The goal of this outstanding book is to provide a comprehensive but accessible narrative that “traces the emergence, dominance, division, and decline of Ireland's most important religion,” especially how it shaped “the construction and disintegration of competing varieties of religious nationalism.” Rather than an internal history of the Irish church or its theological development, the book's focus is on “the ways in which religious beliefs and behaviors have been lived out in the Irish experience of Christianity” (3–4).
After an introductory chapter detailing what archeologists and historians have learned, and are still learning, about the island's long and fascinating pre-Christian period, Gribben turns in Chapter I to Christianity's arrival in Ireland in the fifth century and subsequent conversion of the island's population. The chapter is particularly strong in connecting this process to events in the rest of western Europe, especially the collapsing influence of the Roman Empire; in addressing the mythology surrounding St. Patrick; and in detailing how thoroughly early Irish Christians incorporated the island's pre-Christian religious rituals, sites, dates, and figures (such as Brigid). The chapter rightly devotes significant space to Irish monastery networks that “became the laboratories of an energetic and often daring Christian culture” (39). In addition to the influence they exercised across Europe through leaders such as Columba and Columbanus, these institutions blended recovered pagan mythology, Christian art and ritual, and vernacular language to create a distinctive Irish Christianity and the early foundations for thinking of the Irish as a nation.
Chapter 2 addresses several arrivals: Scandinavian raiders (bad news for monasteries, which erected many of the distinctive round towers still visible across the island today), mendicant orders such as Dominicans and Franciscans, and the English, who in the twelfth century invaded with papal approval and began their centuries-long attempt to rule Ireland. Following the English invasion, Gribben is explicit in referring to parts of the island they controlled as the “English colony,” in contrast to those areas that remained largely “Irish” or “Gaelic” (80–84). This also allows him to introduce a key theme running through the rest of the book: how religious differences in Ireland so often mapped onto ethnic ones.
Such ethnic-religious divides were already present before the Reformation, only to intensify after it, which is Chapter 3's focus. It is a testament to Gribben's skill that he clearly and efficiently navigates this complex period and the connections between what was happening in Ireland and events in England, Scotland, and the rest of Europe. The central theme here is how “the protestant reformation in Ireland comprehensively failed” (90), and the chapter surveys various reasons—not the least of which being the astonishing failure of reformers to provide bibles printed in, or ministers who could actually speak, Irish—but he also flips the question by exploring why Catholic resistance and counter-reformation was so successful in Ireland, allowing it to reverse the trend in the rest of Europe where the ruler determined the religion of the people. It is also notable that the chapter does not shy away from the toll that “tactics of total war” (97) brought to ethnic-religious conflicts during this period, violence that likely reduced Ireland's population by ten percent in the wake of the 1579 Desmond rebellion, and then again by twenty percent during Oliver Cromwell's mid-seventeenth century invasion.
Chapter 4 covers the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One strength is its attention to the penal laws, especially how they did not intend to actually convert Catholics so much as render them politically and economically powerless in order to protect the Anglican ascendancy class, as well as how these measures also victimized the many Irish Protestants who did not belong to the Church of Ireland. Indeed, the attention Gribben pays to the denominational diversity among Protestants on the island, including smaller communities, is a positive feature of the book overall. On the other hand, this chapter could furnish a more detailed account of the “Devotional Revolution,” those dramatic changes in Irish Catholicism following the Great Famine.
Gribben points out that there “was nothing inevitable” about how sectarian Irish politics became by the early-twentieth century, especially given the number of nationalist leaders who were themselves Protestant, but he skillfully shows how a “religious binary” emerged that saw Protestants, especially in Ulster, uniting around unionism and Catholics supporting various forms of nationalism (159–160). Chapter 5 is tellingly titled “Troubles.” It details how ethnic-religious divisions shaped the violent decades leading to the partition of the island into two states. The Republic of Ireland was marked by a powerful Catholic ethos, and the church's institutions enjoyed remarkable political power and control over large areas of public life. Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom and was ruled by a political party dedicated to protecting Protestant identity and privileges at the expense of a large Catholic minority, which eventually sparked a decades-long civil war that only ended with the uneasy truce established by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Which brings us to the “fall” in the book's title. In Chapter 4 and his conclusion, Gribben details the dramatic changes in the Irish religious landscape over the last several decades, especially the Republic's experience of “sudden-onset secularization” (199), marked by a collapse in church attendance and vocations, political battles in areas such as contraception, marriage, and abortion, and, especially, a devastating series of revelations about years of abuse and coverups within Catholic institutions. Gribben effectively communicates just how sudden and striking these change have been.
The book's conclusion also includes Gribben's reflections on the future of Christianity in Ireland. While necessarily speculative, I thought them thoughtful and largely compelling, though of course others might differ. Ultimately, for a relatively short volume detailing so many centuries of Irish religious history, this book is remarkably clear, comprehensive, balanced, and well-written.
