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By Connie Marshner, Crisis Magazine, March 16, 2024

Connie Marshner is the author of the forthcoming book Monastery and High Cross: The Forgotten Eastern Roots of Irish Christianity. She holds a Master’s degree in Gaelic Literature from University College Cork.

Irish Catholicism was never what Americans thought it was. Understanding what it was will explain why it is what it is today and why there is hope for its future.

Some of my conservative Irish-American friends, who cherish the old romantic myth of The Ould Sod as a place where 1950s culture and Catholicism reigned, in The Quiet Man and Bells of St. Mary’s harmony, ask: How could the Church in Ireland have “allowed” divorce/abortion/same sex marriage? And they assume the Faith is dead in Ireland.

“Allowed?” As if the Church could have prevented the secularism, materialism, and self-indulgence of the contemporary West from taking hold in Ireland? As if the Church anywhere has been able to do that? …

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