Making, Breaking and Remaking the Irish Missionary Network

Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century

Matteo Binasco

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030473723
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book reconstructs the efforts that were made to establish a missionary network between the two Irish Colleges of Rome, Ireland, and the West Indies during the seventeenth century. It analyses the process which brought the Irish clergy to establish two dedicated colleges in the epicenter of early modern Catholicism and to develop a series of missionary initiatives in the English islands of the West Indies. During a period of great political change in Ireland, continental Europe and the Atlantic region, the book traces how and through which key figures and institutions this clerical channel was established, while at the same time identifying the main obstacles to its development.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. BinascoMaking, Breaking and Remaking the Irish Missionary Networkhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47372-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Matteo Binasco¹

(1)

Department of History, Foreigners University of Siena, Siena, Italy

Matteo Binasco

End Abstract

On 14 August 1643 Geoffrey Baron (1607–1651), a prominent Irish lawyer and the elder brother of the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure Baron (1610–1687) wrote from Paris to his uncle the Franciscan Luke Wadding (1588–1657). By then, Wadding had become the most influential Irishman in Rome.¹ Since 1642, Geoffrey Baron had been the de facto delegate to the French court of the Irish Confederation—a political and military association of prominent Irish Catholics established in the aftermath of the Ulster rebellion of 1641.² In his letter Baron informed Wadding that in the West Indies, and more precisely in St. Christopher’s island, there was a consistent number of Irish settlers. In the final part of his letter, the Irish Confederation’s delegate solicited Wadding to convince the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide” to repeal its own decree which made the French Capuchins the only missionaries in the island. Propaganda was the Roman congregation founded in 1622 with the key aim to oversee missionary activity in Protestant and non-Christian regions.³ Baron’s request followed the petition put forward by Matthew O’Hartegan (d.1666), an Irish Jesuit, who, in the spring of 1643, had volunteered to leave for St. Christopher as missionary.⁴

Baron’s letter to Wadding epitomizes the objective of this book, namely, to explore the efforts made to establish and develop a triangular missionary network between Rome, Ireland, and the West Indies from the early 1600s until the late 1670s. As we will show, this study argues that there was a continuous making, breaking, and remaking of a clerical network connecting the above mentioned areas. Moreover this book will demonstrate that this networking did not follow an uniform pattern, and it developed along different paths, each of which had its peculiar features.

The decision to focus on this clerical network has been prompted by the radical changes unfolding in the historiography of early-modern Ireland and early-modern Irish Catholicism during the last three decades. Indeed, a number of groundbreaking studies—authored by Irish and non-Irish historians—has demonstrated that from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards several clerical, commercial, and military links connected Ireland with continental Europe and more broadly with the Atlantic area. These links were largely the product of the migrations through which Irish Catholics escaped the persecutions imposed by the forced extension of Anglicanism.⁵ A consistent part of the Irish migrants were clerics who belonged to the diocesan clergy or to the regular orders. From the early 1570s onwards, these priests began to establish a series of colleges in continental Europe.⁶ The key aim of these seminaries was to cater—in line with the decree issued by the Council of Trent (1540–1563)—for the education and training of missionaries who, having completed their studies, would return to Ireland.⁷ This pattern followed the path traced by the English and Scottish clerics who developed akin structures on continental Europe between the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century.⁸

The historiography of the Irish Colleges now consists of a sophisticated body of works that demonstrates how and to which extent these structures were not only seminaries, but also cultural and diplomatic centres for the Irish communities abroad. Yet, a quick glimpse at this historiography clearly indicates that the majority of studies has focused on the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish Flanders, and France.⁹ This geographical focus has left other crucial areas such as Central Europe and the Italian Peninsula on the margins.¹⁰ This imbalance is more evident in the case of Rome. Indeed, works investigating the process which brought to the founding of St. Isidore’s and the Irish College, the first two structures of missionary formation of the Irish clergy founded in the city, are practically non-existent. So far, historiography still relies on hagiographical works written by religious historians and are thus heavily influenced by an inner perspective.¹¹ With regard to St. Isidore’s the most recent works have investigated specific aspects of the polyhedric figure of Wadding, the way the college became a prominent artistic centre of the Roman Baroque, and how this structure became a site of memory in the late seventeenth century.¹²

As for the Irish College, historiography relating to the seventeenth century is even smaller in quantity compared to the amount of analyses dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more recently those dealing with the troubled years between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the fall of the Napoleonic regime.¹³ The fact that very few works have investigated the earliest structures of missionary education for the Irish clergy in Rome contrasts with the impressive amount of painstaking guides, collection of documents, and inventories compiled by a group of Irish religious historians who, from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, perused the material preserved in the Vatican Archives and other ecclesiastical Roman repositories.¹⁴ None of these works, however, led to a more refined analysis that assessed how the Irish clergy based in Rome developed a series of cultural and missionary links with continental Europe and Ireland.

