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The Roman Catholic Mission to the Irish in London, 1840–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Sheridan Gilley
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Extract

The English Catholic Church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals. The English Catholic squire resembled his heretical neighbours both in their virtues and their vices; and his exclusion from English public life had preserved in him the insular prejudice of a simpler age. Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety shut him off from the Irish poor, and created the distinctions which a common creed might alone hope to overcome.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , October 1969 , pp. 123 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1969

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References

1. Brady, Maziere W.: Annals of the Catholic Hierarchy in England and Scotland (London, 1877), pp. 163, 169.Google Scholar

2. Sinclair, Robert: East London (London, 1950), p. 227.Google Scholar George, Dorothy: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1965), esp. pp. 118–31, 236-8.Google Scholar

3. Kerr, B. M.: “Irish Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1800-1838”, Irish Historical Studies 3 (1942-3), p. 365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Bishop Poynter's evidence before the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis, P.P. 1816, 4, p. 302.

5. Mendicity Society, Appendices 7 & 8, in Report to the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom, P.P. 1826-7, 5, pp. 802-13.

6. Report from Select Committees on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants, P.P. 1821, iv; on the Laws Relating to Irish and Scotch Vagrants, P.P. 1828, 4; on Irish Vagrants, 1833, 16; Appendix G to the Reports of the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, P.P. 1836, 34. Also the Select Committee on Emigration, op. cit. p. 7, on Ireland, “whose population, unless some other outlet be opened to them, must shortly fill up every vacuum created in England or Scotland, and reduce the labouring classes to a uniform state of degradation and misery”.

7. The 1841 and 1851 Census returns show an Irish born population of 75,000 and 109,000; representing an estimated influx in the decade of 46,000. Shannon, H. A.: “Migration and Growth of London 1841-1891”, Economic History Review 5 (1934), p. 81.Google Scholar The size of the London-born Catholic population can only be guessed; the Church's own estimates, computed by parish census, or by multiplying its remarkably high baptismal figures by 30, are given below. Uniformly impressive totals are cited in the eighteenth century, and in the 1820s: they indicate a nominally Catholic Cockney population of considerable size.

8. Of those churches which submitted returns, 35,584. I estimate at about 4,000 worshippers the congregations of those churches which did not submit complete returns. Population Census: Religious Worship England and Wales: Accounts and Papers Vol. 89, 1852-53; on London, pp. 3-9; also Rambler articles on the religious census, Vol. I, New Series 1854, pp. 183-90, 257-80, 356-75.

9. On London Catholicism in the 18th Century, and on the Embassy Chapels in particular, see Beales, A. C. F., The Beginnings of Elementary Education in England in the Second Spring, Dublin Review (October, 1939), Vol. 205, pp. 284, 309.Google Scholar Harting, Johanna H.: Catholic London Missions, London, 1903;Google Scholar History of the Sardinian Chapel, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1905;Google Scholar Kelly, Bernard W.: Historical Notes on English Catholic Missions, London, 1907;Google Scholar Newton, Douglas: Catholic London, London, 1950;Google Scholar Ward,, Bernard: The Dawn of the Catholic Revival 1701 to 1803, London, 1909.Google Scholar

10. Father A. M. Baldacconi. On his warfare with the Middlesex Magistrates, Tablet 23/7/1840 to 19/9/1840.

11. Jauch to Wiseman, Archives of the Archbishop of Westminster (henceforward cited as A.A.W.), 29/9/1847.

12. Llewellyn Smith, Hubert: The History of East London, London, 1939, p. 163.Google Scholar

13. “Catholic Italian Schools”, Hatton Wall: Tablet, 6/5/1843.

14. Harting, op. cit., p. 240.

15. Ibid., pp. 225-39

16. Ibid., pp. 257-8. On another French foundation at Hammersmith, see pp. 247-8, 263. Two churches — at Tottenham and Bermondsey — were built by the Baroness de Montesquieu.

