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Chapter Fifteen Fr. Mathew: Apostle of Modernization () Father Theobald Mathew is one of the most neglected figures in nineteenthcentury Irish historiography. To his contemporaries he appeared to be leading a “moral revolution”1 in its own way as important as the campaigns of O’Connell, but whereas O’Connell has continued to attract the attention of historians (including Professor R. Dudley Edwards), Father Mathew’s reputation remains embalmed within the tradition of the Irish Capuchins and remote from the concerns of Irish historians.2 Those scholars who have commented upon his role in Irish history have in general confined themselves to his association with Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Movement.3 It is the intention of this essay to take another look at the career of Father Mathew and the Temperance Crusade in the belief that there must be something amiss with our interpretation of the preFamine period when a man and a movement highly regarded by contemporaries slip through the historians’ nets so easily. This neglect of Fr. Mathew may be attributed to several factors, among which may be included a long-standing tendency among Irish historians to interpret nineteenth-century Irish history in terms of political nationalism . From this point of view, it is hard to make sense of, or even be interested in, the Teetotal Crusade. In fact, the crusade only becomes intelligible in terms of social history, and in a transatlantic context at that. It was in New England in the s that the teetotal movement first took off and it was impulses from the United States which led to the formation of powerful teetotal movements in Britain and in Ireland. Expressions of gratitude to the United States for its moral leadership were regularly made in pamphlet literature of the period and it was not surprising that Fr. Mathew himself should have visited the United States. The American evangelist 256 Asenath Nicholson came to Ireland in  to visit Fr. Mathew and in her book Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, she paid glowing tributes to him. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass saw him as a significant figure. From the point of view of social history, therefore, Fr. Mathew and the Mathewite Crusade form part of a wide transatlantic movement of attempted reform, which was linked with other reform movements of the period, most notably the campaign against slavery.4 Another reason for neglect may be sought in an understandable tendency to see Fr. Mathew in specifically Catholic terms. This has had the effect of making him less comprehensible historically by isolating him and his movement from the largely non-conformist context in which teetotalism had its origins. But the difficulty is more apparent than real. A way for overcoming it is suggested by the work of John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, –, in which he argued that the position in which the English Catholics found themselves was essentially that of a “sect,” excluded from the mainstream of public life. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Irish Catholics, who later formed a major component of Gladstone’s grand ethnic, nonconformist, coalition, may be seen as occupying an analogous position, though later in the century their clergy undoubtedly assumed many of the attitudes of an established church. If this was the case, it is not surprising that an Irish Capuchin should make common cause, with the Quakers and with American evangelicals like Mrs. Nicholson.5 Late in the s, Fr. Mathew was to regret the way in which “other sects” had withdrawn support from his crusade, which seems to imply that he thought of himself as belonging to a sect. Mrs. Nicholson looked upon Fr. Mathew as an ally in the same godly cause. She praised his use of the scriptures to defend temperance and she in her turn handed round copies of the Douai Bible. The boundaries between the sects had become fluid. Thus the Capuchin no less than the American missionary may be seen as part of the great evangelical movement which G. M. Young regarded as one of the two dominating influences of the Victorian period. In the third place, there has been a tendency to see Fr. Mathew too exclusively in terms of drink and abstinence. The teetotal crusade was not however an end in itself; rather, Fr. Mathew saw it as a means to social improvement. A contemporary observer described him as ... avoiding all political questions, no man seems more eager than he for the practical improvement of...

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