The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-Century Irish Realities (review)

Oliver Rafferty has published two well-regarded monographs: a social history of Ulster Catholicism and a study of the Catholic Church and Fenianism. His new volume of essays consists mainly of byproducts of these major projects. Three essays, surveys of Catholicism in Derry, Fermanagh, and Down, were composed for volumes on the history of those counties. Other chapters betray their origins as occasional pieces, offering loosely constructed compendia of information and comment. Complex issues, such as the level of zeal shown by the pre-"devotional revolution" parish clergy, or the extent to which rising sectarian animosity did or did not override earlier patterns of mutual accommodation, are approached by piling up contrasting instances, or the conflicting assessments of contemporaries, in what is too often a self-negating sequence. There are also some surprising lapses. Discussions of popular belief and practice in terms of "superstition" (pp. 92–93, 133) ignore complexities that have engaged serious social historians of religion for several decades. An account of the supposedly uniform squalor and degradation of the Irish Catholic laity in Great Britain cites a fifty-year-old essay by Denis Gwynn, rather than the large volume of more recent work that has partially modified this traditional depiction (p. 70).

All this is a pity, since Rafferty has important insights to offer on his central theme of church-state relations in nineteenth-century Ireland. The British state, he emphasizes, remained unquestionably Protestant, in terms both of the disproportionate share of power and privilege it continued to allow the Protestant minority in Ireland, and of the frankly expressed hostility to Catholicism of many among its leading servants. Yet there was also a pragmatic acceptance that Ireland was best managed in cooperation with the Catholic clergy, and a corresponding willingness to make whatever concessions were required to ensure that such cooperation was forthcoming. Irish Catholic church leaders, for their part, were equally pragmatic. They fiercely contested continuing examples of discriminatory treatment in education and other areas. But their aim remained to secure what they saw as their Church's proper place within the existing structures of power. All this is a welcome antidote to teleological narratives that presuppose a simple opposition between British government and a monolithic Catholic nationalism, and it is the essays focused in this area that provide the most rewarding chapters in the book. These include two essays placing the response of Cardinal Paul Cullen and other churchmen to the Fenian movement firmly in the context of their own agenda for the advancement of Catholic interests. There is also a revealing comparison with the more muted response to revolutionary Irish nationalism of American Catholic bishops, anxious to accommodate themselves to a very different set of assumptions regarding the relationship of church and state. A study of Benjamin Disraeli dismisses his occasional gestures toward the possibility of a Catholic-Tory alliance as wholly opportunistic. William Ewart Gladstone's disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, on the other hand, emerges as the product not solely of electoral considerations, or of the threat of Fenianism, but also of genuine commitment. Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, too, is seen as a complex figure, strongly influenced in his attitude to Ireland by the Toryism of the English Catholic establishment, but set apart from its complacent quietism by his ultramontane views and recognition of the urgent pastoral needs of the Irish in Great Britain. It is to be hoped that Rafferty will in time go beyond these intriguing but sometimes perfunctory sketches to develop more fully his insights into the unique position of nineteenth-century Ireland as the mainly Catholic component of a Protestant but liberal state.