ESSAYS: Cardinal Paul Cullen and his World,Edited by Dáire Keogh and Albert McDonnell, Four Courts Press, 470pp. €55
CARDINAL PAUL CULLEN was the towering figure of modern Irish Catholicism and arguably the most important figure in modern Irish history between the death of Daniel O’Connell and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell. A native of Kildare, in 1819 he entered the Urban College of the Papal Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, in Rome, which controlled the church and episcopal appointments in the UK, the British Empire and the US. The reputation and trust he established there endured, and, in return, his devotion to the supremacy of the Roman church never diminished. He was a papal loyalist to his fingertips, and this was to have a crucial and transformative impact on the Irish Catholic Church.
After a lengthy stay in Rome, where he benefited from the patronage of the future Pope Gregory XVI, and which included a period as rector of the Irish College, in 1849 he was appointed archbishop of Armagh and in 1852 archbishop of Dublin, where he remained until his death, in 1878. In 1866 he was created Ireland’s first cardinal.
He was an indefatigable reformer of the governance and practice of Irish Catholicism, convening the Synod of Thurles in 1850, and a formidable campaigner, correspondent, tormentor, and social and political operator. The one common factor in all his exertions was obedience to Rome, and he played a crucial role in giving definition to papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870.
When he died the London Times concluded: “No man in the kingdom has exercised a greater personal influence or wielded more absolute power.” This was not meant as a compliment. The newspaper had been consistently hostile to him throughout his career, a reminder that for all those he galvanised into supporting his crusades, he made many enemies, including the nationalist archbishop of Tuam, John McHale. He rowed with McHale about politics, education, ecclesiastical power and proselytism, which prompted him to invoke continually the appellate jurisdiction of Rome in resolving these problems.
The range of his activities and the extent of the archive of letters it generated are remarkable. His correspondence is “currently scattered in more than 60 archives, in seven countries on four continents”, a reminder of his international reach and influence. This volume of 27 essays, running to nearly 500 pages, makes excellent use of that correspondence. It is part of an Irish Manuscripts Commission project, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, to publish that collected correspondence, a monumental undertaking that is to be applauded.
The book seeks to demonstrate the potential of the correspondence “as a mine waiting to be exploited by scholars”, and it largely succeeds in this quest. Overall, this is a weighty and nuanced book, and though there are too many essays and some sloppy editing, inevitably creating unevenness in quality, it contains masterful original research by some of the finest historians and scholars working on Irish religious history in its domestic and international contexts.
The contributors rescue Cullen from the stereotypes, common until recently, that presented him as an anti-national “castle bishop”, more Italian than Irish and preoccupied only with politics and ecclesiastical revival. They demonstrate that his correspondence reveals someone who defies easy categorisation. Colin Barr, who impressively details the dilemmas facing the Cullen biographer, points out, in relation to sources, that “for many years there were too few; now there are, if anything, too many”.
On the basis of the better essays in this book, that can be seen as a good complaint. Although Cullen the man is someone who, in Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh words, “remains stubbornly, almost obsessively reserved and inscrutable”, the book excavates the various layers of his administrative, social, pastoral and political concerns and visions in the aftermath of the Famine. The range of themes covered include his preoccupation with obedience and order; his ecclesiastical imperialism; his desire for bureaucratic centralisation and improvement in the behaviour of priests; his promotion of parish missions; and his transformation of religious practices and devotions.
Many of these issues are expertly delineated by Emmet Larkin, who concludes that “the Irish people eventually found his ultramontanism” – the belief that absolute authority in the church should be invested in the pope, coupled with a contention that the greatest danger to the state was the modern liberal secular state – “agreeable in meeting their needs”. Cullen’s outlook prevented greater absorption by England at a time when Ireland was so effectively anglicised in other areas.
