The Devotional Revolution at Fifty

Abstract

The Devotional Revolution at Fifty Douglas Kanter (bio) In June 1972 the historian Emmet Larkin published his seminal article, "The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75," in the American Historical Review.1 Larkin's essay outlined what he characterized as a sudden and dramatic transformation in Irish Catholic devotional practice between the Synod of Thurles in 1850 and the Synod of Maynooth in 1875. Before 1850, he claimed, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland struggled to meet its pastoral obligations owing to an insufficiency of priests and church plant—both of which were a function of institutional poverty—as well as to a rapidly growing population and problems of clerical indiscipline. As a result, only a minority of Irish Catholics in the decades before the Famine could properly be described as practicing their nominal religion, an assertion apparently borne out by the fact that perhaps 33 percent of the population attended weekly Mass. After 1850, however, "the great mass of the Irish people became practicing Catholics" in the span of a generation.2 The reforming leadership of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen was crucial to this remarkable development, Larkin maintained, as Cullen contained clerical faction, initiated pastoral reform, and remade the hierarchy in his own ultramontane image. But Cullen also benefitted from circumstances beyond his control—particularly, from the Great Famine, which by decimating the cottiers while preserving the more prosperous tenant farmers not only reduced pressure on the resources of the church but also left it with a stronger devotional nucleus and better economic prospects. Fundamentally, however, neither Cullen nor the Famine "caused" the devotional revolution. Rather, Larkin argued, the great change in devotional practice was the product of an "identity crisis" among the laity, brought about by Anglicization. Catholicism "provided the Irish with a substitute symbolic language and offered them a new cultural heritage with which they could identify and be identified and through which they could identify with one another."3 The piece concluded, rather rhapsodically, that "no [End Page 51] factor … was more important in the social and moral improvement of the Irish people either at home or abroad in the nineteenth century."4 Larkin's essay went on to become "probably the most famous article ever published by an Irish historian," and the devotional revolution is today one of those rare historical concepts that transcend academic debate and embed themselves in the public consciousness.5 The approaching fiftieth anniversary of the article's publication, consequently, seems an appropriate time to assess its continued relevance to our understanding of modern Irish history, while also exploring lines of inquiry that were not pursued by Larkin himself. The other contributors in this special feature, all leading experts on nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism, develop these themes at length. The present essay, rather more modestly, seeks to provide a review and retrospect of Larkin's controversial thesis. It does not rehearse the historiographic debate about Catholic devotional practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, which has been surveyed elsewhere.6 Instead, it considers the development of Larkin's ideas about the devotional revolution over the course of his long career, utilizing both his extensive publications and archival materials, including his private papers, which were made available for study at Boston College shortly after his death in 2012. An examination of these sources reveals significant changes in Larkin's analysis over time, which reflected the accumulation of evidence over some five decades, his own evolving attitude to the church, and shifts in the intellectual and sociopolitical environment. ________ Larkin became interested in the historical role of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the early 1950s, while still in the early stages of the PhD program in history at Columbia University. In 1953, though he had not yet completed his comprehensive exams and was preparing to write a dissertation on the twentieth-century Irish labor leader James Larkin (no relation), he ruminated upon the need for a [End Page 52] history of the Irish Catholic Church in a letter to the Irish author and socialist Desmond Ryan. "The historical problem," Larkin informed Ryan on December 28, "is indeed what has been the affect [sic] of the clergy's influence in political matters...