Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.

Johnson, Dale A.

Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Edited by James H. Murphy. Dublin: Four Courts, 2005. 255 pp. $55.00 cloth.

The nineteen essays in this volume were initially presented at a 2004 conference of two nineteenth-century societies under a broader theme of "structures of belief." That wider umbrella fits the overall content of the papers better, even if it might be more puzzling as a title for the book, for some essays deal with persons whose views would be hard-pressed to be categorized as either evangelical or Catholic, such as those on William Warren Baldwin's 1819 volume on the civilization of Aboriginal Canadians, Max Arthur Macauliffe's embrace of Sikhism (albeit in the interests of empire, contends the author), or John Tyndall's Belfast address of 1874 promoting evolution and receiving a hostile religious response from both Catholics and Protestants. An even wider sense of the significance of religion for Irish culture in this period is glimpsed in several essays on literary topics that explore various dimensions of the religious divide: Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's historical novels (evangelical); two Young Ireland poets on the famine, one Anglican, one Catholic; William Carlton's attention to popular festivals as a way to reveal the substance instead of just the shell of Irish piety; and May Laffan's novel, Hogan, M.P. (1876), which offers a pluralist rather than dichotomous reading of Irish culture. The tensions represented in these works are tantalizing, even if only occasionally put in a larger context, as when Kara Ryan comments at the end of her essay on Tonna that "any discussion of a so-called nineteenth-century Irish historical consciousness must take place concurrently with an analysis of religious identity" (84).

Complexities on the Catholic side are first represented in Emmet Larkin's study of the period from 1770 and 1847, before "the devotional revolution" that he first identified in a widely read 1972 essay. He calls attention to the chronic shortage of priests, the shortage of accommodation for worshippers, the favoring of Easter duty over regular mass attendance, and the perilous financial resources, largely drawn from dues and fees for service. One significant response to these problems was the emergence of the bishops as a national body, a development looked on with suspicion from Rome, which feared incipient Gallican tendencies. His conclusion: "that the pre-famine Church was not an Ultramontane Church, much less a Tridentine Church" (36). Editor Murphy's essay takes off from this juxtaposition to ask how people remembered these two devotional worlds and suggests that the older forms of religious practice were not just forgotten but deliberately unremembered in order to establish both continuity and respectability for Irish Catholicism. Two essays view the Catholic world from the point of critics, from the inside, on the Maynooth priest and theologian Walter McDonald, and from the outside, on the Fenian movement's effort to be purposefully blasphemous in order to put forth a nationalism in which there would be "no priests in politics."

The first essay dealing with the evangelical side, by David W. Miller, asks whether Ulster Presbyterians experienced a devotional revolution. He uses the frequently discussed 1859 religious revival as a springboard into a much more complex analysis of the tensions between the "old leaven" and the "new leaven" in the denomination over the course of almost two centuries. Confessional subscription, congregational disputes, and communal sacramental rituals done once or twice a year characterized the former, while commitment to revivals and open-air preaching and a sense of indifference to denominational particularities characterized the latter. The conflicts between these two ways of viewing religious practice, the demographic consequences of the famine, and the emergence of a culture of respectability resulted in the loss of working-class Presbyterians to the denomination. Other essays focus on the growth of Protestant anxiety from the 1790s and the later Catholic Emancipation, together with attendant anti-Catholic and antipapist sentiments that appeared in newspapers, tracts, novels, and public activity. But even that had its complexities. Janice Holies helpfully distinguishes between the "coordinative" and the "conversionist" networks within Irish evangelicalism, the first emphasizing its British connections, the latter emerging over the course of the century with a revivalist emphasis and strong sectarian (that is, anti-Catholic) sensibility. Martin Doherty explores the political dimensions of this latter emphasis through incidents involving aggressive street preachers in the south and west of the 1890s.

These essays offer nuances of and glimpses into the complex religious history of the Irish nineteenth century. Many attempt to introduce sources or persons either ignored or misunderstood in previous scholarship, and thus a comprehensive picture of the topic imagined in the title does not emerge here. However, a careful reader will find a few angles with which to continue to pursue the almost mythic contentiousness where the political, the social, and the economic almost always involve the religious.

Dale A. Johnson

Vanderbilt University