Father Robert O’Keefe’s contentious relationship with his own Irish Catholic Church and its bishops is detailed here in an impressively researched and erudite study. The Callan schools affair, as it became known, stemmed from the energetic maverick priest’s suspension in 1871 after he offended his cantankerous bishop, Edward Walsh, in a matter concerning the establishment of a national school in the small town of Callan. The disagreement evolved at the hands of the aggrieved and opportunistic O’Keefe into an enormously complicated, if largely forgotten, cause célèbre, a fascinating juncture of Anglo-Irish (and intra-Irish) civil and religious tensions. In a series of civil trials alleging libel and demanding court costs redress for financial losses, O’Keefe defied the Catholic Church’s procedures and authority and sued in turn his own curates, his bishop, and eventually Paul Cullen, a would-be mediator and the enormously influential cardinal archbishop of Dublin. Colin Barr’s illumination of the complexities of O’Keefe’s oppositional entrepreneurship, his ultimate recourse to Parliament itself, and the political influence of William Gladstone and others in an effort to intimidate his superiors and preserve the civil dimensions of his clerical responsibilities as they related to education brings us very close indeed to the heart of the practical dysfunctions of the Anglo-Irish polity.

Barr’s book threads analysis and narrative together, strongly tilted toward the latter. A brief introduction and six chronological chapters detail an ugly decade of trials, parliamentary debates, public controversy, and attendant rioting and factional disorder in Callan. Along the way, we are brought face to face not only with ecclesiastical arrogance in a variety of distasteful forms but also with the stubborn and at times breathtaking bigotry that so often marked and marred British policy in Ireland, particularly on questions of education and civic life. The story as Barr carefully tells it is enlivened by a series of outsized characters, nicely and understatedly appreciated, including, besides O’Keefe and the much-studied central characters of Cullen and Gladstone, the crusading parliamentarian E. P. Bouverie, the member for Kilmarnock who turned O’Keefe’s rough treatment by his church into political opportunity, and the colorful and disastrous judges William Keogh and James Whiteside, who together confirmed all of the prejudices many in Ireland had against “English justice.”

The book deserves attention from all scholars of the period for the insight it provides into the Anglo-Irish polity. The controversy nicely illuminated the fault lines among a weakening Liberal government; its restive Parliamentary majority; a Tory party whose anti-Irish instincts were being tempered by, as Barr puts it, Disraeli’s lack of appetite for “unnecessary fights with Catholics” (255); and an Irish administration, led by its very sensible Lord Lieutenant, Lord Spencer, that was determined to preserve the hard-fought compromises that made the governance of Ireland practically possible. What makes the work worthwhile for those outside of British history are Barr’s thoughtful efforts to place these particular events in, as the title suggests, the context of broader European “culture wars.” In this great European era of Kulturkampfe and church-state conflict, as vibrant nationalisms collided with determined ultramontanism and Catholic antimodernism in its most virulent and defiant incarnation, actors in the Callan affair were conscious, as Barr is, of both British Europeanness and exceptionalism. Barr nicely contrasts this with the contemporary political opportunism of the era on the continent, particularly in Germany, and connects up the dispute with the important broader history and historiography of the era.

Barr’s analysis of the wider implications of the case could certainly be extended, but, rightly, he is most struck by what did not happen in the O’Keefe case and what that tells us about the British political system. As he points out, many in Britain were outraged by what were seen to be the assertive claims of the papacy and roiled by the apparent demand of the Irish hierarchy that the state accept, de facto, the church’s jurisdiction in the educational realm. While individual politicians responded to and reflected popular pro-O’Keefe sentiment, and many worked to obtain short-term tactical advantage or weaken the Liberal government, despite considerable popular pressure neither British party chose in the end to exploit the popular cause of the Callan priest to disempower, disenfranchise, or otherwise disable British Catholics or attack the institutional church. The story winds up being one, in the end, of the coolest heads prevailing. The authority of the national school board that removed O’Keefe was ultimately respected, and no responsible sitting politician used the crisis to exacerbate the deep anti-Catholicism of both elite and popular culture in Britain with substantive anti-Catholic and anticlerical legislation. If Gladstone was drawn into the matter by the complex theological implications of the case, meeting and corresponding with an easily encouraged O’Keefe, and if many Liberal and Tory members indulged in vocal condemnations of “papal aggression,” in the end Liberals and Tories alike recognized the practical consequences of upsetting the careful educational compromise that was the national school system in Ireland, while Disraeli and the Tories, happy enough to see the government embarrassed, ultimately eschewed the political turmoil that would ensue if an urbane and contemptuous anti-Catholicism ever evolved into an un-Tory ideological imperative. And so, in a complicated welter of committees, hearings, trials, and Parliamentary delaying actions, the system wisely played for time. In the end, O’Keefe’s letters went unanswered, his court cases failed to vindicate him, and he remained ultimately unchampioned, forced eventually to reconcile with the Catholic Church and do penance for his sins. If there were, as Barr tells us, riots in Callan when O’Keefe died in 1881, the infectious civil disorder that the scandal had threatened remained, ultimately, quarantined (with so many other ills) in the dysfunctional Irish limb of the body politic.