In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland by Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J.
  • Timothy G. Mcmahon
Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland. By Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J. (Dublin: Four Courts Press; distributed in the United States by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. 2016. Pp. 247. €45,00; $70.00. ISBN 978-1-84682-583-5.)

The essays collected in Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland interrogate the tension between the political sensibilities of the bulk of Ireland's Catholic faithful and the theological and practical defense of the state that was so much a part of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As will be clear to those familiar with the works of Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J., the author has wrestled with such concerns for decades now. In bringing together eight previously published essays with two new pieces, this welcome volume sheds light on the myriad tensions of those dynamics on an island united politically—in whole and then only in part—to the British state with its distinctly Protestant ethos.

Unsurprisingly, Cardinal Paul Cullen looms large in several essays, including an extended look at his ultramontanism. Readers familiar only with his imperious oversight of Irish Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century will benefit from this sympathetic judgment that "one cannot but be struck by the essentially religious nature of his outlook on life, and on what was happening in Ireland and the Europe of his day. At the very least, this is what one expects from a cardinal." Sympathy does not equate to fawning, as that religious outlook had, Rafferty points out, an "almost apocalyptic tenor, with the forces of light ranged against the forces of darkness." One sidelight of that conclusion was that God intervened to punish sin, which Rafferty notes, included His meting out of a "just punishment" to Abraham Lincoln "for his having attended the theatre on Good Friday" (pp. 122–23).

Readers will come to appreciate three overlapping potential conflicts: those between Irish Church leaders who sought to carve out a more respected (and respectable) place for their flocks in a state that many of those same parishioners sought to undermine; those between the competing yet complementary empires of Britain and Rome in an era of unprecedented imperial expansion; and those between Irish and British Catholic leaders, whose sense of loyalty to Rome was colored by their loyalty to their flocks. At specific points in time—especially during the twentieth century when the Catholic dioceses in Ireland straddled two states, one of which viewed its large Catholic minority as alien and potentially threatening—the third set of these tensions became acute. Figures, including the leader of English Catholicism Cardinal Francis Bourne, could question Irish loyalties during the Great War (1914–1918), while Irish chaplains heroically ministered to soldiers at the front, offering sacramental care in the most dangerous of circumstances (pp. 134–62). At the same time, Rafferty carefully delineates that an individual's personality and background shaped his actions alongside theological training, high office, and circumstance. Thus, one finds the Cardinal Joseph MacRory of Armagh could act as a go-between for the IRA with the government of neutral Ireland in [End Page 389] the 1940s, while Bishop (later Cardinal) Cahal Daly refused to meet with representatives of Sinn Féin, the party associated with the Provisional IRA's campaigns in the 1970s–1990s, which Daly considered "morally evil" (pp. 167–72, 208).

Based on thorough grounding in diocesan and Roman archives, as well as in the contemporary press, this work is very much a study of Catholic leaders—which is to say men in positions to shape Irish Catholicism. With that understanding, it can be read in whole or in parts with great profit.

Timothy G. Mcmahon
Marquette University
...

pdf

Share