A Dominant Church: The Diocese of Achonry, 1818-1960 (review)

A Dominant Church is the third volume in a history of the Roman Catholic diocese of Achonry (ah con' ree) in Ireland. In their form and content, however, the three volumes are strikingly different from each other. The first volume, A Hidden Church, 1789–1818 (1997) was essentially a social and ecclesiastical history organized thematically, while the second volume, In Their Own Words: The Famine in North Connacht, 1845–1849 (1999), was basically a chronological source book of documents comprehensively selected from the local newspapers, parliamentary reports, and various ecclesiastical correspondences concerning northern Mayo. The scope and purpose of this third volume, however, are of another order. "This work is not intended," Father Swords points out in regard to its scope in his introduction, "as a mere ecclesiastical history of the diocese but as a social and political history describing the life and times of its inhabitants" (p. 19). "As in the earlier volumes," he then observes as to his purpose, "extensive use is made here of marginalia and footnotes. Histories such as these are rarely read from cover to cover. Most readers tend to dip in from time to time, usually in search of some item of local interest and the marginalia should greatly facilitate such researches. This volume is the result of extensive research over many years in numerous archives in several countries and the copious footnotes provided here are intended to help and perhaps inspire local historians to revisit their sources in compiling their own histories" (p. 20).

In this formidable effort of some 700 pages to provide local historians with considerable grist for their mills, the author has organized his nineteen chapters in four parts, which alternate between the thematic and the chronological. The two thematic parts are mainly concerned with the social dimension, largely ecclesiastical and economic, while the two chronological parts are mostly political history. The first four chapters in part one, for example, deal respectively with the themes of bishops, priests, education, and the land, while the seven chapters in the second part treat in chronological order Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, Fenianism, Famine again, the Land War, the Plan of Campaign, and the Parnell Split. This table of organization, social and political respectively, is then reiterated in parts three and four. Given that Achonry was among the smallest (only twenty-two of some 1000 parishes), the poorest, and the more remote of the twenty-seven dioceses comprising the Irish Church, it is surprising how prominently it figured in the revolutionary and constitutional Nationalist politics of Post-Famine Ireland. The reason for this, as is made abundantly clear by the author, was to be found in the quality and celebrity of its politicians and clergy.

The great difficulty, however, with this very learned attempt to provide a total history of the diocese of Achonry, is that there is little effort made to analyze or synthesize the ecclesiastical, social, and political dimensions, and the reader is left with a very large bundle to tie up. Among the most interesting and useful chapters in the thematic third part of the volume for this reviewer, for example, were those on "A New Religious Landscape" and the "Devotional Revolution." The first is mainly concerned with the building of churches for the people and convents for nuns in Post-Famine Ireland, which provides the mise en scène for the "Devotional Revolution" that also occurred. "A huge transformation took place," Father Swords explains, "in the devotional life of the diocese somewhere between 1870 and the end of the century, a transformation which was to remain unaltered until the Second Vatican Council" (p. 378). "This 'devotional revolution,'" he adds significantly, "was largely the result of parish missions." On the very vexed historical question of the timing of the Devotional Revolution, therefore, Father Swords views it essentially as a Post-Famine phenomenon, and on the "how" of that transformation he sees the parish mission movement as its effective engine. Father Swords...