History
The 'absenting of the bishop of Armagh' has generally been regarded by scholars as a significant, even pivotal, event in Ireland's early modern religious history. The 'absenting of the bishop of Armagh', as Lord Deputy Croft euphemistically described Archbishop George Dowdall's flight, was preceded, and immediately precipitated, by a meeting between the two men. The surviving notice of their interview, an instruction from Croft to his servant, Thomas Wood, to brief the English privy council on their deliberations, provoked a dramatic response from Dowdall. Dowdall boldly asserted his faith in traditional eucharistic doctrine and confirmed his loyalty to the viceroy. Dr Richard Smyth's treatises were written only a few short years before 'Fides priscorum' at a time when traditional eucharistic doctrine was upheld by Henry VIII and the English nobility who had 'fully and perfectly agreed' to its establishment 'by act of parliament'.
This chapter outlines how Frederick Lucas's social Catholicism led him to identify with the Irish poor as fellow members of the body of Christ, and how he tried to embody that fellowship. Lucas founding editor of the Tablet, was recalled as sacrificing himself for the Irish poor, opposing Castle bishops and their place-hunting lay proteges. Lucas remained in contact with Carlyle for some years after his conversion, and by introducing Young Ireland intellectuals such as Charles Gavan Duffy to the sage contributed to Carlylean influence on their thought. Under the influence of Thomas Carlyle, Lucas turned against the 'pig philosophy' of political economy. The prestige and influence of the English Catholic revival was a source of strength to Irish Catholicism, while English Catholic apologists often cited Irish popular Catholicism as shaming British unbelief.
Modern Irish poetry in English has been dominated by two major figures: both Nobel Prize winners, recognised as the leading practitioners of their time. The first, W. B. Yeats, was a southern Irish Protestant; the second, Seamus Heaney, is a Northern Irish Catholic. So the first notable reflection is that each of them belonged to the ideological (or cultural or religious) minority within their political state. The meaning then of 'Irish identity', or even of the compound 'Catholic-Christian', is far from identical for the two of them. There are many contemporary Irish poets in whom the terminology and/or spirit of the Catholic/Christian is central, in both the Irish and English languages. In the early part of the twentieth century some Christian thinking evolved in a way that addressed the same problems as the secular philosophies of the earlier century, which had been thought to have superseded Christianity.
This chapter presents a case study of Denis Stanislaus Henry. Henry's remarks show that at the early stage in his career he subscribed to the broader, more inclusive Irish unionism of Sir Edward Carson rather than the narrower sectarian-based unionism of the north. The Irish News described Henry as 'one of that weird class of creatures known as an Irish Catholic Unionist' whose stance would be anathema to Catholics and whose religion would arouse the worst sectarian feeling among Protestants. Henry's name was largely forgotten until the late 1960s when, in response to civil rights claims of anti-Catholic discrimination, unionist propagandists trumpeted that the chief justice of Northern Ireland had been a Catholic. Yet attempts to broaden unionism beyond its traditional Protestant base had little success in the divided state after his death and it was not until 1998 that another Catholic unionist was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly.
In his 1985, survey entitled The Irish Catholic Experience, Patrick J. Corish points to 'the complexity of the patterns of culture in which Christianity existed in Ireland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While noting that the source material allows little more than an impressionistic survey of what was distinctive about the Christian religion inter hibernicos as against its equivalent inter anglicos. This chapter focuses on collections of devotional material in late medieval Ireland, which, for the most part, can be found in manuscripts which also contain a great deal of miscellaneous material of a non-religious nature. It considers what devotional interests both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Norman actually shared in common as part of a wider late medieval Catholic culture. The hagiographical work of Christ's passion would be the shared religious culture of both communities leading to the construction of a common Catholic identity in the seventeenth century.
This chapter examines Eugene Esmonde's family tradition of service in terms of the wider phenomenon of Irish Catholic loyalty. The Esmonde family's history certainly demonstrates that adaptation and evolution to the changing coordinates of Anglo-Irish relations was an essential feature of elite Catholic politics. Loyalty to the crown was deeply ingrained in the Esmonde family's history. After all, the Esmondes claimed descent from Sir Geoffrey Esmonde, who was one of the thirty knights who landed with Robert Fitzstephen in Wexford in 1169. His descendants settled in the southern Barony of Forth, built Johnstown Castle and formed part of the close-knit Old English community which developed in Co. Wexford. The children of John Esmonde who came to adulthood in the early decades of the nineteenth century embodied the transitional circumstances of the Irish Catholic aristocracy at that time.
In this chapter, the author provides a historic overview of Christian Ireland in the early middle ages. He then evokes some salient features of early Irish Christianity, both in its material and in its spiritual aspects. The author examines both the universal Catholic mould and the distinctively Gaelic stamp of early Irish Christianity. He concludes by looking at some of the ways in which it has dealt with the pre-Christian past and contributed to shaping the future. The interaction of Gaelic and Catholic in the early middle ages has to be seen in the context of a dynamic history following the Celticisation of Ireland and the Romanisation of western Britain. Historically, Irish penitentials were to be of special significance, as they were of crucial importance for the development of the practice of penance in the middle ages.
In the historiography of early seventeenth-century Ireland the Ulster plantation has assumed a paradigmatic role. Military defeat in 1603 was followed by the flight of the earls and expropriation of the lands of the Catholic Irish and colonisation by Protestant Scots and English. There is certainly contemporary evidence to support this sort of view of seventeenth-century Ulster. From the perspective of the native Irish, the Annals of the Four Masters, written in the 1630s, characterised the Ulster plantation. The scheme that emerged for the lands escheated from the principal Gaelic lords in Ulster envisaged the former lords would be replaced with Protestant settler landlords. Catholicism in the Ulster plantation was not a simple monolithic force to be equated with dispossession, exclusion and the survival of late medieval traditional belief awaiting modernisation by Tridentine reform.
Henry Edward Manning, son of a governor of the Bank of England, graduate of Harrow and Oxford, ended his life being denounced for home rule politics and socialistic economics. Manning expected to 'sink to the bottom and disappear' when he resigned as Anglican archdeacon of Chichester in 1850 before converting to Catholicism. But in 1865, the pope personally intervened to appoint him archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic Church in England, and in 1875 created him a cardinal. Manning's increasing radicalism arguably constitutes a 'greening', the application to England of insights gleaned from his engagement with Ireland. His pamphlet Ireland: A Letter to Earl Grey adopted politically radical ideas in response to Irish conditions. This chapter offers a preliminary sketch of how in the service of a new Irish Catholic identity his economics radicalised, beginning with the pamphlet The Dignity and Rights of Labour.
In a short biographical sketch of the distinguished Irish Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon published in Studies in 1943, James Corboy concluded his essay with a bleak assessment of life on the Jesuit mission to Ireland in 1630. Corboy asserted that after a long literary career on the continent, Fitzsimon returned from exile to Dublin where he was so harassed by persecution that he had no opportunity to write. Tropes of exile, persecution and hardships endured by witnesses for the true faith were recurring themes in Irish historical writing. Fitzsimon's writings project a sense of identity that is self-confidently and assertively Catholic. The historical writings of Edmund Hogan, Myles Ronan, Timothy Corcoran, Corboy and Robin Dudley Edwards, although grounded in meticulous archival research, all have a common rhetorical thread: they are faith narratives.