Abstracts

Thomas O’Connor

Lisbon and the internationalisation of the Irish Church, 1560-1615

From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the ancien régime, the city of Lisbon played a significant role in the shaping and maintenance of Ireland’s early modern diaspora and in the internationalisation of its ecclesiastical relations. The roots of this agency lie in human and mercantile exchanges, particularly the lively commerce between Munster ports and the Portuguese capital. Access to Lisbon facilitated mobility, not just between Irish ecclesiastics and Lisbon but also from Ireland, through Lisbon to Madrid, Rome and beyond. From the mid sixteenth century, there was a small, Irish group in Lisbon, one that grew over the following two centuries to support several religious institutions and a web of social and commercial networks that stretched over most of Ireland and the Portuguese empire. This chapter looks at the Irish presence in the mid-sixteenth century Lisbon; it sketches the city’s role in the maintenance of the Irish mission after 1560 and concludes with a look at how Irish institutions emerged in the city after 1590.

Mícheál Mac Craith OFM

Leuven, the new Donegal, twinned with Prague and Rome

Donatus Mooney was appointed first guardian of St. Anthony’s Irish Franciscan College, Leuven in 1607. As provincial in 1618, he described this foundation as the one remedy for saving the province. Fondly remembering his novitiate days in Donegal, he lamented that friary’s destruction. ‘But through God’s providence, Philip III, King of Spain, has granted the Irish friars of the College of St. Anthony, at Louvain, with a certain allowance for our support.’ In addition to their primary role of training Franciscan priests, the Leuven friars undertook research in Irish hagiography and the production of catechetical works in the vernacular. This hagiographical project, brought to fruition in Leuven, had already been initiated in Donegal’s house of refuge after the convent's destruction. Both religiously and intellectually Leuven was Donegal redivivus. Two more colleges were founded in Rome (1625) and Prague (1629). All three institutions were ardent advocates of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a cause equally championed by the Hapsburg dynasty and the Franciscan order. John Duns Scotus, the first promoter of this doctrine, was held, however erroneously, to be of Irish origin, thus giving the Irish friars patriotic as well as religious motives for engaging with Scotism. St. Isidore’s in Rome became the leading European centre for Scotistic studies in the 17th century, while the college in Prague, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, introduced Scotism to central Europe. 

Alison Forrestal

Searching for the Irish in the Congregation of the Mission, 1625-60

Under the leadership of their founding superior general, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarists (or Congregation of the Mission) became major innovators in the provision of formal missions, charitable welfare, and the formation of clergy, and one of the principal clerical groupings in the French Catholic Church during the seventeenth century. In this paper, I will briefly present aspects of the involvement of Irish migrant clerics in this most significant of institutional actors in the dévot reform movement. The paper will reverse the traditional scholarly pre-occupation with the return of a few Irish Lazarists to Ireland in the 1640s in favour of exploring the assimilation of Irishmen into the Congregation in France, from the year that the first of these entered (1638) to the time of de Paul’s death and the Restoration (1660).

Liam Chambers

Irish colleges, students and migration to France, 1691-1789

Ian McBride has described the Irish colleges on the continent as ‘this extraordinary life-support system’ which explains, in part, the ‘vitality’ of Irish Catholicism in the eighteenth century. This paper examines the history of the Irish college network in France from the Treaty of Limerick to the eve of the French Revolution, laying out the nature and development of the colleges, as well as their relationship with the Irish mission and student mobility from Ireland. The paper examines the challenges faced by the colleges and their students, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century as the context within which the Irish Catholic student mobility changed and the position of the colleges became more precarious as a result. Finally, the paper will comment on the state of research on the subject and the possibilities for further investigation.

Grace Neville

‘De jour en jour’: Glimpses of the Lives of Irish students in the Schools and Colleges of Nineteenth Century France

What do we know about the lives of the many Irish students in the schools and colleges of nineteenth century France? In some cases we know their names and where in Ireland they came from, but what do we know about how they spent their time or what they thought about their studies and the world in which they found themselves? This paper aims to piece together a fuller picture of their lives from fleeting references in sources including the Archives Nationales, Paris and the Bibliothèque du College des Irlandais, Paris.

Timothy McMahon

‘Ireland’s Empire’ in the Age of New Imperialism: Catholic Missions Shaping the Nation

As scholars including Colin Barr and Fr. Oliver Rafferty, S.J., have demonstrated, Irish missionaries played a critical role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in shaping the emergence of dioceses throughout the world, building Catholic infrastructures within the British Empire. Essential to that effort, however, were messages transmitted back to Ireland by missionaries whose experiences shaped popular sensibilities about Ireland’s place in two global empires—that of Britain and that of Rome. Rather than highlighting the metropolitan structures built in the imperial sphere, my intention is to address the messages that missionaries sent home about what they encountered in the field through a comparison of two distinct mission enterprises: that of the Society of Jesus in the Australian colonies, which ministered primarily to settler communities; and that of the Society of African Missions, a French-based missionary order that opened a school in Cork, preparing young men for missions among indigenous communities in west Africa and Egypt. These very different enterprises informed all classes of Irish men and women about the wider world, offering them a sense of their place as Europeans distinct from the British while Irish nationalists at home engaged in campaigns for independence and then built an independent state.

