“The priests do their best to inflame the people.” Religious actors in Ireland, 1800–1845: Instigators of violence or peacemakers?

After the 1801 Act of Union uniting Ireland and Great Britain, and the broken promises made to Catholics, Daniel O’Connell founded the Catholic Association which combined religious and political demands. Despite the pacifying dimension of the movement, the decades preceding the Great Hunger (1845–1851) saw several episodes of violence, before reaching a climax during the revolutionary movement of 1848. Relying on Philippe Braud’s definition of political violence and the study of British and Catholic authorities’ correspondence among other sources, this article intends to shed light on the different dynamics at work in the rise in violence. It also examines the various attempts to readjust to and withdraw from acts of violence, to move beyond ambiguities and better assess the role played by religious agents.

Occupational Corporative Order

Summary The following text is an English translation by the National Catholic Welfare Conference of the address pronounced in January 31th 1952 by His Holiness Pope Pius XII to the Italian Catholic Association of Employers in which he asked for the Christian spirit as the basis for the social order and criticized forced co-determination.

Truth and calumny in Baroque Rome: Richard O'Ferrall and theCommentarius Rinuccinianus, 1648–1667

Richard O'Ferrall's claim of 5 March 1658 that the Stuart monarchy had no right to rule Ireland was made almost in passing. The real purpose of the report made by this Capuchin friar and courtier at the congregation of Propaganda Fide, the committee of cardinals whose jurisdiction included nearly all those missions and churches under non-Catholic governments, was to exclude all Irish Catholics of English descent from high ecclesiastical office. At the centre of his argument was the confederate Catholic association of the 1640s and the place within it of the Old English community. The Capuchin argued that the confederates had remained too closely bound to the Stuart monarchy, and that the Old English had betrayed the confederate cause to Charles I's lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, earl, marquis and later duke of Ormond. Many of O'Ferrall's Catholic contemporaries saw him as a dangerous member of a radical tradition: a clerical assembly at Dublin in June 1666 burned his report along with a copy of Conor O'Mahony's Disputatio apologetica of 1645, which had argued that all Ireland's Protestants should be killed or expelled and a native king elected. The Commentarius Rinuccinianus, begun by O'Ferrall, developed the argument of the 1658 report on a grand scale.

Ulster opposition to Catholic emancipation, 1828–9

The centre stage of early nineteenth-century Irish politics has long been held by Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association. This may be justifiable, as O’Connell created a mass constitutional movement for liberal reform out of a Catholic, peasant population on the fringe of Europe. Less justifiable is the single perspective that sees the struggle for Catholic emancipation as Catholic Ireland’s battle with the British establishment. In 1828 and 1829 there was also a massive Protestant political campaign in Ireland. This centred on the new Brunswick Clubs and Ulster. Yet anti-Catholic and Ulster politics merit few sentences in narratives of these years. Indeed, there is a general neglect of Ulster politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Presbyterianism, the evangelical revival, Catholicism, sectarian conflict, the Orange Order, the Irish Yeomanry, the economy and the growth of Belfast as a city have all received detailed treatment, but the nuances of politics remain vague. The Catholic Association appears to have reduced Ulster’s importance in shaping political developments in the island as a whole from its high-water mark of the 1790s. This does not, however, justify simply leaving Ulster out of the story. This article aims to look at the Ulster anti-emancipation campaign and to correct the skewed picture of Ireland in these years.

Mass Pre-Embryo Adoption

On August 1, 1996, due to the expiration of the five-year preservation limit provided by British law for unclaimed and legally unusable frozen embryos, 3,300 embryos were thawed and discarded. In Italy the news of this impending event triggered many reactions among scholars as well as the general population. In Massa, a little town in Tuscany, a most unusual response arose. Two hundred women banded together and asked to carry out a prenatal adoption. Their purpose in making this request was to avoid what they believed to be mass infanticide. Many of the women were married and already had children. They belonged to a local Catholic association. Nonetheless, their reaction was their own response to numerous appeals to respect life by the Catholic Church worldwide and by Italian Catholic thinkers especially.

Unjustly Condemned?: Roman Catholic Involvement in the APUC 1857–64

The Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC), a joint Anglican/Roman Catholic association of prayer, was founded on 8 September 1857. Seven years later it was condemned by the Holy See for encouraging indifferentism by claiming that the Roman, Greek and Anglican Churches had an equal right to the title ‘Catholic’, the distinctive mark of a true Church. The papal rescript in which the condemnation was contained, Ad omnes Angliae episcopos, also offered a precise definition of the nature of the ‘Catholic Church’ which, in effect, excluded all possible schemes for reunion between the Churches except on the basis of unconditional submission to the Holy See.