The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship by Derek Scally

Abstract

Review articles Derek Scally, The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Dublin: Penguin-Sandycove, 2021), 336 pages The author of this important book has been writing for the Irish Times for some twenty years. From his long experience of working as a journalist in Germany, he has become familiar with the concept of die Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past, so vital for Germans in the light of all that has happened in their country in the 20th century. His book is a pilgrimage, literal and metaphorical, in aid of making the case for something like this process in relation to Ireland – on his own behalf, in the first instance, and, if he can help to promote it, on that of the country and its culture as a whole as well. He writes as the accomplished journalist he has shown himself to be over the years and with considerable research behind his enquiry. He depicts characters and situations with what can sometimes seem like a novelist’s touch, and he has an eye for the telling phrase. Irish seminaries in the past are, for example, described as having been ‘hothouses of theology and freezers for emotion and sexuality’ (104). The result of his skill as a writer is that, despite its length, The Best Catholics in the World is, for the most part, an easy – if often rather depressing – read. His exploration begins in Edenmore, the parish in north Dublin where he grew up in the 1980s, and ranges as far as the Stasi (secret police) museum in Berlin, the city where he has been living for many years – a certain German frame of reference, often quite illuminating, recurs throughout the book. The journey takes him by way of an instructive, if eclectic, itinerary of places in between, associated in one way or another with the often cataclysmic changes in Irish Christian and Catholic history over the centuries since St Patrick arrived on these shores, not least those in the last several decades. And so, beginning somewhat at the beginning, he finds himself in Trinity College, examining the Book of Kells – ‘even the Book of Kells has a shadowy side’, the author informs us (37), the comment a harbinger of not a little debunking of familiar myths in the pages to come. Later he is in Dingle, en route to Skellig Michael, and later again in Glendalough, iconic sites of Review Articles: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 480 early Irish monasticism and what we think of as Celtic Christianity – although that concept will be questioned in due course too – ‘no such thing as Celtic Christianity … the Church was always utterly subservient to Rome’, one academic historian is quoted as declaring (45). He attends Mass at a Massrock in Hollywood, Co. Wicklow, relic of penal days. He goes to consult the Central Catholic Library in Merrion Square, Dublin. In Baggot St, at one end he visits the office of Judge Yvonne Murphy, who presided over several recent investigations into clerical sexual abuse, and, further along, Mercy International, headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy, a significant Irish religious order, more recently embroiled in other abuse scandals. He goes to several Dublin art galleries, to view the artwork of Patrick Bolger (an abuse survivor) and Alison Lowry (inspired by the mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries). He travels to St Patrick’s College, Thurles, location of the 1850 Synod and ‘symbolic starting-point of modern Irish Catholicism’(205).We find him in Galway Cathedral, where a traditional novena to Our Lady is being conducted by a Redemptorist priest. He goes to Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park to attend the President’s garden party for Magdalene survivors. He visits the offices of One in Four, an organisation founded by a prominent survivor of clerical sexual abuse in 2003 to help other childhood victims, in Holles St. He goes to Belmullet in Co. Mayo to meet Fr Kevin Hegarty, whose progressive editing of Intercom in the 1990s, including an article that would touch ‘on every issue that would convulse Ireland for the next...