17. Status Districtus Londonensis, A.A.W., 1842, p. 63.

18. Bogan, Canon Bernard: The Great Link: a History of St. George's, Southward 1786: 1848: 1948, London, 1948, pp. 172, 293.Google Scholar

19. Cf. History of mission in Tablet, 24/4/1858.

20. Tablet, 8/1/1843, 5/8/1843, 12/8/1843.

21. Both Kelly and Moore were publicists of genius; between 1840 and 1860, their letters appeared almost weekly in the Catholic press. Kelly has also left a voluminous body of correspondence in the Westminster Archives; and though his census has not survived, he submitted his general conclusions to Wiseman.

22. “We are pleased to learn that the Rev. Mr. O'Moore has been liberated from prison, and that Mass is now said at this mission every Sunday as usual”. Tablet, 22/4/1843.

23. On a missionary priest: “he prefers working among the poor, and has some means of his own which he can lay out, if he wishes, to great advantage, in Saffron Hill”. John Kyne to Wiseman, W.A.A., 1855.

24. Cf. “Masses, Mendicancy and Mystification” in McCarthy, Michael: Priests and People in Ireland, Dublin, 1902, pp. 118-214.

25. As Elizabeth Bowden built the church of St. Thomas of Canterbury for the Irish market gardeners of Fulham Fields.

26. Bogan, op. cit., pp. 103-4.

27. Griffiths to the Rector of the English College in Rome, 26/9/1842, A.A.W. He continues: “the Chapel as well as a Chapel House are supported only by monies received in the Chapel … rent, taxes, rates of the Chapel as well as a Chapel House are to be paid from the same source; … there are no tithes, no fees, but what are entirely voluntary, and these are very small”.

28. Tablet, 6/1/1844.

29. Bishop William Ullathorne, of Birmingham.

30. Tablet, loc. cit.

31. Cf. Bishop Thomas Grant's letter of veiled reproof, A.A.W., 14/1/1851. “The state and splendour of a Cardinal is scarcely attainable with your limited means in London, … whereas a Cardinal who lives as much as possible for the poor and amongst them is sure to have his weight and consideration even amongst the most unfavourable of our censors….”

32. Cf. Bishop, M. C.: “The Social Methods of Roman Catholicism in England”, Contemporary Review, Vol. 39, March 1877, pp. 610–12.Google Scholar

33. The phrase is Percy, Fitzgerald's: Fifty Years of Catholic Life and Social Progress (London 1901), Vol. I, p. 225,Google Scholar on the indebtedness of the English Church.

34. Tablet, 3/1/1857.

35. Status Districtus Londonensis (cf. 1842, A.A.W.), the source for the figures which follow.

36. Ibid., p. 63.

37. Cf. Pastoral reproduced in Tablet, 6/6/1844.

38. Griffiths to Baggs, his agent in Rome, then Rector of the English College, A.A.W., 11/12/1842.

39. A Most Humble Supplication and Declaration of the Secular Priests exercising the Functions of the Apostolic Mission in the London District . . London, 1840, p. 5.Google Scholar

40. Griffiths to Baggs, for transmission to Fransoni, A.A.W., 24/9/1840.

41. Bogan, op. cit., p. 54.

42. Griffiths to Baggs, A.A.W., draft, 26/9/1842.

43. Ibid.

44. The population of Rome at this time was about a hundred thousand.

45. Brown to Griffiths, A.A.W., 18/5/1854.

46. See his account of a rookery in St. Giles’, Tablet, 24/1/1846: “There are times when no policeman who is at all careful of his life dare show himself within that sacred enclosure….”

47. Lucas, Edward: The Life of Frederick Lucas (London, 1886), p. 161.Google Scholar

48. Tablet, 6/1/1844.

49. Religious Census, op. cit.: about seven and a half of fifteen thousand sittings.

50. Harris, Cf., —: From Oxford to Rome (London, 1847), p. 57.Google Scholar “We own we have often felt surprised at the patient and devout appearance of the unlettered class in Roman Catholic chapels in England, where commonly their extreme removal from the altar precludes their hearing even the form that is passing….” rather more astringently, on the same theme, the Evangelical Vanderkiste, R. W.: Notes and Narratives: on Six Years Mission, Principally among the Slums of London, London, 1852, p. 112;Google Scholar and a Catholic account, Rambler (1850), 5, pp. 11–13.Google Scholar

51. Cf. Oakeley's letters in the Rambler (1849), 4, pp. 208–11.Google Scholar

52. On Capes' position: Rambler (1849), 4, pp. 81–89;Google Scholar on the issue of pew rents, pp. 86-7. His articles in the Rambler on the proletarian Sunday are collected in A Sunday in London, London, 1850.

