Welsh Journals

Daire Keogh, Edmund Rice, 1762-1844 [Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1996]. pbk. 126 pp. ISBN 1 85182 211 9. n.p.g. To generations of R.C. schoolboys in the English-speaking world the prayer 'that thy servant Edmund Ignatius Rice may soon be raised to the altars of thy church' has a familiar ring, recalling short-trousers, large-classes, and the Irish Christian Brothers whose founder Rice was. The prayer was that the Roman Catholic Church would formally recognise his saintly character by declaring him 'Saint.' In 1996 this process moved forward in that he became a 'Blessed' (the stage just before canonisation), and this book was written in the context of that event. However, while written to make known the life of the one being honoured, it falls within the genre of history/ biography rather than hagiography. It is the story of a successful Waterford businessman who, when widowed, deployed his energies to the relief of poverty principally by providing free education to poor boys. Rice is now remembered as the founder of an order of religious brothers dedicated to teaching, the helper of Nano Nagle who set us an order of sisters with a similar aim, and as one of those who played a prominent part in processes that eventually led to the removals of legal restrictions on Catholics. This book traces these sequences of events from accidental beginnings to a pattern of life and a method of teaching that reached every English-speaking country and which played a significant role in the growth of a distinctive Irish form of modern Catholicism. The strength of the book is that it presents Rice very well within his time and society-it is fascinating, for example, to see the decline in cordiality in relations between denominations in Ireland in the early nineteenth century; its weakness is that it does not compare Rice with other religious educationalists who had devoted more attention to the nature of pedagogy and catechesis. THOMAS O'LOUGHLIN Department of Theology University of Wales, Lampeter Roger L. Brown, David Howell A Pool of Spirituality: A Life of David Howell [Llawdden] Gee & Son (Denbigh) Ltd, 1998. Paperback, 318 pages + xiv + 1 plate. ISBN 0 7074 0316 2. £ 17.50. From the opening pages of this book, Roger Brown leaves his readers in no doubt about the heroes and villains in this account of the late-nineteenth century Welsh Church. The chief hero is David Howell himself, a spiritually-gifted ex-dissenting evangelical, who was slighted by senior figures in the Church on account of his social background, his Welshness and his ambivalence on the disestablishment question. At one level, Howell was the classic victim of late Victorian snobbery; he was considered unfit to be a bishop partly because his wife was considered unfit to be a bishop's wife. Worse still, it was discovered that she had been pregnant at the time of