The three-cornered relationship between the Catholic Church, the British government and an advancing nationalism has long been a favourite subject of historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. At one time the result was a teleological account according to which the clergy gradually learned to overcome their theological reservations and take their rightful place within the national movement. In recent years a more complex picture has emerged, in which the Catholic Church is recognised instead as standing partly outside the conventional nationalist narrative. Like the Royal Irish Constabulary, or the Irish-born members of British army regiments, it represented that part of pre-revolutionary Irish society that had not merely accepted the existence of the United Kingdom state but was an active participant in its workings.

This more sophisticated understanding provides the context for Oliver Rafferty's volume of essays. The contents cover a wide chronological span, from the bloody confrontation of radicalism with reaction in the 1790s to the less lethal but nevertheless traumatic Northern Ireland conflict of the 1970s and after. For every part of this period Rafferty draws on a remarkably wide range of sources, citing material from archives, religious and secular, in Ireland, Great Britain, Italy, the United States and Canada. Throughout, he is also able to bring to bear the expertise not just of a historian but of a trained theologian. Thus a chapter on providentialist understandings of the Famine is able to deal confidently, not just with the writings of contemporary observers, both Catholic and Protestant, but also with the centuries-old tradition of theorising on providence and free will, stretching back to Aquinas and before him to Augustine, that helped to shape the thinking of all denominations. And indeed the volume's final chapter, on the responsibility of the Churches to deal with contentious issues of collective memory, commemoration and forgiveness, reads more like a homily than an academic essay.

For all its technical expertise and archival diligence, however, the collection as a whole delivers rather less than it promises. The opening chapter, on ‘Political violence and Irish Catholicism, 1798–1998’, is able to quote, on a single page, original letters dating from 1798, 1847 and 1974. Yet the conclusion it reaches is something of an anti-climax. Irish Catholic bishops, and most of their clergy, while prepared to express sympathy with the political grievances of the laity, were generally prominent in condemning any resort to political violence. The one notable exception was the crucial period following the Rising of 1916, when particular circumstances gave physical force nationalism overwhelming popular support, and the clergy retreated prudently to the sidelines until the political outcome became clear. This conclusion hardly adds much to what was said more than four decades ago in David Miller's Church, State and nation in Ireland, 1998–1921 (1973). Rafferty, moreover, discusses the earlier and later periods, when the Church was more forthright in its condemnation of physical force nationalism, solely in terms of its teachings on just war and political obedience. There is no hint of the other reasons why a Church that had reached a more or less satisfactory accommodation with the British state over education and other matters of concern might be reluctant to put that accommodation at risk by abandoning the politics of the possible for the uncertain outcomes promised by revolutionary nationalism.

A second essay, on the Catholic clergy and the British Empire, is more satisfactory in this regard, highlighting the reluctance of men like Cardinal Cullen of Dublin to criticise a structure that allowed their Church's missionaries to operate safely and effectively across large parts of the globe. Once again the author's range of reference is striking, as when he uses the records of the East India Company to document its financial support of the Catholic bishop of Cochin, deprived of his usual subsidy from Rome by the Napoleonic wars. Overall, however, the essay adds little to what has already been shown in the work of Colin Barr and Sarah Roddy. In other cases, meanwhile, the density of primary sources actually becomes a problem. Thus an essay on the American Church and Fenianism becomes a patchwork of citations, drawn from a commendably wide range of archives, but leaving the reader unclear what conclusions to draw from a plethora of contradictory instances.

The most successful essays, by contrast, are on less obvious themes. Perhaps the best sees Rafferty use British official sources to present a vivid picture of the work of Catholic chaplains on the front line during the First World War. Their motives, he argues, were spiritual rather than political: they were there, they believed, because it was their duty to care for the souls of men facing imminent death. And the evidence is that their presence had an importance for their mainly Irish congregations that contrasted sharply with the indifference to the ministrations of chaplains shown by most members of other denominations. A companion piece on the Second World War is less richly detailed, but offers striking insight into the bitterness of relations within wartime Northern Ireland. Not even the pressure for wartime unity could dissuade Unionist politicians from shocking visiting outsiders by displays of provincial bigotry, while for his part the Catholic archbishop of Armagh professed to see no moral distinction between the Allies and their Nazi opponents. As Rafferty puts it, ‘The capacity of Northern Ireland to disappoint even its friends was attested to time and again during the war’ (p. 191). An essay on post-war developments, on the other hand, sees signs of an improvement in relations between the church authorities and the Northern Ireland government, until a new round of conflict from 1969 forced the Church back into its traditional position of condemning political violence while expressing sympathy with the grievances out of which it arose.