Jérôme aan de Wiel

Ireland's post-war humanitarian aid to Europe, 1945-1950; Catholic networking and missionary activities in action

This paper explores Catholic Ireland's aid to devastated postwar Europe between 1945 and 1950, an event quasi unknown in Ireland or continental Europe today. And yet, masses of unearthed archives show that Irish humanitarian aid extended from Normandy all the way to the streets of Tirana and Greek islands. The memory of the Great Irish Famine of 1845 (the hundredth anniversary in 1945) and European aid played a role in Ireland's collective response to the postwar catastrophe in Europe. This paper throws light on the efforts of the Irish Catholic Church, notably Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin, in organising relief operations, using a transnational Catholic network in Europe and the USA. Relations between the Irish government and the Vatican are explored, notably concerning the government's cooperation with the International Red Cross located in Calvinist Geneva. There was some relief competition between denominations in post-war Europe as some countries wished to return to their Christian roots after the horrors of Fascism and Nazism. Some European clergymen believed that Ireland's humanitarian aid was a reflection or renewal of Ireland's missionary efforts on the continent during past centuries.

Dermot Keogh

Irish missionaries and the Catholic Church during the civilian military dictatorship in Argentina, 1976-1983

The worldwide Papal appeal for missionaries to work in Latin America in the 1960s was answered generously by the Catholic Church in Ireland. The Pallottines and Passionists who had ministered since the late nineteenth century in that country were joined in the ‘60s and ‘70s by other orders of Irish priests, nuns and brothers who worked as teachers and in parishes but now beyond the traditional ministering to Irish Argentines. Following the military coup d’etat in March 1976, many churchmen and women implementing the papal social teaching became people of interest for the new government and a number were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by agents of the state in a six-year campaign of systematic repression.  This paper will examine the murder of five Pallottines on 4 July 1976, the killing of the Bishop of La Rioja, Enrique Angelelli, on 4 August 1976 and, on 11 October 1976, the kidnapping, torture and imprisonment of Fr. Patrick Rice and the catechist, Fátima Cabrera in the context of the successful campaign by Ambassador Wilfred Lennon and Justin Harman to secure their release. This paper will also make reference to the role of the Irish priest, Kevin Mullen, who worked at the nunciature and was outspoken in his denunciation of human rights’ abuses during his posting to Buenos Aires.

Alexandra Slaby

Cardinal Owen McCann, son of Ireland and South Africa’s first Prince of the Church

When the Catholic hierarchy was established in 1951, the Catholic Church had an institutional platform from which to begin to undermine the Apartheid regime. Alexandra Slaby shows the under-acknowledged contribution of Owen McCann (1907-1994), archbishop of Cape Town and South Africa’s first cardinal, on the basis of his hitherto unopened archives at the Archdiocese of Cape Town. McCann was born to an Irish father and Australian mother. He is a product of the Irish missionaries – the Irish Dominicans and Irish Marist brothers. As chairman of the South African Bishops’ Conference and cardinal, his denunciation of Apartheid as violating the Christian recognition of the equal dignity of all human beings echoed from the archdiocese to parishes across the country, the Parliament, the government, the Vatican, and his relatives and clerical correspondents all over the English-speaking world.

Ciaran Reilly

Irish missionaries and the Apartheid struggle in South Africa

Arriving in South Africa in 1976, Fr Edward Lennon’s missionary career commenced in an area known as ‘Zone 14’ in Sebokeng, part of the Vaal triangle, near Johannesburg. Here, in what a colleague described as ‘the end of the earth’, Lennon saw at first-hand the racial discrimination and social injustice that characterised Apartheid South Africa. Recalling these times, Lennon notes that ‘brutality was the order of the day. Our commitment was to be there to be present and to support. We spent a lot of time burying people, individual burials and mass burials. These were very emotionally draining experiences for families, for friends and for us who were close to so many who died’. Fr Lennon’s is just one of the many oral testimonies recorded in 2019, which shed light on the role of Irish missionaries during the Apartheid period. Using these oral histories, this paper examines the role of Irish missionaries in South Africa during the years of Apartheid and examines the impact and legacy of their work. Active participants in the Anti-apartheid struggle, their involvement ranged from political involvement to education, and included health and other forms of community engagement.

Eamon Maher

Sins of the Flesh: Tracing a Filiation between France and Ireland

For centuries, Ireland looked to France as an ally in the struggle against British rule and as a Catholic country with which it shared many principles and preoccupations. In addition, numerous Irish writers lived in France for protracted periods and found they could express views there that were not easily articulated in Ireland. Because of their duty as creative artists to portray the human condition in as truthful a manner as possible, Irish novelists in the 20th century often found themselves at variance with the teachings of the powerful Catholic Church, especially when it came to their depictions of sexuality. Many had their novels banned for containing material that was perceived as posing a danger to public morality and some were forced to flee the country to make a living abroad. Eamon Maher discusses how Liam O’Flaherty (1896-1984) exhibited a similar sensibility to Julien Green (1900-1998) in his negative depiction of human sexuality. Whereas the Nobel Laureate François Mauriac was a more obvious source of inspiration for Irish writers, Green’s Jansenism is also seen to a high degree in O’Flaherty’s fiction, particularly The Puritan (1931). The two writers shared enough preoccupations to allow us at the very least to trace a filiation.

Bertrand Cardin

The Gospel of Faith, Hope and Charity according to Colum McCann

Colum McCann's writing has its finger on the pulse of our contemporaries: it deals with the decline of Christian belief, or the challenge to the existence of a God who does not command any fear or respect any more. His texts even relate irreligious attitudes and blasphemous remarks. However, while many Irish writers violently settle their scores with the Catholic Church through their fiction, Colum McCann also highlights the good done by this institution, particularly in these troubled times. In 2010, when his novel Let the Great World Spin had just come out, he said: “Because of what happened with the Catholic Church and the new stories about paedophilia, I wanted to embrace the generosity, the decency that is actually embedded in the faith and in the Church”. 'Faith' is a recurrent theme in McCann’s interviews and written work. He admits: “A lot of my characters deal with faith in one way or another. I suppose I am obsessed by faith. I do have faith, but I disguise it in all sorts of ways”. Not only does the word – but also the notion of faith permeate his work, like the other theological virtues, hope and charity.