Irish Diaspora

Abstract

Abstract The Irish Catholic Church followed Irish Catholics as they spread across the globe. Of the millions who migrated in the nineteenth century, most were settlers. By 1901, some 2.5 million Irish-born people lived permanently elsewhere, some 1.6 million in the United States alone. They formed a Catholic ‘Greater Ireland’ through which the Catholic Irish moved freely, and which shared common cultural, political, and religious characteristics. This chapter examines how the institutional Catholic Church came to serve this population, how the Irish seized ecclesiastical control from their rivals of different ethnicities, and how Irish priests, sisters, and brothers built an enduring and ideologically coherent Catholic Irish culture that survives to the present day. As an Australian archbishop boasted in 1897, ‘the faith of Ireland’s sons, like a golden chain, binds the whole English-speaking world to God.’