Ireland’s Spiritual Empire

In her 1989 book, The Living Legend of St. Patrick, Alanah Hopkins writes: “There are 800 Churches around the world named after St. Patrick. St. Patrick’s Day means the tolling of bells for Ireland’s saint from Buenos Aires to Shanghai.” In her 2000 book Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Mary Kenny talks about the “spiritual empire” that Ireland created during the 1800’s. If England ruled most of the known world, Ireland created a spiritual empire that dominated the English-speaking Catholic world for over a century. In 1876, one Irish priest wrote:

Ireland has not only done a great deal for the Propagation of the Faith so that her missionaries and nuns and faithful people are now to be found foremost in everything good going on in the various missions of the old and the new world but at present the whole country may be regarded as a vast recruiting field for sustaining the distant missions.

For over a century, Ireland and the Irish diaspora experienced a vocations boom that lasted well over a century. In 1872, Father Thomas Burke, a famous Dominican preacher, pointed to this when he said: “Take an Irishman wherever he is found, all over the earth, and any casual observer will at once come to the conclusion, ‘Oh, he is an Irishman, he is a Catholic!’ The two go together.”

However, studies show that the pre-Famine Irish were not an overly religious people. Studies of the Irish in London, for example, showed a high ignorance of basic Catholic beliefs and practices. But in the wake of the Famine (1845-1849), Ireland experienced a flourishing of Catholic life. Vocations to the priesthood and religious life went through the roof. New schools, new churches went up at an amazing rate, and this poured over into American life. The forced eradication of Gaelic culture in the 18th century played a part, because the Irish “found their securities in the Church and their leadership in the priesthood.” When the Irish came to America, they clung so closely to the Church because it was the only thing they could cling to when they got here.

By the 1860’s, Irish leadership in the American Church was predominant. Of the 464 American bishops named between 1789 and 1935, over half had Irish names. By 1900, two thirds of the American hierarchy (known as the “hibernarchy”) were Irish. By 1900, when approximately 11,000 priests served the American Church, just the names beginning with “Mc” or “O” accounted for 1,000 of the total. Some women’s religious communities, such as the Sisters of Mercy, were Irish-founded. Others, such as the French-based Sisters of St. Joseph or the Belgian-based Notre Dame de Namur sisters, became so Irish that everyone just assumed that’s where they were founded. Other Catholic ethnic groups resented Irish predominance in Church leadership. James O’Toole, in his great biography of Boston’s Cardinal William H. O’Connell, recalls a story of two French-Canadian priests in New England arguing. One got so mad he called the other one Irish!