912.6.6 Jardín Botánico
% SUBSIDIOS EN DINERO
2.9 GESTIÓN ADMINISTRATIVA Y FINANCIERA
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decrease in the number of bishops receiving their education in Spain and Portugal. As shown in Chart 3.3, there were only five bishops from this cohort of bishops known to have been educated on the Iberian Peninsula, representing a meagre 10% of the total number of bishops receiving episcopal preferment. When compared to the Jacobite generation of bishops, where 20% of the bishops were educated on the Iberian
Peninsula, the proportion of bishops educated in Spain and Portugal had decreased by 10%.
Whereas the number of bishops educated in Spain and Portugal decreased, the
number of French-educated bishops continued to increase. During the Jacobite era, 42% of the Irish bishops were educated in France. By the post-Jacobite era this had increased to 56%. Of the French-educated bishops, the vast majority (65%) were educated in Paris. For many of these bishops they would have been educated at a time when reform proposals were being debated between college administrators and the Irish bishops. Undoubtedly these debates shaped their philosophy and understanding of what a seminary should be. This is particularly important as many of these bishops were instrumental in establishing the seminary network in Ireland from the 1780s.
Paris was an important theatre for the first of these Irish college reform efforts in the eighteenth century. The reform initiatives there were first undertaken by college
administrators between 1733 and 1737. Their objective was to abolish the practice of admitting already ordained priests as students to the Paris institution.63 It appears that every Irish bishop was against this reform initiative except for Hugh MacMahon of Armagh. Their argument was that such a reform would undermine their episcopal authority as they would no longer have a say in who was admitted to clerical orders.64 Eventually these reform efforts were shelved only to re-emerge in the 1740s when issues regarding clerical indiscipline took centre stage and the problem of insubordinate ‘priest’ students in the continental colleges were again highlighted as a problem.65 Liam Swords has argued that this conflict between clerical students and non-clerical students was the result of competition for resources, given that a significant number of student-
63 For a complete account of the reform movements at Paris see Liam Chambers, ‘Rivalry and reform
in the Irish College, Paris, 1676-1775’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Irish
communities in early-modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), pp 103-29.
64 Ibid., p. 121.
65 For more on the problems related to clerical indiscipline in Ireland see Eamon O’Flaherty, ‘Clerical
indiscipline and ecclesiastical authority in Ireland, 1690-1750’ in Studia Hibernica, xxvi (1992), pp 7-29; Ian McBride, Eighteenth-century Ireland: the Isle of slaves (Dublin, 2009), pp 246-70.
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bursaries were set aside for clerical students.66 There is no question that financial resources were at the heart of the dispute, but as Liam Chambers has shown, the reform attempts at Paris were also part of a wider struggle taking place within the Irish Church aimed at correcting clerical abuses.67 Over the course of these debates, the central focus was on the propensity of Irish bishops to ordain, and send, unqualified students to the continental colleges.
By the 1760s and 1770s, many Irish colleges faced significant external pressures to re-organise which ultimately brought a fresh round of reform attempts. In 1769 there were attempts to unite the Irish colleges of Douai and Lille, which was thwarted by the Irish bishops from the province of Leinster. From the fragmentary source material that survives, it appears that the plan originated with Luke McKiernan, rector of the Irish College at Douai (1752-1784). His efforts caused an episcopal storm. In a letter to the president of the Irish College at Lille, Nicholas Sweetman, bishop of Ferns (1745-1786) wrote, ‘If Monsr MacKiernan had meant to serve his country, he wo’d have acted above Board, fairly & honestly; and in Concert wth yu, instead of going basely and
treacherously to work under hand; wch shows what sort of man he is.’68 In a letter to Peter Furlong, president of the Irish College at Lille, from James O’Keeffe, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (1752-1787) a year and a half later he wrote that the Irish bishops halted such attempts:
I brought Dunne to an acct some time ago for attempting to unite Lille and Doway [sic.]. He positively deny’d the charge, declaring he never had a notion of it. And tho he had, that he was still of too little consequence to move in an affair of such
importance.69
O’Keeffe further mentioned that rumours had circulated that the Irish College in Lille was in debt, which Furlong denied.70
Similar difficulties affected Paris. In 1775/6 the new Collège des Irlandais opened in Paris consolidating a number of the bursaries but failing to alleviate the economic hardship of the students who remained in the old Irish college still housed in the uncomfortable Collège des Lombards.71 There are indications that bishops actively
66 Liam Swords, ‘Collège des Lombards’ in Liam Swords (ed.), The Irish-French connection: 1578-
1978 (Paris, 1978), pp 44-62, at p. 48.
