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.

After 1830 Catholicism in Britain and Ireland was practised and experienced within an increasingly secure Church that was able to build a national presence and public identity. With the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (Catholic Emancipation) in 1829 came civil rights for the United Kingdom's Catholics, which in turn gave Catholic organisations the opportunity to carve out a place in civil society within Britain and its empire. This Catholic revival saw both a strengthening of central authority structures in Rome, (creating a more unified transnational spiritual empire with the person of the Pope as its centre), and a reinvigoration at the local and popular level through intensified sacramental, devotional, and communal practices. After the 1840s, Catholics in Britain and Ireland not only had much in common as a consequence of the Church's global drive for renewal, but the development of a shared Catholic culture across the two islands was deepened by the large-scale migration from Ireland to many parts of Britain following the Great Famine of 1845. Yet at the same time as this push towards a degree of unity and uniformity occurred, there were forces which powerfully differentiated Catholicism on either side of the Irish Sea. Four very different religious configurations of religious majorities and minorities had evolved since the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Each had its own dynamic of faith and national identity and Catholicism had played a vital role in all of them, either as 'other' or, (in the case of Ireland), as the majority's 'self'. Identities of religion, nation, and empire, and the intersection between them, lie at the heart of this volume. They are unpacked in detail in thematic chapters which explore the shared Catholic identity that was built between 1830 and 1913 and the ways in which that identity was differentiated by social class, gender and, above all, nation. Taken together, these chapters show how Catholicism was integral to the history of the United Kingdom in this period.