Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture.
Author: FULLER, Louise.
Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004. xxxviii, 380 pages. Paperback.
The Roman Catholic Church has been for a long time the most significant social institution in modern Ireland. This historical study, which combines chronological and thematic approaches, traces its fortunes from its apogee in the 1950s to its current condition of self-doubt and decline.
Louise Fuller sets the Church’s role in its historical perspective before considering the triumphant institution of the 1950s. It was a Church of rules and regulations, piety and ritual: mass attendance, church building, processions, pilgrimages, the erection of crosses, statues and grottos, the widespread dissemination of devotional literature and the cult of indulgences were its distinguishing characteristics.
The rising prosperity of the 1960s, plus the effects of the Second Vatican Council, began the liberalisation of Irish society. The bishops reacted defensively. Their conservatism stimulated the emergence of a Catholic intelligentsia, propagating more liberal attitudes and championing the ‘new’ theology.
The 1970s saw a Church more open to liberation theology, to ecumenism and to issues of justice and peace generally, albeit change was gradual and piecemeal. The pace of change accelerated in the 1980s; but the real revolution did not come until the 1990s, when a succession of clerical sexual scandals fatally subverted the unique moral authority of the Church.
Irish Catholicism since 1950 is an important study of the role of the Church in Irish society over the past fifty years.
ISBN: 0717137570
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