Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland 1603-41

A review article by Brendan Bradshaw, s.m.

Issue 388, vol.97, Winter 2008

Furthermore he believes that the question is best tackled piecemeal, on a regional basis. Accordingly, he offers here an examination of the phoenix-like revival of Roman Catholicism in the ecclesiastical province of Armagh in the period between the collapse of the rebellion of the Ulster earls in 1603 and the eruption of a second national conflagration in Ulster in 1641. For the purpose of the examination he refines his regional approach still further by sub-dividing the ecclesiastical province of Armagh into its two ethno-cultural components, Gaelic Ulster and Old English north Leinster.

One advantage of the subdivision is that it allows the Franciscans to receive their due in securing the triumph of the Counter Reformation in Ireland. As MacCuarta generously acknowledges it was the Franciscans rather than his own more glamourised Society of Jesus or the continentally trained seminary priests who spearheaded the Catholic revival in Gaelic Ulster in the teeth of the crown’s attempt to impose its own Protestant religious settlement there. Fully integrated into Gaelic Society since medieval times and greatly esteemed for the holiness and simplicity of their lifestyle ‘na bráithra bochta’ (the ‘poor friars’) as they were affectionately called, were the ones who, through their preaching and pastoral ministrations, generally succeeded in transforming the tradition-bound, cultural Christians of Gaelic Ulster into confessionally-aware Roman Catholics. The newly founded (1606) convent of St. Anthony’s, Louvain played a crucial part in this achievement both as a seminary for training friars for the Irish mission in accordance with the new Tridentine norms and as an intellectual centre producing catechisms, devotional works and polemical material in Irish to back up the campaign of evangelisation. In MacCuarta’s account a second phase of the revival got underway in Gaelic Ulster in the 1610’s with the appointment of the formidable David Rothe as vice-­primate to the absentee archbishop of Armagh, Peter Lombard, and with the return of a trickle of seminary priests to work on the Ulster mission. The appointment of the vice-­primate secured for Lombard a local presence in the archdiocese and the ecclesiastical province more generally and a means of exercising effective control over the conduct of the mission there, while the seminary priests and the Franciscans between them enabled Rothe to set about building a diocesan structure in the province to parallel the one that the Church of Ireland had taken over from the medieval Church by government fiat at the Reformation. The outcome was that by the 1620’s Catholicism in Gaelic Ulster had been brought from the state of near prostration in which it languished in the aftermath of the Tudor conquest to a state in which it functioned effectively both as an institution and a communal religion that commanded the allegiance of the vast majority of the native inhabitants of the province, a revival all the more remarkable for having been achieved in the teeth of a vigorous campaign of state repression. In fact, as MacCuarta recounts the story, the state’s failed campaign of repression holds the key to the explanation of why the Reformation failed in Ulster and - by implication at least - of why the Counter Reformation succeeded there. Concluding his chapter on ’The Ulster Irish and the Church of Ireland’ he explains ‘in the absence of a Protestant preaching ministry in then own tongue coercive measures were doomed to failure and the Ulster Irish experienced the Church of Ireland as a foreign and exploitative body’.

MacCuarta characterises the period from the 1620’s to the outbreak of rebellion in 1641 as a time of consolidation for the Catholic Church in Ulster. The work of consolidation was greatly facilitated by the easing of state repression, especially after the accession of Charles I in 1625. In this relaxed atmosphere the underground Church could show itself more visibly. Bishops were able to take up residence in their dioceses and to give themselves, in a sustained way, to the task of implementing the Tridentine reform programme. High on their agenda was clerical abuse and indiscipline, especially those betes noires of Tridentine reformers, concubinage and clerical vagrancy. Another area of special concern, again reflecting the influence of the Tridentine programme, was irregularities surrounding the sacrament of marriage: clandestinity, consanguinity, resort to vaganti - or even to Protestant clergy - as ministers of the sacrament, divorce and remarriage. Also, in line with the decrees of Trent, the sacrament of confirmation, in abeyance in the period of repression for the want of bishops to administer it, was restored; it formed a central function of the bishop on parochial visitation, eliciting a hugely enthusiastic response from the laity. A final area of concern was the liturgy, especially the central act of Christian worship the Eucharist. As far as was economically feasible the location of the celebration was transferred from clandestine gathering-places or the houses of the gentry to purpose-built mass-houses; rich mass vestments began to reappear as an item on inventories of parish possessions, as did sacred vessels made from precious metals

