Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy by Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M.

Abstract

Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy. By Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. Pp. x, 420. $32.95.) As an Irish Catholic church historian I am not pleased with books such as this for several reasons, and thus reviewing one gives me the opportunity of expressing my frustration and concerns which I know are not unique or limited to myself. One purpose for publishing this volume is expressed in the introduction (p. 5), where the reader is told we need reliable texts of source documents for future generations. But why do we need a book of reliable texts of source documents in the late twentieth century when there are all sorts of inexpensive means of producing exact reproductions of the original documents, for example, microfiche, perhaps with editorial criticism, which can then easily be made available to libraries, archives, private scholars, and the general reader and at minimum cost. Of course, this presupposes that the various archives, in this case of the Sisters of Mercy, are willing to place such material in the public domain and thus not to limit access only to serious scholars, or only to members of their own community. This procedure would also eliminate any suspicion that primary sources been edited or altered in any way which is much easier to accomplish and impossible to detect in printed versions, and something that, from this historian's experience, is hardly unknown in the field of Irish Catholic church history. Another admitted purpose of this book is to promote the cause of Catherine McAuley's ultimate canonization. Thus in the introduction (p. 4), the author and editor, a Sister of Mercy, asks the question: Why is she [Catherine McAuley], whose heroic virtue is recognized, not yet publicly declared a Saint by the Church? The author answers that one reason is that the Sisters of Mercy have not the found sufficient [financial?] means to make her more widely known. Yet in the bibliography we find that over the [last fifty] years alone, writers, mostly Sisters of Mercy, published no fewer than five biographies of Catherine McAuley! To this day there is still no general survey history of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland. Irish historiography itself was late in developing, largely due to the nationalistic jingoism that demanded the preservation of the historic fantasy of the green dream version of that nation's past. This, in part, explains why scholarly Catholic church historiography has also been ignored, since the great expansion in personnel and institutions as well as the powerful public image of the modern Irish Catholic Church would not been possible without its willing marriage to nineteenth-century Irish nationalism which began under McAuley's contemporary and her order's primary promoter, Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin. Thus under this new reality, to be Irish was to be Roman Catholic and vice versa. This was essentially the formula and basis of Irish nationalism which was invented and championed by Daniel O'Connell. …