Paul Cullen’s appointment as Archbishop of Armagh in 1849 was not unanimously welcomed by either priests or people. Indeed, he was chosen only because all the other possible candidates were even more unacceptable to one of the factions into which the Irish episcopate was divided. His strength was that he was neither a ‘castle bishop’, in the pocket of the Viceroy, nor a Fenian, more interested in politics than prayer. His weakness was that he returned a stranger to his homeland. He had left Ireland when he was eighteen and spent the subsequent thirty years in Rome as seminarian, director of the printing and publishing arm of Propaganda, Rector (at one time simultaneously) of both the Propaganda College and the Irish College in Rome and agent for the Irish bishops.
Cullen’s reputation as man of action was enhanced during Rome’s occupation by the revolutionaries of the Risorgimento when it seemed that the Irish College would be requisitioned by the insurgents. There were four Americans on the seminary’s rolls. So the Rector announced that the college was under the protection of the United States government, flew the Stars and Stripes and continued his duties undisturbed. But neither his ingenuity nor his dynamism was enough to make the Irish press and people welcome his appointment. Because of his long years in Rome, one newspaper described him as an ‘unnaturalised Irishman’.1 Another called him ‘an Italian monk’. The claim that he was ‘an agent of Ultramontane advance’ was meant to be offensive, but Cullen did not find it so. He was, above all else, devoted to the doctrine that the authority of the Pope was absolute. It was his absolutist view – combined with his experiences during the republicans’ siege of the Vatican – which made him believe that it was ‘better to have famine than revolution’.2 A man with a more subtle mind might have come to the conclusion that the two catastrophes were related.
Cullen arrived back in Ireland in 1850, three years after the Irish Poor Law had been amended. Until then it had been identical to the English system. Under the act of 1838 ‘relief’ had been almost entirely provided by the workhouses. The destitution that followed the Great Famine was so widespread that the workhouses could no longer provide enough ‘indoor relief’ to meet the paupers’ needs. So the choice was between revising the Act and mass starvation. A limited form of ‘outdoor relief’ was introduced. Three years later, more than one million Irish paupers – one-sixth of the whole nation – were still receiving the pittance provided by the Poor Law Commissioners. And the workhouses, although no longer so full that they were turning mendicants away, were still grossly overcrowded. They were under scrutiny as well as under strain. The Mayor of Cork was shocked to discover that most of the juvenile inmates in the city’s workhouses died before they reached the age of thirteen. In South Dublin, a Catholic workhouse chaplain was dismissed after he supported women who had complained about assaults by members of the staff.
Pressure from reformers, combined with fear of the whole system’s collapse, resulted in the setting up of a Select Committee to which Cullen volunteered to give evidence, for reasons that were entirely consistent with his character and calling. He ‘knew a good deal about the working of the [present] system and was persuaded that it was most dangerous to religion’ and would, ‘if not corrected, destroy the poor’.3 Cullen had sent a questionnaire to all the workhouse chaplains in his diocese. Their response was unanimous and was typified by the comments of the priest who commended ‘the heroism of those afflicted creatures who prefer to endure starvation rather than qualify themselves for relief in the workhouse’. One of his colleagues explained why ‘indoor relief’ was anathema to the virtuous. It provided ‘an encouragement to the evil habits of the male sex and a nursery to female vice’.
