HELLO MODERNITY.

Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
Mary Kenny
Templegate, $19.95, 312 pp.

Mary Kenny is one of the few people on the planet who regret saying goodbye to "Catholic Ireland." Her definition of this reality and the reason for her regrets are catalogued in this book, first published in London in 1997. This is a revised and updated edition with contributions at the end from Maeve Binchy, John Banville, Pierce Brosnan, Andrea Corr, Austin Flannery, Frank (Seventh Earl of) Longford, Edna O'Brien, Peter Sutherland, Pauline McLynn, and Tony O'Reilly.

Kenny, a well-known journalist in Britain, starts with a description of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes--both the book and the movie: "Alan Parker might as well have made a film called How All Irish People Are Absolutely Horrible. For there is scarcely anyone in the whole story of provincial Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s with an ounce of humanity. The McCourt family are all vile: the father is an aimless drunk, and the mother a weak slut. The grandmother is a bigoted old bitch and the aunt is an embittered, scolding spinster...If the family is awful, the neighbors are ugly and mean-spirited, the representatives of the Irish state are cruel and hard-hearted, and teachers, with one exception, are sadistic, twisted tyrants...It goes without saying that the Catholic church is sneering, cruel, and exploitative."

Kenny's Catholic Ireland presents a very different picture. She gives an overview covering the last century, and her book is full of information, data, and facts. However, even though there are sixteen pages of bibliography, there are no footnotes. Kenny refers us for these to the original 1997 edition. The result is that half the book is factual, researched, and based on a solid array of scholarly evidence, meriting the accolade from Conor Cruise O'Brien in the Daily Telegraph, that it should be "read by anyone with a serious interest in Ireland or Roman Catholicism." However, the other half is quirky, chatty, smug, tendentious, and exasperating. And there is no attempt to differentiate between the two. Kenny does not concede much to the typical notion of Catholic Ireland. For most punters, for example, Irish Catholicism is fundamentally connected with nationalism. The Green Flag and the song "Faith of Our Fathers" are emblems and anthems that frame the "National" creed.

We are presented here with a new phenomenon which we might call "Kenny Catholics," because it refers mostly to the way in which Mary Kenny's family, all of whom are mentioned by name, regard or regarded themselves as being staunch upholders of the faith. She forgets to mention that she herself was a late adherent to the family cause. Kenny spent her dashing youth as an outraged liberal burning her bra and driving train loads of contraceptives from Belfast to Dublin to spread the good news of the sexual revolution.

I don't think anyone can quarrel with her conclusions: "The church has been rocked; society is more secularized; prosperity is altering culture; Catholic power has receded." All these propositions are ungainsayable. People like myself also share her hope that "the faith goes on." This hope is based on the thesis that "at all times in history, the Catholic church in Ireland came from the heart and soul and will of the Irish people. It was not an invading or occupying force: it grew organically out of the soil, the land, the sea, the climate, the sky."

That is all very beautiful and poetic and I agree with it, as would those who support Celtic spirituality, nature religion, pantheism, etc. The difficulty comes when we try to define more clearly what is meant by "it." And Mary Kenny's next sentence is where I begin to part company with her: "At all times it reflected the values of Irish society, as well as reacting to values and trends in universal culture." And here is where we are sucked into the smug, claustrophobic atmosphere of middle-class bourgeois Kenny Catholicism. This worldview is described in personal anecdote and is woven from individual taste and idiosyncratic selection of evidence. Thus, she ends the last chapter "What Heritage for Catholic Ireland?" with a quote from a Mrs. Catherine Broadberry, whose only claim to authority is that she was born in County Meath in 1930 and happened to write a letter to Mary Kenny in 1995 describing the Catholic values of her childhood. Broadberry says, "I have with me still my mother's well-thumbed prayer book, with its devotions and prayers so ardently offered up: thus the faith was transmitted, as a pearl beyond price, which should raise our hearts and fill our souls with rapture."

Such maudlin rhetoric and sentimentality presumably makes half of her readership puke, while the other half reach for a Kleenex. Whatever effect the punchline has, it cannot stand up to any serious critical analysis.

Kenny Catholics, of course, read Chesterton and Belloc and sneer at any "spirituality" that is not "recognized." They also believe "in a 'united Ireland' in the near future, but not the united Ireland of song and story...some kind of a 'reconstituted Ireland,' possibly based on a federal system, which will knit together North and South in economic cooperation." Here one would read The Furrow, The Capuchin Annual, The Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and one might wear the green scapular. After all, we are told by the author near the end of her analysis of Catholic Ireland, "I personally believe that there will be a resurrection of the values it represented and a continuity of the faith itself." What this might mean for issues like divorce, for instance, is somewhat ambiguous. Kenny, with her usual scientific clarity, informs us that the 1995 referendum carried the motion to allow for divorce in Ireland by 818,842 (50.3 percent) to 809,728 (49.7 percent). She then tells us that it was "a rainy and inclement day" in the West of Ireland where "No votes" were stronger; "had the sun shone for a couple of hours, the result might have tilted the other way."

Who knows? Perhaps in the new referendum on divorce conducted by the Kenny Catholics in a reunited Ireland, the sun might be shining all day long!

Mark Patrick Hederman is a monk of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, Ireland. He is the author of Kissing the Dark (Veritas).