Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks 1750–1950 ed. by Colin Barr, Hillary M. Carey (review)

This is a fascinating study of Irish religious experience as this found expression in America and the British Empire in a 200-year period. The idea of “Greater Ireland” is not simply a synonym for the Irish diaspora. The Irish in “Greater Ireland” continued to be linked by emotional, cultural, and symbolic ties to the old country. Unlike other studies of the global Irish, the sixteen essays in this work emphasize the centrality of religion in Irish Catholic and Protestant culture, at home and abroad. The editors freely admit that this is not a comprehensive study of the topic; some geographical areas are neglected such as the West Indies, Argentina, Western Australia, and Britain, where the complexities are such as to merit individual volumes. Nor is there a chapter on Irish Jews, but John Stenhouse does indicate cooperation between Irish Catholics and Protestants with some leading Jews over social issues in New Zealand in the late-nineteenth century.

There is a sense in which many of the characteristics of the Irish in the diaspora are a mirror image of the Irish at home. Sectarian differences were a plague with the expansion of the Orange Order in Canada and Australia that served to keep religious rivalries alive. Diane Hall, however, illustrates the centrality of Orange Lodges in identity formation in Australia. She also warns against the dangers of subsuming Irish Protestant experience under the predominantly English character of mainstream Australian Protestantism. Similarly, Michael Gladwin shows the importance of Irish ministers for the development of Anglicanism in Australia despite what is often regarded as the “quintessentially English” nature of the church there.

Irish religious experience could never quite escape the tension produced by Irish political realities. Thus Myrtle Hill, in her chapter on Irish women in Protestant female missions between 1870 and 1914, points out that the Female Association for Promoting Christianity was founded in Belfast at a time when the issue of Home Rule was beginning to come to the fore. Such political tensions also raised questions of imperial loyalty, which, in turn, served to sharpen sectarian animosities.

Were the Catholics loyal to the Empire? Whatever the experience at home, the irony is that, by and large, Catholics served imperial interests. In Canada, according to Mark McGowan, they were consistently imperialistic, but this was facilitated by the fact that the Constitution Act of 1791 gave them religious and political freedoms not available in Ireland. Carolyn Lambert demonstrates that, so far as Newfoundland was concerned, Irish Catholics were marked by both patriotism for Ireland and loyalty to the British Empire. Upon his death in 1914, Archbishop Michael Francis Howley of St. John’s was described as a “true son of Empire” (p. 129). This is despite the fact that he was distinctly muted in his approval of the British side in the Boer War of 1899–1902, quite unlike his wholly Irish Episcopal colleagues at the Cape, who supported Britain against the Boers (Colin Barr, p. 267).

Barry Crosbie reminds us that the peoples of the United Kingdom viewed the Empire differently and had varying interactions with indigenous peoples. This gave rise to trouble for Irish priests and bishops over issues of caste in India. But this may have been part of the process of negotiations with local realities that Mia Cowan identifies in her study of Catholic participation in the public school system in Chicago in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.

But there were other problems for the Irish in “Greater Ireland.” Squabbles at home over “New Light” and “Old Light” theology within Presbyterianism were exported to colonial America in the eighteenth century. Irish Catholics competed with French Catholics in British North America for dominance of the Church, and ultimately the...