James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (J.K.L.) was pastorally and politically the outstanding Irish bishop of his era and arguably of the last two centuries. A prolific writer on Catholic Emancipation, inter-church relations, education and the relief of the poor, Doyle enjoyed an international reputation as a brilliant advocate of the rights of Catholics and Ireland. His thinking on many issues was far ahead of his time.

Doyle was born in 1786 and raised near New Ross in Co Wexford. He was educated in New Ross, and he entered the Augustinian noviciate in 1805. He was sent to Coimbra in Portugal but his studies were interrupted by the French invasion. He was ordained in Enniscorthy in 1809. He then taught seminarians in the Augustinian priory in New Ross. In 1813 he was appointed to the chair of rhetoric in Carlow College and the following year to the chair of theology. In 1819 he was appointed bishop of Kildare and Leighlin at the age of 33. As bishop, Doyle was the leader of the contemporary renewal and reform of the Irish church. His extraordinary hands-on pastoral ministry was unsurpassed in the Ireland of his day. His reputation as a preacher was unequalled. He was a disciplinarian who enforced Tridentine standards. Frequent pastorals urged greater religious exertion and established Doyle's reputation as a firm opponent of political and agrarian terrorism.

Confraternities, Sunday School catechesis and chapel libraries were significant elements of his programme aimed at improving the faith and morals of the laity. A modernising voice in pre-Famine Ireland he advocated the reform of popular mores. He anticipated Fr Mathew by promoting temperance. His building of Carlow Cathedral exemplified a great surge of church-building throughout his diocese. In a report to Rome of 1829 Doyle stated that there was hardly any aspect of the religious life of the laity or the clergy which was not very satisfactory.

Politically, Doyle's first major contribution was his Vindication of the religious and civil liberties of the Irish Catholics published in 1823 under the monogram J.K.L. (James, Kildare and Leighlin). This made a territorial claim forbidden in law to Catholic bishops. The Vindication was an aggressive rebuttal of attacks made on Catholicism which burned with grievance and a sense of historical oppression. It signalled the arrival of a self-confident episcopal spokesman for Irish Catholics who had jettisoned the traditional penal era caution and low profile of the hierarchy. Doyle became the Catholic Association's bishop par excellence, though his important relationship with Daniel O'Connell was often strained.

J.K.L.'s Letters on the state of Ireland published in 1825 is an outstanding work of great passion, brimming with fierce indignation - one of the finest examples of modern Irish polemic. Similarly Doyle's evidence in London before the parliamentary enquiry on the state of Ireland in 1825 was regarded as a tour de force. His name dominated parliamentary debate on Ireland and the Catholic question throughout his era. In 1826 Doyle addressed an Essay on the Catholic Claims to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, which sought to prove that the allegiance of Catholics was not divided. In 1828 he publicly supported O'Connell's decision to stand in the Clare election.

When Emancipation was conceded in 1829 Doyle envisaged that this would signal a new era in Anglo-Irish and interdenominational relations but this proved to be a vain hope. When O'Connell announced that he would agitate the repeal of the Union, Doyle supported repeal in principle but he did not see how it could be achieved in practice without resort to violence. He believed that O'Connell should seek legislative reform for Ireland on issues such as state relief of the poor rather than pursue the repeal of the Union down a political cul-de-sac. Doyle gave extensive evidence before the parliamentary enquiry on the state of the Irish poor in 1830. Faced with great contemporary poverty, Doyle became the leading theoretician of an Irish poor law based on parochial assessment. His view that the state should not simply allow the poor to starve was based on gospel values. He had little support in his time. Early in 1831 O'Connell declared himself for the first time fully convinced of the validity of Doyle's position on the poor but later that year when O'Connell declared that repeal of the Union was his poor law for Ireland they engaged in a serious public dispute.

IN 1822 Doyle denounced a speech of Dr Magee, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, which had attacked the Catholic Church. Magee's speech is often seen as the starting point of an Irish evangelical crusade, known as the New Reformation, to convert Catholics to Protestantism. In 1824 in an effort to turn the New Reformation onto a new path Doyle published a letter on the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant churches which advocated an ecumenical answer as the only solution to the political ills of Ireland.

However, the part of this letter which stated that "if a rebellion were raging from Carrickfergus to Cape Clear no sentence of excommunication would ever be fulminated by a Catholic prelate. . ." attracted much hostile comment while the ecumenical dimension was largely ignored. In 1825 Doyle forbade his clerics from engaging in public controversy with evangelical clergy stating that it was contrary to the public peace. Nonetheless, in 1827, the year a conversion crusade in Carlow failed, Doyle entered the lists of controversy again against Archbishop Magee and the evangelical nobleman, Lord Farnham. In 1828 he had a pamphlet dispute with Bishop Elrington of Leighlin and Ferns, a former provost of Trinity College.

In his public works Doyle was always very critical of the great wealth of the established church which he felt could be put to better public use. Doyle favoured the education of Catholic and Protestant children together but he objected to Protestant schools which insisted that Catholics attending them read the Bible without note or comment. Throughout the 1820s Doyle led a strong Catholic attack on the leading state-funded school society, the Kildare Place Society, on the grounds that it did not offer a proper national use of state finance because its education was not available to Catholics on account of its religious principles. In 1831 Doyle's efforts were successful when the state withdrew its support of the Kildare Place Society and inaugurated the national system of education.

Doyle thought the new system was the best Catholics could achieve at that time and he urged his clergy to seek aid from the national board for their parish schools.

The damage done to interdenominational relations in the 1820s was confirmed in the 1830s by the outbreak of the tithe war which saw many violent episodes. Post-Emancipation, Catholics felt that they should no longer have to pay the tithe tax to the Protestant rector. The refusal of the parish priest of Graiguenamanagh, Martin Doyle, a cousin of the bishop, to pay tithes sparked the campaign in which Bishop Doyle provided the intellectual leadership. Although he abhorred violence, Doyle wrote that because violence might occur citizens could not be disbarred from their lawful right to protest against an iniquitous law. His phrase "may your hatred of tithes be as lasting as your love of justice" became the slogan of the tithe war. Doyle defended his stance on tithes with contemptuous eclat before parliamentary committees of both houses in 1832.

A figure of the first rank, Doyle died of tuberculosis in 1834, after leading one of the most interesting and exciting careers in modern Irish history.

Thomas McGrath lectures in Ecclesiastical History in Maynooth University. His two books on Dr Doyle have just been published by Four Courts Press - Religious renewal and reform in the pastoral ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786-1834 and Politics, interdenominational relations and education in the public ministry of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786-1834