struggle for Irish freedom."

This is a speech that surely contains in embryonic form the essence of a 'free Church in a free state'.

The bishops, it should be noted, were fully cognisant of the outrage among the Irish people over Rome's intervention. 

Emmet Larkin spelled it out: "They told the pope plainly, in fact, in a joint letter signed by 28 of the 30 Irish bishops, that they knew more about the Irish situation than either he or his advisers and that the price to be paid for making his will effective in Ireland would be the loss not only of their own power and influence, but of millions of Irish Catholics at home and abroad. By refusing to enforce the Roman decree, the bishops, in effect, had chosen allegiance to the clerical-nationalist alliance rather than to Rome." 

Could they have gone further, under the leadership of Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh and Archbishop of Cashel Thomas Croke, and distanced the Irish Church not just from the Roman bureaucracy (the “body of cardinals”, as Dillon described them), but from the papacy itself?

While Gallicanism has its origins in France — it received its name from the French Church (in Latin, ecclesia gallicana) — it was not a doctrine restricted to France. In Germany, for instance, there came another challenge to papal authority, from another quarter, in the form of Febronianism. 

"It was contained in a book published in 1763, under the pseudonym of Febronius, by Nicholas von Hontheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier," said Nicolas Cheetham. "In terms which harked back to the Council of Constance, the author attacked the monarchical element in papal rule." 

"He argued that the pope's primacy was only an honorary distinction and the symbol of Christian unity, whereas the reality of power, as in the early Church, properly belonged to the general council." 

Gallicanism was based on claims made by the Assembly of the French Clergy in 1682, which formulated the doctrine in 'Four Gallican Articles'. Here is how historian Thomas Bokenkotter described them: "While acknowledging the primacy of the popes as successors of Peter, the articles denied his authority over temporal affairs; asserted the validity of the decrees of the Council of Constance, which affirmed the superiority of general councils over a pope; made the authority of papal decrees conditional on their acceptance by the Church; and rejected the separate infallibility of the pope." 

Well, we know what happened. According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,"there was a renascence of ultramontanism in France, and the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council (1869-70) made Gallicanism incompatible with Roman Catholicism”. 

It is fanciful to speculate what the adoption in Ireland of an even moderate form of Gallicanism would have meant. This much is clear: It would have had a revolutionary effect on Church-state relations.

Even a watered-down version of Gallicanism in the Free State constitution would have angered Pope Pius XI in Rome, that's for sure. But in 1922 he was preoccupied with other, more pressing matters.

The first shots in the War of Independence were fired in January 1919, just as the members of the first Dáil were assembling in the Mansion House in Dublin. 

But the Vatican's focus was on the peace conference in Paris following the end of the First World War, in November 1918. From this conference would emerge the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations (a forerunner of the United Nations, which was established in 1945 after the end of the Second World War).

The Vatican thought it should have a place at the negotiating table in Paris, but was cold-shouldered. So was the Irish delegation that went to Paris hoping to get international recognition for an independent Ireland.

Despite US president Woodrow Wilson’s espousal of the "right to self-determination" — one of the key concepts he brought to Paris — he was dismissive of the importuning of the Irish delegation. 

As historian Margaret MacMillan put it, Woodrow Wilson "had no sympathy for Irish nationalists and their struggle to free themselves from British rule. During the peace conference he insisted that the Irish question was a domestic matter for the British."

Another historian, Tim Pat Coogan, writing 80 years after the Paris conference, said that the Irish "had successfully negotiated the difficult, lengthy transition from one form of colonialism, that of Mother England, to arrive at a position of independence and co-existence. 

"They must now complete the equally difficult task of developing an efficient and caring society by similarly freeing themselves from the constraints of — while not being unmindful of the benefits of — that other form of colonialism: Mother Church.”

Might not the adoption of a form of Gallicanism, if not in the 1922 Free State constitution, then in Bunreacht na hEireann in 1937, have opened the door to this?

Such speculation is to enter the realm of fantasy, of course, but it serves as a reminder that at the core of the enduring controversies over Church-state relations is the question of control. Who exercises ultimate control, and over what? Is it the Church or the state? And where is the line of demarcation?