67 Chambers, ‘Rivalry and reform in the Irish College, Paris’, pp 103-29.
68 Nicholas Sweetman, Wexford to Peter Furlong, Lille, 20 October 1769 (A.D.N., Lille, 36/D/5
D568/49).
69 James Keeffe, Tullow to Peter Furlong, Lille, 1 May 1771 (A.D.N., Lille, 36D/5 D568/49). 70 Ibid.
71 For a complete account of the economic state of the Irish colleges in Paris see Chambers,
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sought financial support from their priests to assist the colleges,72 but at this time the reputation of some of the colleges began to suffer, especially in the context of literary and political developments within Enlightened French society, which were regarded as a potential threat to the intellectual ‘purity’ of Irish students. In a letter to Peter Furlong of Lille, the father of a potential student wrote:
…only you can satisfy me in regard to what is said heare [sic.] of the French Colleges, gentlemen who have long lived in France, say they are danger and the opportunitys [sic.] the boys may find not only abroad but even from their fellow boarders at home, the books they may read[,] the discourses they may hear all may change into a source of corruption.73
Perhaps this passage is only representative of a nervous father reluctant to send his son to a foreign college. But these views were also shared by French-educated bishops who returned to Ireland the last decades of the eighteenth century. They were acutely aware of the changing scene in France and saw its potential impact on the loyalty of the clergy to the established authority in Ireland. Historical support from the Jacobites did not imply political radicalism on the part of the Irish bishops.74
By the second half of the eighteenth century, French-educated Irish bishops were more than willing to express their loyalty to the house of Hanover and actively
promoted the proposed test oaths that dominated ecclesiastical politics of the 1760s, 70s and 80s, as we have noted in earlier chapters.75 Support for these government-led initiatives was stronger with this cohort than with many of the bishops educated at other colleges on the Continent, or even members of the bishops educated earlier in Paris like Matthew MacKenna, bishop of Cloyne and Ross (1769-1791). Unsurprisingly, the ‘leaders’ of this faction were two French-educated bishops: James Butler II of Cashel and Patrick Joseph Plunkett, bishop of Meath (1778-1827). Eventually Butler and Plunkett came to make up the supposed ‘Gallican’ faction of the Irish episcopal corps.76
72 Dr. MacKenna’s Cloyne Diocesan Register, 1785 (C.D.A., Cobh, Matthew MacKenna Box,
1789.00/2/1785).
73 Letter to Peter Furlong, Lille, 24 May 1771 (A.D.N., Lille, 36/D/5 D568/49).
74 Although his assessment is based purely on conjecture, John Brady argued that the increased rate of
‘apostasy’ amongst Irish clerics the last half of the eighteenth century was directly related to the changing scene in France, ‘The only satisfactory explanation is that the Faith of those who fell had been
undermined before they returned to Ireland’ (John Brady, ‘Origins of Maynooth College’ in Studies, xxxiv, no. 136 (December 1945), pp 511-4, at p. 513).
75 For a detailed account of oaths in the eighteenth century see Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: the
question of an oath for Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1997).
76 In a letter to Rome, Troy wrote that every bishop from the province of Cashel was a ‘Gallican’ aside
from MacKenna (Cloyne), the Dominican MacMahon (Killaloe) and Conway (Limerick) (Troy to Cardinal Antonelli, 14 January 1782 (C.D.A., Cobh, Matthew MacKenna Box, 1789.00/1/1782).
