Publisher's Synopsis
It is impossible to exaggerate the role and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and that influence was exercised at a time when the Irish question was hugely present in the politics of the United Kingdom, then at the peak of its imperial power. That the Church was dominated by some thirty men - the bishops, or as they were called when they acted in unison on all sorts of political, social and educational as well as moral issues, the hierarchy.
We have biographies of a few of these individual bishops; and we have specialist monographs on a variety of the questions to which the bishops gave their attention. But no historian has studied the Church in Ireland or its episcopacy in such detail and depth as Professor Emmet Larkin.
This present volume like its predecessors is primarily concerned with the high politics of the Irish Church. In it we gain insights, through their correspondence, into the personalities and leaders of that Church. We see them take control over the whole of the Irish educational system and view it as exclusively their own realm. And we see them commit themselves to the Nationalist Party and its leaders to become a powerful constituent element in the Irish political system.
Emmet Larkin is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957, and taught at Brooklyn College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Chicago in 1966. His previous books include James Larkin, Irish Labour Leader, 1876 - 1947 (1965), The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878 -1885 (1975), The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (1976), and The Roman Catholic Church and the Home Rule Movement in Ireland, 1870 -1874 (1990).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------""By any standard Larkin's is a remarkable achievement. He has ransacked the archives in Rome as well as the diocesan archives in Ireland. His volumes are accurate, meticulous, sympathetic yet objective. He exhibits masterly powers of selection, organization and analysis. No one can fail to extract new and original material from page after page of this comprehensive survey of the bishops' views on all the great topics and personalities of the time. It is the truest portrait of the Hierarchy of any we possess; it will become the standard source on the Irish bishops of the period, and it will hold the field for many years to come."" -Professor Donal McCartney