Cullen’s evidence to the Select Committee dealt with the physical deprivation as well as the moral danger that indoor relief guaranteed. He rejected the proposition that poverty was a condition which deserved punishment – the basis of the Poor Law – and sought to replace it with a theory of relief which distinguished between the deserving and undeserving pauper. He also wanted the system to make special provision for children and to acknowledge the importance of keeping respectable families together. The spiritual needs of the Catholic poor – 80 per cent of workhouse inmates – were not forgotten. Provision must be made for their form of worship, and Catholic chaplains should be afforded easier access and more respect. All in all, it was an irrefutable statement of Catholic aims. Yet no other bishop endorsed it. Indeed, Cullen’s colleagues were opposed to him giving evidence. They all took it for granted that their submissions would be treated with contempt. John Derry, Bishop of Clonfert, spoke for them all: ‘The fruitlessness of all our appeals to parliament and to the governments which have been successively in power since I became bishop has for a long time made me despair of correcting, in that way, the evils we have to complain of.’ He cited the behaviour of boards of guardians as an example of the prejudice faced by public-spirited Catholics. In most workhouses only a small percentage of the inmates were Protestants. Yet the masters, matrons, clerks, schoolmasters and mistresses almost invariably were. Not one board was chaired by a Catholic.4 The bishops’ pessimism was proved to be justified. The one substantial reform to flow from the Select Committee was the repeal of the law that required every foundling to be registered as a Protestant. Ireland, and its Catholic Church, was left to wrestle with the other consequence of endemic poverty – emigration to what was, usually wrongly, believed to be a better life.
During Paul Cullen’s first year as Archbishop of Armagh, 209,000 men, women and children left Ireland for ever. Between his arrival in 1850 and death (as Archbishop of Dublin) in 1878 Irish emigration totalled well over 2.5 million. One perverse consequence of the depopulation – death as well as departures – was a reduction on the pressure on the clergy. Before the Great Famine there was a ratio of one priest to every 2,800 Catholics. By 1860 it had increased to one priest to every 1,500.5 Emigration was a desperate expedient about which the Catholic Church could not agree. In 1847, eighty-four prominent landowners had petitioned Lord John Russell with the request that the government initiate a colonisation programme that would resettle three million Irish citizens in North Africa. It was the sort of remedy to hunger and homelessness which the Protestant ascendancy were expected to propose. But the resigned acceptance that Ireland would never be able adequately to feed its own people stretched across sectarian and social divides. In 1849, Father James Maher of Graigue in County Carlow – Cullen’s uncle – wrote that it was ‘better to be alive in Illinois than rotting in Ireland’.6 In the following year Father Malachy Duggan, of Moyarta and Kilballyowen in West Clare, argued that emigration was probably the only alternative to ‘people flocking to every door, craving something to prolong life if only for a few hours’.
The bishops – Thomas Feeney of Killala, Edmund Maginn of Derry and John McHale of Tuam – took a different view. Their opposition was partly economic (available funds best spent on domestic relief), partly social (the best people leave, while the worst stay), but primarily religious. Emigrants were notorious for, at best, neglecting their observances and, at worst, losing their faith completely. Archbishop Cullen shared the three bishops’ concern. During his years of residence in Rome he had regularly visited his brother – a successful Liverpool businessman – and discovered that no more than 10 per cent of Irish Catholic immigrants to the city regularly attended Mass and that (to him perhaps, even worse) an alarming number entered into mixed marriages. But, when he helped to establish an Irish Relief Committee in Rome, his appeal to the bishop wisely emphasised the social rather than spiritual effects of famine and consequent immigration – particularly the risk of death and disease faced by heroic priests going about their pastoral duties.
Immediately that he became an archbishop, Cullen wrote to Cardinal Allesandro Barnabo of Propaganda Fide to describe the devastating effects emigration was having on Ireland. A second letter had reported that 5,000 people a week were leaving his archdiocese for America, with the result that ‘entire areas of the country are left abandoned’.7 He was later to wonder if the diaspora was providential – God’s way of spreading Catholicism throughout a great empire. But in 1850 he was more concerned with the causes than the consequences. His first pastoral letter – February 24th – ended his description of the poverty he saw each day with a plea for immediate relief and a rhetorical question: ‘Is there a heart so hard that it is not moved by such misery and desolation?’
