R. Scott Appleby

Patricia Byrne

William L. Portier

Finding themselves in a Protestant nation with little interest and less respect for Catholic habits of mind, often the sons and daughters of immigrants who had no training in the intellectual life of their native cultures, Catholics found themselves challenged to show one could be both Catholic and American. The result was one that Appleby, Byrne, and Portier see as a work of creative fidelity. In this book, the editors offer the reader a chance to see what Catholics from the earliest days to the present grappled with that task. In the process, we gain insight into such questions as, Is there or even ought there be a distinctively Catholic intellectual style? How can Catholics best bring their insights into the nature and shape of the common weal into the public forum to influence debates? Some texts will seem quaint. Others, though, take on immense relevance as one comes to understand the relative poverty of secular ethics in coming to grips with many of the truly great issues that matter most to how a nation ought to live its life. Texts from figures as different as Thomas Merton and John Carroll, Orestes Brownson and John Courtney Murray illuminate the landscape of American Catholic intellectual life. This book is absolutely important for college courses on Catholic life and history, but it will also be fascinating reading for the general reader who wants to understand how the Catholic people made themselves a richly furnished intellectual home in an often hostile land.

American Catholic Intellectual Traditions

Creative Fidelity

This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for souls on famine-ravaged Achill Island off Ireland's Atlantic coast during the nineteenth century. Religious ferment swept across Ireland in the early part of the 1900s, and Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle's Mission Colony was to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and idolatry and into salvation. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, Nangle's own volatile temperament, and the unbearable suffering of his wife Eliza and her children, all threatened the project's survival. In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of 'souperism', offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion, tainted the Mission's work. John MacHale, powerful Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, spearheaded the Catholic Church's fight back against Nangle's colony, with the two clergymen unleashing fierce passions, with vitriol and polemic spewing out from pen and pulpit. Did Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony save hundreds from certain death, or did they shamefully exploit a vulnerable people to religious conversion? This dramatic tale of the Achill Mission Colony spectacularly exposes the fault-lines of religion, society and politics in nineteenth-century Ireland, and continues to excite controversy and division to this day. [Subject: History, Irish Studies, Irish Famine, 19th C. Studies]

The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland

The Preacher and the Prelate

This story inspired the film Love and Rage, starring Daniel Craig and Greta Scacchi, filmed at the Valley House and around Achill Island, where the events of the book take place.

Island Outrage & a Playboy Drama

Veiled Woman of Achill

At Valley House on Achill Island in 1894, an English landowner, Agnes MacDonnell, was brutally attacked and her home burnt. James Lynchehaun, her former land agent, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped twice and won a groundbreaking case in the United States successfully resisting extradition. . A Franciscan monk in Achill, Brother Paul Carney, who had befriended and assisted Lynchehaun, wrote up the fugitive’s story, and Lynchehaun became a folk hero. John Millington Synge visited Mayo in 1904/1905 and decided to locate The Playboy of the Western World in north Mayo. Lynchehaun was one of Synge’s inspirations for constructing the character of Christy Mahon. The crime, the trial and escapes, and the island tensions are unravelled in a gripping account.

The Veiled Woman of Achill

This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for souls on famine ravaged Achill Island in the nineteenth century. Religious ferment swept Ireland in the early 1800s and evangelical Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle set out to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and idolatry through his Achill Mission Colony. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, and Nangle’s own volatile temperament all threatened the project’s survival. In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of ‘souperism’, offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion, tainted the Achill Mission’s work. John MacHale, powerful Archbishop of Tuam, spearheaded the Catholic Church’s fightback against Nangle’s Protestant colony, with the two clergymen unleashing fierce passions while spewing vitriol and polemic from pen and pulpit. Did Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony save hundreds from certain death, or did they shamefully exploit a vulnerable people for religious conversion? This dramatic tale of the Achill Mission Colony exposes the fault-lines of religion, society and politics in nineteenth century Ireland, and continues to excite controversy and division to this day.

Patricia Byrne

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