Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (review)

The imposition of the Protestant state church in Ireland was a turning point in Irish history, but the question of the survival of the medieval Catholic Church, alone in northern Europe, has never been satisfactorily explained. Past explanations abound from the use of the inheritance of the church lands and sources of income, vast in dioceses like Meath and Armagh, to pay the salaries of civil servants in Dublin and reward the Old English landowners for political support instead of endowing the state church; there was also the endemic political resistance of at least the Gaelic chiefs and many of the Old English local landowners to the changes imposed from above on worship, on liturgy, on customs of devotion.

By 1641 it was obvious that Ireland, alone of the other nations that formed the British Isles, was to be a Catholic country. Brian Mac Cuarta has given in this book a convincing explanation of the phenomenon. He has found all kinds of forgotten sources from both sides of the religious and state divide and placed them in a convincing psychological context. He is at his ease, too, in Latin. He has picked the northern ecclesiastical province conveniently, as it contained the Gaelic North racked by the Nine Years’ War and the Ulster plantation together with the settled and prosperous Old English diocese of Meath and Clonmacnoise. Essentially he presents a paradigm for events in the whole island, as well as the wider perspective on a hostile state’s attempt to change people’s religion that is eventually defeated with the support of an outside power like the Vatican.

Briefly, Mac Cuarta charts the Church in Gaelic Ulster, rudderless after the Nine Years’ War, where clerics, unformed theologically, nominally joined the state church. He shows how the blurred lines between the Protestant state church and the Catholic population became clearer with the arrival in Gaelic Ulster, especially of the Franciscans, many of whom came from their newly established college at Louvain. New life was given to old practices. The habit of confession that seemed to have been dead in practice was renewed, retreats were given, and there was a general stiffening of the attitudes of the native clergy. Interesting was the tolerance of the London merchants in their plantation of Derry and the support and shelter offered by the Hamilton families settled in Tyrone from Scotland.

Of course, there was not the same threat to the old-time religion in Meath and Clonmacnoise. Settled and prosperous landowners began to send their children to one or more of the Irish colleges recently established in the Low Countries, France, and Spain. Many became priests and were embued with a vision of the Counter-Reformation, returned home, and remained protected in their ministry by their relations or a network of families related to them. For Meath, a resident bishop, Thomas Dease, arrived, the former rector of the Irish College in Paris.

Above all, the Franciscans, the European-trained secular priests, the Jesuits, and the Capuchins provided focus for the work of the clergy. Their efforts seem to have been orchestrated by the Waterford-born Peter Lombard, primate of all Ireland who was resident in Rome. He sent his secretary, David Roth, as vice primate to Ireland to control, as far as possible, and motivate the clergy by appointing the equivalent of bishops, called variously vicars apostolic or vicars general, to the dioceses in the northern province. They restored normal Catholic life as best they could with a priest for every parish. There were, of course, great differences in the effectiveness of their campaign: weak east of the Bann, relatively strong in Derry and Tyrone, and strong in Meath. But an easing off of persecution, because of the efforts of the English king to marry his son, Charles, to a Spanish infanta, helped as well. It is a fascinating, interesting, engagingly told...