MacCuarta is careful not to present too sanguine an account of the revival. He points out that, as external pressures eased and the revival gained increasing momentum, tensions familiar from late medieval times resurfaced - erupting not infrequently in unseemly fracas between the religious orders, between the regular and the diocesan clergy, between the clergy as a body and the laity. These wrangles necessarily impeded the course of reform. However MacCuarta considers poverty to have been the main obstacle. ‘Ulster Catholics were poor and becoming poorer’, he writes, and he concludes his generally upbeat review of the consolidation of Catholicism in Gaelic Ulster in the two decades preceding 1641 by reissuing a caveat he had urged throughout: ‘the enduring poverty of Ulster Catholics reinforced traditionalist tendencies, weakened the reforming role of bishops and severely limited the number of Tridentine priests who could be supported’. Nevertheless, it is clear from MacCuarta’s account that although the Catholics of Gaelic Ulster in 1641 may have remained no more that ‘half-­reformed’ - to borrow a contemporary phrase - there can be no doubt where their loyalty lay. The battle for ‘hearts and minds’ had been fought and, as Irish history thereafter was to make abundantly clear, the Counter Reformation had won hands down.

The revival of Catholicism in the southern part of the Armagh metropolitan area took a very different course from Gaelic Ulster. The explanation for this lies ultimately in the different ethno-cultural composition of the two places. The southern part extended over north Leinster, which lay within the Pale occupied by the most tenaciously English of the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonists. These Old English, as they had come to be called by the end of the sixteenth century, had for the most part retained their traditional loyalty to the crown in the course of the rebellion of the Ulster earls, while at the same time they maintained loyalty in religion to Roman Catholicism. Unlike the situation in Gaelic Ulster, where the earls had been obliged to flee into exile in the aftermath of their failed rebellion, the Old English elite survived in north Leinster to lead resistance to the religion ‘by law established’. Thus, what emerged in the region, in the testing time of repression during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, was a ‘gentry Catholicism’, as MacCuarta entitles the chapter in which he gives an account of the episode. Thus in turn poverty did not retard the revival there as it did in Gaelic Ulster.          

This explains why seminary priests, always sparse in Ulster, became an increasingly numerous presence in north Leinster from the 1590s onwards. So did the Jesuits. Both groups played a prominent part in spearheading the revival there though, to give credit where credit is long overdue, so also did the Franciscans, who were as well established in north Leinster as they were in Gaelic Ulster since medieval times. A second difference made by the presence of the gentry was that it helped to shield the community from the rigours of the campaign of repression, in this way alleviating what might otherwise have been unsustainable pressure to conform in an area in which the machinery of government operated at its most effective, because of the proximity of the area to the central administration in Dublin. The account MacCuarta provides of the stratagems to which the elite had recourse to frustrate the implementations of the penal legislation can seem at this remove in time wryly amusing: Catholic lords pulling rank on Protestant sheriffs to prevent them from operating in their domains; Catholic jurors delivering perverse acquittals in cases of religious non-conformity; blue-stocking dowagers establishing networks of gentry safe houses, where missionaries could lodge, celebrate mass, preach and catechise; wholesale bribery of venal officials to have them turn a blind eye to non­conformity.

A third difference the presence of the Catholic elite made was to set an example to their social inferiors by their steadfastness under persecution, ensuring that, even when these wavered, they returned to the fold when pressure eased: ‘people were prone to follow the leadership of their social superiors’, MacCuarta writes, all the more so when failure entailed social ostracisation.

For all the differences between north Leinster and Gaelic Ulster, in the end MacCuarta comes to the same conclusion about why the Reformation failed - and implicitly why the Counter Reformation succeeded - in the one place as it did in the other. The Church of Ireland proved incapable of grasping the opportunity offered by temporary conformity to secure conversions; many of the parish churches had been allowed to go to ruin, with the result that they could not be used for preaching or celebration of the liturgy; pluralism was rife, so that it was impossible to man all the parishes; crucially, exceedingly few of the Church of Ireland clergy were able or willing to evangelise. In these circumstances, according to Mac Cuarta, repression proved just as counter-productive in north Leinster as in Gaelic Ulster. It succeeded only in deepening the Catholic community’s sense of resentment, in consolidating its sense of confessional identity and in increasing its social cohesion: ‘Catholicism [in north Leinster] was strengthened through adversity, enabling it to flourish in the less threatening environment of the 1620s and 1630s’.

The final chapter of the book is devoted to the period of flourishing in north Leinster. To an extent the account MacCuarta provides here mirrors the account he already gave of the consolidation of Catholicism in Gaelic Ulster. In the more relaxed atmosphere of the 1620s bishops were able to take up residence in their dioceses and to set about the task of building a diocesan structure to parallel that of the medieval Church which had been appropriated by the Church of Ireland at the Reformation. Mass-houses were established in the parishes where mass could be celebrated once more with due decorum, at first in the towns and then gradually throughout the countryside. In remote areas parish churches, rundown and abandoned by the Church of Ireland clergy, were also utilized. Tridentine clergy increasingly replaced traditionalist massing-priests and gave themselves with enthusiasm to the task of implementing the Tridentine programme of reform under the leadership of their bishops. The mendicants sent their aspirants for training to Counter Reformation centres on the continent and, on their return, used them to set up new foundations, often at sites adjacent to the dissolved medieval foundations. In some cases they were able to reoccupy the original buildings, as in the case of the famous Franciscan convent at Multyfarnham. The new Tridentine religious orders also began to establish themselves in north Leinster, notably the Jesuits and the Capuchins, adding the characteristically Tridentine work of catechising to the more traditional apostolate of the regulars: preaching and conducting missions.

