Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002
The Cause that Called You
By Colm Tóibín
Ireland's Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation's Soul, 1500–2000
by Marcus Tanner
Yale University Press, 498 pp., $29.95
St. Peter's College sits on a low hill overlooking the town and the harbor of Wexford, about eighty-five miles south of Dublin. It is a diocesan college which, when I went there in 1970 at the age of fifteen, housed three hundred boarders who attended secondary school, about seventy seminarians, and thirty teaching priests. The college church was designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, the great architect of the Gothic Revival in the mid-nineteenth century, and each morning we attended Mass there, and each evening rosary and benediction. During my final year I had a seat on a side row of the church and had a panoramic view of the faces of the seminarians on the gallery and the priests on the altar and at the back of the church, and I have a clear memory of the sense of order and holiness and tradition and solemnity. It was unimaginable then, and it is almost unbelievable now, that among our congregation at that time were men who would bring the Irish Catholic Church to its knees.
Review, 6114 words
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