Lazarists/Vincentians: Tridentine Reform and Parish Missions in Grand Siècle France and Cardinal Cullen's Ireland

Abstract

Lazarists/Vincentians:Tridentine Reform and Parish Missions in Grand Siècle France and Cardinal Cullen's Ireland James H. Murphy (bio) What does a special feature in a journal to mark the fiftieth anniversary of an important scholarly milestone betoken? Is the debate over Emmet Larkin's devotional revolution thesis dead or alive? Are we admiring a concluded discussion or seeking for new life in it? In this article I hope to use the comparative cases of the roles of the priests of the mission, called Lazarists in France and Vincentians in Ireland, in the Catholic revivals of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in their respective countries and times to ask what further lines of enquiry might be pursued concerning the devotional revolution.1 First though, let us look at the devotional revolution thesis itself and at how the debate around it has grown and developed. Larkin's original article, "The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75," was published in 1972 in the American Historical Review. For nearly a quarter of a century thereafter, however, Larkin put his efforts into writing a multivolume series focused essentially on the political and constitutional roles of the Catholic Church in Ireland between 1780 and 1918. He completed seven volumes, covering the years 1850 to 1891. Thereafter, he returned to issues close to the devotional revolution, publishing The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (2006) and projecting a further volume on the era of the devotional revolution itself, 1850–75, before his death in 2012. The most obvious thing to note in a discussion of future directions for the devotional revolution debate, therefore, is that the 1850–75 period itself has not been the subject of a sustained narrative. Over the years a standard version of the devotional revolution thesis has [End Page 62] developed that was well articulated in 2017 by Colin Barr and Daithí Ó Corráin.2 The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century when the issue was an excess of priests. The solution to this problem was twofold: regulations severely limiting the number of diocesan priests bishops could ordain, and efforts to curtail what was considered to be the excessive numbers of mendicant friars by requiring them to be educated in part on the Continent. The number of friars went into steep decline, but so too, alarmingly, did the numbers of diocesan priests when the Irish seminaries based on the Continent that produced so many of them closed due to the French Revolution. The ratio of priests to people took a further downward dip as the population of Ireland increased exponentially in the lead-up to the Famine. The practice of station masses, whereby priests periodically offered Mass and heard confessions at various points in their parishes, was introduced as a measure to meet the pastoral gap caused by the scarcity of priests and the limited capacity of existing chapels to accommodate significant numbers at Mass. After the Famine, with a reduced Catholic population, with growing numbers of clergy, and, under the leadership of the determined Paul Cardinal Cullen (1803–78), a dramatic flowering of religious practice and adherence to the norms of Church life as laid down by the Council of Trent (1545–62), a "devotional revolution," as Larkin dubbed it, took place. There have been three distinctive features of the devotional revolution debate over the years: a focus on statistics, a debate over whether the devotional revolution might have begun earlier than Larkin claimed, and a speculation as to the reasons, other than religious ones, as to why it took place. Concerning the third of these Larkin speculated in his original article that the embrace of Tridentine Catholicism as a form of national identity served as a substitute for the loss of the Irish language.3 When the article was later republished with two other articles in book form some years later, Larkin engaged with alternative theories that had been proffered in response to his, though all of them saw the trauma of the Great Famine as causative. They included the collapse in folk religion and the desire of small farmers to increase landholdings by adopting the stem-family system, thus...