Irish missionary effort in America began before the Famine, when most Irish immigrants were non-Catholic, but it matured quickly thereafter between 1845 and 1900 when approximately four million Irish, predominantly Catholic, left their homeland for the United States. Prior to the Famine, priests from the Irish colleges of Spain, especially Salamanca, came to serve in … Read more
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a final surge in Protestant missionary activity in Ireland. This was largely a reaction to the sense of crisis in Protestant circles following both the Act of Union of 1800, and the attainment of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. There was a strong belief amongst evangelical Protestants that … Read more
The Ireland in which Alexius Stafford was born and reared, in the mid-1600s, was a troubled land. The great rebellion of 1641 had been followed by the advent of Oliver Cromwell and his subsequent land confiscations and plantations in the early 1650s. Battles, sieges, despoliation and depression had ravaged town and country. By 1688-89, there … Read more
In 1585 the English privy council branded Richard Creagh ‘a dangerous man to be among the Irish for the reverence that is by that nation borne unto him’, and ordered that he should be detained in the Tower of London. The eighteen-year incarceration of the Archbishop of Armagh in London and Dublin was acutely embarrassing … Read more
When Pope John Paul II made his famous visit to Ireland in 1979, it must have looked to the outside world as if the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ still belonged easily together, as they had for centuries. Semper fidelis was the phrase confidently pronounced by the pope just before he departed from Shannon airport. As … Read more