Author: Tom Cahill

Maureen Dezell is easy to like. She has that true Irish charm in abundance, and, as one Italian American points out in her book, "Don't think [the Irish] don't use that charm". Ms. Dezell's charm, and her obvious enjoyment of exploring the Irish American culture as if it is new to her (which, despite many generations of Irish antecedents in her background, in large part it is!) makes this book an enjoyable read. Her insights, gleaned from interviews with very articulate Irish Americans, are of value to anyone trying to further their understanding of the Irish American culture, not least the Irish in Ireland, sayeth he of that ilk. Ms. Dezell serves up this Irish American story with the Irish woman's instinct for cutting through cant. Or perhaps the American woman's ability to say it, "like it is". Perhaps one came from the other during assimilation. Who knows? She writes as a fully assimilated Irish American woman with a newfound sense of her Irish roots and a strong sense of herself. All to the good.

Ms. Dezell tries to reach the awesome heights which the book's title promises and, not surprisingly, she fails. What she achieves though, and it is very useful, is an accurate snapshot of an attenuating Irish-American culture and the Irish-American cultural resistance to this attenuation. That unceasing resistance to change is the Irish part of Irish America. Americans are most comfortable when cultural attenuation is in the ascendant. Irish Americans, however, flex in the general direction of compromise with the larger culture, but somehow manage to retain their unique identity despite being the most fully assimilated group since the "other" immigrants arrived on the Mayflower. The Irish are the bone in the stew of the Melting Pot.

Although it is a satisfying read, reading this book is not all clover, as it were. As Ms. Dezell chases Irishness down the wind she loses balance when reflecting on a critical component in her story, the Irish as Catholics. The Catholic component of the Irish American story has to be got right if the Irish American story is to be "A Story in Full". I doubt Ms. Dezell will be the writer to do it. Ms. Dezell has deep misgivings about institutional Catholicism. Her choice of sources for quotations marshaled in support of her strident anti institutional-church views, are regrettable in an otherwise elegantly balanced book. She quotes from Garry Wills and others who, almost exclusively, are in fundamental disagreement with the Church. Mr. Wills, a Catholic Anti Catholic if ever there was one, is a very able intellect and popular writer, whose animus toward the Roman Catholic Church is well documented, if not as well known. Wills' animus has been pointed out by at least three respected writers. Newsweek journalist Kenneth Woodward and writer Professor Philip Jenkins were caught in the fire Wills directed at the institutional Church leading to very bitter responses over the most awful charges leveled by Wills against them. Happily both Woodward and Jenkins ably and publicly acquitted themselves. Fr. R J Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism and is now a priest in that tradition wrote: "Garry Wills, one reluctantly concludes, is a deeply dishonest man. I say "deeply" dishonest because in the fever-pitch of rage with which he writes about the Catholic Church and related matters he seems incapable of recognizing when he is lying." And "It is a great pity that [Wills] louche and mendacious commentary is the New York Review's magisterium on all things Catholic. It may be a sign of long overdue change that Mr. Wills' most recent book-length rant with footnotes, Why I Am a Catholic, was so devastatingly reviewed in, yes, the New York Review of Books." So much for Mr. Wills. And unfortunately a key section in Ms. Dezell's attempt to help us, and herself, to deepen our self-understanding.

Irish American Catholics are unique in great part because their antecedents were deeply, deeply Catholic in their worldview. Despite great privations and crushing historical experience the Irish dignity, both cultural and individual, was never crushed because the Irish immigrant had a core Catholic ethic. This Catholic ethic was honed over hundred of years in a colonial crucible where the colonist was violently hostile to Irish religious sensibilities. Cromwell, a Puritan lest we forget, set out to exterminate all of the Irish people because they were Catholic. He almost succeeded. He intended to give Ireland to the dispersed Jews after he had genocidally cleared Ireland of Catholics. Passing by Cromwell's monumental twistedness we need only note how formative the Cromwellian experience was in shaping the Irish people and by extension the Irish Catholic culture. Add to Cromwell's bloodlust the anti-Catholicism regnant in the US during the great wave of 19th and early 20th century Irish emigration to the US and surely one is persuaded that the definitive formative experience for the Irish is the Catholic component of that experience. That experience cannot be understood without at least glancing respect for the institution that is the Roman Catholic Church.

