Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T12:53:39.795Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Sheridan Gilley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 188 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 The largest element in this subject is American, and there has been a renaissance of writing, of rather uneven quality, on the Irish in the United States. Recent works include Wittke, C., The Irish in America, new edn, New York 1970Google Scholar; Duff, J. B., The Irish in America, Belmont, California 1971Google Scholar; Griffin, W. D., The Irish in America: a chronology and fact book, Dobbs Ferry, New York 1972Google Scholar; Greeley, A. M., That Most Distressful Nation: the taming of the American Irish, Chicago 1972Google Scholar; Birmingham, S., Real Lace: America's Irish rich, New York 1973Google Scholar; O’Grady, J. P., How the Irish Became American, New York 1973Google Scholar; Shannon, W. V., The American Irish: a political and social portrait, New York 1974Google Scholar; and McCaffrey, L. J., The Irish Diaspora in America, Bloomington, Indiana 1976Google Scholar. There are also many local and regional studies, for which see McCaffrey. See also Blessing, P. J., ‘Irish’, in Thernstrom, S. (ed.), Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, Mass. 1980 5–45Google Scholar, with short bibliography, and Burchell, R. A., ‘The historiography of the American Irish’, Immigrants and Minorities, i (1982), 281–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 This paper does not deal with Irish Protestant emigrants, though the subject is obviously an important one, especially in America. Chiefly by descent from the ‘Scotch Irish’ from Ulster in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘half of those (Americans) who claim Irish origin are Protestant’: Fallows, M. R., Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1979, 68Google Scholar. American Protestants of Irish descent are predominantly rural and southern and are on average less educationally and commercially successful than Irish Catholics, but as they have lost their Irishness, they do not form a separate community and are less easy to identify and describe. For other aspects of Protestant-Catholic conflict, see notes 13, 15 and 27.

4 There is a mass of information relating to American Catholicism in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols. (with Supplements), New York 1907–22; the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols. (with Supplements) New York 1966–79; and in the (American) Catholic Historical Review. For a short survey, see Gleason, P. (ed.), Catholicism in America, New York 1970Google Scholar. See also Ellis, J. T. and Trisco, R., A Guide to American Catholic History, Santa Barbara 1982Google Scholar. The most recent survey, James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: a history of the Roman Catholic community in the United States, New York 1981, rather underplays the role of the Irish in the American Church. On Australian Catholicism see the specialist detail of Footprints: Quarterly Journal of the Melbourne Historical Commission, Melbourne 1971Google Scholar. For a short survey see O’Farrell, P. F., The Catholic Church in Australia: a short history: 1988–1989, Melbourne 1968Google Scholar, and in its revised and expanded form, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: a history, Melbourne 1977.

5 E. Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review (henceforth cited as AHR), lxxvii (1972), 645Google Scholar.

6 I strongly dissent from the dubious Freudian interpretation of the devotionalism of the movement in Williams, P. W., Popular Religion in America: symbolic change and the modernisation process in historical perspective, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1980, 72–4Google Scholar, because I do not know what evidence could refute or confirm this kind of explanation.

7 For the continental background to this, see Chadwick, O., The Popes and European Revolution, Oxford 1981Google Scholar.

8 Holmes, J. D., The Triumph of the Holy See: a short history of the papacy in the nineteenth century, London and Shepherdstown 1978Google Scholar.

9 Lee, J., The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918, Dublin 1973 4Google Scholar.

10 Miller, D., ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, Journal of Social History, ix (1975), 81–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Connolly, S. J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland 1780–1845, Dublin and New York 1982Google Scholar (with a full bibliography).

12 Kennedy, R. E. Jr argues (The Irish: emigration, marriage, and fertility, Berkeley, California 1973)Google Scholar that a whole series of famines from 1817 weakened the fabric of Irish life: so that the Famine of the late 1840s only came to end a long-term process.

13 Bowen, D., The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70, Dublin 1978CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Semmel, B., The Methodist Revolution, New York 1973Google Scholar.

15 See Baker, S. E., ‘Orange and Green Belfast, 1832–1912’, in Dyos, H. J. and Wolff, Michael (eds.), The Victorian City: images and realities, 2 vols., London and Boston 1973, ii. 789–814Google Scholar; Budge, I. and O’Leary, C., Belfast: approach to crisis: a study of Belfast politics 1613–1970, London 1973Google Scholar.

