Devotional Revolution

Movement 1850–75 inspired by the Irish Catholic archbishop Paul Cullen that transformed contemporary lay-centred Irish Catholic spirituality, leading it to embrace the sacramentally centred spirituality of continental Europe, and especially Rome. This brought Irish Catholics closer to their European co-religionists, and probably increased the desire for independence from their Protestant English rulers. The term itself was coined in the 1970s by a US historian, Emmet Larkin.

The new approach was advocated by Cullen and was initially best received in the more English-speaking south and east. The main result was a more sacramentally and clerically centred Catholicism, in opposition to the lay-centred and home-based spirituality that had resulted from penal restrictions on priests and public acts of Catholic worship. In that sense, it could be depicted as the normalizing of Catholic spirituality in the period after Catholic Emancipation. A connected development was the 1879 Marian apparition at Knock, County Mayo, one of a European-wide series of apparitions during this period.