In 1671 Oliver Plunkett (1625–1681), archbishop of Armagh from 1669 to 1681, wrote from Ireland to the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide”, the Roman ministry founded in 1622 with the key remit to oversee missionary activity in Protestant and non-Christian regions.1 In his letter Plunkett stated with emphasis that “the students educated in Rome know better the intentions of the Apostolic See, [they] know its values”.2 In 1669, two years before Plunkett’s letter, John Grace, an Irish secular priest active in the English islands of the West Indies, sent to Propaganda a report on the conditions of the Irish settler population in those islands. As far as was possible, the priest sought to calculate the number of Irish people in each of the islands.3 Despite his claims that all the Irish in the English islands were Catholics, some of the figures on the settlers’ numbers provided by Grace were not so far from the official census that William Stapleton, governor of the Leeward Islands, compiled in 1678.4 The most telling example was Montserrat, the “Emerald” island par excellence, where, according to Grace , lived 2000 Irish settlers, a figure which was only slightly higher than the 1869 reported by Stapleton.5
At first glance, the letters of Plunkett and Grace seem to have little in common, for they were written by two Irish clerics who had no association with each other, and who lived in two completely different contexts. Yet both documents were addressed to Propaganda, a congregation which had a global outlook on all the Catholic missions.6 The second element that links the two letters is that both Plunkett and Grace identified, albeit in different ways, Propaganda as a powerful structure which embodied the centrality and the prominence of the Holy See. In the case of Plunkett , he could boast of having had first-hand experience of the Papal Curia and Rome, where he lived from 1647 to 1669, first as a student of the Irish College and then as a theology professor at the Collegio Urbano of Propaganda Fide.7 By contrast, Grace never set foot in Rome, but his report to the congregation followed a process that many Irish clerics, whether in Ireland, on continental Europe, or elsewhere, had already experienced.
The letters of these men help to introduce the theme of this volume which is to explore and assess the role played by the Holy See in the establishment and development of a series of missionary networks which embrace Rome, continental Europe, Ireland, and the transatlantic world from 1622 to 1908. The rationale for these dates is dictated by the need to demonstrate the continuous making, breaking, and remaking of the clerical networks established and developed between Rome, Ireland, and the Atlantic world over a long period. A further reason for this timeframe is that it covers the period which extends from Propaganda’s foundation in 1622 until 1908, when Ireland and North America—Canada and the United States—were removed from the congregation’s jurisdiction.
The decision to adopt a “Roman” perspective for this study is linked with three crucial changes unfolding in the historiography of both early modern and modern Ireland. The first is the growing use of continental archives by Irish and non-Irish historians of Ireland. The second is a new interest in the role of Irish Catholics in the transatlantic world in the early modern period. Finally, there is a growing interest in interpreting the religious dimension of the Irish Diaspora, both Catholic and Protestant, in terms of the building of a “spiritual empire”.8 The first of these is linked to the “Copernican” revolution which has occurred in the study of early modern Ireland since the late 1980s.9 Indeed from that moment onwards a growing body of works by Irish and non-Irish historians—particularly French and Spanish—have demonstrated that, from the second half of the sixteenth century, a complex web of cultural, military, and political networks connected Ireland with continental Europe, and the Atlantic area. These networks were largely the product of considerable migrations, in which the Irish Catholics, and to a lesser extent also Protestants —mainly Anglicans and Presbyterians—moved to various locations for a variety of reasons.10
