The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 (review)

This is a significant book that breaks new ground in its description, analysis, and contextualization of Protestant and Catholic hatred (not too strong a word for it) for each other in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Ireland. It makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of the origins of what was to become the endemic sectarianization of Irish society. And it offers an important perspective on the phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Britain and the United States in the later nineteenth century. The book's main theses are based on a very extensive study of the main documentary archives—notable use being made in particular of the Methodist Missionary Society papers—and also of the published religious ephemera produced by the contending parties. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world.

Dr. Whelan examines the emergence in Ireland in the last decade of the eighteenth century of a strong Protestant evangelical movement which took as its objective the conversion of the priest-dominated Irish Catholics. This was a task that had been talked about and even acted upon fitfully since the late sixteenth century, but the results had been, to say the least, disappointing. By 1790 Ireland was infinitely more "Catholic" than she had been two hundred years earlier. This stark fact was a standing reproof to the Protestant Ascendancy that had governed Ireland since the seventeenth century, but until the late eighteenth century there had been for some time a weary, and indeed wary, acceptance that it might not be possible or indeed advisable, to do anything about it. In the 1790's, however, the shattering experience of polarized community relations and religious mayhem culminating in the 1798 rebellion—widely depicted as a sectarian civil war—forced a re-think. One lesson from the rebellion was that Protestantism could never be safe while the mass of the people remained in thrall to their priests, and hence a strong evangelical movement embracing not just Methodists but also key personnel in the Church of Ireland was got under way. This was to culminate in the 1822 declaration of the absolute necessity for a "Second Reformation" by the newly installed Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, William Magee. The Catholic Church, experiencing a resurgence in the early nineteenth century, and under the redoubtable leadership of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin fought back against what it saw as a declaration of war. It was no coincidence that this confessional conflict in the 1820's overlapped with the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell. Each drew upon the other, each sharpened the bitterness with which the debates and the elections were conducted, and when the contest ebbed religion and politics were inextricably linked for the forseeable future. The "Bible War'' may have peaked in the 1830's, as Dr. Whelan argues, but it continued diminuendo for many decades and arguably formed the crucible of modern Irish Catholic identity. By the 1830's to be Irish was to Catholic and, in Ireland, to be Catholic was to be Irish, a synchronicity which had not been the case in the mid-eighteenth century, but which was to persist by and large to the present day.