By 1911 some Irish couples were limiting fertility. Marital fertility fell slowly after independence. The gap between family size in Northern Ireland and Ireland and between Catholic and Protestant families widened. The Irish Free State introduced legislation restricting access to information and prohibiting the sale and importation of contraceptives, legislation that reinforced Catholic teaching. Although similar legislation existed in other countries, it had much less impact than in Ireland. The near-universal practice of religion by men and women meant that Catholic teaching could be enforced in the confession box, and this teaching, combined with the valorisation of large families by Irish society, provided uncaring husbands with a licence to procreate, irrespective of the health or the wishes of their wife. Before the 1960s there was little information available about the ‘safe period’, a church-permitted method of regulating fertility, which was promoted by Catholic organisations in other countries. By 1961, despite marrying at a later age, Irish couples had the largest families in the western world, their fertility was seriously out of line with Catholics elsewhere.

Central to the history of family planning in Ireland is the interaction between religious observance and expressions of Irishness, and how that changed in response to domestic political and socio-economic developments, and international forces. An Irish identity imagined around rural living, Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism, combined with a belief that Ireland could withstand the changes that were underway in twentieth-century western society in relation to sexual behaviour – drove the sustained hostility to legalising contraception. The 1980s was the decade when it became evident that the tide had turned. The number of married women in the workforce rose significantly, and fertility fell sharply. By the early 1990s Irish fertility was still the highest in Europe, but only by a small margin, and it was lower than in the United States. And yet the decline of this imagined Irishness was not unopposed; indeed, many lamented its passing. it is significant that the moral legislation enacted in the first decades after independence survived until the closing decades of the twentieth century, which might suggest that Ireland was exceptional.

No western country experienced as protracted a debate on contraception as Ireland. The longstanding ban on contraception has commonly been seen as the consequence of Catholic church teaching and the near-universal religious observance by Irish Catholics. But the Irish debate went far beyond Catholic teaching. The merits of large families and the laws banning contraception (as well as prohibition of divorce and abortion) came to be seen as a symbol of Ireland’s national identity; the Irish approach to contraception was intimately bound up with ideas of Irishness. The logic of opposition to the use of contraception shifted over the decades. Initially, the belief that ‘artificial’ contraception was contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church was the engine that drove state policy and broader opposition. By the 1970s this argument was being abandoned, in favour of claims that permitting contraception would destroy the fabric of the family and society. The battle to protect Irish society from the “menace” of contraception, abortion and divorce continued into the present century in the face of falling fertility, many single mothers, and a significant abortion trail to Britain.

Chapter 11 explores France’s Catholics’ reactions to the religiously laden references of the Rassemblement National (RN) and Éric Zemmour. It finds that in spite of historical animosities and the abiding policy clashes between the far right and Catholic values, beliefs and institutions identified in Chapter 10, French Catholics’ traditional religious immunity to the far right has begun to erode since the mid-2010s. Whilst this development chronologically coincided with the emergence of the conservative Catholic movement around the Manif pour Tous, the analysed evidence suggests that Catholics’ electoral opening towards the populist right was primarily driven by political and religious supply-side factors. In particular, the narrowing of electoral alternatives for Catholics and the softening of the bishops’ language against the populist right, in the context of the church’s gradual shift from a politically engaged national church, towards a more inward-looking minority church, have contributed to the relative dédiabolisation of the RN and Zemmour amongst Catholics.

Chapter 8 moves on to the French case study. As the nation with the oldest major right-wing populist party in Europe, a well-established electoral constituency of political Catholicism, and one of the strictest models of church–state separation, the French case study provides a unique opportunity to trace the historical development of the relationship between religion and right-wing populism. To study these phenomena, Chapter 8 begins by exploring how the historical antagonism between la France Catholique and la Republique laïque still shapes the relationship between politics and religion today, and how the hard-fought compromise between the two has recently been challenged by a return of political tensions surrounding religion and laïcité, in the context of the French far right’s identitarian rhetoric.