16 Ward, W. R., Religion and Society in England 1790–1850, New York 1973 1Google Scholar.

17 Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, New York 1962 1Google Scholar.

18 Norman, E. R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1859–1873, London 1965 1Google Scholar.

19 McCartney, D., ‘The Church and the Fenians’, University Review, iv (1967), 206Google Scholar; Newsinger, J., ‘Revolution and Catholicism in Ireland, 1848–1923’, European Studies Review, ix (1979), 457–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See above, note 18.

21 See above, note 9.

22 Steele, E. D., ‘Cardinal Cullen and Irish nationality’, Irish Historical Studies, xix (1975). 239–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 P. Mac Suibhne, Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries, 5 vols., Naas 1961–177.

24 Larkin, E., The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878–1886, Philadelphia and Dublin 1975Google Scholar; idem, The Roman Catholic Church and the Plan of Campaign in Ireland 1886–1888, Cork 1978Google Scholar; idem, The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Pamell 1888–1891, Liverpool 1979Google Scholar. Also idem, ‘Church, state and nation in modern Ireland’, AHR, lxxx (1975), 1244–76Google Scholar.

25 Miller, D., Church, State and Nation in Ireland, 1898–1921, Dublin 1973Google Scholar.

26 O’Farrell, P., Ireland's English Question: Anglo-Irish relations, 1534–1970, London 1971Google Scholar.

27 For America, see Billington, R. A., The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: a study of the origins of American nativism, New York 1938Google Scholar; for Britain, see G. Best,’ Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in Robson, Robert (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: essays in honour of George Kitson Clark, London 1967 1–42Google Scholar; Norman, E. R., Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, London 1968Google Scholar; and Arnstein, W. L., Protestant versus Catholic in Mid- Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the nuns, Columbia, Missouri 1982Google Scholar. See above, notes 13 and 15, on Ireland itself, and also E. R. Norman (above, note 18).

28 But see Marty, M. E., ‘The Catholic ghetto and all the other ghettos’, Catholic Historical Review, lxviii (1982), 185–205Google Scholar, which argues that the ‘Catholic ghetto’ was itself a collection of ghettos in an American culture consisting of a ‘ghetto of ghettos’, including the liberal Protestant, one of the apparently ‘dominant’, but also in fact ghetto, culture.

29 Thus, for England, see J. D. Holmes, More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the nineteenth century, London and Shepherdstown 1978; for Australia, Molony, J. N., The Roman Mould of the Australian Catholic Church, Melbourne 1969Google Scholar.

30 Dolan, J. P., The Immigrant Church: Mew York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865, Baltimore 1975 2Google Scholar (with very useful footnote references). See also his Catholic Revivalism: the American experience 1830–1900, Notre Dame 1978. Also Clark, D. J., ‘The Irish Catholics: a postponed perspective’, in Miller, R. M. and Marzik, T. D. (eds.), Immigrants and Religion in Urban America, Philadelphia 1977 4–68Google Scholar.

31 Holmes, Triumph of the Holy See, 212. Also Shannon, American Irish, 48–50; Fallows, Irish Americans, 113; McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora, 140. There is a study I have not seen, Connable, A. and Silbefarb, E., Tigers of Tammany, New York 1967Google Scholar.

32 Smith, Timothy L., ‘Religion and ethnicity in America’, AHR, Ixxxiii (1978), 1115–85Google Scholar.

33 H. McLeod, ‘“Insecure, unknowledgeable, frightened”: the New York City immigrant and religion, c. 1900’ (unpublished paper read to the Conference on the Comparative Study of Immigration to the Americas, Warwick University, May 1981).

34 Handlin, O., The Uprooted, New York 1952Google Scholar. See also his still useful Boston's Immigrants 1795–1865, Cambridge, Mass. 1959Google Scholar.

35 Rudolph J. Vecoli, ‘Cult and occult in Italian-American culture: the persistence of a religious heritage’, in Miller and Marzik, Immigrants and Religion, 25–47. Also Humbert S. Nelli, ‘Italians’, in Thernstrom, Harvard Encyclopedia, 545–60.

36 Jos… ínkmajer, ‘The Bohemians of the United States’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, ii. 620–2; J. Cada, ‘Czechs in the U.S.’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, iv. 605–6. Also K. J. Freeze, ‘Czechs’, in Thernstrom, Harvard Encyclopedia, 261–72.

