Customer Reviews

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland

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Compared to Louise Fuller's Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2002), journalist Mary Kenny's book is lighter not only in size but in style. But, as with Fuller's academic study of the last half-century, Kenny traces too (if in condensed form) the previous history of Irish Catholicism that led up to its undoing. Fuller and Kenny both incorporate effectively the "Question Box" feature of the paper the Sacred Heart Messenger to cite how ordinary Irish Catholics acted and thought, and what such men and women worried about in their practice of the Faith, or at least its outward signs of devotion. Both authors evoke well the legalistic, overscrupulous, and rule-bound nature of a Catholic practice rooted in the ritual, the recital, and the repetition of prayers, visits, or duties in precisely the same manner, or else one risked damnation.

Kenny shows effectively, however, that this now-discarded emphasis on "externals" rather than on the interior reforming of the soul was balanced somewhat by the kindness many--contrary to persistent stereotyping blaming the sins of a few scandalous figures on the goodness of the self-effacing majority--found a notable feature of Irish Catholicism over most of the 20th c. She gives fair credit to the thousands, if not millions, who sought to find comfort and relieve injustice, and how Irish Catholicism, for all its faults, drew many towards a more generous spirit--again countering media distortion. By delving into the anecdotes and asides of many, both clergy and laity, Kenny strives towards a fair depiction of what made Irish Catholicism both admirable and reprehensible, and it his to her credit that you close this book better aware of the intricacies and the impacts of both qualities.

She born around WWII, also intersperses her own coming-of-age into what used to be called "women's liberation" as one of the pioneering Irish feminists, circa 1970, alongside such as Mary Robinson, later President. On varied issues Kenny has valuable insights, on matters such as the material abundance of the North vs. the poverty of the South, on women's roles within the Church and the power they exercised and the marginalization they faced, on the struggle for personal liberty from rules and strictures vs. the rampant consumerism and competition that has transformed Ireland, and on the distortions of the film version of "Angela's Ashes" vs. the more complicated reality of Catholicism and its then-inextricable ties with all of Irish life. The book does jump about a bit, although the chapters generally follow chronology, and at times her journalistic knack for summation overshadows a reader's wish for more in-depth insights, but she does refer to many more such sources in her narrative that can provide these considerations. This book, for a popular audience, is not weighty but nonetheless contains a wealth of ideas, albeit in scattered form.

Kenny blends her own experiences, her wide reading (everyone from Camille Paglia to a youth in "West Side Story" joins the usual parade of scholars and the press), and substantial attention to primary sources. Contrary to what I expected, this book takes its title seriously, and does not skim over either the failings or the successes of Ireland's brand of faith. She reminds us that the missionary spirit and the awareness of the international membership of the Church joined many Irish--even well before its present emergence into a more diverse ethnic society--to their fellow communicants all over the map. This early multicultural thinking, she demonstrates, prepared the way for an Irish ethos geared towards--at least before the Celtic Tiger but still hanging on in places--concern for the poor and the weak. She also separates republicanism from Catholicism in a throughtful argument. She points out that while the abuses that became exposed in the 1990s did much to weaken the Church, that this precarious position had been put in place earlier.

1961 brought TV to Ireland, and from that year on, coincidence or not, vocations declined. The high status, for better and worse, given the clergy and those in religious life, a feature that caught the attention of any visitor to Ireland up until the 70s at least, inevitably also declined, as laity were emboldened by Vatican II and by liberalization of mores. Kenny shows how the language of rights hastened individualism, and how communal identity centered around the Church precipitously slipped as family rosaries were replaced by single mothers, and daily Mass gave way to easy drugs. The moral force of the Church could be eroded quickly; in one incident she shows how an old priest opposed to a couple living out of wedlock was resisted, and how his young successor simply did not confront the couple. In this example, she comments how the rapid collapse of Catholic traditional values and their regulation and enforcement by the clergy in the space of a very short time could implode. A slight exaggeration, one may think, but Kenny shows the cause & effect of the delayed impact of the late 1960s, which arguably in Ireland did not take full hold until the 80s.

I must add my reason for a lower rating of this than it could have earned: persistently poor proofreading. Easily fifty errors mar this text. Not only are many words misspelled, but many have whole syllables missing. Either a spell-checker was not used on the draft, or a fast typist failed to edit the manuscript. Encyclical, on two pages, appears four times. Twice it's spelled correctly, twice incorrectly. This lack of attention to professionalism does, unfortunately, diminish the impact that this book aimed for, in my estimation.

This is an American edition of the book, originally published in Britain in 1997 with footnotes and documentation missing here--in a bid for a wider audience I assume--so as to give room to ten celebrities from Irish life who offer brief and mixed recollections of their own Irish Catholic formative years.