Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I: Tracing change and setting the context. 'The times they are a changin'': tracing the transformation of Irish Catholicism through the eyes of a journalist / Patsy McGarry -- Revisiting the faith of our fathers... and reimagining its relevance in the context of twenty-first-century Ireland / Louise Fuller -- Dethroning Irish Catholicism: church, state, and modernity in contemporary Ireland / David Carroll Cochran -- Refracted visions: street photography, humanism and the loss of innocence / Justin Carville -- Contemporary Irish Catholicism: a time of hope! / Vincent Twomey -- part II: Going against the tide. The poetry of accumulation: Irish-American fables of resistance / Eamonn Wall -- Prophetic voices or complicit functionaries? Irish priests and the unravelling of a culture / Eamon Maher -- Tony Flannery: a witness in an age of witnesses / Catherine Maignant -- 'Belief shifts': Ireland's referendum and the journey from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft / Eugene O'Brien -- part III: Challenges in the here and now. Faith, hope and clarity? A new church for the unhoused / Michael Cronin -- The people in the pews: silent and betrayed / Patricia Casey -- Irreconcilable differences? The fraught relationship between women and the Catholic Church in Ireland / Sharon Tighe-Mooney -- The Catholic twilight / Joe Cleary.

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope's address in Galway were entertained by two of Ireland's most charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were subsequently revealed to have been engaged in romantic liaisons at the time. The decades that followed the Pope's visit were characterised by the increasing secularisation of Irish society. Boasting an impressive array of contributors from various backgrounds and expertise, the essays in the book attempt to trace the exact reasons for the progressive dismantling of the cultural legacy of Catholicism and the consequences this has had on Irish society.