The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland''s most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples.Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the sixteenth century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion''s most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas.But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catho
