1This authoritative actualisation of Catholic historiography on the British Isles covers the centuries from the Tudor Reformation to the pontificate of Pope Francis. It comprises a series introduction where the general editors share observations arising from this new collective assessment, the first one being that Catholicism in the British Isles is still alive. Stimulatingly, the series takes historical developments on both sides of the Irish Sea together, which serves both to highlight the significance of Catholic history in the general history of the British Isles, and to better recognise the specificities of Irish Catholicism. Renewing the language of Catholic historiography, it also announces that it will avoid loose and obfuscatory categories such as conservative and liberal; secular, traditional and progressive; permissive and modern.

2In the introduction to this fifth volume, the editor Alana Harris indicates that in the period under study (1914-2021) a new self-awareness was evident in the Church, in the metropolitan centre as on the margins. Scottish, Welsh and Irish Catholicism receive fresh historiographical attention. New sources are tapped into. New analyses of the influence of bishops and the role of the laity are offered. The editor points to areas in need of more research, such as the formation of male religious and priests, or religious education at school and beyond, or the British and Irish contributions to the international Catholic organisations, or again Catholic media, established and emerging. Sixteen articles follow, which, though thematically arranged, follow on from one another in logical and chronological sequence. The volume ends with new and rich statistical appendices going up to 2020 – a goldmine for researchers.

3Of particular interest in Mary E. Daly’s chapter is the reflection on the application of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) in the public policies of the newly independent Irish state. Her study is an invitation to (re-)read Edward Cahill, SJ’s The Framework of a Christian State (1932). Daly also draws attention to the lack of integration of the Irish laity, leading to a form of passivity, a theme – posited as an explanatory factor – which recurs in the volume. Stephen Bullivant then draws a similar overview in his study of the representation and development of Catholicism in England and Wales, looking at the movement of conversion of intellectuals and novelists in the interwar years. A chapter on Scottish Catholicism follows, wherein Paul Gilfillan charts the growth of a singular national Catholic culture that developed in the adversity of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice, and in the shadow of a British ultra-montane Catholic identity. Paradoxically, while there is no longer a Catholic seminary in Scotland, Scottish Catholicism, rekindled by the recent identity politics of independence, may be entering a new phase of growth.

4Then Michael Snape reminds the reader that formal relations between Britain and the Holy See were established only in 1914, just as the Great War was about to serve as a major catalyst for Catholic literary creativity. He places the disproportionate share of Catholics in the British armed forces in the context of the Catholic moral tradition of the just war dating back to St Ambrose and St Augustine and reiterated in the catechism of the Council of Trent.

5David Geiringer and Laura Kelly offer a new comparison of cultural shifts across the British Isles as they were witnessed around mid-century in relation to sexuality, reproduction and the body. Catholic pronouncements – clerical and lay – on homosexuality and gay marriage in Scotland and Northern Ireland are compared with Protestant attitudes, revealing areas of cross-denominational overlap. The following chapter, by Stephen G. Parker, explores the experience of Catholic education and seeks to understand the paradoxical combination of routine physical brutality and appreciation for the overall formation received. The author questions the coincidence between systemic brutality and fortress mentality, while assessing the quality of religious education in a new way, highlighting the contribution of one reforming diocesan priest in Birmingham. The vagueness surrounding the ethos promoted by today’s Catholic schools is also exposed.

6Mary Heimann and Cara Delay’s chapter on saints and devotional culture sheds light on the centrality of English devotional life in Britain, and suggests that Ireland has been devotionally compartmentalised. The developments about Irish devotional practices described here are already familiar to Irish studies scholars, who may be allowed not to subscribe to the early assessments of 21^st-century Catholicism. Some of them may also hope for more scholarly attention in the future on Northern Irish devotional practices.

7Robert Proctor then analyses the architecture of Catholic churches and more broadly and stimulatingly of Catholic presence in the city. Particularly significant here are the relations between 20^th-century Irish architects and the Catholic hierarchy, considered in the light of Catholic architectural innovation in Britain and French advances in sacred architecture and scholarship. In the mid-1950s, the contemplative potential of aesthetic modernism brought about a new awareness, in Ireland and elsewhere, that sacred architecture could bring people closer to the Eucharist, following the Liturgical Movement set in motion by the French Benedictine Dom Guéranger.

