Abstract
Oliver Rafferty took care to note when he completed this book’s preface that he did so on the Feast of the Venerable Bede, which is certainly an appropriate day for a priest-historian to finish any project. But if he has not quite produced, Bede-like, an ‘ecclesiastical history of the Irish people’ he has nonetheless brought together some of his most interesting work, old and new, in an absorbing collection of essays.
The collection’s unifying theme will not be a surprise to anyone previously familiar with Rafferty’s work, and it is one that, as he demonstrates, bears examination from several angles. How the Irish Catholic Church interacted with the state, with politics, and with political violence in the modern era is a potentially vast question that has multiple complicated answers. To Rafferty’s credit, in the ten chapters here, he alights on numerous fascinating and varied case studies in his quest to provide some of these answers.
It is worth noting, however, that one gets a sense of the core strengths of the book before even reading it. The lengthy list of abbreviations serves as a chronicle of many decades of archival work on the author’s part in Ireland, Britain, and the United States. Meanwhile the image on the dust jacket (from the Lavery painting ‘The Blessing of the Colours’) which shows the Archbishop of Dublin giving benediction to a Free State soldier bearing the Irish tricolour, is symbolic of Rafferty’s wider purpose; we are to learn not merely how this striking tableau came to be in this first culmination of the nationalist movement, but how it later played out, both north and south, too. This is a commendable chronological sweep.
Indeed, the book begins with an overview essay that should be required reading for any student of modern Ireland, capturing as it does the twists and tensions in the Church’s middleman position between an often hostile state and an—also occasionally hostile—people. The Church was sometimes seen by the British state as (and happy to act as) a brake on political violence and separatist nationalist aspirations; yet by the advent of independence it was clearly aligned with a movement that represented exactly those things, which, as the author notes, rather went against its supposedly ‘timeless and transcendental’ moral teachings. Rafferty’s diagnosis of this trajectory as an effort ‘to maintain a role in public life’ (p. 40) is an astute one.
Many of the subsequent chapters expand on themes that emerge in this opening essay, and there is a pleasing and entirely apt emphasis on an Irish world rather than the island in isolation. Chapter two, for example, addresses the relationship between Catholicism and the British empire, noting that the latter’s expansion facilitated the former’s global spread in direct as well as indirect ways; yet again, we see the Church hierarchy embracing an institution for pragmatic reasons, moral qualms notwithstanding. Chapter four puts North American Fenianism under the spotlight, noting that among many reasons why the Church opposed it (even if individual clergy often demurred) was a calculation that it rivalled Catholicism’s influence over the diaspora, as well as whipping up dormant Nativist anti-Catholic sentiment, thereby threatening the Church’s growing accommodation with state and society at large in both Canada and the US.
The two previously unpublished essays in the volume (numbers three and eight) intervene effectively in two diverse historiographies and address major events in the 1840s and 1940s respectively. ‘God in the Famine’ catalogues the broad variety of religious responses to that disaster, wherein both Protestant and Catholic tended to see some kind of providential judgement at work, but predictably, could not agree what sin, national or otherwise, was being punished, nor indeed, what response the chastisement demanded. Rafferty captures the swirl of responses well, although one wonders whether the chapter might have been elevated further by more exploration of the longer-term effects of this stiff test of religious sensibilities.
‘The Catholic Church in Ireland and the Second World War,’ meanwhile, covers some familiar ground in discussing the Church’s response to the de Valera government’s policy of neutrality—largely supportive—but provides interesting new insight from the perspective of the northern dioceses on the matter. Cardinal MacRory, we are told, thought the southern Irish state should not be criticized for its neutrality, but, in fact, praised for not joining the Axis side in the war (p. 195). Such was northern Catholic alienation from the British and Northern Irish states at this juncture. This, of course, merely worsened after the war, and Rafferty hints that it is possible to draw a direct line through the war to the Troubles in terms of London’s failure to intervene against blatant sectarian rule in the north. This is, like much of the rest of the book, a nuanced chapter with balanced judgement.
Essays on Catholic chaplains in the British army during World War I, on Cardinal Cullen’s ultramontanism, on the journal Studies, and on the Catholic Church and the Nationalist community in the north round out the volume, while a final, philosophical and self-reflective piece on ‘embedded memory,’ considering the role of history and memory in religious identity and the conflict this has given rise to in Ireland, is an appropriate end point for a book that has cast much light on these historical problems.