Irish Catholicism and Science: From ‘Godless Colleges’ to the ‘Celtic Tiger,’ by Don O’Leary (review)

Following on his Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History (2006), Don O’Leary has now provided a further comprehensive chronicle of the relationship between Irish Catholicism and science from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Its ten chapters tell the story in chronological sequence—a story that involves not only a dramatic development of ideas, but is also a far more international story than might be expected of a comparatively marginal national church in a small country. Irish Catholicism in the nineteenth century—largely due to the Famine and the subsequent diaspora—had an enormous impact on Catholicism worldwide. The story, therefore, of the ever-changing relations among Irish clergy, scholars, universities, and laity with regard to science and science education involves incidents and perspectives peculiar to the Irish Catholic church, but also linked with a much wider story throughout the English-speaking world. The debates of the science-theology dialogue are perennial and international. O’Leary never loses his focus of describing “the Irish Catholic experience,” but he also effectively shows its connections with (sometimes acrimonious) debates that rage to this very day from Rome to Maynooth, from Dublin to New York.

Those who have studied the vagaries in the relationship between religion and science during the last five hundred years (more or less since Galileo) have noted four modes of that relationship: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration, to use the terminology of Ian G. Barbour’s Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (1998). As O’Leary notes, no one of these by itself can characterize the Irish experience. Rather, as is true elsewhere, there are numerous examples of all four modes, with the understandable exception of integration. There were, on the one hand, the sustained, even somewhat heroic, efforts of Walter McDonald (a professor of theology at Maynooth), who “rejected the contention that there was an inevitable conflict between Catholic doctrine and modern science.” Though it received an official imprimatur, McDonald’s book Motion: Its Origin and Conservation (1898) was condemned by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and he “was censured and carefully watched by his clerical colleagues.” On the other hand, Henry V. Gill, an Irish Jesuit and scientist and frequent contributor to the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, “asserted that no scientist, even as eminent as Newton or Kelvin, could ever devise ‘a thoroughly satisfying theory of the universe’ if he declined the opportunity to be guided by the Roman Catholic Church.” For Gill, it was, says O’Leary, as though “the only viable formula for a good relationship between Roman Catholicism and science was for the scientists to surrender their intellects to the church.”

The latter attitude helps to explain why the status of science and science ducation in Ireland was threatened, if not downright abysmal, throughout much of the period of the book’s study. There were, of course, broader factors not strictly tied to Catholicism that militated against science: resources were not always available, and “the population base from which scientists could be drawn was halved in the years from 1845 to 1936.” A massive decline in the Protestant population, “which had produced a disproportionately high number of Ireland’s scientists,” made the problem even worse. But the latter factor also suggests why Irish Catholicism as such retarded the development of science in the country. Science played no significant part in the education of the clergy, and neither for that matter did modern philosophy. University students were indeed allowed—even sometimes required—to read Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and others, but “the intellectual freedom . . . was more imaginary than real.” The study of such philosophers was primarily “for the purpose of disproving [their] errors.” In a period when Ireland produced literary genius of the highest caliber, it produced very few scholars making significant contributions within the sciences.

The complexities of the issues were no more evident than in the relationship between the Catholic hierarchy and the British...