During 1922–1923 Irish nationalists divided bitterly on the issue of whether to accept the compromise treaty that had ended their armed revolt against British rule. The Catholic bishops, and the great majority of their clergy, sided firmly with supporters of the treaty. The resulting conflict between the Church and the anti-treaty republicans provides the focus of M. P. McCabe's study. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including newly released Vatican material, he traces the response of the church authorities to the treaty debate and the short but brutal civil war that followed, as well as to the emergence during the same period of a separate and Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. A further chapter examines the ill-fated mission to Ireland in spring 1923 of the Vatican representative Monsignor Salvatore Luzio, an episode that made clear the determination of the Irish hierarchy to keep the whole business of negotiating their relationship with the new state and its opponents firmly in their own hands. The narrative, despite the title, focusses closely on the years 1922–1924, with only a short concluding chapter on the years up to 1932.

Throughout this fraught period, McCabe argues, the main priority of the church authorities, marginalized during the guerrilla war of 1919–1921, was to reassert their authority. In particular they were concerned to regain the moral high ground from the anti-treaty republicans, who had appropriated to their own cause the language of spirituality, basing their case on an appeal the holiness of the national struggle, the binding nature of oaths to uphold the republic, and the claims of the martyred dead. Their resulting determination to uphold the new Free State at any cost forced the bishops into some awkward contradictions. Archbishop Byrne of Dublin privately revealed to the government his belief that executions in reprisal for attacks on its own personnel were not just unwise but immoral. Yet in public he, in common with his colleagues, remained silent. During the War of Independence, equally, clergy at all levels had condoned and even praised hunger strikes by nationalist prisoners. Cardinal Logue of Armagh continued to support such protests by nationalists imprisoned in the new Northern Ireland. Yet his colleagues now denounced hunger strikes by anti-treaty prisoners in the Free State as constituting the sin of self-murder; one bishop even denied a deceased hunger striker a church burial.

McCabe makes large claims for his analysis. Previous historians of the Irish Catholic church, he claims, have failed to offer a properly objective and critical account, instead demonstrating “a sympathetic mentality toward the Church that only devout political partisans would show for a political party or organisation” (2). His aim is thus to present a “genuinely critical and objective” account of the kind that has up to now been “sorely lacking” (3–4). In pratice however, his work reveals a dismaying lack of the promised analytical rigour. The language is often imprecise, as in the startling opening claim that the silence of the bishops in the face of the Free State's ruthless campaign of counter insurgency was “not morally justifiable” (1). (He means that it was inspired by political rather than moral considerations.) The argument is also less than consistent. Having initially seemed to condemn the internment of republican activists “for months after the end of the military conflict” (5), McCabe later concedes that the mass release of active members of a rebel army that had cached rather than surrendered its weapons would have been “sheer folly” (181), an admission that surely puts the bishops' silence on the question in a rather different light. He also has to admit, in a brief concluding assessment, that the wholehearted support given by the bishops to the pro-treaty administration was motivated by genuine fears that the newly created state would simply collapse under the strain of civil war (252). And indeed, against the background of the terrors unleashed by the Bolshevik revolution and the post-war break up of the European state system, it has to be asked how much room remained for Macchiavellian calculations of political advantage of the kind McCabe suggests, as opposed to a desperate adherence to the forces of order. This is a dimension of the subject that a rather arbitrary focus on the theme of a “fight for moral superiority” obscures.

None of this is to deny that the response to the upheavals of the years 1916–1923 was strongly influenced by a concern to protect the Church's central position within southern Irish society. But here McCabe's analysis is not as novel as he asserts. As long ago as 1973 David Miller's account of the War of Independence showed how the bishops, unwilling either to break off relations with the British government or to challenge majority nationalist opinion, avoided irretrievably committing themselves one way or the other until the outcome became clear. Earlier, as Vincent Comerford and others have shown, the Church showed a similar pragmatism in navigating the shifting sands of Victorian Irish politics. Bishops and clergy unreservedly condemned the minority tradition of revolutionary violence represented by the Fenian movement. Only a few years later, however, they swallowed their considerable initial hostility to Protestant leadership and agrarian radicalism to accommodate themselves to the unstoppable rise of Parnell's Home Rule movement. The resulting alliance was to last until, with the rise of Sinn Féin after 1916, it no longer brought an alignment with the winning side. In Ireland, God, or at least the Catholic God, has always marched with the big battalions, and McCabe is only the latest historian to point this out.