We Remember Maynooth: A College Across Four Centuries by Salvador Ryan John-Paul Sheridan (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Salvador Ryan and John-Paul Sheridan (eds), We Remember Maynooth: A College Across Four Centuries (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020), 512 pages. This book marks the 225th anniversary of the foundation of Maynooth College in 1795. The British government financed the establishment of the Royal College at Maynooth for the education of priests at a remove from the influence of revolutionary Europe, where Irish priests were trained at that time. The book’s objective is to provide, not a history of the college, but essays written ‘between the lines of history’.1 The editors have succeeded admirably with this handsomely produced and most enjoyable publication. Most of the one hundred short contributions, generally three to six pages, are recollections of students and teachers in Maynooth since the 1950s. The historian Terence Dooley highlights how the visit of Queen Victoria to Carton House in 1849 illustrated the ambiguous nature of the college’s relationship with the British administration. In 1845 the government had provided a grant of £30,000 towards the construction costs of the college, but the bishops differed as to the tenor of their proposed address of welcome to the queen. Archbishop MacHale of Tuam thought that it should emphasise the cruel neglect of the famine victims by Victoria’s ministers. Archbishop Murray of Dublin, who ran an impressive famine relief scheme, thought that more could be achieved by working with the British administration than against it. He drafted an address of warm welcome, which acknowledged that the thought of people’s woes ‘pressed already so severely on Your Majesty’s parental heart’. Murray hoped in vain that ‘the amiable little Queen’ might visit Maynooth, and the college president, Msgr Laurence Renehan, drafted an address of welcome which expressed gratitude for its endowment. In the event, Murray and Renehan were among those who dined with the queen in Carton House.2 The dominant themes in the recollections of former students and staff relate to the impact on the college of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and the effects of the opening of the college to lay students shortly afterwards. Many of the reflections by priests who were students in the 1950s and 1960s emphasise the barren and sterile nature of much of their theological training, Spring 2021: Book Reviews Studies • volume 110 • number 437 102 coupled, however, with fond memories of the college itself. Joseph Duffy, the retired Bishop of Clogher who was ordained in 1958, recalls that the spark which enlivened his Celtic studies BA course was missing when he came to study theology. As a preparation for preaching, he found that the rigidities of the theology courses added little to the national school catechism.3 The theology students in the late 1960s rebelled against the system and managed to secure improvements in how the subject was taught and in its content. Two professors of theology, ‘Frankie’ Cremin (as he was affectionately known by generations of students) and Enda McDonagh, came to represent, respectively, the old and the new approaches to theology. McDonagh has spent seventy-plus years in Maynooth as student, professor, and retired resident. He was appointed Professor of Moral Theology and Canon Law in 1958. The linking of these two fields of study was the custom in many Catholic institutions and, in McDonagh’s view, had distorting effects on moral theology which, in many of the textbooks, came to be treated as a legal tract.4 Patrick Hannon recalls the shock when Cremin told his postgraduate student seminar in 1965 that his undergraduate students had interrupted his lecture to complain that Cremin’s courses showed no awareness of the renewal of moral theology then in train for more than a decade. Cremin was the Irish bishops’ peritus, or expert, at the Second Vatican Council. He was aware of the new trends in theology but remained an unrepentant exponent of the moral theology of the traditional manuals. Hannon concludes that only an old-fashioned loyalty prevented Cremin, a kindly and fair-minded man, from openly criticising McDonagh and other junior colleagues for exposing their students to the new thinking. Hannon considered that the Maynooth regime stunted growth and did not prepare students for...