The definitive American tradition of church without government dominance was secured when an Irish Catholic leader, Bishop John Hughes most decidedly an adherent of the traditional self-understanding of the Roman Catholic Church, threatened to level New York should another Catholic building be set afire or otherwise vandalized in that city. The civic leaders and the press read the situation correctly (3,000 armed Irish Catholic men are a tad persuasive - Ye think?) and a timely peace settled on the development of that vital thread in the American tapestry, religious freedom. What America's Founding Fathers started, the practical implementation of a political system whereby freedom to worship according to one's conscience was guaranteed to be free of any State interference, was made manifest in the sharpest possible terms by Catholics, mostly Irish, who had had enough.

The idea that is America, gave the Irish hope that this great fight for freedom to worship free of state or other interference could be won. But, without the previous suffering of the Irish people for their Catholic religious beliefs in their own land, the fight would not have been fought with such great intensity or with such immediate results and America would not be what it is today - the freest country in the world. Ms. Dezell fails to understand fully the Irish American culture to which she belongs because this central piece of traditional Catholic influence on her culture's formation is counter to her self understanding. She has the Garry Will's version down Pat, if you will pardon the pun.

The author's worldview, as it appears to me in her book, is a classic example of what often happens to an individual during cultural assimilation. A daily compromise is reached with the outside world until, finally, one feels less different to the broader culture. However, the god of cultural compromise while offering peace and acceptance usually demands as tribute, acceptance of "acceptance at any price". Today, as the most obvious and for some, bitter, example, leading Irish Catholic politicians in America are in the vanguard of defense of abortion and promotion of alternative versions of marriage. Leading national newspapers from Irish dominated cities, including Ms. Dezell's employer the Boston Globe, provide essential media oxygen for these politicians. Nothing could be more counter to that Catholic tradition to which leading Irish American politicians claim to belong than partial birth abortion and gay marriage.

Irish Catholics' support of abortion and gay marriage takes the Irish Catholic love of the underdog and their definining sense of social justice and puts it on its head. Abortion and alternatives to marriage, properly understood, are destructive of any understanding of the family as the Irish have understood it for millennia. Is the future of Irish America to be one of deep dishonesty to true Irish self-understanding and to that Faith which is a prime source of our survival as an immigrant peoples? A secular, post modern, deconstructed, Irish American culture does not comport with the America our Irish immigrant antecedents suffered and died to build. I cannot help feeling in my darker moments that we Irish in America and in Eire are, Esau like, given up our inheritance for a mess of potage. Ms. Dezell's book does nothing to disabuse me of this notion. Indeed it reinforces it I am sad to say.

Our Irish American culture, a source of the greatest justifiable pride for Americans and Irish alike, was saved, on balance, by the Irish people's love for family, their strong sense of responsibility for children, their unremitting belief in divine benevolence, in short their Faith as expressed in traditional Catholicism - which most assuredly includes Vatican II properly understood. Not understanding this key component of our Irish American cultural experience may very well find our history ending in the Gadarene depths.

Ms. Dezell's contribution, in bringing this book to us, is to do what she could to stand athwart a long history of Irish blarney about itself and offer an alternative, more disciplined very readable view. What a gift to give her own. Her book helps the Irish talk about themselves more clearly, more surely, more accurately. The Irish talking about, well, the Irish. The more things change...

This book is recommended reading for the good reason that, despite the limitations described, it cannot be ignored as a solid and readable attempt at Irish American cultural self understanding. Its readers will have their understanding of the Irish and American cultures deepened, if not adequately, at least usefully. No small accomplishment that. An updated perspective for we Irish, on both sides of the pond, to see ourselves at the turn of the 21st century. Well done, Ms. Dezell.