Books Ireland, December 2002 Noble pursuit Brian Power The Soul of Europe and other selected writings. Donal Murray, Veritas, 190 pp €12.95 pb 21 cm 1-85390-594-1 Donal Murray recalls how in 1998 a journalist, Peggy Noonan, wrote a prophetic article. She expressed a fear that, because people had no time any more to stop and think, within a few years someone would do a ‘big terrible thing in New York or Washington’. Close to the mark though she was in that respect, no sane person will dare to prophesy exactly what the world will be like by the end of this century. What might be ventured would be to lay down principles as to how it could be made a better place. This Donal Murray does within the context of his Christian faith. Currently Bishop of Limerick of the Catholic Church of the Latin Rite and formerly a professor of theology, he has both the credentials and the craft required to do so. His selected writings consist of papers he produced for a variety of occasions in the later part of the last century. Although this may detract from the unity of the book, it ensures consideration of a wide variety of issues. In contemplating the meaning of life in Western Europe, Murray emphasises that freedom is a personal but not a solitary reality. It is only in relationships that we come to self- understanding and true freedom. The characteristic attitude of the isolated individual in the face of political structures and economic forces is one not of freedom but of helplessness. Too much passive tolerance and passive respect for pluralism makes the individual ineffective and frustrated. While enjoining maximum respect for the views of others, Murray is clear that such respect is ideally rooted in the mystery of the Absolute towards which the search of the human person for truth is always pointing. It is in the context of our God-given ability and right to choose to make a difference that the author examines issues relating to poverty, social justice, education, health care and youth ministry. ‘One can hardly imagine,’ he observes, ‘anybody in parliament or boardroom or on a factory floor taking time to point out that the Infinite God is close to us or that the most important question about some decision we are about to make or some action we are considering is whether it leads us closer to the eternal life God promises. On the contrary, in many areas of life we are expected to behave as if our deepest beliefs and questions are irrelevant. Yet our culture is full of indications that people are searching for a deeper meaning to life, sometimes attempting to find it in absorptions that are either trivial or harmful. The tension between our inner urge towards the spiritual and our necessary embodiment in the material is one that Pope John Paul 2 explores in Evangelium vitae, one of the encyclicals to which Murray turns from time to time. The Men I Killed. F.P. Crozier, Athol Books, 152 pp €10 pb 21 cm 1-85034-085-3 The search for a greater truth began for one high-ranking officer after he resigned from command of a force set up in Ireland in 1920 to assist the RIC in maintaining law and order. Known as the Auxiliary Cadets and distinct from the notorious Black and Tans, its members were all ex-officers of the British Army. All honourable men, one might think. That was not the final conclusion of General F.P. Crozier when, after a period of hospitalisation, he discovered that some of his men were involved in a succession of brutal murders, corrupt practices and lawless riots that included the burning of Cork city. The letters, memoirs and accusations that flowed from his pen after he resigned his command on a matter of principle resulted in embarrassment and cover-up on the part of the political and military establishments. These selected writing, alas, make more fascinating, if horrifying, reading than anything the most erudite moral theologian might produce. Edited and introduced by Brendan Clifford, the book leads us through Crozier’s recollections of the Boer war, the first world war, the Ulster unionist challenge to the British government in which he played a prominent part, and the Irish war of independence. The General’s conversion to the cause of world peace stands in sharp contrast to his earlier ruthless conduct of wars on behalf of the British Empire. Brought up, only partly in Ireland, to swear allegiance to the Empire, he found much to examine when he contemplated some of his actions his concept of military duty had imposed on him. He reflects on his role in the deaths of young men like Private Johnny Crockett, who went missing in shock from his detachment of the Royal Irish Rifles, and university student Kevin Barry of the IRA. Retrospective analysis turned Crozier the ruthless general into a belligerent pacifist. Not a particularly realistic one, though. He believed it was the new duty, even the destiny, of his beloved Empire to impose peace as well as civilisation on the world at large. Christian Living Today: essays in moral and pastoral theology. William Cosgrave, Columba, 256 pp €13.95 pb 21 cm 1-85607-323-8 Whatever about its inability to achieve the market appeal of the average whodunit, moral theology remains a noble and necessary pursuit. William Cosgrave continued to pursue it after his move from the academic life into pastoral ministry provided insights into contemporary issues. Bringing together the best of modern thinking, he distinguishes between the legal and relational models that have been employed by writers – the legal typically before and the relational more typically after the Second Vatican Council. He devotes a chapter to the concept of moral character, a topic he believes to be important in the context of the relational or personalist model. Briefly, as he says, my moral character consists of who I have become as a result of my life experiences and my moral choices and actions over my lifetime. This leads to a consideration of the formation of moral character; factors within us such as knowledge, freedom and emotions that condition it; and social and community influences on our thinking and behaviour. Building a good moral character, that is becoming fully human, loving and virtuous, is a lifelong project that is always in the making and is never complete in this life. How best to deal with one’s emotional life is given extensive treatment and there is a chapter on the understanding of the nature of sin within the relational model that is generally employed now by theologians. In the course of a short history of the development of the Sacrament of Penance Cosgrave notes that the twentieth century was the only period in the history of the Catholic Church in which the practice of frequent confession prevailed. Its recent decline is the result of such factors as the disappearance of the idea that one must go to confession before receiving communion, the emergence of a more balanced understanding of the nature of sexual morality, and the realisation that quality should count more than quantity in estimation of the value of the sacrament. The value of the three existing forms of the sacrament, in our times usually known as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, is discussed within the context of the proposal that each form has been devised for a different purpose. Having paved the way towards insight, Cosgrave writes with clarity about concrete moral issues in the domain of religious and political freedom, marriage and sexuality. The final illuminating chapter dealing with spirituality, including Christian spirituality, in its diverse forms, illustrates the value of the model he had adopted as a framework for these essays on moral and pastoral morality. The First World War in Irish Poetry. Jim Haughey. Bucknell University Press (distrib. Associated University Presses), 310 pp £42 hb 24 cm 0-8387-5496-1. Although Cosgrave discusses such issues as liberation theology and social sin at some length, his book has nothing to say about moral issues directly related to war. Jim Haughey reminds us that over 35,000 Irish people died in the First World War, ten times as many as have died in what are euphemistically style the Troubles. Writing about ‘war poetry’ written by Irish men and women then and in later times enables Haughey to confront the historical ambiguities and complexities that lie behind much of what is happening in Ireland today. Most of us educated in Irish schools on the south side of the border in the 1930s and 1940s will have heard a lot in history classes about the 1916 Rising, but little about what people usually referred to as the Great War. Considering how many participated in the war in comparison with the relatively small who took part in the Easter Rising, it seems astonishing that the memory of the greater number should have been suppressed. History, indeed, stopped short at the GPO with a nod to the heroic deaths of the executed leaders. I cannot recall anything been said in school about the hugely significant political consequences of those executions. We were left to suppose that the Irish people as a whole supported the rebellion, which they did not. It would be equally untrue to suppose that they were enthusiastic in their support of Britain’s war against Germany. Most of them accepted it for one reason or another. Looking at my own family background, I can see how an Enniskillen woman of English ancestry whose family, including herself (and, at one time, her husband, an admirer of the Redmond Brothers), found jobs with the British Civil Service might have felt obliged to deliver maternal cautions such as ‘We’re going into Kingstown today, but you must remember to call it Dunleary now.’ Enough, for this sort of reminiscence may be catching, and is perhaps pardonable only in the cause of great poetry such as that of Michael Longley.