devotional revolution

devotional revolution, term coined in 1972 by the American historian Emmet Larkin to describe what he saw as a sudden and dramatic transformation of popular religious practice in Ireland in the period c.1850–75. Other historians argue that the changes concerned were, in fact, part of a long‐term modernization of Irish religious life going back to the Counter‐Reformation. They resulted in the replacement of kin‐group‐centred, lay‐controlled, and semi‐pagan devotional practices, like patterns and wakes, with standardized, usually imported, clerically vetted alternatives, performed in the local church building and integrated into a process of personal sanctification. The decisive instruments of devotional change were Sunday sermons, parish missions, and confraternities. The reformed devotions, largely by accident of timing, became part of the new Catholic identity under construction in 19th‐century Ireland. Initially, they were best received by better‐off, socially and politically active Catholic elites, gradually percolating down the social ladder. By the early 20th century they had made a fairly clean sweep of traditional practices. Because they were so intimately associated with the institutional church, and with a certain phase of Irish nationalism, these devotional practices did not weather very well the process of religious modernization associated with the second Vatican Council, leaving a gap in contemporary Catholic religious practice.

Thomas O'Connor