Much of the argument in favour of planned emigration was based on the mistaken belief – shared by the emigrants themselves – that to escape from Ireland was to escape from poverty. John Lynch, Bishop of Toronto, published an open letter to the Irish bishops, which warned against wholesale and improvident emigration. Immigrants to his diocese were forced by poverty to live in areas that were ‘haunts of vice’, with the result that they were ‘lost to morality, to society, to religion and finally to God’, and he drove his point home in a private letter to Cullen which reported, with shame and regret, that as in Canada, so in Liverpool. Two-thirds of the city’s prostitutes were Irish.
It was not only in Canada that the Catholic immigrants lived in squalor. A Mrs Charlton, author of Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady, described Bellingham, where iron ore deposits had been found, as ‘full of dirty ill-conditioned Irish labourers’.8 And some of the Catholic clergy were equally censorious. One Kensington priest complained that the expatriate Irish were responsible for ‘immovable belts of stink’ in his parish church and that, thanks to them, ‘bugs walk about in surplices and take possession of gentlemen’s hats’.9 The priest who opened a new Mass centre in Sheffield recalled that, although trade was good and in general the city prospered, ‘our poor people, through neglect and disorderly habits and, most of all drink, were in a state of utmost poverty and degradation’.10
Cardinal Cullen was at once more sympathetic to the immigrants and more critical of the English clergy. In November 1856 he wrote to Cardinal Barnabo with the complaint that the Catholic Church in England was less interested in meeting the needs of the poor than in building spectacular churches, ‘polished, with palatial salons, covered in beautiful carpets’. He cited, as an example of the sinful regard for respectability, the Redemptorists of Clapham who, he claimed, feared that they could not accommodate the poor within their Sunday congregations without them ‘dirtying the fine linen and offending the eyes of the great’.11
It was true that the Redemptorist chapel in Clapham could only accommodate seven hundred worshippers, and that was far fewer than the number who wanted to attend Mass on Sunday. And the same problem was prejudicing the work of parishes all over England. Throughout the country Catholics were being denied access to the sacraments because their local church was too small to meet the expanding needs of the area it served. By 1851 – largely thanks to the Irish immigration which followed the famine – the Catholic population of England had grown to 700,000. They had to be accommodated in the 586 churches and chapels that had served the country before the Irish came. The weekly attendance at Mass was a little in excess of 250,000. The churches and chapels could seat about 180,000.12
Between 1837 and 1845, thirty-five new Catholic churches had been built in England, most of them in the Gothic style, but not all designed by Pugin.13 Few were in the places in which the immigrants had settled, and Cardinal Wiseman saw it as his duty – as a central feature of his reorganisation of the English Catholic Church – to create new parishes. Each one must, he had no doubt, have a proper church at its centre. That ambition was most easily performed in places where a rich benefactor could be found. Although he rejoiced that a new church in East London had been ‘erected by the penny contributions of Irish labourers, bargemen, bricklayers, hodmen and other toilers’,14 he knew that the poor could not meet the need on their own. The ‘people’s pence’ had an emotional, a romantic and perhaps a moral attraction, but did not build churches as quickly as rich men’s pounds.
Father William Lockhart, sent by the Cardinal to Kingsland in North London, found Thomas Kelly, a prosperous builder, and persuaded him to allow the first floor of his house to become a Mass centre and presbytery. Inspired by the sacrifice, Father Lockhart used resources of his own to buy a disused pre-Reformation Church in Ely Place, Holborn. Father George Spencer, the son of an earl, said Mass in a temporary chapel in West Bromwich until – having begun the process with £200 of his own money – he had raised enough capital to build a church. In the provinces, donors were more difficult to find. So working men played a bigger part. Although a Mrs Eyre of Bath financed the creation of a new church to replace the temporary chapel on the ground floor of a cottage in Newport, in other parts of Wales, life was particularly hard. In Merthyr Tydfil, Mass was said in a loft over the local abattoir. In Abersychan, services were held in the club room of a public house. The attic which the priest in Swansea rented was used, despite its rotten roof, but was necessarily abandoned when the floor collapsed.
