Religious Renewal and Reform in the Pastoral Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786-1834 by Thomas McGrath, and: Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education in the Public Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786-1834 by Thomas McGrath (review)

346book reviews Although Oxford escaped the French Revolution, she did not escape the onslaught of German Idealism. Kant had insisted that philosophy should be freed from what he believed to be the "stranglehold of theological and political orthodoxy " (p. 105). Brockliss suggests that "the Idealist saw the university as a missionary institution. Henceforth it was to be the breeding-ground of the perfect man. The university would replace the Church as the guardian of mankind's spiritual health" (p. 106). During the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, Oxford's traditional system and Anglican orientation came increasingly under attack. Challenges came from outside, through Parliamentary interference and from Protestant Nonconformists who demanded the right to send their sons. The forces for change on the inside proved to be even stronger. Increasingly naturalistic science became alluring after 1850; Anglican liberals, in the shape of the "Oriel Noetics" and Broad Churchmen, worked gradually against ecclesiastical authority and to open the university to their own latitudinarianism. R B. Nockles shows in a brilliant chapter that the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who had insisted that the university should be an arm of the church under ecclesiastical authority, ultimately and paradoxically, came to oppose university and church authority when they, themselves, came under university censure for their sympathies to Rome (chapter 7). Finally, Christopher Harvie shows that by 1864 the movement to nationalize the university was no longer the work of liberal churchmen wanting to give equal access to students from various Christian confessions, but of secular radicals,within and without the university (p. 725), enthralled by the Kantian dream of a research university no longer tied to a Christian confession of any kind. The one faith left to such a university was the vision of perfecting society and the human person free of divine intervention. J. R Ellens Redeemer College Ancaster, Ontario Religious Renewal and Reform in the Pastoral Ministry of Bishop James Doyle ofKildare and Leighlin, 1 786-1834. By Thomas McGrath. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon . 1999. Pp. xiv, 355. £35.00; $55.00.) Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education in the Public Ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786-1834. By Thomas McGrath. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 1999. Pp. xi, 331. £35.00; $55.00.) When William John Fitzpatrick published his two-volume biography of Bishop Doyle in 1861, he considered it might be one of the last memoirs illustrated by correspondence "after the manner of Boswell and Lockhart." It sur- BOOK REVIEWS347 vived, rather, as the unchallenged source on "J.K.L."'s public life and ministry for well over a century untilTom McGrath decided to revisit the primary sources in Carlow and elsewhere. The resulting new two-volume study of Doyle,while not strictly in the biographical genre, devotes particular attention to the persona of its subject and to the rôle he played in the Tridentine renewal of Irish Catholicism in the early years of the nineteenth century. The second volume of McGrath 's concentrates upon the bishop's trenchant contribution to national debate and to his wider influence on Irish Public affairs and policy. Fundamental to McGrath's understanding of Doyle's ecclesiology is the argument he presents against a too uncritical acceptance of Emmet Larkin's fashionable theory of "a devotional revolution" in Ireland, germinated under Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin but sustained, invigorated, and advanced by Cardinal Paul Cullen,the essence of which was to be found in a revitalization of religion and devotional practice, guided by ultramontane policies and gently influenced by the effect of the famine years of the 'forties and large-scale emigration . McGrath's premise is that this so-called "revolution" was but really the final stage of an earlier Tridentine renewal that had been slowly taking place in Ireland since the late eighteenth century, the speed of its progress being necessarily tempered by penal legislation, poverty, and economic adversity. "Evolution ," not "revolution" is thus the key concept, and James Warren Doyle is manifested as one of the major catalysts in the process. Mainly self-educated, Doyle was a professed...