Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland by James H. MurphyReview by: Matthew KellyIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 138 (Nov., 2006), pp. 252-254Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20547441 .

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252 Irish Historical Studies

Dissenters, into its fold. Certainly from 1820 the 'gloves were off, but Whelan sets the conflict in a longer time-frame. Magee's intervention brought the Protestant crusade to a

new level, and his charge drew immediate response from Catholic quarters, particularly from James Warren Doyle, 'J.K.L.', who was the most articulate of a new generation of

confident Catholic bishops. While Bowen focused upon the 'Protestant crusade', Whelan broadens the debate on

this vital battle and its effects upon both communities in Ireland, She concludes that the sectarianism of the 1820s destroyed the union project and confirmed the pre-existing tensions between the 'two nations' on the island. Following the example of other

commentators, she sets the battle firmly within the context of the campaign for Catholic emancipation, but her analysis is enhanced by her discussion of the wider economic and

social context of the period. She devotes considerable attention to the eighteenth-century antecedents of the struggle, though more could have been said on the effects of the penal laws, the radical debate of the United Irishmen and the sectarianism of the Orange Order.

Similarly, while she makes very good use of the scholarship of David Hempton, Myrtle Hill and Thomas McGrath, the valuable insights of James Kelly and Thomas Bartlett are largely neglected. That said, the study is firmly set within the intellectual framework offered by scholars such as William Sewell, Linda Colley and Michael Barkun.

Dr Whelan's discussion of the international dimension of the 'Second Reformation' is a

significant advance on Bowen's account. The attitude of Pope Pius VII (1800-23) is particularly telling. Within the context of evangelicalism in Poland, he declared: These [Bible] societies are abhorrent to me, they tend to the subversion of the Christian religion ... It is a plague which must be arrested by all possible means.' (pp 133-4) Such attitudes

were shared by the Irish Catholic bishops, but their opposition was not simply ideological. What emerges most clearly from Dr Whelan's volume is the sense that the Catholic hierarchy was seriously challenged by the evangelical assault. It is clear too that the numbers of conversions to the reformed church were far higher than traditional histories would have us believe.

Whelan's Bible war is a very significant contribution to the history of nineteenth century Ireland. It charts a pivotal episode in the emergence of modern Ireland and provides a prism through which the great issues of the age can be examined. It is an essential text for any reader attempting to understand the troubled history of the island.

D?1RE Keogh Department of History, St Patrick's College, Drumcondra

Evangelicals-and Catholics in nineteenth-century Ireland, Edited by James H. Murphy. Pp 256. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2004. 55.

Few would deny that Emmet Larkin's *The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850-70' (American Historical .Review, xxvii (1972), pp 625-52) has been one of the most influential articles in Irish historiography of the past forty years. Despite challenges to his chronology and the suggestion that the transformation of the Catholic church and Catholic practice in Ireland was more evolutionary then revolutionary, this seminal article continues to provide an entr?e into one of the most important themes in nineteenth-century Irish history. Larkin rises to the challenge posed by his critics in the opening chapter of this lively and accomplished collection, He restates his argument by demonstrating that the pre-Pamine church offers the historian precise interpretative challenges and must be understood on its own terms/Rome feared that the peculiar practices that evolved in Ireland bespoke a Gallican or Febronian tendency. Not so, argues Larkin, The Irish custom of stations, by which itinerant priests administered the sacraments, was the practical solution adopted by a massively overstretched church* It was a problem that became more

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Reviews and short notices 253

pressing as the increase in the number of Catholic priests and churches in Ireland in the period 1750-1848 failed to keep pace with the growth in population.

David W. Miller and James H. Murphy pay homage to Larkin. Miller concludes that Ulster Presbyterians did not experience a devotional revolution; Murphy suggests that in Charles J. Kickham's Knocknagow pre-devotional-revolution Catholic practice in Ireland was 'unremembered'. Kickham presented the station mass as a custom in harmony with

apparently immemorial Tridentine practice. Miller, following a necessarily complex argument in what is perhaps the most significant essay in this collection, identifies changes in Presbyterian practices which are best understood in terms of the sensibilities of the growing Presbyterian middle class. 'Old Light' and 'New Light* Presbyterianism, he proposes, might be complemented by the notions of 'old leaven' and 'new leaven'. There was little or no political dimension to the more 'respectable' forms of worship that

evolved. These were most evident in the disappearance of festal communion in favour of 'a regimen of decorous weekly worship, better-suited to the schedules, wardrobes and residential patterns of ... well-dressed and well-scrubbed communicants

* (p. 45). It

became more difficult for 'plain folk... to act out their identification with the Presbyterian community' (p. 45), Although industrialisation and urbanisation put the lower classes increasingly beyond the reach of the churches, this was exacerbated by religious practices encouraged by the very people most anxious about the moral and spiritual degeneration apparently caused by modernisation. Evangelism was the obvious answer, and* following Janice Holmes, Miller argues that it was chiefly aimed at lapsed Presbyterians. Old problems re-emerged in these new conditions. The agenda that shaped Henry Cooke's

leadership of the Presbyterian church in the 1840s was undermined by rejuvenated evangelicalism, renewing the theological and class tensions within the church that had fuelled the growth of more'respectable'practices.

