The Legal and Constitutional Organization of the Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

The intention here is to survey the constitutional and legal status of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth century. This is looked at from both the point of view of the British state and in the light of the canon law of the Catholic Church. Although no longer overtly persecuted Catholicism was restricted in some of its operations, and despite being among the least government-supervised churches in Europe, bishops and priests still excoriated what they took to be the Church’s legal restrictions in the Protestant state. Not only did the Church press for greater legal safeguards but it also, internally, sought to conform itself more closely to the prescriptions of canon law. The Synod of Thurles of 1850 was all important in this regard and set the parameters for other such synods well into the twentieth century.