53. Griffiths to Dr. Thomas Grant, Rector of the English College in Rome, A.A.W., 19/2/1847; again, to Grant, on the same subject, 30/4/1847.

54. Leetham, Claude: Luigi Gentili: A Sower for the Second Spring (London, 1965), p. 250.Google Scholar

55. Griffiths to Gentiii, A.A.W., 19/12/1847.

56. Cf. his Report on London, Leetham, op. cit., pp. 299-304.

57. Lucas in the Tablet, 3/1/1850.

58. Leetham, op. cit., pp. 249-50, 302.

59. Ibid., p. 371.

60. Ibid., p. 300.

61. Leetham, op. cit., p. 161,

62. (History of the) Saffron Hill Mission, A.A.W.; a pamphlet plea for small missions, printed circa 1859.

63. Rambler (1848), 1, pp. 242–3, 268.Google Scholar

64. O'Connor to Wiseman, A.A.W., 4/9/1849.

65. Hodgson to Wiseman, A.A.W., September 1849.

66. Ibid.

67. George, op. cit., pp. 122-3. Also Bogan, op. cit., p. 54.

68. The Catholic version of the incident is in the Tablet, 19/7/1851; the Protestant in the London City Mission Magazine (1851), Vol. 16, p. 252.Google Scholar

69. Wiseman's account is contained in a long letter to Monsignor Talbot, the Pope's English Chamberlain, reproduced in Dublin Review (1919), Vol. 164, pp. 21–22.Google ScholarPubMed

70. Ibid., also Tablet, 9/1/1851.

71. Wiseman to Frederick William Faber, of the Oratory; cited in full in Purcell, Edmund, Sheridan: Life of Cardinal Manning Archbishop of Westminster (London, 1896), Vol. 2, pp. 3–9.Google Scholar Most of the information in the following paragraphs is taken from this letter. For the early Passionist missions in London, see Charles,, Conrad: “The Origins of the Parish Mission in England and the Early Passionist Apostolate 1840-1850”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 15, pp. 12–1 A. Google Scholar

72. Wiseman in Purcell, op. cit., pp. 4-5.

73. The phrase is Lytton Strachey's. “Cardinal Manning” in Eminent Victorians (London, 1929), p. 66.Google Scholar McClelland has tried to redress the balance upset by the malice of Purcell, but he has shed little new light on the Manning of the ’50s and ’60s. McClelland, Vincent Allan: Cardinal Manning; His Public Life and Private Influence 1865-1892 (London, 1962);Google Scholar for a more balanced assessment, see Leslie, Sir Shane: Cardinal Manning (Dublin, 1953).Google Scholar

74. Purcell, op. cit., pp. 111-2.

75. For a long and colourful account of this retreat, see Tablet, 3/2/1855, and another, Tablet, 11/4/1857.

76. Furniss, Cf., John, Fr.: The Sight of Hell: Book 10 in Books for Children (Dublin, 1858).Google Scholar On his work, Livius, Rev. T., C.S.S.R.: Father Furniss and his Work for Children (London and Leamington, 1896), pp. 20,Google Scholar 42-5. He gained his vocation to the religious life in 1849, while working under Frederic Oakeley in the Irish slums of Islington. Ibid., p. 20.

77. Tablet, 30/6/1860. For another Jesuit mission to the poor—in their Westminster parish, Tablet, 4/4/1857.

78. “... a notorious truth which has long been publicly deplored”. Tablet, 9/10/58. Also Rambler, New Series, 1 (1854), p. 188.

79. “As a body, moreover, the habitual criminals of London are said to be, in nine cases out of ten, ‘Irish Cockneys’, i.e. persons born of Irish parents in the Metropolis, and this is doubtless due to the extreme poverty of their parents….” Mayhew, Henry and Bennington, John: The Criminal Persons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London, 1862), p. 165;Google Scholar also pp. 402-3: “The greater number of the professional thieves of London belong to … the Irish Cockney tribe….”