Regarding the siege mentality that characterised his battles, and his belief that there was a global conspiracy to undermine the very foundations of religion, Oliver Rafferty observes that while his public image may have been harsh and unbending – and for his Protestant opponents he was, as Ambrose Macaulay points out, “the gloomiest and most determined bigot, perhaps, in Europe” – he did show some tenderness and understanding in his dealing with priests. He was also appalled by the poverty of the era, which he frequently denounced, though this, according to Ciaran O’Connell, was “focused more on an appeal for compassion from the oppressors of the poor rather than a call for justice for them”.
O’Connell argues that Cullen’s pastoral vision was “breathtaking in its diversity, inspiring in its implementation and remarkable in its effect”, covering healthcare, education, church-building and a multitude of new institutions. All of this required money and was, Mary Daly suggests, about a reassertion of Catholicism in the public sphere and about dealing with the “infrastructural backlog from the penal laws”.
Virginia Crossman comprehensively illustrates how Cullen’s dissatisfaction with the poor-law system was born of genuine compassion but also of a Victorian preoccupation with “moral health”, a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and a “deeply paternalistic view of welfare management”.
Cullen presented the case for a more humane approach to the relief of poverty by the British government, but he did not get what he wanted from legislation. This brought home the limitations of co-operation with the state; hence the determination to go it alone with exclusively church-controlled institutions. As Joseph Doyle demonstrates, Cullen sought religious and class segregation in the education system and was obdurate on the need for denominationalism and a limited curriculum for poorer Catholics as, in his own words, “too high an education will make the poor oftentimes discontented and will unsuit them for following the plough or for using the spade . . . The rich must have schools for themselves and learn many things not necessary for persons in a different state of life.”
Cullen was not successful in all his endeavours, although he played a crucial role in the appointment of Irishmen to ecclesiastical positions in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Rory Sweetman highlights his failure to defeat the dominance of the missionary orders in New Zealand. Scotland remained immune from his influence, and, despite his efforts, he did not manage to control American Fenians. His battle with the Fenians was a constant, a conflict vividly and maturely assessed by Matthew Kelly, who sees him as “a figure of tremendous political agency whose vigour helped create the dynamic sustaining his conflict with Fenianism”.
In this, his perspectives were profoundly shaped by continental politics and a fear and hatred of revolution. He rallied Irish Catholics to the defence of Pope Pius IX and his temporal authority during the move towards Italian unification in 1860, raising £80,000, which Anne O’Connor suggests was “probably the largest sum subscribed to any cause between 1845 and 1882”.
Cullen’s political stance may have evolved towards a form of conditional unionism, but he was not always politically aligned with the state. He sought to steer a course between British Conservatives and Liberals but was often awkward in his dealings with them and found some encounters with Dublin Castle officialdom intensely annoying. He was pragmatic enough, and the nationalist caricature of him as being in the lap of British imperialism is crude and simplistic. However, given his sometimes contradictory stances and the sheer volume of his words, some may still find the Cullen they want through a process of selective citation.
The contributors to this book do not fall in to the trap of reading history backwards. Given the collapse in recent times of the authority of the Catholic Church, and the exposure of the consequences of callous centralisation and preoccupation with status above all else, it might be tempting to lay the blame at the door of Cullen. But his was a different era, and reading Cullen from an early 21st-century cultural perspective is to ignore this. The Ireland he returned to in 1849 was one in which Catholics had suffered substantially. Protestant ascendancy was part of the apparatus of power across many areas of Irish society, and, in Ó Tuathaigh’s words, “Cullen could still plausibly represent his cause as the steady advance of the proud but long downtrodden Catholics on the well-fortified citadel of Protestant privilege in mid-Victorian Ireland”.
Notwithstanding that assertion, it is surely legitimate to see Cullen as the individual who created many aspects of the governance and style of an Irish Catholicism that was, in the long run, exposed as too rigid, lacking sufficient humanity and too subservient to Rome. For those seeking to put that Catholic evolution into a proper historical context, this richly layered book is a very good place to start.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. His most recent book is Occasions of Sin: Sex and Societyin Modern Ireland, published by Profile