Given the Trump administration’s ambiguous approach to religion discussed in the previous chapter, Chapter 15 explores how American Christians have reacted to it. It finds that although there initially appeared to be a certain level of religious immunity among practicing Christians against Trumpism, this religious ‘vaccination effect’ against national populism has since diminished and even reversed to the extent that, unlike in Europe, American Christians have become one of the populist right’s most loyal constituencies. American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to Trump appears, however, to be less the result of a shift in their attitudes than of supply-side factors. Specifically, a perceived lack of political alternatives as well as the inability and unwillingness of Christian leaders to publicly speak out against Trumpism seem to have contributed to this development.

No other institution wielded comparable transnational power over such a large body of the Irish diaspora than the Catholic Church, yet it was riven with internal divisions over the questions of land and labour during the 1880s, and its grip on Irish popular opinion was increasingly strained and contingent. In this chapter, the relationship of the Church to questions of land reform is discussed, particularly its role in sustaining radical critiques of liberal modernity and capitalism. It discusses the importance of priests to the Land League, and the challenges faced by the Catholic hierarchy in both Ireland and the United States to contain and direct the force of Irish land and labour radicalism. The chapter also looks closely at Henry George’s relationship with the religiosity, his use of theological arguments, and his tensions with the Catholic Church in the United States.

The combination of violent crimes, gruesome and prolonged execution spectacles, and natural disasters created an atmosphere of tension and fear in late 1780s Mexico City. Scientists of the era identified the flaming clouds that Gómez described above as an aurora borealis. But most people in this era would not have read these scientific interpretations. Instead, shocking natural phenomena prompted a turn to their faith in the supernatural for explanations and remedies. This reaction drew from both European and Indigenous connections between the divine and the physical world. Gómez himself communicated a sense of the ineffable links between human acts and natural phenomena (perhaps caused by unseen supernatural entities) in the first quote by juxtaposing an earthquake with the execution of five men. The skepticism of the European Enlightenment did not diminish the Novohispanic belief in miracles.

The attitudes and legislative initiatives of the Irish government in the 1920s and 1930s cast a long shadow over the rest of the twentieth century. Lack of access to contraception combined with the power of Catholic teaching meant that there was considerable fear around pre-marital sex, which also influenced how sex education was disseminated in the period with a focus on morality rather than physiology. In the absence of formal sex education, young men and women were provided with moral codes regarding sexual activity, which were in turn policed by families and communities. This chapter shows how attitudes to sex in the period were clouded in a culture of fear which was perpetuated by Catholic Church teachings. Yet, at the same time, women’s magazines and television programmes such as The Late Late Show attempted to push against these boundaries through more open discussion of matters relating to sex and family planning.

This chapter highlights the profound influence of the legal and religious context on individuals’ choices around family planning in the early twentieth century. Individuals’ accounts suggest that their parents lacked knowledge of contraception and complied with Church teachings. Yet, the documentation of court cases relating to contraception in the Irish press, and letters from Irish men and women to Marie Stopes complicates this picture and suggests a tension between what oral history respondents think about their parents’ reproductive health experiences and the lived realities of men and women of fertile age in early post-independent Ireland. This chapter provides clear evidence of resistance and attempts at resistance. In addition, the letters from Irish men and women to Marie Stopes suggest that many Irish men and women perceived a lack of access to birth control as having a negative impact on both maternal and infant health.

By the 1970s, younger generations of Irish men and women were beginning to question the Church’s teachings in relation to contraception, and many others were exhibiting resistance in their contraceptive practices. It is evident, however, that for the older generations, Church teachings had a significant impact on their family planning choices, often resulting in guilt and shame if individuals chose to use contraception. Although it is clear that the encyclical Humanae Vitae caused considerable anguish for some members of the priesthood, speaking out against papal teachings could have significant consequences. Many priests toed the line and the confession box was an important sphere where priests could continue to exert power over women’s family planning choices. Yet, it is clear that some priests were also beginning to follow their own consciences, and used the confession box compassionately to assist individuals who were troubled by their decision to use contraception.

