Church and State in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century

Extract

I should first like to refer to some documents which I found during my research this summer in the Propaganda Archives in Rome. Then, I should like to show how they help towards a better understanding of the very complicated historical relation between Church and State in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The first of these documents is a series of three letters from an Irish priest to his agent in Rome in January, 1823, concerning the impending appointment of a new Archbishop to the See of Cashel. The second is a long letter from the Bishop of Elphin to the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda, in February,1826,protesting the charges leveled against him at Rome by the Augustinians of his diocese. These two men, priest and bishop, peasant and aristocrat, represent the essential faces of the clergy in Ireland in the nineteenth century. More often than not, however, the priest or the bishop was not simply the one or the other, but rather an interestingly complex amalgam of these two representative types. Their letters, then, tell us a great deal not only about the Church in their time, but give us historical insight into the Church of their posterity.