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‘Gallican’ became something of a pejorative epithet at this time and in Troy’s view, for instance, described bishops who were ready to make overtures to the Irish
government without first consulting Roman officials. Fears of greater secular control over Church affairs was still fresh on the minds of the Roman hierarchy as Germany in the 1760s became increasingly Gallican under the influence of the Febronian movement and the suppression of the Jesuits under the papacy of Clement XIV (1769-1774), largely at the insistence of Catholic monarchs.77 These continental developments naturally affected how the Catholic Church in Ireland was perceived by the Protestant establishment. The Oath of Allegiance (1774) drawn up by Frederick Augustus Hervey, Church of Ireland bishop of Derry (1768-1803), was part of a plan to divide the Irish Catholic episcopal corps into two conflicting factions, Gallican and papist, with the ultimate goal that the ‘great maxim divide et impera would be followed with equal equity and success.’78 Hervey’s plan was minimally successful as it did divide the Irish Catholic episcopal corps along his desired lines, but growing political unrest on
Continental Europe made this division short-lived. Moreover, the main divisions over the oaths were largely confined to the provinces of Dublin and Cashel. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the bishops from the province of Dublin were largely educated on the Iberian Peninsula and Italy whereas the bishops from the province of Cashel were educated in France.79 Unfortunately the scope of this study does not permit a detailed evaluation of what impact their educational background might have had in shaping their views on matters of church and state. C. D. A. Leighton asserts that if the Cashel
bishops are labelled ‘Gallican’ then one could safely so label the majority of activist Irish Catholics who made up the greater part of Catholic opinion in the late 1780s and 90s,80 including the leader of the ‘anti-Gallican’ movement, Archbishop Troy of Dublin.
It is clear that Rome tried to counter these allegedly ‘Gallican’ bishops by favouring senior Irish ecclesiastics who had strong Roman credentials. Now that the complication of Jacobite loyalty was a thing of the past, Rome had more opportunity to exercise freely its own preference in this regard. Significantly, three archbishops appointed at
77 Owen Chadwick, The pope and the European revolution (Oxford, 1981), pp 411-7; Eamon
O’Flaherty ‘Ecclesiastical politics and the dismantling of the penal laws in Ireland, 1774-82’ in Irish
Historical Studies, x, no. 101 (May 1998), pp 33-50, p. 37.
78 O’Flaherty, ‘Ecclesiastical politics’, p. 35.
79 A notable exception was James O’Keeffe, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (1752-1787) who was the
lone Dublin bishop to support the oath and who was the only Dublin bishop to have been educated in France.
80 C. D. A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant kingdom: a study of the Irish ancien regime (Dublin,
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this time were educated in Rome: Troy of Dublin, Richard O’Reilly of Armagh and Thomas Bray of Cashel. Although Bray received part of his education at St. Guard in Avignon, most of his studies took place at Rome. Moreover, in the appointment of the latter two bishops, O’Reilly and Bray, each received their papal provisions following reception of strong letters of recommendations from Troy. As stated in chapter one, Troy’s influence over episcopal appointments earned him the title of ‘Bishop Maker- General’. This epithet seems especially apt when one looks at his role in the promotion of archbishops at this time.
During this period one notices a significant decrease in the number of bishops earning degrees, a pattern that continued with the bishops appointed in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Only 47% of the bishops are known to have obtained a degree, of this percentage, nearly two-thirds received the highest degree possible, a doctorate in theology. For comparison purposes, it should be noted that only two bishops took degrees in law81 and both were from the province of Armagh, a trend that continued Jacobite practice. Bishops not taking higher degrees were not vastly different from the rest of the Irish student population. In their prosopographical studies of the student communities at Paris and Leuven, both Brockliss and Fertè (Paris) and Nilis (Leuven) show that the number of Irish students obtaining degrees by the middle to late eighteenth century was in a general decline.82 According to Nilis, many students took courses in theology but never completed their degrees.83 Of the four post-Jacobite bishops who were educated at Leuven, two were members of the ‘elite’ group of
students who took theology degrees, both were bishops of Limerick. John Young (1792- 1813) who completed the sacrae theologia baccalaureus currens and his predecessor Dennis Conway (1779-1796) who completed the higher degree of sacrae theologia
baccalaureus formatus.84
A possible reason for the decline in degrees is that they were no longer deemed useful or necessary for episcopal preferment. This may be linked to the increasingly common practice of appointing coadjutor bishops with rights of succession to Irish sees. As will be noted, this practice increased the influence of the sitting bishop on the
81 Andrew Donnellan, bishop of Clonfert (1776-1786) registered with the faculty of law at the
University of Paris in October 1739. It is unknown whether he completed his degree programme.
