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When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
from the church to the commune occurred. Brodman, Racine, and Mambretti, have recently suggested the ecclesiastical powers remained in control throughout the period. 65 In fact, while the institutional church was resistant to ceding its power, there is abundant evidence of the civic authorities exerting authority over charitable institutions in the fourteenth century while by 1450 they were appropriating all control over the hospitals and seeking to consolidate them into larger civic institutions. Evidence from the first half of the fifteenth century suggests an
others are neglected or excluded. This is certainly true in relation to the study of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Much scholarly work focuses on the assumed psychopathology of the perpetrator and on failures of individuals who were in positions of authority in the Church in relation to their handling of abuse complaints. I suggest that there is a need to expand such individualistic perspectives and examine how cultural, theological, organisational and institutional Church influences were integrated and assimilated into and in turn influenced the Irish
end of the 1960s, many congregations and orders were accepting (though perhaps not really celebrating) the critical faculties of their new entrants, proposing that her personal attributes would be necessary to address the needs of the secular age. These shifts over the 1940s to the 1960s demonstrate how understandings of the Modern Girl influenced the training of female religious in British congregations and orders. The institutional Church and female religious reacted to this discourse and took steps to restructure the lived experience of religious life to
Loy is doomed to frustration. This is, paradoxically, because he believes that he can remove her clothes (those being the external paraphernalia that are part and parcel of the true institutional Church or Churches that she, as the community of the redeemed, inhabits) or – and this is simply tradition as such: ‘Primo, secundo, tertio is a good play; and the old saying is, the third pays for all.’ On fainting as a recurrent motif in The Faerie Queene, see Green, ‘Swooning in the Faerie Queene’. Green observes its typically restorative character (126). 53 Cf. Book of
religious revival, or, as Knight put it, the ‘large outpouring of the spirit’, failed to materialise. 1 Knight’s response to cholera shows that institutional churches had much invested in special displays of public worship. For the devout, divine visitations and deliverances, and the accompanying days of fasting and thanksgiving, represented opportunities for evangelism and mission. It is true that some religious groups refused to participate because they did not recognise state authority in spiritual matters. For others
Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism is the only book-length study of lay Catholic women in modern Irish history. Focusing on the pivotal century from 1850 to 1950, it analyses the roles that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women played in the evolution of Irish Catholicism and thus the creation of modern Irish identities. This project demonstrates that in an age of Church growth and renewal stretching from the aftermath of the Great Famine through the early years of the Irish Republic, lay women were essential to all aspects of Catholic devotional life, including both home-based religion and public Catholic rituals. It also reveals that women, by rejecting, negotiating, and reworking Church dictates, complicated Church and clerical authority. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism re-evaluates the relationship between the institutional Church, the clergy, and women, positioning lay Catholic women as central actors in the making of modern Ireland. It also contests views that the increasing power of the Catholic Church caused a uniform decline in Irish women’s status after the Great Famine of the 1840s, revealing that middle-class, working-class, and rural poor lay women fought with their priests, dominated household religion, and led parish rituals, thus proving integral to the development of a modern Irish Catholic ethos and culture.
Chapter one, which examines the recruitment of the foot-soldiers of the institutional Church, draws attention to the sheer variety of clergy who peopled the Church in the British world in the pre-1860 period. The chapter highlights common dynamics in the development of the colonial clerical profession in the three chosen case studies. We will see that the aims of churchmen from across the Church party spectrum were frustrated by a persistent set of recruitment problems back in Britain—the major problem being that was no centralised or coordinated system for recruiting clergy. The first part of the chapter surveys the range of government organisations, voluntary groups and private individuals that played a part in recruitment; the second half provides a detailed examination of the clergy themselves. A number of questions about the recruitment, training, education and social and ethnic backgrounds of the clergy are considered. The recruitment of clergy shows that power was far from being centralised in the colonial Church: this was an institution that was made up a variety of networks and connections; it was also one that allowed a range of actors to have a hand in finding the men who would staff and run the colonial Church.
broaden our understanding of how the institutional Church was transformed from a privileged establishment into what was ostensibly a great voluntary association. 12 While there is a growing literature on how the Church and individual clergymen negotiated this dramatic shift, 13 some of the implications of the change of status have not been fully examined. Here we will see how the
general criticism of ecclesiastical institutions' inability or unwillingness to meet the charitable demands of these communities. While the universal desire for legitimization of hospital foundations by ecclesiastical authority indicates the still active perception of the all-powerful institutional church, the specifications for lay control by founders indicates the suspicion and declining respect for this institution's actual ability to provide these social services. Still, once hospitals were founded and approved they tended to follow a method of administration that