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

Dan O’Leary’s book is a thoroughgoing exposition of the debate among Catholics in Ireland about science. The scope is ambitious, beginning with Charles Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth century and carrying the narrative up to 2006, Richard Dawkins’s visit to Ireland, and the ensuing controversy. There are a number of sources that O’Leary has uncovered, including the Edward Coyne and Thomas Larcom papers from the Irish Jesuit Papers in Dublin and the National Library of Ireland respectively.

The history of Irish Catholic reactions to Darwin is interwoven with the history of Catholicism itself. This includes the impact of the Syllabus of Errors in the 1860s, the revival of interest in St. Augustine that gave a handle for some Catholics keen to reconcile Darwin with Catholic dogma, the tightening of clerical control from Rome in the 1890s, and the growth of modernism and the Catholic reaction to it in the early 1900s.

In the late-nineteenth century there were—surprising from the point of view of somewhat polemical accounts of the Catholic Church’s reaction to modern science—significant attempts to reconcile Darwin with Catholic theology. Ireland, however, stands out in producing a much more robust and unforgiving Catholic response to evolution. O’Leary points out that Irish Catholics in the late-nineteenth century went even further than papal commentary at the time required. He points to their hostility to St. George Jackson Mivart even before Mivart’s excommunication in the 1890s. This was in contrast to English Catholics such as Mivart and John S. Vaughan, who believed that their Irish co-religionists were rejecting unreasonably the possibilities of a reconciliation between evolution and Catholic doctrine.

O’Leary attributes this greater defensiveness to the poor level of clerical education. He also puts forward the view that many prominent English Catholics such as Mivart and Blessed John Henry Newman were converts. They still retained, therefore, a greater closeness to intellectual elites in England. They shared many of the same cultural assumptions and attitudes. In contrast to Ireland, English Catholics failed to set up third-level colleges exclusively for their co-religionists, and English Catholics went on being educated with their peers. Irish Catholics continued to be educated in mixed institutions in the nineteenth century but decreasingly so as the century progressed. One reason that the bishops argued for a Catholic university was to stem the noxious influence of Darwinian evolution on their flocks.

Occasionally O’Leary’s book slips into straightforward exegeses of articles in the Ecclesiastical Record and elsewhere, or in Catholic anti-Darwinian books of the twentieth century. One would have liked more summaries of the arguments that are often repetitive, sometimes to an astonishing degree. In the 1940s O’Leary clearly shows that Irish Catholic polemics against Darwin were still repeating the inadequacy of the fossil record or predicting its imminent demise because of growing scientific skepticism about natural selection. On the other hand, scholars will find the book a very useful source in tracking the history of anti-Darwinism in Catholic Ireland. There is, for example, a very good exposition of anti-modernism in the first decade of the twentieth century.

This is, from one perspective, a rather sad and disturbing history, not because of the perturbations caused by Darwinism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For Irish Catholics keen to establish a denominational third-level institution at a time when English universities were being progressively secularized, there were particular difficulties. What is depressing is the low intellectual level of the Irish Catholic controversialist in the period after 1920, although some Irish Catholics were engaged in debates with notable English agnostics like H. G. Wells. But Wells and others were frequently polemicists who were stuck intellectually in the debates of the 1890s and early 1900s. The science of natural selection had moved on...