A major town planning dispute between church and state in Galway in the 1940s over the location for a new school provides a lens for rethinking Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity. Using town planning and urban governance lenses, this article argues that existing scholarship on the postwar Irish Catholic Church overstates its hegemonic power. In analyzing the dispute, it critiques the undue focus within European town-planning studies on the state and on the supposedly “rational” agendas of mid-century planners, showing instead how religious entities forged parallel paths of urban modernity and urban governance. It thus adds an Irish and an urban-planning dimension to existing debates within religious history about urbanization and secularization, showing how adaptive the Irish Catholic Church was to high modernity. Finally, with its focus on a school building, it brings a built environment angle into studies of education policy in Ireland. In seeking to revisit major historiographical debates within town planning, religious history, and studies of urban modernity, the article makes extensive use of the recently opened papers of Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, a noted public intellectual within the Irish Catholic Church and a European expert on canon law.

中文翻译：

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天主教权力和爱尔兰城市：戈尔韦的现代性、宗教和规划，1944-1949

1940 年代，戈尔韦教会和州政府之间就新学校选址问题发生了一场重大的城市规划纠纷，为重新思考爱尔兰与现代性的独特接触提供了一个视角。本文使用城市规划和城市治理的视角，认为现有的关于战后爱尔兰天主教会的学术研究夸大了它的霸权。在分析争议时，它批评了欧洲城市规划研究中对国家和本世纪中叶规划者所谓的“理性”议程的过度关注，而是展示了宗教实体如何打造城市现代性和城市治理的平行路径。因此，它为宗教历史中关于城市化和世俗化的现有辩论增加了爱尔兰和城市规划的维度，显示了爱尔兰天主教会对高度现代性的适应性。最后，它以学校建筑为重点，将建筑环境角度带入爱尔兰教育政策的研究中。为了重新审视城市规划、宗教历史和城市现代性研究中的主要历史学辩论，本文广泛使用了爱尔兰天主教会著名公共知识分子和欧洲专家戈尔韦的迈克尔·布朗主教最近发表的论文关于教会法。