In the Anglican Communion the Church of Ireland is generally associated with Low Churchmanship. The Irish branch of Anglicanism has indeed long had a vigorous Evangelical element; and ritualism was curtailed after Disestablishment took effect in 1871 by changes to the liturgy and canons. Nevertheless Irish High Churchmanship can be traced back to Bramhall and Taylor in the seventeenth century as well as to Georgian, Victorian and more recent representatives of that tradition. In recent years Austin Cooper and Peter Nockles (among others) have written about this aspect of Irish Anglicanism.

This book is a new addition to this area of study. Yelton, a retired judge and sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has written a number of works on Anglo-Catholic history, including one on Anglo-papalism and another on Anglo-Catholicism and the Church of South India controversy.

This book begins with a general survey of the history of Irish High Churchmanship, going back to Alexander Knox and Bishop Jebb of Limerick early in the nineteenth century as well as dealing with John Gregg, archbishop first of Dublin and then of Armagh from 1920 to 1959; he provides a survey also of the alterations in the Church’s canons after Disestablishment. Those changes prohibited not only eucharistic vestments and incense but also altar crosses. The prohibition on altar crosses (canon 36) was removed only in 1964. The current canons exclude implicitly eucharistic vestments, copes and mitres (canon 12); and ban explicitly the elevation of the host, the eastward position and sacring bells (canon 13) as well as incense (canon 40). In certain dioceses some or all of these vestments and practices may be tolerated but their present illegality is clear.

Yelton then proceeds to more detailed accounts of Fletcher Sheridan Le Fanu (1860–1939), the sometime chaplain of St John’s, Sandymount, in Dublin – a centre of Irish Anglo-Catholicism – who founded the Guild of St Patrick, a society described by the author as ‘the first real attempt to promote Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of Ireland as a whole in a definite way’. The Guild’s aims included prayer for ‘a deep sense of the evils wrought by the changes made in 1877 by the revision of the Book of Common Prayer’. At its height in 1927 the Guild had 428 members but (at least this was the case in 1924) one-third of those who belonged were in England. By 1937, as Anglo-Catholicism flourished in England, the guild’s membership had declined to 300.

The chapter on Le Fanu is followed by studies of a number of parishes: All Saints, Grangegorman, which George Tyrrell attended before his conversion – this chapter includes a brief account of the Community of St Peter, a religious order for women which operated for a brief period in the parish; St George’s, Belfast – this section also includes a treatment of the work of the Society of St Francis in Northern Ireland; St John’s Sandymount; and St Batholomew’s, another Dublin parish. Two of those parishes are already the subjects of substantial histories by professional scholars: one by Brian Walker in the case of St George’s and another by Kenneth Milne in that of St Bartholomew’s.

The most original sections of this book are perhaps those devoted to two religious communities for women in Dublin: the Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV) and the Community of St John the Evangelist (CSJE). As Yelton observes the role of these two societies has hitherto been ignored by historians of the Church of Ireland. The CSMV was, as Yelton observes, ‘the first indigenous sisterhood in the Church of Ireland’. In his account he is handicapped by an absence of records. The community was founded in 1887 by Richard Travers Smith, the Tractarian incumbent of St Bartholomew’s, Dublin; the Evangelical archbishop of Dublin, Lord Plunket, acquiesced in Travers Smith’s project. Later Wardens of the community included F. S. Le Fanu and A. H. McNeile, the New Testament scholar and devotional writer who became the Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin in 1917. The sisters of the CSMV ran a hostel for boys and, later, taught in a school for girls. By the 1930s they were involved in the care of elderly ladies.

The CSMV’s home, St Mary’s House, was taken over in 1959 by the CSJE. That latter society Yelton regards as having been the more successful in numerical terms. In all about forty sisters of the CSJE were professed. Like the Guild of St Patrick the CSJE was founded by F. S. Le Fanu; the first sister, Violet Herbert, took vows in 1907. The community was attached to St John’s Sandymount. The community’s chapel, not being a parish church and therefore free from archiepiscopal scrutiny, was suitable for the expression of Le Fanu’s liturgical and ritual predelictions. He used there from 1914 onwards the English missal; in 1915 he began to use incense and four years later a tabernacle was installed; in 1923 he bought a monstrance and in 1925 a statue of our Lady was blessed. Such practices were the reason why Archbishop Gregg declined to act as the CSJE’s Visitor; that role was taken instead in 1926 by McNeile.

Nevertheless Gregg visited the CSJE’s house in 1930 and four years later he confirmed in its chapel girls from a home run by the sisters. Gregg’s successor in Dublin, Arthur Barton, also confirmed girls there. (Yelton does not say whether or not the tabernacle was removed or concealed during visits by the two archbishops.) The author suggests that it may well have weighed with Gregg and Barton ‘that the sisters were carrying out external work with which others would not be involved’. When the Ordinary of the diocese was absent the chapel’s transgressions of the Church of Ireland’s canons continued: John Betjeman, then working in Dublin, was the thurifer at midnight mass at Christmas 1942. The sisters were also the only part of Irish Anglicanism to welcome Pius xii’s proclamation of the Assumption in 1950 – a dogma which Gregg and Barton rejected in a pastoral letter. The CSJE also had a presence in Wales and ran a retreat house for the diocese of St Davids. The community ceased to exist in this century: the last sister died in 2023.

Anglo-Catholicism and the Church of Ireland is hardly flawless. The book’s coverage of its subject is less comprehensive than the title might suggest. Errors are few; one obvious one is the assertion that Archbishop J. H. Bernard of Dublin – an admirer of Cardinal Newman, as Yelton fails to mention – was consecrated in 1915; the correct date is 1911. A more serious deficiency is that it is often unclear what sources Mr Yelton has used. Many footnotes turn out only to be brief biographical details of persons mentioned in the text. In the case of the account of the CSJE some references are made to sources held by the Representative Church Body Library in Dublin. The book lacks both a bibliography and an index. Reference ought to have been made to two articles of relevance: Peter Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect? The Church of Ireland, High Churchmanship and the Oxford Movement’, HJ xli (1998), and Alan Ford, ‘The cost of democracy: the Church of Ireland and its ritual canons, 1871–1974’, Church History xci (2022). However, Yelton has published a work which will have value if it encourages others to undertake more detailed research on Anglo-Catholicism and High Churchmanship in the Church of Ireland.