The Role of Irish Clerics in Paris University Politics 1730-40

Abstract

Abstract Anti-Jansenist Purges and Irish Clerics The debate about grace, which divided the Counter-Reformation Church and pitted Jesuits against Jansenists, would have been a mere affaire de cures had the European ancien regime distinguished theology and politics. This was emphatically not the case. In France, the Gallican church was a monument to the interpenetration of the ecclesiastical and the civil domains. The French king had a particular duty to uphold its privileges and protect true religion.2 In the early eighteenth century it mattered a great deal to Louis XIV that his Gallican church was still divided over the grace question, particularly as the politics of grace had penetrated the politics of state. Indeed, by this time the original theological debate had become profoundly politicised and religious language was used to articulate the claims of conflicting authorities, secular as well as ecclesiastical. The theology of grace favoured by the Jesuits was associated with monarchical centralization as well as with papal authority and episcopal hegemony. The Jansenists ‘ theology of grace, on the other hand, attracted the support of more traditionally-minded Gallicans in general, a few episcopal devotees of the Doctor of Hippo, a number of lower clergy Richerists and those institutions of the French ancien regime which traditionally opposed monarchical centralization. The parlement of Paris was foremost among these. The early eighteenth-century focus for the conflict of authorities was the papal bull, Unigenitus. Published by Clement XI in 1713 at Louis XIV ‘s behest, it was part of Louis ‘s strategy of rapprochement with the papacy. As such it was motivated by changing circumstances in international diplomacy and represented a marked change from the Gallicanism of the earlier part of his reign.