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Patrick Boyle, The Irish Colleges and the Historiography of Irish Catholicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Liam Chambers
Liam Chambers*
Affiliation:
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick
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Extract

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

Type
Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 317 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

1 The full title is The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901, with a Brief Account of the Other Irish Colleges in France: viz., Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Poitiers, Douai and Lille; and a Short Notice of the Scotch and English Colleges in Paris (London, 1901).

2 These is no complete bibliography of Boyle’s works, though an incomplete listing is available in Anon., ‘Patrick Boyle’s Writings’, Colloque: Journal of the Irish Province of the Congregation of the Mission [hereafter: Colloque] 11 (Spring 1985), 391–3; additions in T[homas]. D[avitt]., ‘Patrick Boyle’, Colloque 17 (Spring 1988), 397–8.

3 The key challenge to Boyle appeared in Brockliss, L. W. B. and Ferté, P., ‘Irish Clerics in France in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Statistical Study’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section C 87/9 (1987), 527–72.Google Scholar

4 This draws on accounts of Boyle’s life and personality presented by McGuinness, John and Oakley, John respectively in Colloque 11 (Spring 1985), 382–9 Google Scholar, as well as Boyle’s diary: Paris, Irish College Paris Archives [hereafter: ICPA], MS A3.b46. An extensive collection of Boyle’s papers is held in the ICPA: MSS A3.b1-47.

5 [Murphy, Thomas], ‘The Irish College, Paris’, IER 2 (1866), 180–5, 252–62 Google Scholar. Like Boyle, Murphy was a member of the college staff.

6 Boyle, Irish College, vii.

7 Ibid. 141–233.

8 Ibid. 7.

9 Ibid. 111.

10 Ibid. 10–11, 16–17, 22; Boyle’s work on Vincentian history included St Vincent de Paul and the Vincentians in Ireland, Scotland and England, A.D. 1638–1909 (London, 1909); Some Irish Vincentians in China in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Dublin, 1918).

11 Boyle, Irish College, 15–18, 22–4; for an up-to-date account, see O’Connor, Thomas, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008), 219–26.Google Scholar

12 Boyle, Irish College, 34–5, 39.

13 Ibid. 61–4.

14 Ibid. 90.

15 Swords, Liam, ed., ‘History of the Irish College, Paris, 1578–1800: Calendar of the Papers of the Irish College, Paris’, AH 35 (1980), 2–233 Google Scholar, at 47, 51,110–15, 127, 133–4, 145, 148–9, 151, 163, 179.

16 A number of students attempted to challenge this clericalizing tendency in the nineteenth century, but without success. See, e.g., ICPA, MS A2.e53, Seamus Foley to Abbé Caire, 31 July, 27 August 1852.

17 Boyle, Irish College, 42.

18 Ibid. 75.

19 See Chambers, Liam, ‘Rivalry and Reform in the Irish College, Paris, 1676–1775’, in O’Connor, Thomas and Lyons, Mary Ann, eds, Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), 103–29.Google Scholar

20 In 1932 Boyle commented to John McGuinness that the problems of the 1850s were ‘more serious than I imagined’, which suggests that limited information was available to him in 1901. See Boyle to McGuinness, 10 October 1932, in Colloque, 11 (Spring 1985), 389–91. On the 1850s, see Chambers, Liam, ‘Paul Cullen and the Irish College, Paris’, in Keogh, Daire and McDonnell, Albert, eds, Cardinal Paul Cullen and his World (Dublin, 2011), 358–76 Google Scholar; Moran, Gerard, ‘John Miley and the Crisis at the Irish College, Paris, in the 1850s’, AH 50 (1996), 113–25.Google Scholar

21 See n. 2 above. In addition, Boyle’s translation of Pius X’s encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique (1910), which attacked the French Le Sillon movement, should be noted. It appeared as Some Errors Respecting the Rights of Democracy: Letter of His Holiness Pope Pius X to the Archbishops and Bishops of France on the Subject of the ‘Sillon’ (Dublin, 1911). Marc Sangnier had established Le Sillon in 1894 to promote closer relations between the Catholic Church and the Third Republic; the movement disbanded following condemnation in Notre Charge Apostolique.

22 Boyle, Patrick, ‘Irish Colleges on the Continent’, Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols (New York, 1907–12), 8: 158–63 Google Scholar, at 163.

23 Kelly, James, ‘The Historiography of the Diocese of Dublin’, in idem and Keogh, Daire, eds, History of the Diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), 1–19 Google Scholar, at 8.

24 Renehan, Laurence, Collections on Irish Church History (Dublin, 1861)Google Scholar; Moran, P. F., Spicilegium Ossoriense: Being a Collection of Original Letters and Papers Illustrative of the History of the Irish Church from the Reformation to the Year 1800, 3 vols (Dublin, 1874-84)Google Scholar; Burke, W. P., Irish Priests in the Penal Times (1660–1860) (Waterford, 1914)Google Scholar. Boyle singled out the influence of Alphons Bellesheim, Geschichte der katholischen Kirche in Irland: Von der Einführung des Christenthums bis auf die Gegenwart, 3 vols (Mainz, 1890–1): Boyle, Irish College, vii.

