Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity by Gladys Ganiel (review)

Abstract

Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity, Gladys Ganiel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 273 pages. The changing place of religion in Ireland is perhaps the most dramatic societal trend of recent decades. Gladys Ganiel, a sociologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, is one of the leading figures seeking to chart, analyse and understand these changes. In Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, we see the fruit of a multi-year project that began as an investigation of ecumenism in Ireland.1 In the course of extensive interviews and surveys, Ganiel and her associates discovered a great vitality and diversity flourishing around the margins of an Irish church apparently in steep decline. She presents an argument here that the socio-religious changes taking place have created space for what she calls ‘extra-institutional’expressions of religion. She has documented movements through which people sustain and nourish their faith alongside, in addition to, or outside the formal strictures of the church as it has been commonly understood. Her guiding metaphor is of a religious market which, having been monopolised by Roman Catholicism, is now increasingly diverse. Within this space, competing actors offer different approaches to exploring spirituality and the extra-institutional expressions can prompt personal transformation – without collapsing into rampant individualism – which ‘has the potential to contribute to reconciliation on the island of Ireland’.2 Her first two chapters situate the conversation. Post-Catholic is a category most prominently advanced in Irish discourse by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. In an essay about renewal for America magazine in 2013, he used the phrase to frame the present situation in terms of what went before. This recognition of the inevitable centrality of history (and a keen appreciation of geography) establishes the argument Ganiel advances on solid ground. Post-Catholic, in this usage, does not mean to suggest that Catholicism is gone. Rather, it foregrounds the fact that contemporary Irish religion – in all its diverse forms – must engage with the changing place of Catholicism. It describes a shift in consciousness, not an inevitable institutional trajectory. The Catholicism of a previous era ‘has been displaced’ and a ‘mixed religious market’now prevails.3 It does not follow that the island is secular (for whatever meaning one proposes), post-Christian, or post-religious. In fact, Ganiel notes that people in Ireland have a relatively high rate of religious identification.4 If Ireland is a post-Catholic religious market, so what? In chapter three, Studies • volume 109 • number 433 97 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 97 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 97 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 Ganiel investigates the societal implications in terms of reconciliation. The initial project which inspired this book was a survey of attitudes to ecumenism which aspired to reach out to every church leader on the island (over 4,000 invitations were sent out),5 based out of the Irish School of Ecumenics. What Ganiel and her collaborators established in these surveys is that, while churches are cognisant of the Christian prerogative to engage constructively in the processes of social change, there remains much work to be done at the parish level in terms of welcoming and integrating immigrants and that the work of ecumenism specifically and reconciliation more generally face significant challenges.6 The hypothesis that drives this book forward is the idea that extrainstitutional expressions of faith offer more potential for transformative contributions on these critical social questions. Chapters four through ten test this idea with case studies from around the island. Each case study consisted of interviews with a representative sample of the communities investigated. At first glance, some of these examples are not obviously extra-institutional. What could be more ‘establishment’ than a parish pastoral council (chapter four discusses the one in Ballyboden), and are there any aspects of the historic church more enduring than monastic communities (chapter nine concerns the Holy Cross Benedictine monastery in Rostrevor)? Ganiel nevertheless makes a strong defence that the particularities in each case warrant the description. The other case studies include the now-closed Jesuit youth initiative Slí Eile, the Pentecostal Abundant Life congregation in Limerick city, the joint Presbyterian and Methodist community in Waterford, the Redeemed Christian...