I'm reading an interesting book, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism by Emmet Larkin, which sheds more light on why the Irish became so fervent in the Faith between the 1830s to the 1860s, a "devotional revolution" that carried with great strength until just the past few decades when materialism and exposure to the globalized culture have triggered a re-paganization of the country. Ultimately it comes down to the familiar refrain that it is only when we're stripped of the earthly do we tend to go to God (i.e. God as "Friend of last resort" and His Body the Church as culture of last resort). It also reminds me of how our pastor Msgr. Lane reads St. Paul's mentions of the "flesh" opposing the Spirit as referring to "culture" rather than physical flesh:
The crucial question still remains - why did the Irish people respond so readily to the reform of their Church and become virtually practicing Catholics within a generation? The Great Famine was truly a gigantic psychological shock, and it certainly would be both neat and convenient to be able to assign so impressive a cause for so remarkable an effect. A guilt-ridden and frightened people turning more formally and fervently to their God in their hour of need makes more, indeed, than a good deal of superficial sense. The problem, of course, is that the devotional need appears to have been increasingly present before the famine, and only the adverse circumstances of population growth and the lack of money and personnel on the part of the Church prevented the need from being realized. The famine, therefore, was as much the occasion for as a cause of the devotional revolution being made and consolidated in Ireland, and one must probe more deeply if one is to understand why as well as how this remarkable historical phenomenon took place.
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...The Irish, after all, had been gradually losing their language, their culture, and their way of life for nearly a hundred years before the famine...In a word, then, Irishmen who were aware of being Irish were losing their identity, and this accounts in large part for their becoming practicing Catholics. --Emmet Larkin
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