80. Cited and rebutted in the Tablet, 11/2/1854.

81. Tablet, 22/7/1854.

82. Cf. the mass of social comment in “Kate Geary: or the Irish in London”, a novel serialized in the Rambler (1851-52).

83. In an Irish Catholic priest's reply to an English Catholic attack upon the immorality of the Irish population of the Isle of Dogs, Tablet, 10/10/1846. For an Irish priest's condemnation of the immorality of several old London rookeries—St. Giles, Calmel Buildings and Cato Street—see Father Theobald Mathew's evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Colonization from Ireland, P.P. (1847), 6, p. 253.Google Scholar Also the exchange over Irish Cockney virtue between Thomas Doyle and Lord Duffenn, Tablet, 29/3/1856.

84. Ct. Mayhew's famous description of Irish womanhood: “they are very chaste, and unlike the ‘coster girls’ very seldom form any connexion without the sanction of the marriage ceremony….” Mayhew, Henry: London Labour and the London Poor…. (London, 1861), 1, p. 105.Google Scholar There is an enormous Catholic literature idealizing Irish slum poverty: cf. Rambler (1849), ii, p. 3 Google Scholar: Scenes in London, or the more balanced analysis of Irish character in Kate Geary (op. cit.). Rambler (1851), 7, pp. 277–96.Google Scholar

85. Fullerton, Lady Georgiana: Faithful and True: the Life of Elizabeth Twiddy (London, no date), p. 9.Google Scholar

86. Ibid., p. 42.

87. To the sorrow of the Evangelical City Missioner, London City Mission Magazine (1861), 26, pp. 111–2Google Scholar, for an account of a like display, sponsored by the Oratorians in Charles Street, Drury Lane.

88. Price, Edward: Sick Calls: from the Diary of a Missionary Priest (London, 1855). The Strike and the Drunkard's Death, pp. 45–72;Google Scholar The Dying Shirt Maker, pp. 123-40.

89. Oakeley, Frederick: The Priest on the Mission: a Course of Lectures on Missionary and Parochial Duties (London, 1871), p. 122.Google Scholar

90. Rambler (1849), 4, p. 434.Google Scholar “... the zeal manifested by the Irish for the sight of a priest during illness … proceeds from a notion … that the priest, as such, is endowed with the power of healing diseases …”.

91. Oakeley, op. cit., p. 151. “The Catholic poor look upon the priest as Protestants do upon the physician… .”

92. Cf. Kate Geary (op. cit.), Rambler (1852), 9, p. 446.

93. Mayhew, op. cit., i, p. 118.

94. Wiseman to Talbot, Dublin Review (op. cit.).

95. Or occasioned them: the Irish avenge a priest's honour, Times, 18/7/1853.

96. Cf. Mayhew, op. cit., 1, p. 115.

97. Despite the sentimental Fenianism which the priesthood opposed, the politics of the Irish slum—so far as it went—was the politics of the confessional: agitation over Catholic rights, continental liberalism and the Temporal Power.

98. “The London Irish”, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1901, p. 132.

99. Cork Examiner, 22/12/1842; cited in Tablet, 14/1/1843.

100. Fr. Holdstock of Somerstown to Tablet, 21/4/1943.

101. Scritti Referiti nei Congressi: Anglia 12: printed pamphlets on Frs. Mac-Donnel and Boyle, 1842 and 1850. I owe this reference to Prof. Owen Chadwick; also Jauch to Wiseman, A.A.W., 29/9/1847.

102. Tablet (op. cit.). The five were Moore and Foley at Virginia Street, Reardon at the Spanish Chapel, Kelly at Hammersmith, and D'Avila at Islington.

103. Notoriously, Faa di Bruno.

104. Cf. Father John Stanton's lecture to the Guild of the Brotherhood of St., Patrick, The Lamp (1855), 8, pp. 74–5.Google Scholar

105. A vintage specimen of this species of eloquence was delivered at St. Patrick's, Soho, on St. Patrick's day, 1857, by Cardinal Wiseman himself: Tablet, 21/3/1857. For an effort by Manning in the same style, Tablet, 13/10/1860.