Title: Violence, politics and Catholicism in Ireland /
Authors: Rafferty, Oliver,
Year: 2016
Subjects: Catholic Church Ireland History; Catholic Church Ireland History; Catholic Church; Political violence Ireland History; Political violence Ireland History; Violence Religious aspects Catholic Church; Political violence; Violence Religious aspects Catholic Church; Ireland
Abstract: This collection of essays looks at the interrelated themes of Catholicism, violence and politics in the Irish context in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although much effort was expended by institutional Catholicism in trying to curb the violent propensities of the Fenians in the 19th century and the IRA in the 20th, its efforts were largely unsuccessful. Ironically, Catholicism had greater achievements to boast of in its influence in the British Empire as a whole than over its wayward flock in Ireland. But there was a cost in the church's commitment to British imperial expansion that did not always sit easily with growing nationalist expectations in Ireland. Although it provided support for the British forces in the First World War, by the time of the Second World War the church's views of that conflict differed little from those of the government of independent Ireland, although there were sufficient differences that ensured Catholicism was not just nationalism at prayer. These and other issues such as religious perceptions of the Famine, Cardinal Cullen's role in shaping the ethos of Irish Catholicism and the role of memory, including religious memory, in Irish violence combine to make this a fascinating study.
Contents: Political violence and Irish Catholicism, 1798-1998 -- The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British Empire -- God in the famine -- Fenian terror and Catholicism in North America -- Cardinal Cullen's ultramontanism -- Studies in the shadow of modernism -- Catholic chaplains to the British forces in the First World War -- The Catholic Church in Ireland and the Second World War -- The Catholic Church and the nationalist community in Northern Ireland since 1960 -- Embedded memory and the churches in Ireland.