37 Lees, L. H., Exiles of Erin. Irish migrants in Victorian London, Manchester 1979Google Scholar. Also, ‘Patterns of lower-class life: Irish slum communities in nineteenth-century London’, in Thernstrom, S. and Sennett, Richard (eds.), Nineteenth Century Cities, New Haven 1969 3–85Google Scholar.

38 Lees, Exiles of Erin, 250.

39 M. Anderson, ‘Urban migration in Victorian Britain: problems of assimilation?’, unpublished paper presented to the Urban History Conference in Gottingen, 1982.

40 See my ‘Vulgar piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850–1860’, Durham University Journal, Ixxiv (1981), 15Google Scholar.

41 See the statistics in Lesourd, J. A., Les Catholiques dans la sociiti anglaise 1765–1865, 2 vols., Paris 1978, ii. 892–946Google Scholar. See also on London, McLeod, D. H., Class and Religion in the late Victorian City, London 1974Google Scholar; on Liverpool, Waller, P. J., Democracy and Sectarianism: a political and social history of Liverpool, 1868–1939, Liverpool 1981Google Scholar.

42 J. Bossy, ‘Postscript’, in Evennett, H. Outram, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, Cambridge 1968 1–42Google Scholar.

43 See, for example, the conflict between bishops and sisterhoods in Sister O’Donoghue, Mary Xaverius, Mother Vincent Whitty; woman and educator in a masculine society, Melbourne 1972Google Scholar.

44 Vaney, N., The Dual Tradition: Irish Catholics and French priests in New Zealand: the West Coast experience, MA diss., University of Canterbury, New Zealand 1977Google Scholar; Davis, R. P., Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics 1868–1922, Otago 1974Google Scholar. I am grateful to Rory Sweetman for these references.

45 Thus, if John Bossy is to be believed (The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, London 1975), English Catholicism by 1800 is to be understood as a very English variety of dissent: though Bossy argues that English Catholics gave greater attention to the Irish mission than is often thought (Ibid. 314–16).

46 ‘No important decisions on the Church in Ireland or its dependencies in America, Canada and Australia were made by Propaganda without reference to Cullen.’ Molony, Australian Catholic Church, 25ff. for this pattern in Australia.

47 Kiemen, M. C., O.F.M. and Wyse, Alexander, O.F.M. (eds.), United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: a Calendar, 2nd ser. viii, Washington, D.C. 1980 1Google Scholar. See also the good short bibliography on American Catholic history, 335–6.

48 See Healy, J., Maynooth College: its centenary history, New York 1895Google Scholar. Something of the international outreach of the largest of the Irish Orders, the Sisters of Mercy, can be gauged from Carroll, M. Austin, Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters of Mercy, 4 vols., New York 1881–1888Google Scholar. There is a great uncharted sea of nineteenth-century conventual biographies. In a class by itself is Murphy, J. N., Terra Incognita or the convents of the United Kingdom, London 1873Google Scholar.

49 Dollan, P., ‘Memories of fifty years ago’, The Mercal Cross, vi (1953)Google Scholar.

50 Fr Finbar Kenneally, O.F.M. (ed.), United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: a Calendar, 1st series, vols. i-vii, Washington D.C. 1966–77.

51 An extreme example of such Irish Catholic ‘lay’ Christianity, in predominantly Catholic Newfoundland, was the ‘Benevolent Irish Society’, which supported the local solely Catholic school, but which was so rigorously ‘non-denominational’ that it banned any distinctly Catholic teaching until the Irish bishop forced the issue in 1829. Howley, M. F., Ecclesiastical History of Newfoundland, Boston 1888 2Google Scholar. For the Irish in Victorian Canada, see Nolte, W. M., The Irish in Canada 1812–1867 (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland 1975)Google Scholar. I am grateful to the Rev. Dr Frederick Jones of Bournemouth for this reference. I have not seen the work myself.

62 E.g. Margaret M. Press, R.S.J., Julian Tenison Woods, Sydney 1979Google Scholar.

63 Ellis, J. T., ‘The U.S.A.’, in Aubert, Roger (ed.), The Church in a Secularised Society. The Christian centuries, V, New York and London 1978 2Google Scholar. For a summary see Ellis, , American Catholicism, Chicago 1969Google Scholar.

