Sarah Roddy’s Money and Irish Catholicism: An Intimate History, 1850-1921, which is out in e-book format now and will be released imminently in hard copy by Cambridge University Press, examines the finances of the Irish Catholic Church between the end of the Famine and the advent of Irish independence. This was a period when the Church grew in infrastructure, personnel, and influence. As she shows, money – raised voluntarily from millions of lay Catholics – was instrumental in that growth.

Dr Roddy explains the reasons for, and process of, writing this book:

The book is my third monograph (second as a sole author) and has been a long time in the making. It’s more than 10 years since I first started wondering about the funding of the Irish Catholic Church, exactly 10 years since the ESRC funded some of my research on the topic, and about three years since I finally had the opportunity to sit down to write the final manuscript. So, by way of introducing the finished product to Social History Society members, I want to say something about its circuitous journey to completion. How books (especially second and subsequent ones) get written, and how projects develop from neat funding applications with well-defined and ambitious objectives to final publication is a curiously neglected topic but one worth discussing.

The idea for this project stemmed from an observation I’d made in my earlier research: that the financial records of the Irish Catholic Church were a large and under-explored resource. I was able to draw on the surviving records of multiple dioceses, parishes, and religious orders across Ireland and outside it. And since the Church was funded on a voluntary basis – there was minimal state funding and no compulsory tithe – it rapidly became apparent that this had the potential to be not just another institutional story, but rather a story of millions of ordinary Catholics paying for the upkeep and growth of the Church.

I duly started with a strong element of quantitative methodology, asking how much money lay people gave the Church in this period. Yet as the research progressed, that question gradually faded into the background. More than one archivist suggested that, in any case, ‘how much’ would be a very hard thing to establish. A lot of the data is bitty, and it would take many assumptions to get to a plausible figure. There are spreadsheets on my hard drive that show I started down the route of asking it, but as the project developed that question of ‘how much’ became intellectually less significant as well as practically challenging. It was enough to establish that the answer was ‘a lot’ and an increasing amount as the period went on.

Instead, led by the surprising narrative richness of the material, I became much more focused on the why – why did all of these lay people give the money, what did it mean to them, what did it tell us about their lives? These sources offered glimpses into people and relationships that were often completely unrecorded elsewhere, save perhaps in passing conflict with what many saw as a hostile state. With some interpretive work, they showed the private concerns, and the everyday and long-term priorities of people who otherwise left little trace of such intimacies.

What that meant for the book, ultimately, was not that a big, quantitative question was replaced with fuzzier and supposedly ‘smaller’ qualitative ones. Instead, I’d argue that the luxury of time to think as I worked through the research and writing process helped me find the true locus of value in the financial records of the Irish Catholic Church. They are not, in the end, important because they show the institution growing in size and influence, though they do indeed show that. Rather, they are important because they offer an intimate portrait of the ordinary people who made that happen.

For more on the process of researching and writing this book, listen to a podcast Sarah did with the Irish History Students’ Association here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/38HckDSh8jnnm2CkDqWGYB