In Liverpool, Bishop Alexander Goss was determined to replace – with something more appropriate to the Glory of God – the wooden hut in St James’ Street where the Society of St Vincent de Paul held services. Unfortunately he could not even afford to complete payment for the site. Nevertheless he laid the foundation stone and, during its dedication, invited members of the congregation to contribute. Some of them had come prepared. At the end of the service the Irish ships’ carpenters of the parish passed in line, each one laying one day’s wages on the newly blessed stone.15 Other tradesmen, and men with no trades at all, followed suit. More than £100 was collected on the day.
Before the Great Famine, Ireland was similarly short of churches but – since, unlike England, it was a Catholic country – it was able to mitigate, though not solve, the problem in a Catholic way. ‘Mass stations’ were established in private houses throughout the country. In them the sacraments were administered at Christmas, through Lent, during Holy Week and on other nominated days. They also provided convenient opportunities for parish priests to collect parish subscriptions; but, for all their utility, they did not find favour with Rome. Lofts, kitchens and clubrooms were acceptable as long as they were permanently converted into chapels. The week-by-week switch from sacred to secular purpose was not. Disapproval was expressed and it might well have become prohibition, had not the shortage of premises – like the shortage of priests – been ‘solved’ by the famine and consequent emigration. As things turned out, the problem was simply exported to Catholic parts of England.
The problem was most serious in Liverpool, where immigrants from Ireland suffered all the poverty and degradation about which the anti-emigration bishops had warned. In November 1855, the Catholic Institute Magazine wrote of ‘thousands of homeless, moneyless, raimentless, foodless creatures that call the Catholic Church their mother in Liverpool’.16 The crisis in care was increased by the Great Famine, but existed long before the potato crop failed. As early as 1832, the Liverpool District Provident Society – in its annual report for the previous year – had replied to critics who complained about ‘relieving so many of the Irish poor’. It conceded the fact, but was unyielding in defence of the necessity. ‘Out of 11,303 relieved, 8,069 have been from Ireland. Heavy as the burden must be, it appears unavoidable … As long as the Irish poor are situated as at present this charge upon the funds of the Society cannot, it is feared, be much diminished.’ The report was clear that blame for the ‘burden’ that the Provident Society – and other Liverpool charitable institutions – had to bear must be shared between the Great Famine and the coming of cheap steamboat travel across the Irish Sea. Liverpool was accessible and it was also a staging post to the promised land of America. Indeed, many illiterate Irish peasants were sold tickets to Liverpool in the belief that they were buying their passage to New York or Boston.
Liverpool thus became the paradigm of nineteenth-century attitudes towards the Catholic poor and the example – magnified and concentrated – of the behaviour of poor Catholics and their Church. In the age of carefully modulated compassion, Protestant and non-denominational charities were far more likely than their Catholic counterparts to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor. The Liverpool Select Vestry warned – as numbers of immigrants began to rise – that to ‘administer relief indiscriminately is only to offer encouragement to others and increase the evil’. The Provident Society – despite an earlier robust defence of providing indiscriminate help – decided to reduce ‘the promiscuous and more particularly the pecuniary relief of beggars’ by distributing soup tickets rather than cash. The authorities, as represented by Alfred Austin, the Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for the North West, endorsed the view that thoughtless charity – based on sentimentality rather than reason – exacerbated, rather than relieved, the problem:
The extremely wretched appearance of most of the Irish immigrants strongly excites the compassionate feelings of the Inhabitants of Liverpool and an indiscriminate alms giving has been the consequence. Every street swarms with Irish beggars and their gains is at once an inducement to them to continue the profitable pursuit of Mendacity and an invitation to fresh numbers to come over from Ireland to Liverpool to participate in the profit.17
