Introduction
Stretching back more than two hundred years, modern Irish Christian missionary endeavour has involved dozens of organisations across all denominations, each with its own separate structures and histories and each peopled by hundreds of individual missionaries, both male and female. These orders, societies and missions have reached over the entire world, criss-crossing rising and falling empires and perhaps even creating ‘spiritual empires’ of their own in the process. In that time they each encountered millions of men, women and children of all classes and races and of many established and emerging ethnic and national identities, impacting upon myriad lives, for better or worse, as they went. Thus, there is a need to map, insofar as possible, the field of Irish missionary history as it stands, but, equally importantly, to point to ways in which it might develop and grow from here. The chapter will therefore present an overview of Irish Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic missionary structures and geographical scope based on existing scholarship. It will then draw out some significant themes surrounding the missionary work itself, something that ought to be done at least partly in conversation with the historiographies of Christian missionary endeavour originating from elsewhere in the western world. Finally, it will attempt to locate Irish missions within the broader sweep of Irish social history and suggest some possibilities for how that history might be taken forward in the future.
Who were Irish Missionaries?
Before establishing who Irish missionaries were in detail, it is necessary to determine who they were in abstract. Who counted as a missionary? This question is more complicated than it might appear, and is an especially knotty one in relation to Ireland. Although in most modern contexts ‘missionary’ has come to denote a person engaged in the conversion of ‘heathens’ on so-called ‘foreign’ missions, it has historically been a much more elastic term. Essentially, anybody who left his or her home area on defined religious business for an extended period could be seen to be engaging in mission. Thus, Protestant and Catholic clergy fundraising among their respective diasporas, newly ordained priests temporarily joining an English Catholic parish (which were known as ‘missions’ until the early twentieth century) or even priests bringing spiritual renewal to other Irish parishes could all claim the title of missionary.