The Irish Catholic Diaspora

Figures

Figure 1. Students at Irish colleges for seculars, c.1788.

Figure 2. Students at Irish colleges for seculars, by status, c.1788.

Acknowledgements

This volume is the fruit of the happiest and most intellectually stimulating and humanly uplifting of collaborations. It is my honour and my privilege to acknowledge the institutions and persons to whom it owes its existence as a contribution to an area of research in which there is still a lot of ground to explore. As Irish missionary presence across the globe dwindles, research into the manifold aspects of its deployment across time and space is attracting more and more scholars keen to travel and explore newly available archives.

I wish to express my gratitude for the institutional and financial support provided by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the GIS EIRE, the ERIBIA research group at my university, the University of Caen Normandy which hosted the conference and supported this publication, my Irish Studies colleagues in Caen and notably Bertrand Cardin, and my colleague in Lille Catherine Maignant who is a constant source of support and encouragement. It was Catherine who introduced me to Eamon Maher, my colleague and friend whose energy is matched by his discernment and constant good humour and who makes academic collaborations a celebration.

Speaking of working joyfully brings to mind Cardinal Antonio Tagle, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples at the Vatican, who had graced our conference with his blessing and with a video testimony about his childhood in the Philippines surrounded with Irish missionaries. ‘I thought God was Irish’, he beamed.

I am very grateful to Anthony Mason from Peter Lang Oxford for turning this collaboration into a book we can hold in our hands, and to Eamon Maher, General Editor of the series, for his expert input and advice on the project. And from the depths of my heart, I also thank the contributors of this volume: Thomas O’Connor, Mícheál Mac Craith, Brian Mac Cuarta, Liam Chambers, Eamon Maher, Tim McMahon, Dermot Keogh, Thérèse Osborne, Bertrand Cardin, Jérôme aan de Wiel ←ix | x→and Ciarán Reilly. I also thank Colin Barr for his advice on the volume. It has been a joy to engage, converse, exchange views and texts. I look forward to more such collaborations, through books and in all sorts of Irish diasporic spaces.

Introduction

Grahamstown, renamed Makhanda, is a town in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa which is associated with British military presence in the nineteenth century, with British-modelled schools, a prestigious university giving the town its intellectual vibrancy and some forty church spires. Hence, it has been nicknamed ‘Oxford in the Bush’ and ‘the City of the Saints’. Stepping out of the heat and of the dazzling sunlight reflected on the bright façades, out of the way of humans and now also animals busying themselves down the main street, I walk into the Observatory Museum. Am I in for an immersive educational experience in optics or astronomy?

My eye is caught by a display panel dedicated to James David Ricards (1828–93). Born in Wexford, he had studied at St Peter’s College, Wexford, then at St Patrick’s, Maynooth, where he trained for the priesthood before receiving a Doctorate in Divinity a few years later. He came to the Cape Colony in 1849 to serve the Catholic Church on the Eastern Frontier and was ordained in Grahamstown in January 1850. He served as a schoolmaster, a chaplain to the forces and an editor of The Colonist, the first Catholic weekly published in South Africa. He was consecrated Bishop on 18 June 1871 in St Patrick’s Church, Grahamstown. He was remembered as a powerful intellectual for his broad interests and his skills as a lecturer and educationist; he was the founder of South Africa’s best Catholic school (St Aidan’s – or Ricards School – in Grahamstown). In addition, he was the one who introduced the Jesuits, Marists, Dominicans, Trappists and Sisters of Nazareth to South Africa. ‘Citizens of Grahamstown also knew this versatile man as a youth club organizer, producer of plays and popular orator. All this, in addition to his arduous parochial duties.’¹

←1 | 2→This encounter was to open a door onto a new world for me in my research career. I had just published the first edition of my Histoire de l’Irlande de 1912 à nos jours, I was at a crossroads in my personal life, and my family in South Africa thought I should come and pay them a long-overdue visit. I had never met my great-aunt Shirley in Grahamstown, the wife of the late Rhodes University academic Don Maclennan (1929–2009), lecturer in English and Irish literature and published poet. Family differences resulted in an irreparable life regret: never to have met him, especially as we came very close in 2000 when we were both in Trinity College Dublin, he chatting with Seamus Heaney in the Common Room, and I teaching French in the Arts Building.