54 Cork 1947. Also idem, The Irish in Scotland, 1798–1845, Cork 1943. Also see McRoberts, D. (ed.), Modem Scottish Catholicism 1878–1978, Glasgow 1979Google Scholar; Walker, W. M., ‘Irish immigrants in Scotland: their priests, politics and parochial life’, Historical Journal, xv (1972), 649–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Juteopolis Dundee and its textile workers 1885–1923, Edinburgh 1979 1–47Google Scholar. Anson, P. F., Underground Catholicism in Scotland 1622–1878, Montrose 1970Google Scholar, dwells mainly on the native Scots tradition.

55 Leetham, C., Luigi Gentili. A sower for the second spring, London 1965Google Scholar.

56 Melbourne 1965.

57 O’Donoghue, F., The Bishop of Botany Bay. The life of John Bede Polding, Australia's fast Catholic archbishop, Sydney 1982Google Scholar.

58 McLay, Y. M., R.S.M., James Quinn: fast Catholic bishop of Brisbane, Armadale 1979Google Scholar.

59 For Australia, Fogarty, R., Catholic Education in Australia 1806–1950, 2 vols., Melbourne 1959Google Scholar; for America, Reilly, D. F., O.P., The School Controversy, 1891–1893, Washington, D.C. 1943Google Scholar.

60 McLay, James Quinn, 185–6.

61 Tuathaigh, M. A. G. O., ‘The Irish in nineteenth-century Britain: problems of integration’, Trans. Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xxxi (1981), 149–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with abundant footnote references.

62 ‘Irish Catholics have the best education and the best income in the country...’ Greeley, A. M., The American Catholic: a social portrait, New York 1977 6Google Scholar. On the other hand (Ibid.), ‘British Protestants get higher-prestige jobs than do Irish Catholics with the same education.’

63 Barron, M., ‘Intermediacy: conceptualization of Irish status in America’, Social Forces, xxvii (1949), 257–63Google Scholar; cited Fallows, Irish Americans, 60–1.

64 Cross, R. D., ‘The Irish’, in Higham, J. (ed.), Ethnic Leadership in America, Baltimore 1978 1–97Google Scholar.

65 See the splendid summary, ‘Irish reception in four communities’, in Fallows, 30–44.

66 McCaffrey, Irish Diaspora, 188.

67 See the brilliant impressionistic portrait, ‘The legend of Jim Curley’, in Shannon, American Irish, 200–32.

68 Fennell, Desmond (ed.), The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland, London 1968 1Google Scholar. Fennell puts this ‘myth of the Irish: a failure of American Catholic scholarship’ in proper historical perspective, by pointing out that many of these ‘Irish Catholic’ characteristics criticised are either generally Tridentine or generally Victorian, rather than specifically Irish.

69 Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation, 255.”Lawrence McCaffrey (Irish Diaspora, p. 178) also expresses the belief that the American Irish have sold their Irish inheritance for a mess of suspect American pottage.

70 Curran, R. E., S. J., Michael Augustine Corrigan and the Shaping of Conservative Catholicism in America, 1878–1902, New York 1978Google Scholar; ‘The McGlynn affair and the shaping of the New Conservatism in American Catholicism, 1866–1894’, Catholic Historical Review, lxvi (1980), 184–204Google Scholar.

71 McClelland, V. A., Cardinal Manning: his public life and influence 1865–1892, London 1962Google Scholar.

72 See his speech in the Report of the Nineteenth Eucharistic Congress, held at Westminster from 9th to 13th September, 1908, London 1909 5–50Google Scholar.

73 Ford, P., Cardinal Moran and the A.L.P.: a study in the encounter between Moran and Socialism 1890–1970, Melbourne 1966Google Scholar. For the more recent history see Truman, Tom, Catholic Action and Politics, London 1959Google Scholar.

74 Ellis, J. T., The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, 1834–1921, 2 vols., Milwaukee 1952Google Scholar.

75 This perspective informs the remarkable research on the Roman Catholic community in Manchester by G. P. Connolly. His work includes: ‘Catholicism in Manchester and Salford, 1770–1850; Le Chretien quelconque’, vols 1–3 (Manchester University Ph.D. thesis 1980); ‘The transubstantiation of myth: towards a new popular history of nineteenth-century Catholicism in England’, this Journal, xxxv (1984), 78–104Google Scholar; ‘Little Brother be at Peace: the Catholic priest as Holy Man in the nineteenth-century ghetto’, Studies in Church History, xix (1982)Google Scholar.