Irish Way

The Irish Way, edited by Frank Sheed, 343 pages

A collection of biographical essays by Irish authors on holy men and women of "the island of saints and scholars", The Irish Way was published in the momentous year of 1932, the year of the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and the 1500th anniversary of the beginning of St Patrick's mission to the Irish.  The accumulated essays amply demonstrate how the legacy of St Patrick's mission inspired the Irish missionaries who over the centuries served the Church heroically in Scotland, Lombardy, Paraguay, England, and the United States.  It is a remarkable experience to read of Patrick's untiring journeys throughout Ireland, shadowed everywhere by threats of assassination, to save the souls of the people from the fires of Hell, and then read of the Franciscan friar Michael O'Clery's equally restless travels a thousand years later, shadowed everywhere by threats of arrest and execution, to save the history of the people from the fires of the Reformation.  It is exceptionally poignant to read Alice Curtayne's lyrical descriptions of the beautiful Irish countryside as Fr Thaddeus Moriarty follows his Master down his own via dolorosa.  It is inspiring to read side-by-side the parallel lives of Catherine McAuley and Mary Aikenhead as they labored to found the Sisters of Mercy and the Irish Sisters of Charity in the troubled nineteenth century, and humbling to follow Margaret Hallahan, an orphaned serving maid, as she struggled to restore a sense of the sacred amongst newly emancipated Catholics in England. 

Although The Irish Way is less literarily distinguished than its successor volume The English Way, it is more unified and cohesive.  This is less the result of an overall plan than the nature of the subject - the story of how the Irish people "having been despoiled of all the precious things by which nations keep their souls alive, all except one, remained vitally a nation, a fact explicable only by some extraordinary quality in their Catholicism, in the special Irish Way of being Catholic."