The object of this essay is to analyze Joyce`s paradoxical view of religion in "Grace" in which he defends the sacred of religious dogma and ritual at the same time, criticizing the religious secularization of Irish middle-class Catholic community. In the short story "Grace," Joyce presents the Irish Catholicism as overwhelmingly, fatally materialistic and power-hungry as it works through community. Joyce, at first, associates the debasing with materialism, on the emphasis upon the gentlemanliness of Christianity. The conversation of Kernan`s friends are especially vulnerable to the social status of gentleman so that they seek material and social values even in religious matters. Next, Joyce dwells almost exclusively on the means of religion-especially, on the powers of religious rhetoric. Kernan`s friends in his bedroom focuses on the words and images of the powerful authority of the Jesuits, which bind them together in a paradoxical community of deceit and belief. These speech acts tend to overwhelm their users so that, as with the gentleman`s clothing, Kerman and his friends take the sign for the signified. Thirdly, the concluding scene in the spiritual retreat of the church again presents a sanctified picture of the same association of religion with money. Joyce strongly satirize Father Purdon`s sermon that values spiritual conversion in terms of material success. "Grace" is Joyce`s strong indictment of the Irish Church`s appropriation of and accommodation with paralyzing economic ideology, and its consequent failure to fulfil its worshipers` spiritual needs.