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The Irish Dimension of the British Kulturkampf: Vaticanism and Civil Allegiance 1870–1875

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Hilary Jenkins
Hilary Jenkins
Affiliation:
University College, Dublin
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Extract

‘There were about ten million Catholics in the British dominions, and, properly considered, Queen Victoria was one of die great Catholic powers of Europe. She reigned over more Cadiolics man some Catholic Sovereigns’. This was the claim of an Irish member of parliament in advocating equality of Catholic education with Protestant at the great meeting held by Cardinal Cullen in the Marlborough Street ‘Cathedral’ in Dublin in January 1872. The meeting was intended to demonstrate the unanimity of laity and clergy in the demand for denominationalism in the National Schools system and the rejection of mixed schools. On the same day the opposition to Cullen's policy was expressed by die Radical John Roebuck in an address given in Sheffield, in the course of which he argued that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 had merely been a dissembling attempt by the Liberals to dupe Dissenters and Radicals and bind diem to Mr Gladstone. It had not brought religious peace to Ireland. ‘Were not the whole body of the Cadiolics, headed by Cardinal Cullen, still determined upon attaining their old end, which was supremacy of the Cadiolic Church in Ireland?’ At the Dublin gathering Cullen quoted J. S. Mill on die danger of a state monopoly in education and roundly condemned the government's policy of mixed education as a scheme which die Protestant Archbishop Whately had admitted was the only way of weaning the Irish from the abuses of popery. The organ of Irish nationalist opinion, The Freeman's Journal, rallied support by denouncing Lord Hartington for resisting the logic of die argument that Irish education of Cadiolic children should be handed over to ‘the priests and people of Ireland’: English Protestants were insincere in favouring a denominational system for Scotland while treating Catholic education for the Irish as subversive of civil and religious liberty.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 1979 , pp. 353 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Standard, 20 January 1872; Express, 17 January 1872; The Times, 19, 20 January 1872; Freeman's Journal, 16 January 1872; Daily News, 18 January 1872.

2 Larkin, Emmet, The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modem State, 1878-1886, Dublin 1975, xxi.Google ScholarLarkin's earlier articles are also valuable contributions to a reassessment of the nineteenth century history of the Irish Church: ‘Economic growth, capital investment, and the Roman Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Ireland’,A[merican] H[istorical] R[eview], lxxii (1967)Google Scholar; ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850-1875’, AHR, lxxvii (1972)Google Scholar; ‘Church, state, and nation in modern Ireland’ AHR, ixxx (1975)Google Scholar.

3 Newman, J. H., Memorandum about My Connection with the Catholic University, first published in John Henry Newman Autobiographical Writings, ed. Tristram, Henry, London 1956.Google ScholarThis memorandum was composed by Newman between November 1870 and May 1873 and is, therefore, an accurate guide to his private thoughts about Irish ecclesiastical affairs during this period. My Campaign in Ireland, Catholic University Reports and Other Papers, printed for private circulation in 1896, is also relevant.

4 He told Lord Granville (2 November 1874) that his motive had been to defeat a world-wide Roman Catholic conspiracy ‘to direct European war to the re-establishment of the temporal power; or even to bring about such a war for that purpose … The whole circumstances have vividly recalled to me the trouble of mind I went through before publishing the letters to Ld. Aberdeen about Naples-another difficult case in which I was obliged to act because no-one else could have die same point of view’: Philip Magnus, Gladstone, London 1954, 235.

5 Gladstone, W. E., The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation, 11 1874.Google ScholarIn considering Gladstone's state of feeling when he wrote the pamphlet it should be remembered that during the summer of 1874 he had spent some time with Döllinger, who had been excommunicated for his refusal to accept the Infallibility decree, and his emotions had been further raked over by a visit to his sister Helen, a Roman Catholic convert who sympathised with Döllinger.

6 For a full account of both these affairs see Norman, Edward, The Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, London 1965Google Scholar.