In the last two decades this large movement of Irish people, which would anticipate the great Irish Diaspora of the nineteenth century, has raised several questions about the economic, political, and religious factors that lay behind it. Moreover a number of studies have tried to provide a better understanding of how and to what extent this flow of people contributed to altering and shaping a new sense of Irishness or a completely new identity which was influenced by the host societies where the Irish settled.11 A quick glance at the “new” scholarship of the Irish abroad demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of the works are focused on the Irish communities which emerged on the Iberian Peninsula, in France, and in the Spanish Netherlands, and, to a much smaller extent, on the Irish who came to populate the Italian Peninsula, Austria, and Central Europe.12 The fact that very few studies investigate the Irish on the Italian Peninsula is possibly linked to the fact that that region attracted only a modest number of immigrants.13 Yet, this does not mean that the Roman sources have been overlooked by the historians. From the latter decades of the nineteenth century Irish religious historians made ample use of the material contained in the Vatican Archives, the Vatican Library, the archives of Propaganda, and other ecclesiastical archives of Rome.14 The most tangible outcome of their researches was the publication of a series of painstaking guides, inventories, and collections of documents of the Irish material contained in the Roman archives.15 Their investigations did not, however, lay the foundation for a more refined analysis that could demonstrate the role played by the Holy See in the development of the Irish clerical networks, and in the construction of Irish Catholicism. The result is that until today the majority of the studies for the early modern period that rely on the Roman sources are focused on the institutional history of the Irish Colleges which were founded in the city of Rome, on the clerics who were ordained there, and on the Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding (1588–1657).16
There are of course some noteworthy exceptions of studies that have used the Roman sources to provide a new perspective on the effective role played by the Holy See in crucial periods of Irish Catholicism, and more broadly in early modern Irish history. One is Tadhg Ó hAnnrachâin’s analysis of the papal nuncio, Gianbattista Rinuccini (1592–1653), which shows how the Holy See sought to preserve Irish Catholicism during the 1640s, when all the British Isles were engulfed in political and religious turmoil.17 Another is Hugh Fenning’s investigation of the question of the Irish novitiate during the eighteenth century.18 A third is the ongoing research of Ian McBride on how the Holy See tried to support Irish Catholics during the Penal Law era.19
The second crucial change in the historiography that must be taken into account is the growing interest in the activities of Irish Catholics in the Atlantic area during the early modern period. Not only is this demonstrating that there was an Irish presence in that region, but it is challenging the traditional stereotype of an English Atlantic created by the established Church of England.20 This “Anglo-centric” approach is likely informed by the fact that the Irish, like the Scots, had very limited financial resources to sustain overseas enterprises and settlements during the first half of the seventeenth century. With the notable exception of the Irish ventures organized in St. Kitts and in the Amazon Basin, the Irish were initially relegated to a marginal economic and political position in the Atlantic region.21
The above factors seemed to play against a fuller investigation of the experience of Irish Catholics, and more broadly of all Catholics, within the English Atlantic. The consequence is that, until the late 1980s, the literature mainly relied on the work that the Jesuit historians Thomas Hughes and Aubrey Gwynn had done on the Catholic clergy in North America and on the Irish in the West Indies, Luca Codignola’s analysis of the attempt made by George Calvert (1580–1632), 1st Baron Baltimore, to found a colony in Newfoundland, and John D. Krugler’s work on Maryland.22
This inattention to the value of the Roman material is also reflected in the new historiography on the Catholics in the English Atlantic. The studies of Jennifer Shaw and Kristen Block on the Irish in the Caribbean, and Shona Helen Johnston on the Catholics in the Anglo-Atlantic during the seventeenth century, overlook the strategies conceived and put forward by the Holy See.23 This neglect of the “Roman” perspective has inevitably reinforced perceptions of the marginality of the Irish clerics who operated in the Atlantic area. A clear demonstration is provided by Donald Harman Akenson, who, in his ground-breaking study of Montserrat, dismissed the experience of the Irish missionaries as unimpressive. According to him, “in the seventeenth century, the church authorities had a good deal more on their minds than a few Irish colonists on the far edge of the earth”.24 While Akenson’s claim is true in the sense that there was a constant shortage of Irish priests in the English islands of the Caribbean, and more broadly in the English colonies of North America , he underestimated the information that they passed to Propaganda, which, despite the few resources and the distance, helped to inform st...