Goodbye to Catholic Ireland

ISBN: 0872432459

Author: Kenny, Mary

Condition: Used

Few countires have changed more dramatically in the last decades of the 20th century than Ireland. And the most dramatic aspect of all has been the alteration from "Catholic Ireland" to the "post-Catholic", and sometimes "anti-Catholic" Emerald Isle.



Where once the Irish identity was almost inextricably bound up with Catholicism, today the modern Irish are inclined to distance themselves from the Church, to criticize and even reject everything that was once spelled out by the very words "Catholic Ireland". It would not be excessive to claim that there is in Dublin today a sense of shame about Ireland's association with Catholicism.



Mary Kenny charts this change not only through orthodox historical sources, but through personal and social detail, autobiographical anecdote, popular literature, devotional literature, lonely-hearts quests and the prayers of irish mothers through the decades.



Goodbye to Catholic Ireland was widely acclaimed on it's publication in ireland and the U.K. and William Trevor chose it as his Book of the Year in the London Sunday Times.