In the spring of 1975, my good friend Lawrence McCaffrey, while enjoying a short holiday with our families in Brown County, Indiana, suggested that I should consider reprinting a number of my articles on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth century in the series he was then editing for the Arno Press on The Irish-Americans. He explained that he thought a reprint of a collection of my articles would prove very useful in arriving at a better understanding of that most interesting phenomenon, Irish Catholicism, which became so important a part of the religious landscape of not...

“Our poverty may appear contemptible, and even sordid,” wrote Patrick Curtis, the archbishop of Armagh, to his agent in Rome in 1825, “but it is not really so.” “We are, indeed, very poor, and I believe you know,” he explained, dignifying the twenty pounds he enclosed for the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome, “that my Mitre, though Primatial, is one of the poorest in Ireland: and yet the claims on us are increasing….”¹ Seventy-five years later, almost to the day, in 1900, his successor in the primatial see of Armagh, Michael Cardinal Logue, cleared over thirty thousand pounds...

“If you knew,” a Waterford priest wrote Tobias Kirby, the new rector of the Irish College in Rome, on January 3, 1850, “all there is to remedy, all the evil there is to check!”¹ “We have not had,” he further explained to Kirby, referring to the decline in clerical discipline after the famine, “a Conference here since the beginning of the distress, four years now probably—& but one retreat all that time & everyone doing & thinking & speaking as it listeth him, & no one to prevent it.” The occasion for this lament was the recent and encouraging news from Rome that Paul...

In the two previous chapters I examined the economic and social power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth century.¹ The economic power and influence of the Church in Ireland proved to be formidable. Indeed, the Church had become stronger and stronger during the nineteenth century by building an imposing establishment in terms of both plant and personnel. All this was done, moreover, in a country that had not experienced an industrial revolution, had exported some five million people, and still remained in 1914 one of the more economically backward areas in Western Europe. On...