That was not the Catholic way. The Church embraced a variety of views about the Christian obligation to the poor. But the predominant feeling was compassion, and the almost invariable reaction to the poverty of the time was the organisation and sponsorship of good works. The Catholic Institute Magazine went so far as publicly to criticise the Protestant view of charity, which, it claimed, ‘proceeds with a fixity of system, a calm calculation of practical results and a rigid economy of good works which utterly destroy, to Catholic eyes, all that in Charity is most beautiful and most holy’. The Catholic charities of Liverpool were competitive as well as critical. J Neal-Lomas, at the 1866 annual dinner of Liverpool Catholic Club, actually challenged the Protestant churches to match the charitable record of the Church of Rome. Eleven out of every twenty inmates of the Liverpool workhouses were, he said, Catholics, and raising funds with which to support them was a constant struggle, and only one in ten of Liverpool houses, with a rateable value of £20 or above, was occupied by members of the same faith. But Neal-Lomas ‘felt it a glory to belong to a Church which would take care of the destitute’. John Belchem – historian and author of Irish, Catholic and Scouse – believes that Liverpool-Irish Catholics came to regard poverty as a badge of identity. Whether or not that was so, they certainly coalesced into a mutually supportive community in which the rank-and-file clergy believed that their vocation was to give material as well as spiritual succour to their followers. Father James Nugent – admittedly a priest with an unusually active and vocal social conscience – had no doubt where his duty lay: ‘I want the poor people with me. I want the poorest of the poor in order that I may throw some ray of comfort and consolation across their troubled lives.’
Nugent became the first president of the Liverpool Catholic Reformatory Association and pioneered a series of work schemes, including harvesting in the fields of a Cistercian monastery. He believed that, as well as providing much-needed material comfort, regular employment would help recipients along the road to redemption and rehabilitation. Alexander Goss, the Catholic Bishop of Liverpool, was clearly more concerned with tranquillity in his respectable flock than in the material and spiritual welfare of its lost sheep. He was dismissive about the Cistercian farm scheme and advocated, in its place, compulsory removal to the colonies. Had his idea been adopted, some young men – who had left Ireland as children in the families of voluntary immigrants – would have been required to emigrate a second time.
Father Nugent was the all-purpose reformer, as determined to redeem fallen women as he was to improve the behaviour of violent and dishonest young men and boys. He was handicapped in his work of redemption by the angry refusal of respectable Catholic Liverpool to face the unpleasant fact of female frailty. The truth about male crime – exposed by Nugent after he became the Catholic chaplain to Walton Gaol – was to be regretted, but had to be accepted. A majority of the male prisoners in Walton Gaol were Roman Catholics and, for the thirty years that followed the Great Famine, 60 per cent of the Catholic prisoners were Irish-born. Usually they were convicted of minor offences, which were often related to the high incidence of drunk-and-disorderly conduct amongst immigrant men. Nugent asked respectable Liverpool to show compassion to petty offenders who were not part of the ‘well-to-do class or even skilled labourers and mechanics, but the poorest and most destitute class’.18
It was, however, more difficult – in some cases, impossible – to accept Nugent’s revelation that so many women, born and bred in the pure Catholic air of Ireland, fell from grace in the more fetid atmosphere of the Liverpool slums. The Irish press, and Irish nationalist newspapers in Liverpool, were outraged by Nugent’s assertion – in his first annual report of the Reformatory Association – that ‘more than 60% of law-breaking prostitutes in Protestant Liverpool’ were what the Irish People called ‘our own countrywomen’. The facts were, however, irrefutable. According to an 1866 inquiry into contagious diseases in the city, there were 1,313 ‘houses of bad character’ in Liverpool, and Irish prostitutes were to be found in the most squalid brothels. The authors did their best to soften truth’s blow. ‘It is well known that Irish women in their own country are, even amidst very unfavourable surroundings, a most virtuous class.’ However, in Liverpool they made up the ‘most degraded class of prostitutes, living in brothels in the very worst streets in the borough and resorted to by the numerous negroes always present in Liverpool as ships’ cooks, stewards, seamen and labourers’. It was the consequences for the women’s health, as much as for their mortal souls, that caused Nugent – in a fit of despair – to consider the wholly impractical idea of sending vulnerable young girls to Canada, where (he seemed to believe) the wide-open spaces would restore health and encourage respectability.
