Since the United Irishmen's rebellion in 1798 the Catholic Church in Ireland has struggled with the fact of political violence emanating from the Catholic community. The Church, in general, tried to steer Catholics away from the use of violence as a means of bringing about social and political change in circumstances where there was a democratic means of ameliorating the Catholic community's ills. The problem became more acute with the creation of Northern Ireland which was constructed to ensure a permanent Protestant Unionist majority, and which was by and large antagonistic to the Catholic community. Nevertheless, from 1925 Catholic bishops accepted the reality of the state and in the face of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) ‘Border Campaign’ (1956–62) rejected terrorist violence and upheld the integrity of Northern Ireland state institutions.
The institutional Church was faced with similar problems in the more recent Troubles. Bishop Edward Daly, of Derry, wrote of his acute concern about the fact that the ethos communicated in Catholic schools in Northern Ireland did not prevent the alumni(ae) of those institutions from swelling the ranks of the IRA and refuting the injunctions of Catholic churchmen to abandon violence. It is to these and cognate matters that Margret Scull turns her attention. She examines not only the issue of the Church's denunciation of violence, but the role of individual priests and bishops in helping to bring about the peace process. The responsibility of pastors to uphold the idea that only peaceful means might be used to bring political change was meet with ruthless resistance by the IRA and its supporters. There were, however, attempts by some priests such as Des Wilson and Joe McVeigh to develop an Irish Liberation Theology, but this did not gain much traction and the effort to evolve such a theology tended to isolate those individuals from the broad Catholic consensus about the conduct of affairs in Northern Ireland in the period of the Troubles.
Although there have been several PhD theses on the subject Scull's is the first full length book on the role of the Church in the conflict since Gerald McElroy's The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland crisis, 1968-86 (Dublin 1991). The author has looked at a commendably wide range of material and has interviewed some key figures in Church and politics, but surprisingly only a single nun. Nevertheless these interviews give real insight into the complementarities and antagonisms between the Church, nationalism and republicanism.
Anyone writing on the topic is to some extend hampered by the fact that not all ecclesiastical archives for the period are open to public inspection, but Scull is wrong to argue that there is a fixed hundred-year rule with regard to Irish church archives (p. 9); not even the Vatican now operates such a policy. One novel aspect of the work is the use made of the archives of the Church in England and Wales. It is a pity that the author did not make use of Scottish Catholic archives, although she is aware of the role that Cardinal Gordon Gray of Edinburgh and Archbishop Thomas Winning of Glasgow played in both condemning the IRA and working for peace (pp. 117–18, 136). She does uncover interesting material in England about Fr Patrick Fell, an English convert, and priest of the Birmingham diocese, who served eight years in prison for IRA activity in Coventry.
Among the most important campaigners for peace who emerge from these page are Fr Denis Faul and Fr Raymond Murray. Faul, who played a crucial role in ending the hunger strikes in 1981, was vilified by the IRA and was certainly one of the most courageous priests operating during the Troubles. Another towering figure was Fr Alec Reid, a Belfast-based Redemptorist who worked behind the scenes to help bring about a rapprochement between John Hume, the leader of constitutional nationalism, and Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein the political wing of the IRA. The Hume-Adams talks led to the peace process.
The author is not quite at home with Catholic nomenclature. She can write throughout of Catholic ‘clergymen and women’, the latter I presume is a reference to nuns; in writing about Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich she says that when he joined the priesthood he took the episcopal motto ‘Fratres in Unum’ (p. 106); she refers to a ‘Methodist Sacred Heart Church’ (p. 188); confuses a rector with an abbot (p. 197); has Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster offering a ‘Mass for St. Patrick’ (p. 139); and refers to the trustees of Maynooth seminary as the ‘Board of Directors’ (p. 2). At times the work is badly and confusingly written and there are, for an OUP book, a significant number of typos.
No historian will get everything right. There are, however, a number of misstatements in the work. It is not possible to list them all, but here is a random selection. In discussing the Official IRA's bombing of Aldershot Army Barracks on 22 February 1972, in retaliation for Bloody Sunday, she asserts that seven soldiers were killed (p. 53). In fact the dead consisted of a Catholic priest, five cleaning ladies and a gardener. She talks of a ‘secret deal’ between Pius xii and Hitler (p. 113) but gives no evidence for this except to note the title of John Cornwell's absurdly named Hitler's pope. The author maintains that John Hume was the ‘European M.P. for Foyle’ whereas the whole of Northern Ireland is a single constituency for the European parliament; she thinks that St Ignatius College Stamford Hill is in Durham, rather than London (p. 212); and claims that St Agnes Church in Belfast is a ‘Cathedral’ (p. 216). Scull would have us believe that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago was the centre of a child abuse scandal in the early 1990s but in fact he removed more than twenty priests from active ministry for such crimes. Scull maintains that the decision to prohibit any cabinet minister from meeting John Paul ii on his 1982 visit to Britain, in the course of the Falklands War, can be ‘seen as a snub’, but this neglects that fact Margaret Thatcher had a meeting with the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Casaroli, in Downing Street.
Some of the author's judgements are open to question. A single example will have to suffice. She misconstrues the reason that Pope Francis did not visit Northern Ireland in the course of his Irish visit in 2018. It was not because the situation in the North had not changed enough to ‘risk it’ (p. 199), but rather the impossibility of the Argentinian pope visiting any part of the UK, in the light of the Falklands War, if he were to maintain any credibility in his homeland.
Despite many imperfections this is an important study, but it must be read with care. The full story of the Church and the Troubles still awaits its definitive historian.
