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  • The European Culture Wars in Ireland: The Callan Schools Affair, 1868-81
  • Oliver P. Rafferty S.J.
The European Culture Wars in Ireland: The Callan Schools Affair, 1868-81. By Colin Barr. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions. 2010. Pp. xiii, 306. $89.95. ISBN 978-1-906-35953-9.)

Barr sets out to tell the story of Robert O'Keeffe, the parish priest of Callan, County Kilkenny, whose suspension in November 1871 by Cardinal Paul Cullen, archbishop of Dublin but acting in his capacity as papal legate, occasioned one of the great causes célèbres of nineteenth-century Ireland. Cullen was forced into this measure because O'Keeffe had initiated legal proceedings against his own bishop, Edward Walsh. O'Keeffe, in a misguided instance of pastoral zeal, had invited some French nuns to come to Callan to run a girls' school. He and the sisters expended considerable sums on preparing a building. Walsh knew nothing of the venture, and when finally O'Keeffe asked for permission, the bishop refused. O'Keeffe then sued his bishop in a civil court. Walsh imposed a canonical penalty on O'Keeffe, who then appealed to Cullen.

The cardinal's suspension of the turbulent priest meant O'Keeffe lost not only his livelihood as pastor but also was dismissed from quasi-state positions as chaplain to the local poorhouse and manager of several local schools under the control of the National Board of Education.

The decisions of the poor law and education authorities roused Protestant, judicial, and parliamentary opinion in Britain and Ireland, because, on the face [End Page 387] of it, a servant of the queen was dismissed at the bidding of a cardinal of the Roman Church. O'Keeffe described Cullen as one exercising the

absolute sway of a foreign despot, brought up in a foreign country [Cullen had lived in Rome as student, professor, and rector since he was seventeen until his return to Ireland as an archbishop and papal legate in 1850], and claiming to be above the law of his own.

(p. 78)

O'Keeffe sued Cullen, in addition to bringing several other lawsuits against sundry clerics, and was awarded by the trial jury, under a less than impartial Protestant chief justice, one farthing in compensation, but with costs of the legal proceedings awarded against Cullen. This verdict was overturned on appeal. Still, O'Keeffe had the support of virtually every shade of anti-Catholic opinion in the United Kingdom, which to varying degrees beat the antipopery drum. This included the former and current prime ministers, Lord John Russell and William Gladstone; many of the leading newspapers of the day; and the Orange Order. Further, the matter was discussed at cabinet level on at least fifteen occasions, and gave rise to parliamentary motions and a parliamentary inquiry in which O'Keeffe was "made to look mendacious, vindictive and money-grabbing" (p. 232).

Barr is surely correct to see the case not simply in Irish and British terms, but to set it in the context of wider forces of tension between church and state in Europe as a whole at that stage of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the title is not accurate. The church-state tensions in Ireland were not the equivalent of the German Kulturkampf, as Barr would have it. The anticlerical and anti-Catholic sentiments in a number of contemporary European states did not equivalently give rise in the United Kingdom to restrictive legal penalties. Furthermore, the European struggle was not only a result of ultramontanism but also formed part of a pattern laid down in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, not least in the shape of Josephism in Austria-Hungary. Equally, this reviewer is not as convinced as Barr that no-popery had faded from the British popular imagination as early as the 1870s (p. 265). The very success of O'Keeffe's appeals for help in his legal challenges is proof-positive against such a view.

These are, however, minor points. The work is meticulously researched, very well written, and splendidly produced. Barr has not only combed archives in some twenty-eight deposits in six countries but...

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