The determination of respectable Liverpool to clear the borough of its brothels brought Nugent out of semi-retirement – not to cooperate with the authorities, but to mitigate some of the suffering that closure caused. He bought a boarding house and turned it into the St Saviour’s Refuge and – proclaiming the need to Rescue the Fallen – set out, in the words of the Catholic Times, ‘to meet the urgent want occasioned by the local police crusade against immoral houses, whereby large numbers of unfortunate women of this class were thrown destitute and homeless into the streets’.19 Under the supervision of nuns, the women were prepared for transfer to one of the Homes of the Good Shepherd, where they were employed in the laundries on what was described as ‘penitential work’ – thus raising one of the questions which hangs over descriptions of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. Should the laundries and their harsh penitential regimes – early mornings, long working days, poor food, institutional clothing and virtual imprisonment – be judged by the standard of the times, and therefore admired as demonstrations of love and compassion, or should they be regarded by more modern measurements of those virtues as examples of how harsh and unforgiving the Pharisees can be?
At least the Liverpool Catholic Church felt an obligation to provide some sort of succour for its destitute followers. The Protestant City Fathers felt little obligation to meet the material needs of the borough’s new Irish citizens, and none at all to respect the demands of their religion. In 1850, James Whitty – a prosperous draper and immigrant from County Wexford – launched a campaign to shame the Liverpool Vestry into acknowledging its duties to the whole community. The Lancashire Free Press – the first Catholic newspaper on Merseyside – joined in with the demand that Catholics be allowed to enjoy ‘the full and free benefits of the British constitution’,20 which, it went on to claim, with dubious authenticity, was essentially the product of pre-Reformation England. In consequence a room was set aside in the Brownlow Workhouse – where half the resident paupers were Catholics – for Mass to be said on a Sunday. It was not until thirty years later that the Board of Guardians agreed to pay a fee for the services of a priest. Richard Sheil – a merchant who did business with America and was, for many years, the only Catholic on the Liverpool council – paid, out of his own pocket, for a chaplain to be employed by the Kirkdale Industrial School, where pauper children were prepared for low-skilled work. Although there were 451 Catholic pupils in the school – out of a total roll of 795 – the Vestry rejected the proposal that there should always be one Catholic teacher on the staff. The Protestant politicians campaigned against what they called ‘Rome on the Rates’ and used their commanding positions in the institutions of the poor to proselytise among the young (often orphaned) paupers.
Father James Nugent – mid-nineteenth-century Merseyside’s most determined pioneer of Catholic elementary education – estimated that more than 23,000 children regularly spent their days ‘roaming about the streets and docks’.21 The police put the figure even higher. They calculated that 48,782 children, between the ages of five and fourteen, did not attend school, and that more than 25,000 of them ran wild each day. Most were the sons and daughters of Liverpool’s 150,000 Catholics. Dissatisfied with the level of provision, and bitter about the Protestant bias in what schools there were, Catholic Liverpool responded by setting up schools of its own whenever resources permitted. A redundant hospital was bought from the West Derby Union and turned into St George’s Industrial School under the supervision of the Christian Brothers. Father Nugent – who had a weakness for flamboyant slogans and titles – set up the Association of Providence for the Protection of Orphan and Destitute Boys in a disused theatre. A year later he founded a refuge for homeless boys (under the title ‘Nobody’s Children’), which began as a night shelter and evolved first into a training centre and then into a paper-bag factory and cobblers’ shop to employ the trainees.
Liverpool was not the only, or even the first, diocese in which Catholics struggled to provide what the Vestries and Councils either neglected or organised in ways that discriminated against Catholics, by preventing them from fulfilling the obligations of their faith. The first Catholic orphanage was opened in 1847 at North Hyde, in Middlesex; the first Catholic reformatory at Blythe House, in Hammersmith; and the first Catholic Industrial School at Walthamstow in 1870. But it was in Liverpool where the need was the greatest and where the response, by the nature of the city, was most riven by sectarian prejudice.