8The reflection on the liturgical orientation of church architecture is carried on in the following chapter devoted to liturgy and music. In it, Christopher McElroy traces the influence of an unrecognised network of lay and clerical liturgical experts, who have shaped liturgical study and practice after distancing itself from Pius X’s motu proprio on liturgical music Tra le sollecitudini (1903) in Britain and Ireland. The author looks at periodicals such as The Tablet and Doctrine and Life for opinion pieces on the reception in Britain and Ireland of the Liturgical Movement. The author points out that, at a time when women were petitioning to gain franchise, hearing that the Vatican was removing them from choirs was an outrage. The reader learns that the archbishop of Dublin pleaded with Rome not to remove women from choirs. However, interest in chant developed in Dublin with a summer school offering examinations recognised by Solesmes. Quoting Helen Phelan (successor at the University of Limerick to the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin), the author notes less engagement in Ireland with the pre-Conciliar liturgical reform and – echoing a sense of passivity noted earlier on – a strong inhibition towards singing in liturgy, even in the presence of large numbers. Interestingly too, the author analyses the reasons for the absence in Ireland of an organised reaction to the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms on the lines of the Latin Mass Society in England.

9Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros thereafter proceed to look at the development of the Catholic novel as a genre in a context where, in contrast with England, Catholic writers in Ireland were not converts in a position of difference, but belonged to the majority. And yet, the authors argue, there was a Catholic Literary Revival in Ireland. They look at the evolution of themes in British literature from redemptive suffering to the exploration of the everyday and the material in contemporary Catholic novels that use literary techniques so as to raise the theological questions of the time. In this remarkably well written and elegantly authoritative chapter, the authors also suggest that Irish Catholic novelists have more stories to tell than stories of abuse and spiritual anxiety. They also celebrate the body, nature and the senses.

10In the following chapter focusing on the same point in time, Maria Power characterises the post-conciliar ecumenical project as a shift from conversion to conversation. Conversion remains the ultimate goal, but in the meantime, if denominations had gained a more truthful understanding of each other (Cardinal Basil Hume) and worked together on issues of social reconstruction, that would have been a valuable objective, especially in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The significance of conferences (at Glenstal and Greenhill) and the role of religious is noted, alongside that of Church leaders such as Cardinal Cahal Daly. The chapter also re-interrogates the efficacy of cross-denominational grand gestures.

11The work of unity is also at the heart of the missionary endeavour. Fiona Bateman stimulatingly places the creation of the Society of the Missionaries of St Patrick (a.k.a. the Kiltegan Fathers) in 1932 in the context of a post-revolutionary, post-civil war endeavour to unify the country. Her reading of the St Patrick’s Missionary Bulletin is a finger on the pulse of the missionary discourse, with a special attention to the profile of the ideal missionary, the representations of Africa, and the fading presence of paternalism even in its most subtle, psychological expression. Against a background of institutional abuse, the Irish missions still tell a positive story.

12Carmen M. Mangion then offers a study of the involvement of British and Irish Catholics in works of charity, with a section on hospitals, and some concluding thoughts on the transformation of charity into social justice. The following chapter, by Breda Gray and Louise Ryan, tackles another topic relative to mission, charity and migration: a history of Irish chaplaincies. The figure of the Irish chaplain amid Irish diasporic communities lost influence with the growth of other migrant communities in Britain, and with the abuse crisis at home.

13Mary E. Daly and Marcus Pound then re-examine the role of the media, Church and state responses to clerical child abuse, and the relationship between canon law and civil law, as well as between the Vatican and the national hierarchies. Their study widens the scope by looking at abusive regimes more broadly. It also alerts to the risk of detachment and historicisation that academic writing on the subject can create.

14The concluding chapter is Daithí Ó Corráin’s fascinating analysis of contemporary Irish Catholicism, for which he has studied minutes of bishops’ diocesan meetings and of the Irish Conference of Bishops. His Rendering to God and Caesar: The Irish Churches and the Two States in Ireland, 1949-73 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006) is often referenced throughout the volume. He complicates the perception of the Papal visit in 1979 as a celebration of Catholic Ireland. He also draws attention to the importance of individuals who have shaped the destiny of Catholic Ireland by the profile that they brought to the positions that they occupied: cardinals, whether or not they had had any episcopal experience; or Nuncio Gaetano Alibrandi, who was in Dublin for twenty years between 1969 and 1989, and advised the pope on the appointment of thirty-four prelates in Ireland – all with intransigent positions on family questions. The author correlates the choice of episcopal profiles and the decline of vocations – which the pope tried to rekindle in 1979. His chapter – and the volume, and the series – concludes with a tableau: that of a huge church building all but deserted of its congregation, increasingly frail on its foundations, and eventually being demolished and rebuilt to the tenth of its former size alongside a parish building and an old age home. It is a tableau of adaptation.