In this collection particular attention is paid to Protestant anxiety in the age of Catholic emancipation. Shirley Matthews demonstrates that although there was no significant Irish

presence in Hampshire, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in the county nonetheless

grew in response to the perception of a general threat to Protestant Britishness. Katherine Parr analyses two Young Ireland poems on the Famine through the religious connotations

of their language and structure. Despite Jane Francesca Elgee's esperanza') sympathy for

the victims of the Famine, anti-Catholic sentiment suffused the work of this Protestant

nationalist poet. Elgee's 'dismissal of the facts of famine' (p. 104), Parr argues, means she

failed to recognise British responsibility. In contrast, a poem by the Catholic Richard D'Alton Williams embodied a Catholic sensibility and recognised what he described as the 'foreign tyrant's wrong' (p. 104). It might be asked whether Elgee's denials were

symptomatic of the wider anxieties of Anglo-Irish nationalists who considered themselves motivated by enlightened political ideals but had to come to terms with the entrenched ultramontane Catholicity of the majority population. Kara M, Ryan finds similar denials in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna*s The Rockite. The novel suggests that Irish rebellion stemmed from Catholicism's enslaving of the mind; Ryan says Tonnai causation obscured the 'foundational material transgressions' (p. 77) of the British government

Maureen O'Connor's and Louise Fuller's pieces provide alternative viewpoints. O'Connor's excellent analysis of the remarkable Anglo-Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe shows how the recognition of British misgovemance and abus? was compatible with religious prejudice (Catholicism was termed 'the great moral plague* (p. 191)), a deep sympathy for Irish grievances, and progressive views on gender. Most provoking was Cobbe's idea that the Irish Catholic historical imagination stymied a rational engagement with contemporary politics. Cobbe wrote of a people who inhabited *a world of ...

splendours regretted in the past and utterly unreal and impossible future hopes, They see neither where England has actually wronged Ireland heretofore nor how her Constitution opens to them now ... the lawful means of obtaining all just redress .* they can ?&$m.

Instead of this, they are still talking of Tara and Kincora, of OlIarA Fodhia and Brien Boiromhe/ (p. 194) Walter McDonald, it can be imagined, would hay& bad so?

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254 Irish Historical Studies

sympathy for this view. Fuller's account of his experience at Maynooth leaves the reader

in no doubt about the intellectually retrograde state of Ireland's leading Catholic educational institution. The novices were even denied access to the Freeman 's Journal, the

moderate newspaper of home rule nationalism.

This is an excellent collection that introduces the reader to a range of intellectual and

scholarly approaches. It does, however, raise questions about the wider context of Irish

evangelicalism. With the obvious exception of Janice Holmes, few contributors situate

evangelical Protestantism in Ireland in wider British debates and movements. Little attention, for example, appears to have been paid to Boyd Hilton's The age of atonement:

the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford, 1988). And when thinking about Protestant hostility to Catholicism as an historically contingent phenomenon, attention also needs to be given to the politics of the Catholic church, which brings us back to Larkin's 'devotional revolution'. After 1789 Rome's

political leadership was reactionary, making it the single most powerful counter

revolutionary agent in nineteenth-century Europe. As Amy E. Martin's analysis of John

O'Leary's Fenian recollections suggests, this was a problem for some nationalists, few of

whom were atheists. The Nation newspaper, for example, struggled to reconcile its

sympathy for European nationalist movements with its Roman loyalties. The Fenian solution fno priests in polities') was born of the Cullenite intersection between the progress of the Italian Risorgimento and Irish developments. Indeed, some nationalists saw that the British polity, in spite of its appalling record in Ireland, was, for much of the nineteenth century, among the most liberal in Europe. Among its many qualities, this collection invites thinking about the religious dimension of this, the seeming paradox that runs through the history of Ireland under the union.

Matthew Kelly Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Southampton

A dominant church: the diocese of Achonry, 1818-1960. By Liam Swords. Pp 700, illus. Dublin: Columba Press, 2004. 35.

This is the third volume of Father Liam Swords's study of his native diocese. The first volume covered the years 1689-1818; the second departed from the conventional chronological framework and went beyond diocesan boundaries to give accounts of the Famine in north Connacht in the words of many of those who lived through it. The third volume resumes the chronological narrative, the date 1818 having been chosen because in that year Patrick McNicholas became bishop and set about removing some abuses which, he thought* were to be attributed to the fact that his immediate predecessor, John Flynn, had been paralysed for several years before his death, Flynn's two predecessors had been non-resident and had only 'visited the diocese hastily in summer time*. McNicholas disciplined refractory clergy, improved the educational facilities for his priests, and established his residence in Ballaghaderreen. His episcopate lasted thirty-four years, but he was inactive owing to ill-health for several years before his death in 1852. One might question, perhaps, whether 'dominant' is a suitable description of the church

in Achonry before the Famine. The diocese was poor and the proportion of priests to people was low. When McNicholas became bishop there were forty-one priests serving in the diocese; that figure remained the same in 1841 and 1851. By 1841 the population stood at about 136,000? and on the eve of the Famine had probably passed 140,000. The struggle to provide churches and to help the poor before and during the Famine was extremely difficult-

:

The term "dominant- is much more applicable for the later years of the nineteenth and for the twentieth century. The number of priests increased, convents were established, and

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