This chapter maps the continued presence of Roman Catholics at the inns of court, from the accession of Elizabeth and her protestant church settlement of 1559 to the eve of the civil war. ‘Survival and Resurgence’ shows that besides a significant remnant of Catholic lawyers who had held firm to their traditional beliefs and successfully resisted conformity to the new dispensation, the 1570s saw the arrival of missionary priests charged with reviving the old faith. Besides supporting existing Catholics, they sought new adherents among the gentlemen students of the inns of court, as a vital step towards freeing the country from heresy.

Notwithstanding a battery of increasingly restrictive measures aimed at excluding Catholics from the inns, ‘Quietism and Survival’ shows that papists continued to be admitted and even promoted to the bar and bench. But the anticipated flood of well-born converts did not eventuate, and in the early seventeenth century the failure of Gunpowder Plot saw a more relaxed and tolerant attitude towards Catholics, at the inns as elsewhere, on the part of both government and the inns’ rulers. While both pragmatic and commendably tolerant, this policy stance underestimated the political potency of anti-popish paranoia among the population at large.

Roberto Bolaño was the only Latin American novelist of the post-Boom period who attained notoriety similar to that of his famous predecessors. Exploring what makes his brief Nocturno de Chiles worthy of such canonical status, I propose five criteria of evaluation: 1) elevated themes, as put forth by Longinus; 2) a self-reflexive literary warp; 3) an unfathomable secret; 4) transformation of received tradition; and 5) a style at once profound, unique, and recognizable. The confession of a priest, Sebastián, presumably on his death bed, the novel recounts his life, including his concomitant vocations for the priesthood and literature. Longinian elevation is manifest comically. The protagonist’s immersion in both the classical and the modern provides literariness. The secret resides in the presence of an Austrian shoemaker whose monument to national heroes seems to point to the origins of fascism. Sebastián’s consideration of current Chilean writers and their knowledge of universal works, such as the Divine Comedy becomes a consideration of literary tradition. And his elegant, erudite style is evident from the very beginning. In the end he and the reader realize that the “wizened youth” who challenges him as his conscience throughout is the one writing the novel.

What do the religious institutional structures look like in Catholicism and Sunni Islam? In order to trace how religious institutional structures may shape the early evolutions of religious parties, this chapter explores the historical development of structures of religious authority and how they looked when religious parties arose. The focus of the analysis for each religion varies to reflect the historical trajectories of their religious institutions and what such different trajectories mean for the analytical narrative of this book. The analysis proceeds in chronological order and begins with Catholicism to be followed by Sunni Islam. In the case of Catholicism, the focus is less on the evolution of religious institutions and more on how divergence from orthodoxy and orthopraxy are handled within the Catholic Church. As the religious authority in Catholicism, the Church’s handling of divergences is key to understanding how it dealt with the rise of Catholic parties. In the case of Sunni Islam, the focus remains on the historical evolution of religious authority, paying close attention to the parameters of major shifts in the eleventh and early twentieth centuries.

Like Newman’s troubled journey towards Rome, Gladstone’s agonized change of mind in 1845 over the Maynooth grant for the training of Catholic priests in Ireland is charted in letters that reveal his vulnerability and uncertainty, and a nervousness that is uncannily reflected in the mechanics of the uniform penny post. One of Browning’s letters was left in the Barretts’ letterbox and one of Newman’s was dropped on the road. In Gladstone’s case, heightened tension leads to the blunder of a unsealed ‘secret’ letter being sent to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. And with a blizzard of such correspondence surrounding Gladstone’s concerns about the Maynooth grant, it seems to have been a leaked letter that enabled The Times to report his imminent resignation from the cabinet. This Gladstonian drama is played out in two acts, the first in private, the second in public through printed open letters regarding Maynooth.