Paul Cullen (1803–78) was the outstanding figure in Irish history between the death of Daniel O’Connell and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell. Yet this powerful prelate remains an enigmatic figure. This new study of his career sets out to reveal the real nature of his achievements in putting his stamp so indelibly on the Irish Catholic Church. After several years spent in Rome, at a time when the papal states were under constant attack, Cullen was sent back to Ireland as Archbishop of Armagh and subsequently of Dublin. He had been charged with reorganizing the Catholic Church in his native country—a task which brought him into conflict with the authorities, many of his fellow-bishops and frequently nationalist opinion. The first Irishman to be made a cardinal, he played a leading part in securing the declaration of papal infallibility from the First Vatican Council (1870). Cardinal Cullen has not generally been well treated by historians. A brilliant scholar, whose intelligence was never underestimated by contemporaries, he has been dismissed as an ‘industrious mediocrity.’ A tough-minded, indefatigable political tactician, he has nevertheless been described as a world-denying spiritual leader. Cullen was the most devoted of papal servants, yet he was accused of ‘preferring the ... principles of Irish nationalism to the opinions of his friend Pius IX.’ Generations of Irish nationalist historians, however, have taken a different view, seeing the leading Irish churchman of the nineteenth century as a tool of the British government. In Paul Cardinal Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism, Desmond Bowen shows the true purpose of Cullen’s mission. An Ultramontanist of the most uncompromising type—‘a Roman of the Romans’—neither the aspirations of the Irish nationalists nor the concerns of British governments were of primary importance to him. The mind and accomplishments of this most reserved and complex of men can be understood only in his total dedication to the mission of the papacy as he interpreted it during a time of crisis for the Catholic Church throughout Europe.

Professor Kerr's scholarly and incisive analysis charts the souring of relations between Church and State and the destruction of Lord John Russell's dream of bringing a golden age to Ireland.

This book builds upon research on the role of Catholicism in creating and strengthening a global Irish identity, complementing existing scholarship by adding a ‘Roman perspective’. It assesses the direct agency of the Holy See, its role in the Irish collective imagination, and the extent and limitations of Irish influence over the Holy See’s policies and decisions. Revealing the centrality of the Holy See in the development of a series of missionary connections across the Atlantic world and Rome, the chapters in this collection consider the formation, causes and consequences of these networks both in Ireland and abroad. The book offers a long durée perspective, covering both the early modern and modern periods, to show how Irish Catholicism expanded across continental Europe and over the Atlantic across three centuries. It also offers new insights into the history of Irish migration, exploring the position of the Irish Catholic clergy in Atlantic communities of Irish migrants.

"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley

Drawing on an immense body of literature and research, Brian Jenkins analyses the forces that shaped mid-nineteenth century Irish nationalism in Ireland and North America as well as the role of the Roman Catholic Church. He outlines the relationship between newly arrived Irish Catholic immigrants and their hosts and the pivotal role of the church in maintaining a sense of exile, particularly among those who had fled the famine. Jenkins also explores the essential "Irishness" of the revolutionary movement and the reasons why it did not emerge in the two other "nations" of the United Kingdom, Scotland and Wales.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Over seven million people left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book is the first to put that huge population change in its religious context, by asking how the Irish Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches responded to mass emigration. Did they facilitate it, object to it, or limit it? Were the three Irish churches themelves changed by this demographic upheaval? Focusing on the effects of emigration on Ireland rather than its diaspora, and merging two of the most important phenomena in the story of modern Ireland – mass emigration and religious change – this study offers new insights into both nineteenth-century Irish history and historical migration studies in general. Its five thematic chapters lead to a conclusion that, on balance, emigration determined the churches’ fates to a far greater extent than the churches determined emigrants’ fates.