Betrayal of the Innocents: Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain by Timothy Mitchell (review)

638BOOK REVIEWS Brewer to explain, in the light of the Protestant community's dominance within their society, the unique persistence into the late twentieth century of antiCatholicism as such a salient element in the political culture of Northern Ireland . This analysis of the contemporary situation is preceded by a lengthy review of the history of anti-Catholicism since the seventeenth-century plantations . For a work of academic sociology this is a remarkably passionate book. In the preface the author and his research assistant declare themselves "Christians and sociologists," and one of their principal concerns is to convince the objects of the study that the theological foundations of the latter's anti-Catholicism are as unwarranted by scripture as their perceptions of Catholic belief are unfounded . To engage three distinct disciplines—sociology, history, and theology —is a risky endeavor. (J can't help wondering, for example, whether a New Testament scholar would think the Pharisees receive fair treatment.) The historical section of the work reflects wide and sensible reading in the Irish historiography of the past generation and suffers from the flaws of that literature . In particular, Brewer echoes the tendency of recent historians, including sometimes this reviewer, to understate the significance of Presbyterian alienation from the Protestant establishment in the eighteenth century and to exaggerate the rapprochement of Dissenters and Anglicans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. However, his typology of anti-Catholicism may be just what we Irish historians need to think our way out of the puzzle we have created in this revisionist reaction against dewy-eyed nationalist history. Something like Brewer's oddly-named "Pharisaic" mode of anti-Catholicism, with an irenic and compassionate regard for the agrarian underclass of the Famine era, is an important component of Irish Presbyterianism in its crucial transitional state which remains to be properly explicated. David W. Miller Carnegie Mellon University Betrayal of the Innocents: Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain. By Timothy Mitchell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. Pp. vu, 178. $39.95 clothbound; $16.50 paperback.) Interpretations of the past sweeping over the centuries often make fascinating reading. But for historians moved by the traditional evidentiary canons of their craft, such grand sallies are the cause of some discomfort. This provocative study by a highly regarded social anthropologist combines the insights of his field with psychological theory and a dose of history to argue that Spanish Catholicism developed over the centuries a powerful set of values identified as authoritarian sexual repression. The imposition of these values on society, he maintains, was damaging to individuals and encouraged patterns of sexual abuse by the clergy ranging from the use of the confessional in the sixteenth BOOK REVIEWS639 century to seduce penitents to cases of clerical sexual abuse brought to light in contemporary Spain. That such cases occurred in the distant and recent past is beyond dispute. Nor is there any doubt that the Spanish Church's traditional dark and pessimistic view of human nature in its sexual dimension verged on the obsessional , perhaps more so in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier times. To what extent this obsession was a uniquely Spanish phenomenon , as the author argues, is less certain. Similar concerns with upholding rigorous morality in sexual matters were scarcely absent from Protestant Europe until it was submerged by the powerful secularizing currents of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The thesis that the five centuries considered in some detail in this study are connected through an unchanging pattern of authoritarian sexual repression and the clerical abuse that accompanied it rests primarily on psychological arguments that may well have merit, although difficult to prove from an historical perspective. It is more difficult to see a direct historical connection between the abuse of the confessional brought to light by the Inquisition in the sixteenth century and recent cases of sexual abuse by priests. The author appears to assume that the clergy formed an undifferentiated mass over the centuries when, in fact, it underwent as dramatic a transformation as civil society during the nineteenth century. The chaotic recruitment of priests, the vastly uneven levels of clerical education, the extraordinarily diverse social backgrounds of the clergy...