82 Brockliss and Fertè, ‘Irish clerics in France’, pp 543-6; Nilis, Irish students at Leuven University, p.
5.
83 Ibid.
84 According to Limerick historian John Begley, both Conway and Young obtained their doctorate in
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appointment of his successor. However, the evidence suggests a higher proportion of clerics appointed coadjutor bishops held advanced degrees than those clerics who were appointed directly to episcopal and archiepiscopal sees. During this episcopal
generation 57% of the coadjutor bishops appointed are known to have received degrees whereas the figure is only 38% for bishops and archbishops. It might be argued that the decrease in the number of bishops taking higher degrees is a further indicator of the changing socio-economic background of the Irish episcopate. As shown in the previous chapter, by the end of the eighteenth century the social background of Irish bishops had changed. With more bishops entering the Irish episcopal corps from the lower order of clergy it may not have been financially feasible or necessary to take higher degrees.
Shifting educational profile of the Irish bishop, 1801-1829
As illustrated in the previous section, the changing political situation on the Continent the latter half of the eighteenth century put significant pressure on the Irish colleges. Moreover, as the penal laws were repealed in Ireland, Irish bishops were now free to set up diocesan seminaries. This development provided Irish bishops with the possibility of increasing their influence over the education of their clergy. In the final period, an ever increasing proportion of future bishops received their education at domestic institutions. This had profound consequences for the nature and content of clerical educational programmes and heavily influenced the political and world view of the new generation of Irish bishops taking office in the nineteenth century.
Irish colleges in France came under significant stress with the outbreak of the French Revolution, a stress that reverberated throughout the network of Irish colleges reaching Flanders, Rome and the Iberian Peninsula.85 Liam Chambers convincingly argues that, although the French Revolution severely damaged to the Irish college network, it was not ‘the great cataclysm which swept the entire continental college system away.’86 Some of the colleges re-emerged after the tumult of revolution. A Parisian faculty member could write in 1815 to the newly appointed archbishop of Cashel, Patrick Everard:
If Maynooth and other institutions offer stability for home education it may however be consonant to wisdom to preserve some continental Establishments where select students may receive further instruction and a social Polish by resorting foreign universities…87
85 Liam Chambers, ‘Revolutionary and refractory? The Irish colleges in Paris and the French
Revolution’ in The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, ii, no. 1 (September 2008), pp 29-50.
86 Ibid., p. 31.
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Notwithstanding the possibility of a continental college offering future bishops in the nineteenth century the opportunity to acquire some culture, the fact remains that the French Revolution and continental wars altered the traditional formation system beyond recognition. The creation of a national seminary network not only impacted their
educational and professional formation of future bishops but also influenced their religious and political allegiances. These would differ significantly from their continentally educated predecessors.
From 1801-1829, most of the senior Irish ecclesiastics receiving episcopal
preferment were educated at Salamanca and the newly established seminaries in Ireland, accounting for nearly 57% of the newly appointed bishops. As illustrated by Chart 3.4, the number of French-educated bishops decreased sharply from the Jacobite and post- Jacobite generation of bishops, a decrease of nearly 31%. Surpassing France was the Irish College at Salamanca whose alumni wielded significant influence over episcopal promotions, a point that is demonstrated by the appointment of Patrick Curtis,
archbishop of Armagh (1819-1832). At the time of his appointment, Curtis had spent a majority of his ecclesiastical career (thirty-seven years) on the Continent serving as rector at the Irish College (Salamanca). Although he was seventy years old, his
Flanders France Iberian
Pen. Ireland Italy Mixed Ukw
Armagh 0 1 3 5 0 1 5 Cashel 1 2 3 4 1 1 1 Dublin 0 1 3 3 1 0 1 Tuam 1 2 2 4 0 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6