The conference to which this new network of French, Irish, Canadian and American historians and Irish Studies scholars were assembled was due to be held in May 2020, but then Covid hit, forcing us to have an online event in June 2021. Even as I was sitting alone in the lecture theatre during a few dark rainy summer days in Caen, my screen was filled with images of my colleagues delivering absorbing talks and engaging in sometimes animated discussions – the one surrounding French Jansenism as opposed to ←2 | 3→British Victorianism as an explanatory factor for the rigorist spirituality of Irish seminaries springs to mind in particular.

Sourcing the circulation, settlement and influence of the Irish religious groups in continental Europe, the Americas, Australia and South Africa, the volume starts in Lisbon in the sixteenth century. How did Lisbon become the hub of Irish trade and the seat of the Irish Catholic Church in exile after the Reformation? Why had Irish clerical traffic moved from Rome to Lisbon? How did that connection develop? Thomas O’Connor explains the interconnections between trade and religious networks, working from archives he consulted in Ireland, London and Portugal. Who came first: clerics or tradesmen? How did they serve one another? How were the Irish regarded in Lisbon? How did they integrate? What role did Lisbon play in the survival of Irish ecclesial structures post-Reformation? It is a fascinating story further enlivened by anecdotes. Mícheál Mac Craith OFM follows the Irish college movement in early modern Europe to the aftermath of the Elizabethan conquest and the destruction of religious houses, including the Franciscan friary in Donegal. How did the Donegal Franciscans end up in Leuven, and from there journey on to found colleges in Prague and Rome? How were they supported? This chapter not only traces the journey of the Irish Franciscans to their continental exilic destinations but also shows what doctrinal, artistic and intellectual legacies they left. Fr Mac Craith, being a scholar of Irish, draws attention to four pioneering contributions to the Irish language and to Church and secular historiography ←3 | 4→that those Irish Franciscans made as a result of their relocation to central Europe. Whenever we hear the words ‘Immaculate Conception’, we will remember those displaced Donegal Franciscans and their exilic destiny.

The collection stays in France for a while before crossing the Atlantic. The question of the influence of French spirituality on the Irish Catholic seminaries (through French teachers) is still debated by historians today, as evidenced during exchanges at the conference itself. Eamon Maher traces the Jansenist influence of French Catholic authors on the writings of Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984) in the area of sexuality. Was the negative view of sexuality perpetuated for so long in Ireland by the Church and by literature a product of French Jansenism or of Victorian puritanism? Eamon Maher, ←4 | 5→who is exceptionally well read across French and Irish literature, provides us with fresh insights on this point by comparing the Irish writer with his Franco-American contemporary, Julien Green, a convert to Catholicism who never really ridded himself of his Episcopalian roots, and with the Nobel Laureate François Mauriac.

At this point, we leave modern and revolutionary Europe and its Irish exiles on the continent and enter the age of the ‘Irish missionary movement’ which begins, in its ‘missionary’ description, in the nineteenth century and comes to deploy itself across the British Empire. Timothy McMahon traces Irish missionaries who joined the Jesuits and the Société des Missions Africaines (SMA) and were posted to Australia and Africa. What did they do there? To what extent did their Irish identity and the Irishness of their Catholic traditions dissolve alongside English Jesuits and French missionaries? Did they seek to perpetuate Ireland’s ‘spiritual empire’, a concept borrowed from Colin Barr’s magisterial Ireland’s Empire² and interrogated by several contributors? A few essays now follow the changing contours of Irish missionaries’ self-perception as Catholics and Empire Irishmen and women as they come to serve Catholic communities in the British Empire.