7 Lyons, F. S. L., Ireland since the Famine, London 1974, 152.Google Scholar

8 Charles Stephen Dessain and Gornall, Thomas, [The] Letters and Diaries [of John Henry Newman: the Controversy with Gladstone, January 1874 to December 1875], Oxford 1975, xxvii. 123 ffGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid.: Newman to Emly, 15 October 1874, 140-2.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.: Newman to Lord Blachford, 25 October 1874, 144-5.

12 ‘British public opinion and the Kulturkampf in Germany’, Catholic Historical Review, xxviii (1943), 340–75Google Scholar; on the growth of anti-Catholic feeling,Norman, Edward, op. cit., 440Google Scholar.

13 Lord Blachford, Newman's Tractarian friend who had remained an Anglican, wrote to him, after Gladstone's final shot in the campaign, that Gladstone had always been something of an ‘Italo-maniac—and now he seems to be almost Prussianising’ (Bismarck congratulated him on his pamphlets in March 1875): Letters and Diaries, xxvii. 211.

14 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, third series, cocvi. 320.

15 Cited in Edward Norman, op. cit., 435.

16 Letters and Diaries, xxvii. 153, 159.

17 Ibid., xxvii. n. 159.

18 Freeman's Journal, 7 June 1872.

19 Express, 10 September 1869.

20 Memorandum: The Catholic University (above note 3), 324-6. Newman’s memory of the divided opinion o n the wisdom of an exclusively Roman Catholic university was sharpened by Manning's opposition to Roman Catholics going to Oxford. In the 1850s mixed education had been supported by Dr Murray, Cullen's predecessor in Dublin, Dr Russell of Maynooth, the Jesuit Fr Curtis, Thomas O'Hagan, later Lord Chancellor of Ireland, by many Catholic lawyers, country-gentlemen such as Lords Kenmare, Castleross and Fingall, as well as by Dr McHale and the nationalists. By 1872 Newman had reached the conclusion that ‘mixed education in the higher schools is as much a necessity now in England, as it was in the East in the days of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom’: Letters and Diaries, xxvi. 75. He was, properly speaking, anti-clerical in the matter, convinced from his own experience that university education should chiefly be in lay hands.

21 Letters and Diaries, xxvi, 393-4. In this letter, written to George Fottrell of the Catholic University in Dublin, 10 December 1873, Newman also wrote: ‘One of the chief evils which I deplored in the management of the affairs of the University twenty years ago when I was in Ireland, was the absolute refusal with which my urgent representations were met, that the Catholic laity should be allowed to cooperate with the Archbishops in their work… I came away from Ireland with the distressing fear, that in that Catholic country, in like manner, there was to be an antagonism between the hierarchy and the educated classes’.

22 Letters and Diaries, xxvi. 61.

23 See letters of Aubrey de Vere to Emly about Newman's mode of reply to Gladstone, pressing Emly to use his position in the House of Lords to act as a representative Catholic spokesman, ‘everyday the Religious question will be forcing itself more and more into polities’: Monsell Papers, National Library of Ireland, Box 8317.

24 Monsell Papers, Box 8317, letters of S. E. de Vere to Emly, 2, 12 March 1873. Cf. ‘For my part I regard our Hierarchy as a fatal obstacle to the peace and prosperity of Ireland and I can hardly blame the Newdegates (and-clerical M.P.s) for the very natural mistake with which they identify Catholicism with an overbearing and selfish Hierarchy’: 2 March 1873.

25 Monsell Papers, Box 8319: P. J. Keenan to Emly, 15 February 1873.

26 Macauley, J., Ireland in 1872, A Tour of Observation, London 1873, 232Google Scholar. See also Whittle, Lowry, ‘Irish elections and the influence of the priests’, Fraser's Magazine, new series, i (1870)Google Scholar.

27 Macauley, J., op. cit., 169, 211–15.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 233.

29 Monsell Papers, Box 8317: Dease to Emly, 25 August 1872.

30 Freeman's Journal, 24 july 1872.

31 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, third series, ccxii. 1828.

