The Holy See, British Policy and the Plan of Campaign in Ireland, 1885-93 (review)

Abstract

Few periods of Irish history present as daunting a nexus of competing interests, agendas, schemes, and diplomatic intrigues as the years treated in this valuable book. In 1886, as the Irish peasantry faced poor harvests and declining prices, as well as the standing conditions of a notoriously dysfunctional land tenure system, nationalists launched "the Plan of Campaign." Under the auspices of Charles Stewart Parnell's National League tenants demanded rent reductions, threatening stubborn landlords, along with their agents and more compliant tenants, with boycotts and worse as the struggle for control of the land in Irish society intensified. Ireland's leading Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authorities endorsed the Plan, outlawed by the British government. Across the country, with episcopal approval, many priests served alongside secular activists as co-ordinators, spokesmen, and fundraisers. The Tory government of Lord Salisbury, faced with so direct an attack on property rights, resolved to influence Pope Leo XIII to compel the Irish bishops to repudiate the Plan and rein in the Irish clergy. The Pope, concerned about the independent-mindedness of the Irish Church, worried about the problem of nationalism more broadly, and enticed by the prospect of obtaining formal diplomatic relations with the world's pre-eminent power, dispatched a Commissary Apostolic, the Capuchin titular Archbishop Ignazio Persico, on a fact-finding tour of Ireland in the summer of 1887. The following year, Rome condemned the Plan in no uncertain terms. In the ensuing weeks and months, under tremendous pressure from all sides, in a masterful demonstration of the fine art of bureaucratic intransigence, the Irish bishops prevaricated, and ultimately frustrated the agendas of the powerful in both Rome and London. The controversy is rightly regarded by most historians of modern Ireland as critical to the development of the emerging Church-state [End Page 794] concordat and, more broadly, the evolution of Irish nationalism. By insisting on their practical right to determine the proper relationship of the Church to national movements, and by resisting even the most direct and authoritative interference with those rights, the bishops cemented their place within the emerging Irish political system.