Father Nugent’s achievement would not have been possible without his flair for publicity. But there were complaints that his work publicised the least attractive aspects of the Liverpool Catholic Irish. Despite that, and the occasional complaint from their leaders that they contributed little to the upkeep of their Church, men and women who could be legitimately so described – Irish by birth, Liverpudlian by residence and Catholic by faith – were remarkably cohesive in their loyalty to the old country, the new homeland and the unchanging religion. Unlike in Glasgow, where they were openly rejected, Irish priests – many of them the product of Maynooth’s rigorous regime – were welcomed in Liverpool as a continuing connection with ‘the old country’. They acted as interpreters for families who spoke only Gaelic, and they identified families in particularly desperate need of help, and they made sure that none of their parishioners misappropriated funds that were intended for the deserving poor. Most important of all, they became the glue that held the Liverpool Irish Catholics together – even though their leaders sometimes quarrelled among themselves.
The Jesuits, true to form, tried to establish a presence in the city while remaining semi-detached from the rest of the Church, which – it must be said, in fairness to the Society – did its best to keep them at arm’s length. In 1841, at the first anniversary meeting of the Society of St Francis Xavier, the sympathetic laymen were given an account of the conflicting arguments with which the objections to the establishment of a Jesuit church had been justified. ‘First it is alleged that the proposed church is not necessary … Secondly it is alleged that a church in Salisbury Street will harm St Anthony’s and St Nicholas’ … Thirdly it is alleged that the proposed site is out of town and there is no Catholic population around it.’22 For their part, the Jesuits were unyielding in their insistence that the special rights of regulars to act independently of lay authority must be respected. And they made their point in uncompromising language. ‘During the inspection, the inspectors claimed to be received as the bishop’s representatives … The bishop has no right to do in a school what he has no right to do in a church … He has no right of inspection.’23
In the Midland District the question of inspection (its pecuniary advantages and it procedural pitfalls) had obliged Nicholas Wiseman to emphasise a point of principle which echoed the argument about authority that had dominated Henry’s Reformation. His circular – which asked ‘how many children in your Mission require Education’ but do not receive it? – was accompanied by a covering letter which provided useful information about the possibility of obtaining funds from the ‘Catholic Poor-Schools Committee’ and government assistance with the payment of teachers’ salaries. It ended with a stern injunction to preserve the religious integrity of Catholic schools and their staff:
Opportunities will be given for Catholic schoolmasters to be examined by an inspector … Such masters who pass through it and obtain a certificate will be entitled to pecuniary assistance and the employment of a Pupil apprentice … I urge on you the importance of not allowing your School master to submit to examination by any but a Catholic inspector.24
Wiseman’s instruction was the result of fear that Catholics in a strange land would forget, or at least dilute, the faith of home. Writing in the year of the Great Famine, a Birkenhead priest claimed, much to his obvious distress, the ‘deplorable effects which the woes of the last season seem to have had in almost utterly destroying the religious instincts of the Irish in Britain’.25 In fact – allowing for the need to adjust to the new life, the deprivation from which they suffered and the bitterness that many of them must have felt towards Providence, as well as society – church attendance remained remarkably high. According to the 1851 census, the ‘Irish born’ population of Liverpool was 83,813, and 38,123 Catholics were recorded as present at Mass on Sunday March 30th. Some of the worshippers were, no doubt, native Liverpudlians. But a number of ‘Irish born’ citizens must have been Ulster Protestants. So it is reasonable to assume that the ratio (thirty-eight churchgoers out of every eighty-four Irish immigrants) is more or less correct. But it makes no allowance for Irish-born Catholics who were too old, too young, too sick or too indolent to attend church. Include them in the equation and the ratio changes. Half of the Catholics who were able to do so attended Mass on that specific Sunday. And there would have been many others who – claiming that piety did not require them to make a weekly attendance – called themselves ‘good Catholics’ because of the occasional appearance at Mass, but happened not to choose Sunday March 30th 1851 as one of the days for formal worship.
