The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England by Ambrose Macaulay

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England by Ambrose Macaulay Thomas Bartlett The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England. By Ambrose Macaulay. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. 2016. Pp. 416. $74.50. ISBN 978-1-84682-600-9.) It cannot be said that the Irish Catholic campaign for ‘Emancipation’ has been ignored by historians. James A. Reynold’s pioneering analysis of the mass movement that led to the eligibility of Irish Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament (Yale University Press, 1954) was supplemented by Fergus O’Farrell’s study of the local sources of O’Connellite support during the 1820s (Dublin, 1984). Nor has the life of Daniel O’Connell, the campaign’s leader, been neglected. Oliver MacDonagh’s magisterial two-volume biography (London, 1988, 1989) of the ‘Liberator,’ as O’Connell was quickly dubbed, can be set alongside the more recent two-volume study by Patrick Geoghegan (Dublin, 2008, 2010) and, easily overlooked, a fine short piece by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2010). Is there really anything left to be said? To that question Ambrose Macaulay has delivered a resounding yes, and he has produced a well-documented volume to be placed together with the earlier authorities. In doing so, Macaulay—a parish priest in the Diocese of Down and Connor and author of a number of well-received biographies of leading Catholic clergymen—highlights probably the most bizarre outcome of the century of Penal Laws to which Irish Catholics and the Irish Catholic Church were subjected. As the dismantling of the Penal Laws proceeded fitfully from the 1770s on, the Catholic Church that finally emerged into the daylight was not only unbroken but largely unbowed; indeed, there were those who claimed that the Church was in fact strengthened by its time in the darkness of the Penal era. By 1800 when the Penal curtain was finally cast aside, the Irish Catholic Church was revealed to be entirely beyond the control of the British government. At that time in every country in Europe—Protestant or Catholic—the state demanded and received a say, great or small, in the appointment of bishops, and all states aspired to oversight of episcopal correspondence. In some states, the clergy were in receipt of government pay. However, in Ireland the Catholic Church was beyond the reach of a British government, which, gallingly, had no role in Catholic episcopal appointments, no power to scrutinize episcopal correspondence, and no control over the clergy’s pay. [End Page 166] The resolution of this matter, and of other issues including appropriate oaths to be taken by Catholics to avail of the new post-Penal Laws dispensation, and the question of state pay for Catholic clergy forms the substance of Macaulay’s study. To accompany the repeal of the Penal Laws, successive British governments insisted on ‘insurance’ in the form of oaths denouncing alleged Catholic beliefs— inter alia, that it was fine to murder a Protestant Prince, and that no faith need be kept with heretics—and a say in episcopal appointments as well as some oversight of Vatican-Ireland correspondence. As a result Catholic bishops in both Ireland and in Britain had no option but to become fully involved in a campaign to maintain their independence from the Protestant state, as well as safeguard their position with respect to the Catholic laity only too willing to challenge episcopal authority. Utilizing an enormous array of documentation, much of it from the Vatican Archives but also including diocesan archives throughout Britain and Ireland, Macaulay offers an authoritative guide through the Irish bishops’ efforts to be accommodating toward the British government while at the same time remaining beyond its control. He tells this story in a masterful way, and for those interested in episcopal diplomacy (and rancor) this study has much to offer. John Milner, vicar apostolic of the Midland District and an ‘indomitable controversialist’ (p. 355) and self-appointed scourge of any backsliding on episcopal independence, inevitably figures large in this account, but so too does Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, a key Vatican diplomat during...