Reform, Revolution and Reaction: Archbishop John Thomas Troy and the Catholic Church in Ireland 1787-1817 by Vincent J. McNally (review)

BOOK REVIEWS111 summit in the pope. like views were held by Cardinals F. Zelada, V Borromeo, and G. GerdU. Opposition to this squad of ultramontanes came from G. M. Albertini .O.P, a confirmed devotee of St. Augustine,who stoutly defended the orthodoxy ofPistoia on matters ofgrace and free wiU but on other grounds found the Synod unacceptable. Furthermore, Albertini suggested that Di Pietro and those who reasoned simUarly were nothing but Molinists. A somewhat reduced commission continued the examination from 1792 until 1794, ultimately producing in the latter year the buU Auctorem Fidei (August 28), condemning eighty-five propositions from Pistoia. Countries other than Spain were slow to accept the buU, but eventuaUy the NeoUltramontanism that developed under Pius LX swept resistance before it so that until the mid-twentieth century hardly a murmur was heard against even the wisdom of the Synod's condemnation. In defense of the Roman position painstaking and scrupulous care was lavished on the examination of Pistoia's decrees. The Synod's decrees contained some glaring inconsistencies. Its recommendation that Italian could on occasion be used as a Uturgical language, whUe not possibly shocking to current practice, could not at aU be harmonized with the fact that Italian in the eighteenth century was far from being uniform. That Pistoia expUcitly praised the Four Articles ofthe Gallican Clergywas to say the least undiplomatic. Urging the faithful to read works repeatedly condemned by Rome as Jansenist or PhUo-Jansenist certainly chaUenged papal authority in an excessively provocative way. SamuelJ. Miller Boston College (Emeritus) Reform, Revolution and Reaction: Archbishop John Thomas Troy and the Catholic Church in Ireland 1787-1817. By Vincent J. McNaUy. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1995. Pp. xi, 256. $36.50.) Some members of the nineteenth-century Irish episcopal bench are, in view ofthe sources relating to them,unlikely ever to attract a biographer. Regrettably even the great John MacHale is in this category. Others very worthy of attention , like Daniel Murray, have hitherto failed to find a biographer. Paul CuUen, treated by Desmond Bowen, found the wrong one and was unreasonably attacked . One, therefore, records some pleasure that Vincent McNaUy's doctoral research onJohn Thomas Troy has, at length, come to pubUshed form. Troy has certainly found a writer with that basic requirement of the biographer—a sympathy for his subject. Also in McNaUy's favor is die good use made of an extensive body ofprimary sources. It is, in fact, the advantage which McNaUy has taken of the late eighteenthcentury increase in the volume ofIrish CathoUc archives which makes his book a very worthwhUe read. Again and again, the work's dependence on manuscript sources produces the most interesting disclosures of the mind and cir- 112BOOK REVIEWS cumstances of the Irish Church Ui Troy's era. Regrettably, however, whUe the Usting of manuscript sources is impressive, that of modern printed sources is much less so.WhUe there is a fine knowledge of the life ofTroy and consequent sympathy for the man,there is far less knowledge ofand sympathy for his times. Troy's reign in Dublin coincided with the climax of the period of Britain's firmest adherence to Christian orthodoxy and monarchical principle since 1688. It began with the accommodation ofToryism, asJacobitism went into terminal decline around the time of the Seven Years' War. The new outlook was confirmed by the experiences of the American rebelUon and the French Revolution . In the 1790's Pitt exUed the Foxites to the wUderness, waged what became a crusade against Jacobinism and democracy, and brushed off radicaUsm at home like a fly. McNaUy's lack of awareness of the dominant inteUectuaI and poUtical reaUties of the day leads him to a criticism ofTroy for his expression of and coming to terms with them. The inteUectuaI foundation of the era's order, its poUtical theology, is quaintly abused in passing as "pie-in-the-sky theology."When forced to confront it by Troy's poUtical pastoral of 1793, McNaUy dismisses this expression of it as the product of a mean-spirited personal disposition. Unacceptable too to McNaUy is Troy's desire to integrate CathoUcism into the British confessional state by supporting a subordinate...