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BOOK REVIEWS563 acceptable settlement of any controversy could be worked out between Vienna and Rome. In his final chapters, Grisar examines several other aspects ofTschiderer's career . Nationalism was a growing problem for him, in a diocese split between Germans and Italians. He deplored it as a cause of disunity among Catholics and a source of strife; he criticized Italian nationalism for its hostility to the Temporal Power, but defended Italian clergy attacked by the government for their nationalist sympathies. Liberalism he disliked, identifying it with anticlericalism, and his attitude toward the 1848 revolutions was generally unfavorable. There is no bibliography, but there is an appendix of documents useful for showing Tschiderer's views. As mentioned earlier, Grisar's work has its limitations today, and it is a pity it was not published when it was first written. Nonetheless, it is still of value, for it is a work of great scholarship, based on intensive research. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century Catholicism in the Austrian Empire, particularly in the Tyrol, can still read it with profit. Alan J. Reinerman Boston College Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913- By Ruth Fleischmann. (NewYork: St. Martin's Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 188. $65.00.) During the early decades of this century in Ireland,when the Literary Revival, at its zenith, was earning the country international critical acclaim, one of the most popular of its writers was a parish priest from County Cork. But the aspects of Ireland featured in the work ofW. B.Yeats,J. M. Synge, George Moore, and Bernard Shaw, and which have continued to appeal to later generations of twentieth-century readers, have little prominence in the novels of Patrick Augustine Sheehan. Always known simply as Canon Sheehan from the honor the Church bestowed upon him in 1903, he depicted instead a nation so permeated by Catholicism and devoted to its priests and traditional pieties that social inequality , and indeed politics generally, were of far lesser significance. And he portrayed the enemies of such an Ireland not primarily as British rule or oppressive Protestant landlords, so much as socialist or nationalist radicals, or patriotically posturing hypocrites. His ideal was an Ireland poor in material terms but morally the safer for that, in which patriotism was inextricable from unwavering loyalty to the Church. This vision was less accurate for the Ireland of Sheehan's own day than for that of the 1920's and '30's, after most of the country gained independence as the Irish Free State. That was certainly not the Ireland the Revivalists wanted, and for their successors—writers like Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor—its 564BOOK REVIEWS yoking of nation to Church was acutely uncomfortable. Canon Sheehan feared that materialism would overwhelm the Ireland he envisioned, and it has, though more slowly than he anticipated. Traditional Catholic Ireland lingered into the 1960's, when economic advances and the Church's own embrace of change effected its rapid demise. Ruth Fleischmann is not sympathetic to Canon Sheehan's ethos, nor admiring , in the main, of his literary qualities. His novels have the faults common to popular fiction: sentimentality, didacticism, and too great a reliance upon coincidence and melodrama, but his sacerdotal characters are often compelling. Fleischmann most creditably examines their complexities and the conflict, to which Sheehan was personally sensitive, between the intellectual tendencies or ambitions of many priests, and the dullness to ideas of most of those to whom they ministered, a disparity so often issuing in clerical autocracy. As Fleischmann indicates, Sheehan's social attitudes were comparable with those of numerous contemporary leaders; indeed, his novels are indispensable to any reconstruction ofthe sense of Ireland that prevailed early in this century among so many of its people. His writings bespoke an age in which the Revival itself arose, a context, now largely hidden, against which Ireland's betterremembered writers defined themselves. Ignorance of that very Catholic Ireland serves even its opponents poorly, and Fleischmann's revisiting one of its major proponents merits genuine praise. Robert Mahony The Catholic University ofAmerica Cardinal Herbert Vaughan: Archbishop of Westminster, Bishop of Salford, Founder of the Mill Hill Missionaries. By Robert...

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