32 Ibid., 1834, 1840.

33 Ibid., 1847.

34 Ibid., 1814.

35 Ibid., 869.

36 Ibid., 793.

37 Ibid., ccxv. 2045.

38 Ibid., ccxii. 1343; ccxv. 1140, 2045-53.

39 Ibid., ccxv. 2051, 2053.

40 Ibid., ccxiii. 516-23, 530.

41 J. Macauley (above note 26), 211-12.

42 Ibid., 215.

43 Fitzpatrick, Henry Clare, Report of the Action for Libel brought by the Rev. Robert O'Keeffe against H. E. Cardinal Cullen, London 1874.Google ScholarSee also O'Keeffe, Robert, Cardinal Cullen and the P. P. Callan, Dublin, 1872Google Scholar.

44 Saturday Review, 31 May 1873.

45 Spectator, 31 May 1873.

46 Freeman's Journal, 31 May 1873.

47 Express, Standard, 24 June 1873.

48 Dr Murray's policy was expressed by Newman's friend, Dr Russell of Maynooth, in approving Gladstone's university measure: ‘The university scheme is a most able and ingenious one, and appears to me to provide every safeguard against unsound thinking that can exist in a mixed university… But we must be prepared for angry and impassioned criticisms… I have no idea what course the Bishops will take’: Monsell Papers, Box 8318, Russell to Emly, 15 February 1873.

49 Letters and Diaries, xxvii. 148-9.

50 Gladstone, W. E., The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation, London 1874, viiGoogle Scholar, On the Home Policy of the Future, passim.

31 Robert O'Keeffe, Ultramonlanism, Nat. Lib. of Ireland, 240-1, 255-6; O'Keeffe presented his case in terms that fitted Gladstone's argument so exactly that the omission of any reference to the affair is the more singular: ‘Are we in a land of freedom and subjects of a realm whose ruler, in the person of William the Conqueror, informed Hildebrand, that he owed and would pay him no civil allegiance?’: letter to The Times, 16 October 1872; ‘I believe Cardinal Cullen is doing immense injury to the Catholic religion by reviving these antiquated censures of the middle ages, and endeavouring to apply a legislation which was enacted to screen the vices of ecclesiastics from the public view, to the civil proceedings of our courts of law, before which all her Majesty's subjects, without distinction of class or creed, stand equal’: letter to Freeman's Journal, 11 November 1872. He also claimed both English and Irish precedents for resisting papal aggression: ‘Will the people of these free countries, Protestant and Catholic I care not, tolerate a papal assumption of temporal power in the igth Century which our ancestors in the 16th denounced as an invasion of the rights of the monarchy, and an unwarrantable tampering with the duties of the subject, and which the Irish of the 12th century resisted in arms, until reduced to subjection by the superior strength of the English nation?’: Ultramontanism, 259.

52 Gladstone, W. E., Vaticanism, London 1875, 95, 99.Google Scholar

53 Letters and Diaries, xxvii. 11. 29. Queen's Bench. The Rev. Robert O'Keeffe v. his Eminence Cardinal Cullen. Speech of John O'Hagan, Esq., QC, summing up for the Defendant, Dublin 1874, printed at Cullen's wish. John O'Hagan should not be confused with his father-inlaw Lord O'Hagan. In his speech he argued that if the statute of Elizabeth was still the law and could annul the spiritual action of the pope then the catholic religion was not tolerated in Ireland. He had earlier been responsible for examining O'Keeffe's school policy in his capacity as a National Education Commissioner. O'Keeffe claimed that he had introduced the teaching of Greek, Latin and French and received every encouragement from the Education Office and that diey would have paid for these extra subjects ‘if Cardinal Cullen could be got to assent to the teaching of classics in National Schools’: Ultramontanism, op. cit., 247-8.

54 H. C. Fitzpatrick (above note 43), introduction. As late as 1913 the archbishop of Dublin, William J. Walsh, diought it necessary to justify the case against O'Keeffe in an extensive treatment of the libel suit. The articles whitewash the ecclesiastical authorities and portray O'Keeffe as an insubordinate cleric: Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5th series, i (February, March, April, May, June 1913) and ii (December, 1913).

55 Letters and Diaries, xxvii. n. 211: Lord Blachford to Newman, 29 January 1875. In the same letter he referred to Gladstone as always ‘something of an Italo-maniac—and now he seems to be almost Prussianising’.