Emmet Larkin has devoted his academic career to the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. As a young historian in the 1950s, he envisaged a five-volume history of the Irish Catholic Church from 1780 to 1918. The massive scale of the undertaking meant that many more volumes were required to retain the level of detail Larkin, of the University of Chicago, felt the subject deserved. So far seven volumes have appeared, covering the period 1850 to 1891.
This collection of absorbing essays in honour of Larkin is divided into two sections. The first examines the Irish hierarchy's efforts to create its own political destiny. Hugh Kearney's essay on the centenary celebrations of O'Connell's birth and Donal Kerr's study of the Church and political violence illustrate the struggle between the secularist tendencies of both constitutional and physical force nationalists on the one hand, and the religious-based nationalism which the powerful Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, sought to develop in the latter half of the 19th century.
The second section looks at devotional practices in Ireland. David Miller's essay on Mass attendance in 1834 illustrates the lax canonical practices of pre-Famine Ireland. The success of the Church in reversing this trend is shown in James S. Donnelly's essay on Marianism from 1930-1960.
The two major themes that have shaped Larkin's work are: that by 1886 "an effective governing consensus of Leader (Parnell), Party (Irish Parliamentary Party) and Bishops was tantamount to a de facto Irish state; and that a "devotional revolution" took place in the second half of the 19th century.
Joe Lee argues that Irish self-government was inevitable by 1886 and Larkin's thesis that Cullen presided over the making of "practising Catholics of the Irish people in a generation " is still controversial. However, there seems little doubt that the achievement of Cullen and the Church was to help create a national identity which was uniquely Catholic in outlook and prepare the Church for a time when its authority would go unquestioned.
Timothy Fanning is a freelance journalist and critic