In two ways MacCuarta finds that the revival in north Leinster differed from what happened in Gaelic Ulster. One was in the thoroughness and intensity of what was achieved. In that regard the survival of a Catholic lay élite made all the difference. Their wealth made it possible to fund the continental training of young men for the priesthood on a far greater scale than in Gaelic Ulster and to provide the wherewithal for the construction of a network of mass-houses and of new foundations for the regular clergy. The result was a better informed, a more confessionally aware and a more observant laity: MacCuarta singles out the diocese of Meath under the energetic Bishop Dease as a model of the Tridentine ideal among Irish dioceses - in contrast to the ‘half-­reformed’ dioceses of Gaelic Ulster. The other - related - difference had to do with the more urbanized nature of the area and, by reason of its location, the more open, less tradition-bound mentality of its people. It was possible to go further in north Leinster in developing a Tridentine-style devotionalism among the laity, centred on processions, ceremonial, assemblies and sodalities. MacCuarta has much to say about how the port town of Drogheda led the way in all of this and about its role as a hub or entrepot, through which young men seeking a Catholic education made their way to the continent and through which many of them subsequently returned as ordained priests to offer their services to the mission.

Yet, exemplary though north Leinster may have been in its response to Tridentine reform, MacCuarta finds it necessary, in conclusion, to sound the same note of caution he sounded in the case of Gaelic Ulster about idealizing the situation there. As in Ulster, north Leinster was afflicted by growing pains. As external repression eased, suppressed internal tension resurfaced, much of it money related. The strain of providing resources for a steadily expanding clergy began to tell on the laity leading to unseemly wrangles about dues and fees. The clergy squabbled among themselves about similar issues. The diocesan clergy determinedly resisted encroachment by the regulars on services such as burial and the performance of the Easter duty, to which money-offerings were attached. The orders competed among themselves for the right to conduct communal devotions that provided a lucrative source of income. MacCuarta traces in some detail the spectacular battle that raged in Drogheda throughout the early 1620s, provoked by the attempt of the Jesuits to establish a sodality there, thus breaking the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the Franciscan third order. Despite all of this - indeed in a sense because of it - MacCuarta has no doubt that the vast majority of the people of north Leinster had become fervently committed Counter Reformation Catholics by the early 1620s, many even by a decade earlier.

The history of the Reformation in Ireland has been a staple academic study ever since history was established as an academic discipline in Irish universities in the early decades of the twentieth century. The field of Counter Reformation history has been much less cultivated, not least because of the range of linguistic skills required to tackle the sources. MacCuarta’s monograph, meticulously researched, reflective and measured in its conclusions, fluently and lucidly presented, makes a major contribution to that under­subscribed genre.

MacCuarta could, of course, have done better - to borrow the less than fulsome phrase of the annual school report. The book is disappointing in two principal respects, arising in each case from a defective historical methodology. First, what MacCuarta provides is essentially a traditional ‘history of events’. No attempt is made to elucidate the mental world that the participants in the story occupied. Yet the story revolves upon the intellectual transformation - of values, attitudes, of perceived religious identity - involved in the transition of the two communities of the north of Ireland from tradition-bound medieval Christians to confessionally-aware Roman Catholics. Here, surely, is a major lacuna, all the more lamentable for the availability of a richly stocked repository from which to fill it, the poetry in Irish written in that place and in that period, a resource that Breandán Ó Buachalla and Marc Caball have led the way in exploiting precisely in order to explore the mind-set of the period. Second, MacCuarta writes in an austerely magisterial style oblivious, it would seem - though clearly he is not - to the debates that have raged since the 1980s around the subject of the history of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation in Ireland. He makes no attempt to situate his work in that context or to draw out the implications of his study in such terms. Here, again, is a missed opportunity, even indeed an evasion of responsibility to a profession that his book in other ways serves so handsomely. Like all academic disciplines history advances dialectically, by means of the capacity of its current practitioners to challenge and to revise the received wisdom. Disagreeable though such a task might be to someone of the eirenic disposition of Brian MacCuarta, to leave it undone is to run the risk of allowing the pursuit of the historical truth to subside into an agreed lie.

Brendan Bradshaw, s.m.