Given its subservience to Rome, was the Free State truly 'free'? Hadn't its subservience to British rule been replaced after 1922 with subservience to Rome rule? Wasn’t this the defining characteristic of Church-state relations in Ireland? 

And wasn't this a central feature of the 'colonialism' in the post-treaty Ireland that Tim Pat Coogan sought to highlight and from which he urged liberation?

Down the centuries, popes have had a lot to say on the subject of Church-state relations, as have emperors and monarchs and dictators, as well as democratically-elected leaders.

Ever since the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, there was a 'marriage' of throne and altar, an alliance between Church and state. And this arrangement would last for 1,000 years.

Over the centuries, the papacy would be shaped more and more by a monarchical model, the popes coming to see themselves increasingly as monarchs claiming absolute power.

The renowned church historian Eamon Duffy said that Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) represented the "pinnacle of papal power and influence".

Innocent took an exalted view of papal supremacy. 

"He believed that the pope had ultimate authority over the secular as well as the religious sphere."

Later, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) would give formal expression to this claim when he issued the bull 'Unam Sanctam' (at the time, the papacy was engaged in a dispute with the French crown). 

"In it, the pope notoriously claimed that, 'It is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman  pontiff'."

As John Julius Norwich noted in his 2011 tome The Popes: A History, “papal absolutism could hardly go further”.

Ever since then, the papacy has had to retreat from this absurd absolutist position, as religio-political circumstances brought home to Rome what Duffy has called "the distance between inflated religious rhetoric and cold reality".

That would stop in face of the challenges posed by the French Revolution. 

"The French Revolution and its pan-European Napoleonic aftermath traumatised the Catholic Church," as the Georgetown University professor, John W O’Malley, SJ, has said.

A central feature of the response to this trauma was the rise of ultramontanism. "One of the most remarkable trends in 19th-century Catholicism was the tremendous increase in the power and influence of the papacy," writes Thomas Bokenkotter.

If the liberal Catholic movement had suffered a serious setback because of Pius IX’s 'Syllabus of Errors' of 1864 (condemning separation of Church and state, religious freedom, and a free press), it was nearly destroyed by the First Vatican Council. In however weakened a form, it would survive. And its day would come.

None of the radicalism that was prevalent in Catholicism in other parts of Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution ever made it to the shores of Ireland.

There is a certain irony in the fact that while, on the political front, people like Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen drew inspiration for their revolutionary fervour from the French Revolution, there was no parallel influence discernible within the Irish Church, even though some of its clergy were educated in France before and after 1789.

But no new thinking about Church-state relations ever surfaced in Ireland. And any flowering of opposition to papal centralisation in Rome, especially following Vatican I (1869-70), would have been short-lived once the Cardinal Paul Cullen era (1849-78) got under way in Ireland. He was an unstinting supporter of the ultramontanism that led to the declarations on papal primacy and papal infallibility at Vatican I.

Despite the furore over the 'Syllabus', the "ultramontane juggernaut rolled on” and Pius IX, undaunted, on December 6, 1867, announced plans to convoke a general council, to begin in Rome on December 8, 1869. Vatican I would prove to be a near-death experience for liberal Catholicism.

Yet liberal Catholicism was never completely dead. And it flowered anew during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which, among many other things, reshaped our thinking on Church-state relations.

That said, liberal Catholicism never took root in Ireland, where the concept of a 'free Church in a free state' could never catch on as ultramontanism was reinforced by Cardinal Cullen. 

In addition, and of huge significance, after independence the key members of the Free State government were all ultra-conservative Catholics.

If nothing else, liberal Catholicism showed that there is more than one model of Church-state relations. And if there is to be a new covenant (as called for by the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in August 2019, when he spoke in Dublin Castle in the presence of Pope Francis), who is to say that a renewed form of liberal Catholicism (a neo-Gallican element) — perhaps drawing inspiration from Pope Francis's commitment to a synodal Church — will not 'colour' it, given all that has happened in Ireland since the visit of John Paul II in 1979?