Rite and Reason: Achonry, the second-smallest Catholic diocese in Ireland (to Killala), was a formidable cradle of our spiritual empire, writes Brendan Ó Cathaoir.
A new book, which transcends diocesan interest, reveals that to the end of the 19th century, Irish Catholics frequented Confession and Communion just twice a year.
More than 1,000 priests, nuns and brothers from the diocese served as missionaries in all four continents. While the Catholic Church in Achonry expanded in clerical and religious personnel, the population, however, continued to decline after the Famine, mainly through emigration.
In 1841 there were about 136,000 people in the diocese; in 1881 the population stood at 104,490; by 1971, it had fallen to 40,000.
Liam Swords is in the scholar-priest tradition. His "labour of love" involved research in archives over many years in several countries. His sources range from the Vatican archives to the Dillon papers in TCD.
A Dominant Church completes his three-volume history of Achonry diocese. (The earlier volumes are entitled: A Hidden Church and In Their Own Words - devoted to the Famine in the north-west.) It is a repository of political and social - as well as ecclesiastical - history and, moreover, a treasure-trove for local historians.
Against a background of movements from Catholic Emancipation to the Civil War, Father Swords weaves a tapestry illuminated by text, illustrations and appendices. His magnum opus compares favourably with the late Ignatius Murphy's three-volume history of Killaloe diocese.
In an era of faith, fatherland and poverty, priests played a central role in the lives of their people, particularly when the diocese had a bishop like Francis MacCormack.
According to Anne Deane, one of the remarkable women who emerge in this book, MacCormack was "always surrounded by the poor and trying to help them".
Deane was an aunt of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, John Dillon. (He acknowledged his debt to her on a monument sculpted by Pádraig Pearse's father at Straide churchyard in Co Mayo.) She created an emporium in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, and became first president of the Ladies Land League. Swords describes Dillon and Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League, as "soul brothers".
Agnes Morrogh Bernard was another woman who combined entrepreneurial skills with compassion.
Daughter of a Cork landlord and English mother, she founded convents of the Irish Sisters of Charity in Ballaghaderreen and Foxford, Co Mayo, where she started the woollen mills that uplifted a poverty-stricken community.
Up to the end of the 19th century, lay Catholics frequented the sacraments of Confession and Communion only twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. Parish missions spearheaded a devotional revolution.
Accordingly, and it is scarcely credible, Bishop Patrick Morrisroe was able to report to Rome in 1922 that there had been only two instances of concubinage (unmarried people living together) in the diocese in the previous 30 years.
The lifestyle of priests reflected their growing wealth, although a sizeable number died young, often from tuberculosis or other infections picked up during sick calls. As late as 1892, poor people in the west were sharing their cabins with farm animals. John Dillon remarked that if half the £1,400,000 spent annually on the RIC "was applied to useful purposes, we would never have any distress in the country".
The ironies of history abound. We first meet Henry Doran as Lord Dillon's bailiff; secondly, as a Congested Districts Board inspector; and, by 1912, Sir Henry Doran is holidaying at a German spa with Denis O'Hara, a leading priest and patriot. Doran became an early car-owner, with the redoubtable O'Hara one of his first passengers.
O'Hara's utilitarian view of education contrasted with the visionary Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, who lived just five miles from Ballaghaderreen. But the priest was aware of the realities of emigration and migration: that "our girls leave home and land in New York without knowing a single thing about cooking, washing or housekeeping. They have to begin on the lowest wages and put up with the hardest work."
About 430 young men from the diocese died in the first World War, roughly the same number killed during the 1916 Rising. Reflecting growing revulsion against the subsequent executions, John Dillon declared in the House of Commons: " . . . you are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood".
Father O'Hara, a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was attacked by crown forces during what Swords makes a point of calling the "War" of Independence.
His point appears to be that the Civil War was fought with more intensity in that part of the country than the independence struggle. As a result, the growth of a civic society was retarded and the power of a patriarchal church consolidated.
Sometimes excessive detail clouds this 700-page chronicle. The statement that "on the eve of the Great Famine overpopulation was the greatest single problem facing the country" reeks of Malthusianism.
The problem was an unjust political, economic and social framework. To describe the soup kitchen scheme as "more than a qualified success" is disingenuous.
The feeding of three million people during the summer of 1847 saved many thousands of lives and gave the poor a respite from hunger.
In the autumn, however, the British government pronounced the crisis over and shifted responsibility for Irish poverty on to the iniquitous Poor Law system. Another half a million excess deaths occurred in the remaining Famine years, 1848-50.
Brendan Ó Cathaoir is a historian and journalist with The Irish Times. He was awarded a D.Litt. degree this year.
A Dominant Church: The Diocese of Achonry, 1818-1960 by Liam Swords is published by Columba Press.