The faith still has significant public and private sway despite blows to the church
A few years ago, Eugene O’Brien and I started work on a book of essays entitled Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond.
We approached contributors from different disciplines and shades of opinion to provide as balanced an overview as possible of what is an emotive topic.
The timespan covered in the book is revealed, somewhat obliquely, in the subtitle.
It begins with the visit by Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, when the large crowd at the youth Mass in Galway was entertained by two high-profile and charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary.
It would subsequently…