Shaking the Foundations

In Underground Cathedrals, Mark Patrick Hederman, OSB, abbot of Limerick’s Glenstal Abbey, has written a brave and timely book. His focus is on the still-unfolding collapse of Irish Catholicism, the one ecclesiastical establishment in Western Europe whose dominance and influence seemed so firmly founded that the Gates of Hell—and then some—would not prevail against it.

To use Yeats’s oft-quoted lines, “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” In the case of...

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