In The Best Catholics in the World, Derek Scally examines the abuse scandals which rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 1990s, the generations of moral and institutional rot which facilitated this abuse, and the ongoing fallout of it all. Scally is as much interested in why so many Irish people were acquiescent—even if passively or semi-consciously—to repressive religious and social structures as he is in the rampant institutional failures of the church.

I understand why Scally took that particular tack, and why he tries very hard not to turn the book into a hatchet job on all Irish religious or on Catholics more generally. I have to admit that I don’t think I’d be able to be so even-handed if I were writing something like this—see the number of epic arguments that I (as an Irish person roughly a decade younger than Scally) have had with my dad over the years over whether people are too harsh on the religious orders in Ireland because after all they provided an education that the state couldn’t or wouldn’t have during much of the 20th century. This, for me, is an argument which edges perilously close to “but Mussolini made the trains run on time”, and there were parts of this book that I did think edged away from “even-handed” towards “both-sides-ism.”

Scally gently chastises many contemporary Irish people for not having moved past anger with the institutional Church to a place where they can instead think about reconciliation practices and appreciate the “glories” of Catholic Ireland. This is a tad patronising, and seems to be built on an unexamined (and deeply culturally Christian) assumptions about the desirability of forgiveness. There are a number of points in the book where his phrasing or assumptions make plain the fact that he’s not a religious studies scholar or a historian, and I found myself wrinkling my nose a bit as I read. There’s also one bit where he implies that people living in largely secular societies seem to lose the ability to think abstractly or in metaphors, which was deeply weird.

These reservations aside, this is still an important and challenging read. Scally’s series of interviews with Cardinal Seán Brady alone are worth the price of admission, as are many of the moments when Scally is interviewing people one-on-one or thinking on a local scale as opposed to making big-picture pronouncements. There are many questions posed here which more Irish people of all ages would do well to grapple with. ( )