Only in recent years has the personnel of the St. Isidore’s and the Irish College been viewed as the backbone of the Irish clerical community who resided in Rome during the early modern period. In that sense the detailed prosopographies compiled by the Irish Dominican Hugh Fenning have provided a much clearer picture of number of the Irish clerics ordained in Rome—including the students of the two colleges—from the late sixteenth century until the eighteenth century.¹⁵ More recently Clare Carroll’s work has demonstrated—through a longue durée approach—that the foundation of the two colleges was part of a complex cultural process through which the Irish displayed their own sense of identity to the other foreign nationes in Rome.¹⁶

A common problem which affects all the above works is that they largely ignore the fact that the Irish Colleges in Rome had the potential to develop a series of missionary links which could extend beyond Ireland, and thus reach the communities of Irish settlers who, from the early 1630s, established themselves in the West Indies. Most English-speaking historians have focused on the economic and political dimensions of this Irish migration, with the consequence that the Irish missionary ventures organized in West Indies were seen as peripheral.¹⁷ Until the mid-1980s the standard works were the pioneering studies authored by the Irish Jesuit Aubrey Gwynn, who interpreted the Irish missionary activity in the West Indies through an hagiographical perspective.¹⁸ Except for Gwynn, only the Italian historian Giovanni Pizzorusso—who focused on the last phase of their activity—has reassessed the role of the Irish missionaries by placing it within the broader context of the development of the Catholic missions in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.¹⁹ More recently Igor Pérez Tostado has emphasized the “global” aspect of the Irish active in the Atlantic area during the early-modern period.²⁰

Yet, the “Atlantic” dimension of the Irish clergy, and more broadly of the Holy See, continues to be relegated to a marginal position within the historiography on the Atlantic world. This continues to focus on traditional themes such as slavery, state formation, and encounters between the native people and the European settlers. This contrasts with the analyses made by Luca Codignola who has demonstrated that since the early seventeenth century a series of clerical networks were developed between Rome and the North-Atlantic area.²¹

Given its transnational nature, analysis of this Irish clerical networking must also be placed within the current historiographical trend that interprets the Catholic Reformation as a global phenomenon.²² As explained by Tadgh Ó hAnnaracháin, Ireland—though located on the western periphery of Europe—played a crucial role in the advancement and success of the Catholic renewal.²³ The missionary movement is now seen as a seminal feature of the process which made Catholicism a global religion and transformed Rome in the “hub” of the Catholic world.²⁴

This transnational approach has been successfully applied to the studies on the Irish Catholic clergy during the nineteenth century thanks to the radical transformations unfolded in the studies of the Irish Diaspora. Indeed the analyses of Colin Barr, Hilary Carey, and the third volume of Treasures of Irish Christianity have demonstrated that a consistent mass of Irish regulars and seculars succeeded to obtain prominent roles in many locations of the British Empire, thus building an “Irish spiritual empire”. Though the last decade has witnessed a remarkable expansion of studies on this spiritual empire, the historiography continues to be exclusively focused on the nineteenth century.²⁵ The consequence is that, until now, no efforts have been made to apply this global approach to the activities of the Irish clergy during the early-modern period.

The time is ripe for a new analysis that can illustrate the process which led to the establishment and development of a missionary network connecting Rome, Ireland, and the West Indies during the years from 1600 to 1669. This book seeks to fill the gap by exploring and assessing the complex interplay of factors which brought to the planning and development of this clerical network and its impact in the areas where it was developed. A further aim of this book is to trace and assess the movement, the activities, and the achievements of the personnel who were involved in this network, and how and whether the two missionary poles—Ireland and the West Indies—succeeded to be connected with Rome, the epicentre of early-modern Catholicism. By adopting a comparative perspective, the book will demonstrate which of the networks examined, and which flanks of them, were stronger and whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Irish Clergy in Rome in the Early Seventeenth Century
• 3. The Beginning: The Founding of St. Isidore’s and the Irish College
• 4. Forging the Missionary Links between the “Urbs” and “Hibernia”
• 5. A New Dimension to the Irish Mission: The West Indies
• 6. Missionary Supply in Crisis Years: The Colleges and Ireland
• 7. The Colleges in Transition
• 8. “Ten Thousand Irish Catholics Extremely Oppressed by the English Heretics”: Rome and the Irish Missions in the West Indies During the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter