Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (review)

It is well known that toward the end of the English Civil War, the Irish Catholic Confederacy that had been involved in a separate struggle with the Dublin Protestant government divided into two camps. Broadly speaking, the Old English were willing to treat with King Charles I and accept limited religious gains, while the Gaels who followed the advice of the nuncio wanted to press on and completely re-Catholicize Ireland under a foreign ruler. What is scarcely known and now for the first time the subject of a detailed and careful study is that the two positions mirrored closely divisions in the Irish Catholic Church that had been developing since the end of Elizabeth’s reign. As O’Connor convincingly shows, priests trained on the continent for the Irish mission in the first half of the seventeenth century fell into two groups. Those educated in colleges in Flanders and at the universities of Leuven and Paris tended to come under the influence of the hard-line Augustinian ideas of the Flemish theologians, Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansen, and the Gallican ecclesiology of the French Church. They stressed the powerlessness of the human will and a rigorous ethics, distrusted the regular clergy, and taught that Catholics should be loyal to legitimate Protestant monarchs. Priests educated, on the other hand, at Rome and in colleges and universities in Spain and Portugal tended to be supporters of the much more liberal anthropology preached by the Jesuits, accepted the role of regulars as parish clergy, and were much less ready to seek accommodation with Dublin Castle. In the debate over tactics in the late 1640s, the Jansenists usually sided with the Old English, the Molinists with the Gaels, all the more that the majority of Flemish-trained priests came from Leinster. Admittedly, the fit was not perfect: the Jesuits on the mission paradoxically countenanced coming to terms, while many priests trained in the Low Countries and France were carried away by the thought of total victory and backed the nuncio.

It is impossible in a few words to do justice to the breadth of O’Connor’s scholarly account of the mission to Ireland in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century. Its aim is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of Jansenism and Gallicanism for understanding the development of the Irish Church under the early Stuarts. On the other, it aims to show the significant role played by individual Irish theologians on the continent, notably Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh, in the articulation of Jansenist ideas. In other words, as the title implies, this is a study of the Irish contribution to a great European debate. It is also the study of a lost cause. By 1670, Jansenism had been pushed to the margins everywhere. Outlawed by the papacy in a number of bulls beginning with De eminenti in 1643 and too closely associated in the eyes of King Louis XIV with the Fronde, its supporters either toed the new establishment line or were ostracized. In Ireland the movement lost all credibility. The events of the Interregnum and the Restoration demonstrated that accommodation with the Protestant state brought few benefits: a strict Roman allegiance became and stayed the order of the day. In the final analysis this is a book about the Irish Catholic Church’s mixed response to the problem of a Protestant monarch in an age when religious allegiance was still fluid, the permanence of the confessional divide was unclear, and the clergy depended on the bounty of Catholic landowners. The events of the 1650s that destroyed the landed power of the Catholic Old English as well as the Gaels and placed the Protestant ascendancy firmly in the saddle made the Jansenist position appear pass...