Catholics arrived at Botany Bay with the first fleet in January 1788. But it was not until 1820 that institutional Catholicism arrived in the persons of two Irish priests—Fathers Philip Conolly and John Joseph Therry. They had been appointed after considerable negotiation between the British government, the London Vicar Apostolic, Bishop William Poynter, the Vicar Apostolic of Mauritius, Bishop Edward Bede Slater (in whose vast territory Australia was included), and the Roman Congregation of Propaganda Fide. In the period 1788 to 1820 sporadic priestly ministry had been carried on by three Irish convict priests and by Father Jeremiah O’Flynn, the maverick Prefect Apostolic, whose brief appearance in Sydney in 1817-18 was terminated by deportation.

In the spring of 1848 a number of respected English vicars-general, William Bernard Ullathorne of the Western District, John Briggs of the Northern District, and Thomas Brown of Wales decided that one of them, together with Fr Luigi Gentili, the Rosminian missioner, should proceed immediately to Rome. Their object would be to support, by personal intervention with Pius IX, a memorial drawn up by Briggs, signed by twenty Irish and three or four bishops in Great Britain, which was solemnly presented to the Pope by Thomas Grant, President of the English College in Rome. This memorial ran:

In May 1859, a beautifully printed card urging Revd Michael Condon to visit ‘La Plus Belle Dame de Greenock’ dropped through his letterbox. He had just arrived that day in his new parish of Cartsdyke. Given the prejudice encountered, the appalling living conditions, and the endless demands on him and his fellow clergy, their resistance to such charms seems remarkable. The Irish were allegedly ‘liars, blasphemous, ignorant, lying, thieving etc.’ And that was a Scottish priest speaking. Not surprisingly Condon could write to a Scottish priest. ‘I cannot wonder that being treated like a dog by your confrere, I should be classed among dogs by yourself.’

Henry Venn, the CMS honorary secretary between 1841 and 1872, is rightly regarded as the great exponent of self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing churches. I have argued elsehwere that his principles took many years to assume their final shape and that, when they did, they contained what was regarded as an ecclesiological anomaly—that there should be separate bishops for different races in the same geographical area. Between about 1856 and 1872 Venn became increasingly daring in his proposals, abandoned his support for the idea of a single European bishop wherever there were European settlers and was instrumental, not only in having Samuel Crowther appointed as the first black bishop in West Africa or in responding positively to suggestions of an Indian bishop for South India, but also in proposing, both in India and in China, that the needs of a truly culturally integrated independent ‘native’ church demanded that its structures should be separated from those of the imported European church.

To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.

In 1905 was published one of the most interesting books ever written about New York. It was a study by Elsa Herzfeld of twenty-four working-class families living on Manhattan’s West Side. All too briefly, yet with many tantalizing quotations and anecdotes, she discussed a whole series of themes that most previous students of New York life had taken for granted, or perhaps regarded as too trivial to be worth recording: the pictures people had on their walls, the music they liked, relations between spouses and between parents and children, beliefs about good and bad luck, funeral customs, and attitudes to physicians and hospitals. The families all included at least two generations, the older of which was predominantly European born. Most were of Irish or German descent. The purpose of the volume was to identify the distinguishing characteristics of what it termed Tenement-House Man’. There is thus a tendency to stress what is common to the families studied, and to suggest a shared pattern of life. Time and time again, though, there are hints that religion was a differentiating factor within this allegedly homogeneous culture. In particular there are frequent references to Catholics as in some sense a group apart—a very large group apart, as they made up about 40 per cent of the city’s population at that time.

Recent biographies of Archbishops Mannix and Duhig have shown how those doughty warriors for the Catholic faith in Australia faced a rising tide of anti-Catholicism in the period 1916-23. Studies of Australian society and politics during and after the First World War have dwelt at length on the sectarian impulse. The conflict between Catholic and Protestant has even been cast by Professor Manning Clark as the central theme of Australian history.

On 25 October 1920, a new name was added to the martyrology of Irish nationalism. On that date, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman Terence MacSwiney, died in Brixton prison after a hunger-strike which had lasted 74 days. He had held office for little more than six months, his predecessor having been roused from sleep and shot, most Irish people believed, by plain clothed policemen. MacSwiney had succeeded not only to the symbolic positions of head of the municipality and titular chief magistrate, but also the less decorative but potentially more deadly positions of president of the Cork branch of Sinn Fein and commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. Brought up in the full flood of the Catholic spiritual and Gaelic cultural revivals, MacSwiney had a long record of active commitment to the struggle for Irish independence. He had been imprisoned by the British in 1916 in the aftermath of Dublin’s Easter Rising which he had watched from Cork in an agony of indecision, developing in one English historian’s view ‘a guilt complex which he was later to expiate in the grimmest possible way’. In August 1920, only days after the introduction of courts martial to replace civilian courts in Ireland, he was arrested in the City Hall, while presiding over a meeting of the Brigade Council. Proclaiming his allegiance to the Irish Republic, the Lord Mayor challenged the right of the British Army to detain him, and immediately commenced a hunger-strike.

On 11 January 1913 the following article, signed by ‘Me Fein’, appeared in an Irish periodical of pronounced nationalist views under the heading ‘Wexford Again. More Language Compulsion’: