THIS is a book of remarkable ambition: the whole story of Christian Ireland, its rise and fall, in a single and concise volume.

It is a story of faith constant through 1500 years. But Crawford Gribben sees it also as a story of “emergence, dominance, division and decline”. The attempt to tell the whole story from Celtic times through to the astonishingly rapid secularisation of today is what makes this book so special and important (Features, 19 November).

Many will turn first to the attractive story of the early Celtic Church. Columbanus writes to Pope Boniface as, “We Irish, inhabitants of the world’s edge . . .”. In affirming that they hold the faith intact, he announces the birth of Christian Ireland. The early Irish Church was full of missionary energy — spreading the faith by peregrinatio, an “improbable strategy of random discovery”.

But that clear-sighted faith was to be gradually supplanted by darker stories. The failure of Protestant reformation in Ireland is obviously of seminal importance: “Catholics and Protestants promoted different ways of being Christian and different ways of being Irish.” The 16th and 17th centuries brought violence and death. The Ulster Irish rose in 1641, with the result of thousands of deaths among Protestant settlers. Sustained but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make Ireland Protestant continued. Later, the Penal Laws represented a failed attempt to preserve the privileges of the Ascendency.

But it is the account of more recent times which will probably catch the attention of many readers; for the fall of Christian Ireland is a story of extraordinarily rapid collapse. Irish Partition of 1922 has had a remarkable impact on the peoples and the Churches that it divided.

Those who shaped the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera’s Constitution of 1937 hoped that “Ireland’s principal religious communities would be brought together in a single jurisdiction under the moral and social oversight of the Catholic Church”. Meanwhile, north of the new Irish border, there emerged James Craig’s “Protestant parliament for a Protestant people” — a State that from the beginning carried the seeds of the violence that was to come.

The last moments at which the possibility that Christian Ireland might fall must have seemed unthinkable were the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 — marking the 1500th anniversary of the arrival of St Patrick — and the visit of Pope John Paul, when one third of the total population attended mass in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

The collapse when it came was “sudden, shocking and decisive”. Successive scandals involving the abuse of children in Catholic institutions destroyed trust in the Church. Taoiseach Enda Kenny argued that “in defending its own institutions, the church had undermined Irish democracy.” Weekly mass attendance plummeted as secularisation took hold in a morally conservative society. No doubt the “Celtic Tiger” economy played its part in that rapid change.

I found Gribben’s account of the fate of Christian Ireland north of the Irish Border rather less compelling. I did wonder, for example, about one surprising omission: the story of the Orange Order and the Drumcree Protests of the 1990s. Enmeshed in its historic links with the Orange Order, the Church of Ireland struggled to maintain its integrity as a “bridge Church” north and south.

More subtle, too, are the ways in which declining faith — the rise of the “nones” — has diluted the pervading sectarianism of Northern Ireland. The author wonders about a future when the Irish Border no longer has a self-sustaining rationale. He sees further decline in the movement of the two largest Churches of the Protestant community to the Evangelical Right of the faith spectrum.

Yet, in the ebb and flow of what seem at times to be unconnected movements, Gribben sees a more hopeful future for Irish Christianity. “After the failure of religious nationalism”, he wonders whether “what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance.”

The Rt Revd David Chillingworth is a former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland
Crawford Gribben
OUP £25
(978-0-19-886818-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50