Carmelite Crusader: John Spratt of Dublin 1796-1871 Raising Dublin, Raising Ireland; a Friar's Campaigns D'Arcy Fergus (review)

Abstract

Council was clear that we are always learning more about what the natural law is, and arguably a more coherent approach is, like Aquinas, to view it as human reasoning in operation as it tries to understand our world, including our humanity. In this latter context the observations of Canadian philosopher/ theologian Bernard Lonergan are germane- objectivity comes about through ‘authentic subjectivity’, a subjectivity that examines the evidence through a ‘self-corrective process of learning’. The evidence about human sexuality and gender is constantly gathering and requires new assessment by the church – and this is what Pope Francis has facilitated. Dillonisnotarguingthatthechurchshouldnecessarilydevelopapostsecular mentality, nor that the public relevance of Catholicism is contingent on its embrace of postsecular expectations. Rather, she is proposing that ‘the postsecular recognition of the mutual relevance of the religious and the secular opens up new lines of dialogue, and thus of action, both within the church and for its role in secular society’ (p.9). I note that, in applying her analysis to Ireland, it may be that, because modernity and secularism were late in coming here, we are still perhaps in a rather more reactionary mode towards the relevance of public religion. Curiously, while the book contains comprehensive notes and a helpful index, it does not have a bibliography. This is a scholarly, thoughtful and stimulating book, well written, and accessible also to the non-specialist reader. I recommend it highly. Dr Gerry O’Hanlon SJ is a theologian, who has lectured and written extensively on the post-Second Vatican Council Irish Catholic church. His The Quiet Revolution of Pope Francis: A Synodal Catholic Church in Ireland (Dublin: Messenger Publications) was published recently. Carmelite Crusader: John Spratt of Dublin 1796–1871 Raising Dublin, Raising Ireland; a Friar’s Campaigns, Fergus D’Arcy (Dublin, Carmelite Publications, 2018), 621 pages. John Spratt (1796–1871), Carmelite and Dubliner, was the great ‘supporting actor’ in Dublin’s Catholic revival. Serving alongside Archbishops Troy, Murray and Cardinal Cullen, he played a pivotal role in the transformation of the penal, mission church, into the ultramontane institution that persisted Studies • volume 107 • number 428 510 Winter 2018/19: Book Reviews until the middle decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, Spratt devoted his attention towards the creation of the architecture of pastoral care that characterised the century, through the creation of schools and orphanages whichofferedanexplicitlyCatholicalternativetotheprotestantestablishments that were deeply distrusted by the Catholic clergy. Alongside ‘the Liberator’ and his successors, too, Spratt laboured to create an Irish Ireland, a ‘Catholic Ireland’, which would be characterised by freedom, industry and sobriety. Ireland in 1871 bore little resemblance to the island of Spratt’s youth. In politics, for instance, agendas moved from Emancipation, to Repeal, Fenianism and the Land Question. In the development of the church, too, Catholicism in Dublin had been radically transformed from a mission, to a confident institution, in a process personified by the characters of the city’s archbishops, the meek Murray and the regal Cullen. The former worked with a circle of bourgeois philanthropists, and the founders of fledgling religious orders, to put in place opportunities for charity, while the latter presided over a complex architecture of care to rival the state system, symbolised most starkly by the Mater Hospital, celebrated by contemporaries as ‘the palace of the sick poor’. The historiography of that transformation, and of nineteenth century Ireland in general, has been unkind to the memory of the ‘midwifes’ of those changes. Indeed, commentators are more assured speaking about Cullen and Parnell of the later decades, than they are addressing the achievements of Troy, Murray and O’Connell, religious and political leaders who navigated more nebulous waters of the early century. In many respects, John Spratt is a victim of that general amnesia, but there is a sense that he had become slightly anachronistic even in his own life time. Certainly, the Fenians portrayed him as a relic of an O’Connellite past, while the Cullenite church, basking in the victory of Church Disestablishment (1869), looked towards its own ascendancy, rather than recalling the ambiguous years between Emancipation and the Synod of Thurles. This is the context in which the memory of John Spratt faded. He was the subject of...