CRAWFORD GRIBBEN
Oxford University Press
£25
ISBN 9780198868187
Reviewed by Mary Kenny
I have grown accustomed to the theme of Christian (and Catholic) Ireland’s decline and fall: it is almost a new genre of collective ‘misery memoir’. Crawford Gribben’s conclusion, at the end of his admirable and scholarly book, is broadly similar to that of other gloomsters: Christian Ireland is dead. It fell off a cliff in the mid-1990s, as ‘Irish society was by then awake to the monster it helped to create’. Weekly Mass attendance collapsed from 91% in 1972 to 30% by 2011. By 2016 one third of the population of Dublin and Galway identified as non-Catholic.
This collapse had been accompanied by the Ferns Report (2009) and the Ryan and Murphy Reports (2010) on clerical abuses and corrupt seminaries; then came Catherine Corless’s revelations about the Tuam Mother and Baby Homes and Enda Kenny’s oration of righteous indignation against what Irish Catholic society had allowed, in March 2017.
But for Gribben, who teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast, if there has been a fall, at least there was a rise. There were fifteen centuries of Irish Christianity during which the identity of the Irish nation was forged by Christian devotion and practice, and, after the Reformation, by a distinctive Catholic Irish identity.
The simple stories that we learned in childhood weren’t just legends: they are increasingly evidenced by contemporary scholarship. Patrick was a remarkable character (as Roy Flechner’s fine 2019 biography illuminated) who eclipsed the earlier evangelist Pelagius partly because his Confessio, written around 470, ‘is among the most psychologically revealing of ancient texts’. Patrick also helped to forge a conscious Irish identity. Irish Christianity did indeed draw on the pagan traditions of nature-worship embedded in the culture and made use of them—the shamrock’s symbolic link with nature is meaningful.
The Patrician culture that followed was rich and remarkable: international, European, cultivated—and the ‘island of saints and scholars’ was a merited reputation. The c. 200 Irish monasteries were community centres rather than ascetic locations detached from the world. Columba (born in Donegal in 521) is a hugely significant figure—the earliest known Irish poem, composed in 597, appears in Columba’s biography. Malachy, too—friend and confrère of St Bernard of Clairvaux—is very important. There’s an element of truth in the popular little book authored by the American Thomas Cahill that Irish monks saved European civilisation just when it might have disappeared.
Then came the Vikings, slaying and pillaging (and very probably raping) for gold and treasures. They brought destruction, although eventually many became Christianised, or practised a fusion of faith involving both Christianity and Thor.
By the time the Hiberno-Scandinavians had integrated, we were having trouble with the Anglo-Normans, who arrived in 1169, as we know from of old, encouraged by Diarmait Mac Murchada. Gribben tells us that there is still much work to be done on the Irish experience under Anglo-Norman rule.
And so to Henry VIII and the troubled centuries that followed. In all these travails, ‘Ireland was held together by the church’. The Protestant Reformation never gained any meaningful foothold among the native Irish: by the end of the sixteenth century there were only 120 Irish-born Protestants. And many converts to the Reformed faith reverted to Catholicism. (Edward Spenser’s own grandson—he of the anti-papist Faerie Queen—became a Catholic.) Cromwell’s depredations were just as bad as tradition claims: the island’s population may have been reduced by 20% by his conquest.
Catholicism not only hangs on: it grows and becomes more confident, despite the tragic end of Gaelic Ireland with the defeat of O’Neill and O’Donnell. The Famine increases devotional life, and Cribben praises Paul Cullen for his organisational skills and for opening up opportunities for women—as evidenced by the number of ambitious nuns who founded orders. And despite the great contribution that Irish Protestant patriots made to the national cause, Catholic sensibilities infused the national movement, which led to 1916. Subsequently, the Catholic Church made the Free State possible in 1922: along with the GAA, it was the only institution that could bring healing after the Civil War.
In our own time, we are familiar with the trajectory of decline and fall, and Cribben’s narrative here is unsurprising. And yet I don’t fully agree with his conclusions, because this downward slope has been observed in almost every comparable society. Modernity means secularism: among young people in Britain, only 1% now claim an association with the Church of England, female priests and bishops notwithstanding. The scandals associated with the Irish clergy are odious, but I believe decline would have happened anyway. (In 2019 I interviewed a group of women in Ennis who came from Catholic backgrounds: none were now believers, although none had had any negative experiences with the clergy—indeed, the local priest was praised for his kindness and humanity.)
According to Pew research, the most observant Christians in Europe are the Greeks. The Greek Orthodox Church has never modernised, never even reformed, but has simply adhered to its mission of holiness, beauty, spirituality and the ‘faith of their fathers’. I wonder whether there is an answer here to Crawford Gribben’s final question: what will replace Christianity in Ireland?
Mary Kenny’s The way we were: Catholic Ireland since 1922 will be published by Currach Books in 2022.