Native-born Catholics were more assiduous worshippers than were the Catholic immigrants. But the two groups were divided by more than the frequency of church attendance. Many of the native Catholics regarded themselves as different in kind from most of the faith. During a dinner party at Eaton Hall, the Marquess of Westminster reproved one of his guests for expressing his dislike of Catholics when there was ‘a Catholic lady present’. He was referring to Mrs Charlton, the author of The Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady. Mrs Charlton assured the Marquis that, far from taking offence, she had never thought that the disparaging remarks in any way related to her. Yes, she was a Catholic, ‘but an English one, not an Irish one – which is all the difference in the world’.26 She was right. Culturally and socially she had little in common with the Liverpool immigrants and hers was a very different Church – at the beginnings of Wiseman’s leadership, not yet totally freed from the Catholic gentry’s belief that it should be governed by them rather than by rules laid down in Rome. But she did not realise that, because of the primitive energy that had come out of Ireland via Liverpool, the Catholic Church was changing – first in the cities into which the Irish initially came and then, as they spread out, throughout the country. Henry Manning was right to give thanks for the consequences of the diaspora. ‘The thing which will save us from low views about the Mother of God and the vicar of Our Lord is the million Irish in England.’27
While the Catholic Church in England was being changed by the Irish of the diaspora, Cardinal Paul Cullen was making formal changes to the organisation of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Cullen was wrestling with the rebellious ‘spirit … developing here every day, among not only a few priests but a good many of them’. He described the growing mood of insubordination as ‘scant respect, not to say contempt for the authority of the Holy See’.28 The Synod of Thurles, which had met in August 1850, was the battleground that Cullen chose for his opening assault on the traitors within the gate. The opening skirmish had ended in a narrow victory – the reluctant agreement not to cooperate with the secular colleges. The second engagement was a battle fought on two fronts. The proposal that disagreements between the bishops, which could not be resolved between them, should be referred to Rome was agreed unanimously. The proposition that no bishop was to take action or express an opinion on a subject of mutual concern, without consulting the whole episcopate, was bitterly opposed by the Archbishop of Dublin and was only carried by sixteen votes to twelve. The Synod had also passed regulations which unified, throughout Ireland, the liturgy of the sacraments and laid down new rules for the conduct of the clergy. But it was Cullen’s battle with the bishops for which it will be remembered – a battle that was only the beginning of a long campaign.
The month before the Synod met, Cullen had – through his influence with Cardinal Franzoni, the Prefect of Propaganda Fide – arranged for the See of Cloyne and Ross to be split and William Keane, a priest ‘well disposed to be obedient to the Holy See, to be made Bishop of Ross. Cullen had already decided that the only way in which he could impose his will on an unruly episcopate was to change its composition. That was essential if he was to obtain the right answer to what, he told Rome, was ‘the real question to be decided – whether the decisions of the Holy See ought or ought not to be obeyed, whether the Pope should govern the Irish Church through the majority of the Irish bishops or if the English should govern it by means of the Archbishop of Dublin’. He added that the need for change was reinforced by the age and infirmity of some of the incumbents. ‘The Bishop of Dublin is eighty-three years of age. The Bishop of Killaloe has dropsy and, it is believed, will hardly survive Christmas. The Bishop of Dromore is totally deaf and is not fit to govern his diocese. The Bishops of Down and Connor and of Kerry are both very ill.’ If the Vatican took ‘great care in the choice of new bishops, within three years, things [would] be totally changed in Ireland’. The cull took ten. But long before it had been completed, the rebellious clergy of Ireland had been tamed and Paul Cullen, by 1852 Archbishop of Dublin, was imposing his Ultramontane will on the Catholic Church in Ireland.