St Catherine's Parish Dublin, 1840-1900: Portrait of a Church of Ireland Community, and: Roscommon before the Famine: The Parishes of Kiltoom and Cam, 1749-1845, and: Window on a Catholic Parish: St Mary's, Granard, Co. Longford (review)

St Catherine's Parish Dublin, 1840-1900: Portrait of a Church of Ireland Community. By John Crawford.

Roscommon before the Famine: The Parishes of Kiltoom and Cam, 1749- 1845. By William Gacquin.

Window on a Catholic Parish: St Mary's, Granard, Co. Longford, 1933-68. By Francis Kelly.

[Maynooth Studies in Local History, Numbers 6, 7, and 8.] (Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 1996. Pp. 57, 64, 63. $9.95 each, paperback.)

These slender volumes were originally master's theses completed at Maynooth under the direction of Raymond Gillespie. Each work is very narrowly focused, and none of the authors makes much of an effort to show how their studies support--or challenge--the leading scholarly work in the field. Nonetheless, there is much to commend in these books. Each author draws on previously untapped sources--parish records, vestry minutes, deeds, and school registers. Each study is well written and finely illustrated, especially Crawford's, which has several photographs and etchings of St. Catherine's church and the clergymen who served it.

What is most significant about these works is that each presents material that will force Irish historians to reconsider some long-held assumptions. For example, while Anglicanism is generally thought to have been declining in southern Ireland in the late nineteenth century, Crawford shows that St. Catherine's was a relatively vibrant parish; he attributes much of its strength to the zeal of two evangelical ministers who were stationed there in the 1880's and '90's. Likewise, while many recent scholars have argued that there was considerable unrest and secret society activity in rural Ireland, Gacquin's parishes in Roscommon were calm on the eve of the Famine.

Kelly's findings were the most startling. He studied Canon Denis O'Kane's thirty-five-year tenure as pastor of St. Mary's Church in Granard in County Longford. O'Kane, a highly-educated, personable man, was at St. Mary's from 1933 to 1968, years in which the Catholic Church is widely thought to have been the dominant force in all facets of Irish life. Kelly claims, however, that O'Kane and his curates met considerable resistance from many of the faithful in Granard. He estimates that only 55% of the parishioners attended Mass every Sunday in the 1930's. In an effort to evangelize the people, O'Kane arranged for a number of parish missions, but they had very mixed results. In 1938, Father Columbus, a Capuchin friar, led a week-long mission at the parish. As he was leaving, he informed O'Kane that the parishioners were "a bad lot indeed . . . [with] very bad customs and . . . a very pagan and material outlook" (p. 37). Of course, there were also many parishioners who attended daily Mass and were active in the Legion of Mary and the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, but the devout were definitely outnumbered by the lukewarm and the fallen away.

Each of these studies, but especially Kelly's, makes new, well-substantiated claims that all students of modern Irish history need to take seriously.

John F. Quinn
Salve Regina University

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