The Historical Dimensions Of Irish Catholicism

In three short essays (first published as articles in The American Historical Review), Larkin analyzes the economic, social, and political context of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Devotional "occasions" or experiences by Irish Catholics form the crux of this powerful, first book-length anthropological study of Irish Catholicism. Rich in ethnographical material, wide-ranging archival sources, insightful cultural observations, vivid accounts of individual experiences, and thoughtful scrutiny of religious questions and theories illuminate twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork. From these varied resources Lawrence Taylor creates a memorable account of the forces that shape local forms of Catholicism in southwest Donegal.

After 1830 Catholicism in Britain and Ireland was practised and experienced within an increasingly secure Church that was able to build a national presence and public identity. With the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (Catholic Emancipation) in 1829 came civil rights for the United Kingdom's Catholics, which in turn gave Catholic organisations the opportunity to carve out a place in civil society within Britain and its empire. This Catholic revival saw both a strengthening of central authority structures in Rome, (creating a more unified transnational spiritual empire with the person of the Pope as its centre), and a reinvigoration at the local and popular level through intensified sacramental, devotional, and communal practices. After the 1840s, Catholics in Britain and Ireland not only had much in common as a consequence of the Church's global drive for renewal, but the development of a shared Catholic culture across the two islands was deepened by the large-scale migration from Ireland to many parts of Britain following the Great Famine of 1845. Yet at the same time as this push towards a degree of unity and uniformity occurred, there were forces which powerfully differentiated Catholicism on either side of the Irish Sea. Four very different religious configurations of religious majorities and minorities had evolved since the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Each had its own dynamic of faith and national identity and Catholicism had played a vital role in all of them, either as 'other' or, (in the case of Ireland), as the majority's 'self'. Identities of religion, nation, and empire, and the intersection between them, lie at the heart of this volume. They are unpacked in detail in thematic chapters which explore the shared Catholic identity that was built between 1830 and 1913 and the ways in which that identity was differentiated by social class, gender and, above all, nation. Taken together, these chapters show how Catholicism was integral to the history of the United Kingdom in this period.

Louise Fuller sets the Church's role in its historical perspective before considering the triumphant institution of the 1950s. It was a Church of piety and ritual: mass attendance, church building, processions, pilgrimages, the erection of crosses, statues and grottos, the widespread dissemination of devotional literature and the cult of indulgences were its distinguishing characteristics. The rising prosperity of the '60s, plus the effects of the Vatican Council, began the liberalisation of Irish society. The bishops reacted defensively. Their conservatism stimulated the emergence of a Catholic intelligentsia, propagating more liberal attitudes and championing the new theology. The '70s and '80s saw a Church more open to liberation theology, to ecumenism and to issues of justice and peace generally, albeit change was gradual and piecemeal. The real revolution did not come until the 1990s, when a succession of clerical sexual scandals fatally subverted the unique moral authority of the Church which had been its greatest strength.

This is the first book-length study to investigate the place of lay Catholic women in modern Irish history. It analyses the intersections of gender, class and religion by exploring the roles that middle-class, working-class and rural poor women played in the evolution of Irish Catholicism and thus the creation of modern Irish identities. The book demonstrates that in an age of Church growth and renewal, stretching from the aftermath of the Great Famine through the Free State years, lay women were essential to all aspects of Catholic devotional life, including both home-based religion and public rituals. It also reveals that women, by rejecting, negotiating and reworking Church dictates, complicated Church and clerical authority. Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism re-evaluates the relationship between the institutional Church, the clergy and women, positioning lay Catholic women as central actors in the making of modern Ireland.

Argues that there are fundamental social and economic similarities between the two groups; but that taboos against intermarriage, segregated schools and the nature of Protestant and Catholic religious beliefs keep the Irish at loggerheads.