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The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Sheridan Gilley
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Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 188 - 207
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

2 The largest element in this subject is American, and there has been a renaissance of writing, of rather uneven quality, on the Irish in the United States. Recent works include Wittke, C., The Irish in America, new edn, New York 1970Google Scholar; Duff, J. B., The Irish in America, Belmont, California 1971Google Scholar; Griffin, W. D., The Irish in America: a chronology and fact book, Dobbs Ferry, New York 1972Google Scholar; Greeley, A. M., That Most Distressful Nation: the taming of the American Irish, Chicago 1972Google Scholar; Birmingham, S., Real Lace: America's Irish rich, New York 1973Google Scholar; O’Grady, J. P., How the Irish Became American, New York 1973Google Scholar; Shannon, W. V., The American Irish: a political and social portrait, New York 1974Google Scholar; and McCaffrey, L. J., The Irish Diaspora in America, Bloomington, Indiana 1976Google Scholar. There are also many local and regional studies, for which see McCaffrey. See also Blessing, P. J., ‘Irish’, in Thernstrom, S. (ed.), Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, Mass. 1980 5–45Google Scholar, with short bibliography, and Burchell, R. A., ‘The historiography of the American Irish’, Immigrants and Minorities, i (1982), 281–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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69 Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation, 255.”Lawrence McCaffrey (Irish Diaspora, p. 178) also expresses the belief that the American Irish have sold their Irish inheritance for a mess of suspect American pottage.

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