John Henry Whyte (1928–1990)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2030600.html

Of my father's four books, this was much the least successful; rather than addressing a concrete issue in Irish history or politics, he attempted a wide survey of the extent to which Catholics were organised as such, in a rather small set of countries - those European or European-descended states that had enjoyed democracy since the second world war and actually had enough of a Catholic population to write about (Spain and Portugal exluded on the first criterion, the Nordic countries on the second and Greece on both).

The paradigm he sets up is potentially interesting: that on the one hand, you might find a "closed" political catholicism where Catholics all join a Catholic party, are only in Catholic civil society organisations (including trade unions) and where the Church regularly intervenes in politics; on the other, you might find an "open" Catholicism where Catholics are no more or less likely to join particular parties than anyone else, there is no specifically Catholic civil society, and the Church is silent. Neither of these has ever actually happened in reality. Continental Europe on the whole veered closer to "closed" Catholicism than the Anglosphere, and much more in the years immediately before and after the second world war than earlier or later, but there are exceptions all along the way (and in an appendix he looks at Malta, which had strong clerical intervention in politics but was otherwise much more "open").

I can see why the book did not do well though. By the time it was published, in 1981, Catholicism was changing out of all recognition; I think there would have been much more in common in what Catholics did and thought between 1950 and 1850 than between 1950 and 1980. There are lots of nice numbers of election results, censuses and opinion polls to try and quantify who thought of themselves as Catholics and who they voted for. But the economic aspect is largely omitted; surely the question of why Catholics tend(ed) to vote more leftish in some countries and more rightish in others can be answered to an extent by how well off they are/were? And concentrating on the numbers alone, useful though they are, means losing focus on the actual topics of debate, which are mentioned only really in passing.

The most interesting question raised but not really answered in the book is to what extent the Catholic Church as a whole, or regional elements within it, ever really aspired to restore the total control of society that the church liked to think that it enjoyed in the middle ages. The evidence from the book is, not very much, and not very successfully to the extent that this was so (with occasional exceptions). That then would lead on to a potentially much more interesting discussion about what the Church can reasonably think it is doing as a political actor at all. But for that one would have to look elsewhere.… (más)

This book has stood the test of time very well. It remains the original text on the relationships between church and state in Ireland since 1922 up to 1970. The text is very free-flowing and readable and the interpretation of the events by the author is also very instructive. Other works have built on this one and expanded further certain thoughts of the author but this should remain the first port of call for the student. To have the text of the Mother and Child Scheme and other documents in the Appendix is also very useful. Extensive footnotes ease the speed of reading.… (más)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/702642.html

This was the first of my father's four books, published in 1958 when he was 30, as adapted from a postgraduate thesis. It tells the story of the short-lived group of MPs for Ireland in the 1850s campaigning for increased rights for agricultural tenants and equal rights for Catholics. It's an interesting study of a relatively minor piece of history. I understand there's been precisely one other book published on the subject in the last fifty years...

The "Independent Opposition" won almost half of the Irish seats in the 1852 general election, largely because of two gratuitously anti-Catholic moves by British politicians in the months before the vote - the outgoing Whig government of Lord John Russell passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and then Lord Derby's caretaker Tory government made a proclamation that sparked anti-Catholic rioting in Stockport immediately before the election. It's extraordinary that the Famine per se, only recently past, doesn't seem to have been a political factor that played in 1852 (the first election since 1847). The death of O'Connell in 1847 and the dismal failure of the 1848 rebellion seem to have been bigger factors, though if anything they militated against the consolidation of any nationalist movement. (And despite some wishful thinking and a very few exceptions this movement does seem to have been pretty much restricted to Munster, Leinster and Connacht.)

It failed, in my father's analysis, mainly because of a lack of leadership. Two of its most interesting characters, John Sadleir and William Keogh, defected to the new Liberal government almost as soon as the votes had been counted. Any one of several other potential leaders could have built it into a more long-lasting movement, but one by one they fell by the wayside - Frederick Lucas (the founder of The Tablet) died suddenly at the age of 43, George Henry Moore was kicked out of parliament for electoral malpractice, and Charles Gavan Duffy gave up in despair and emigrated to Australia (where he became Prime Minister of Victoria). The odds were stacked against any party whose policy was concerted opposition rather than the personal advancement of its own members, and the failure of the 1850s movement makes the success of Parnell a generation later all the more remarkable.… (más)