For God and Ireland: The Fight for Moral Superiority in Ireland 1922–1932. By M. P. McCabe. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2013. x + 302 pp. $89.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)For God and Ireland: The Fight for Moral Superiority in Ireland 1922-1932 . By M. P. McCabe . Dublin, Ireland : Irish Academic Press , 2013. x + 302 pp. $89.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesDuring 1922-1923 Irish nationalists divided bitterly on the issue of whether to accept the compromise treaty that had ended their armed revolt against British rule. The Catholic bishops, and the great majority of their clergy, sided firmly with supporters of the treaty. The resulting conflict between the Church and the anti-treaty republicans provides the focus of M. P. McCabe's study. Drawing on wide range of sources, including newly released Vatican material, he traces the response of the church authorities to the treaty debate and the short but brutal civil war that followed, as well as to the emergence during the same period of separate and Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. A further chapter examines the ill-fated mission to Ireland in spring 1923 of the Vatican representative Monsignor Salvatore Luzio, an episode that made clear the determination of the Irish hierarchy to keep the whole business of negotiating their relationship with the new state and its opponents firmly in their own hands. The narrative, despite the title, focusses closely on the years 1922-1924, with only short concluding chapter on the years up to 1932.Throughout this fraught period, McCabe argues, the main priority of the church authorities, marginalized during the guerrilla war of 1919-1921, was to reassert their authority. In particular they were concerned to regain the moral high ground from the anti-treaty republicans, who had appropriated to their own cause the language of spirituality, basing their case on an appeal the holiness of the national struggle, the binding nature of oaths to uphold the republic, and the claims of the martyred dead. Their resulting determination to uphold the new Free State at any cost forced the bishops into some awkward contradictions. Archbishop Byrne of Dublin privately revealed to the government his belief that executions in reprisal for attacks on its own personnel were not just unwise but immoral. Yet in public he, in common with his colleagues, remained silent. During the War of Independence, equally, clergy at all levels had condoned and even praised hunger strikes by nationalist prisoners. Cardinal Logue of Armagh continued to support such protests by nationalists imprisoned in the new Northern Ireland. Yet his colleagues now denounced hunger strikes by anti-treaty prisoners in the Free State as constituting the sin of self-murder; one bishop even denied deceased hunger striker church burial.McCabe makes large claims for his analysis. Previous historians of the Irish Catholic church, he claims, have failed to offer properly and critical account, instead demonstrating a sympathetic mentality toward the Church that only devout political partisans would show for political party or organisation (2). His aim is thus to present genuinely critical and objective account of the kind that has up to now been sorely lacking (3-4). …