25 e.g. M’Donald, William, ‘Irish Ecclesiastical Colleges since the Reformation: Salamanca I’, IER 10 (1873), 353–66 Google Scholar, at 356–7.

26 For discussion, see Chambers, Liam, ‘Paul Cullen and the Irish College, Paris’, in Keogh, and McDonnell, , eds, Cardinal Paul Cullen, 358–76.Google Scholar

27 ICPA, MS A2.b74, Documents concerning the establishment of the Bureau Gratuit, 1873.

28 Boyle, Irish College, 105–7; Paris, Archives nationales, F17 17546, ‘Fondations Catholiques Irlandaises: Procès Verbaux des Séances du Bureau Gratuit’, tome 1: 1873–1895.

29 ICPA, MS A2.b111, Report of the Irish College, Paris, for the Year 1888–89; MS A2.b111, Thomas McNamara to the Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland, 24 September 1889.

30 ICPA, MS A2.b143, Report of the Irish College, Paris, for the Year 1891–92.

31 Figures derived from ICPA, MS A2.c4, ‘Registre des élèves entrés au collège entre 1858 et 1938’.

32 Boyle, Diary, 1–37.

33 Boyle, Patrick, ‘A Plea for the Irish College in Paris’, IER 21 (1907), 285–99.Google Scholar

34 Boyle, Patrick, The Irish Catholic Foundations in France (Dublin, 1909).Google Scholar

35 Boyle, Diary, 57–60; see also Boyle’s strong case for reopening, addressed to the Irish bishops, in ICPA, MS A2.b179, Report of the Irish College, Paris, for the Year 1918–19.

36 By comparison, the researches of Boyle’s contemporary, Georges Daumet, appear to have had little impact in Ireland: ‘Notice sur les établissements religieux anglais, écossais et irlandais fondés à Paris avant la révolution’, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 37 (1910), 1–184; 39 (1912), 1–224.

37 Brady, Ciaran, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (Dublin, 1994).Google Scholar

38 Despite major advances and important publications, Benignus Millet was correct when, in 1990, he reiterated John Silke’s observation that ‘much of the history of the colleges remains to be investigated’: Millet, Benignus, ‘The Seventeenth Century’, in Muiri, Réamonn Ó, ed., Irish Church History Today (Armagh, 1991), 42–62 Google Scholar, at 56.

39 Walsh, T. J., The Irish Continental College Movement: The Colleges at Bordeaux, Toulouse and Lille (Cork, 1973).Google Scholar

40 Giblin, Cathaldus, A History of Irish Catholicism, 4/3: Irish Exiles in Catholic Europe (Dublin, 1971), 63.Google Scholar

41 Swords, Liam, ed., The Irish-French Connection, 1578–1978 (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar. Robert Amadou’s exhaustive study of the Collège des Lombards, which was the main Irish College in Paris from 1677 to the 1790s, has had less impact, but merits attention: ‘Saint-Ephrem des Syriens du Collège des Lombards à nos jours’, Mémoires de la Fédération des Sociétés Historiques et Archéologiques de Paris et l’Ile de France 37 (1986), 6–152.

42 Brockliss and Ferté, ‘Irish Clerics in France’, 550.

43 The Irish in Europe Project based at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, has been at the forefront of much recent research and has pioneered the use of relational databases in this field. See the project’s website: <http://www.irishineurope.com/>.

44 Swords, , ed., ‘Irish College, Paris’, 179.Google Scholar

45 For an illuminating case study, see O’Connor, Priscilla, ‘Irish Clerics and Jacobites in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris, 1700–1730’, in O’Connor, Thomas, ed., The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), 175–90 Google Scholar. Óscar Recio Morales has emphasized the political importance of the colleges in ‘Not only Seminaries: The Political Role of the Irish Colleges in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, History Ireland 9/3 (Autumn 2001), 48–52.

46 For recent approaches to the ‘Irish in Europe’, see O’Connor, , ed., Irish in Europe; O’Connor, Thomas and Lyons, Mary Ann, eds, Irish Migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003)Google Scholar; eidem, eds, Irish Communities; eidem, eds, The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe: Refashioning Irish Identities (Dublin, 2010).Google ScholarPubMed

47 Chambers, ‘Rivalry and Reform’, 103–29.

48 Indeed Patrick Boyle pioneered work on these subjects in ‘Glimpses of Irish Collegiate Life in Paris in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, IER ser. 4, 11 (1902), 432–50. The material history of the colleges has recently attracted attention: McDonnell, J., ‘From Bernini to Celtic Revival: A Tale of Two Irish Colleges in Paris’, Irish Arts Review 18 (2002), 165–75 Google Scholar; Santamaría, Ana Castro and Almajano, Nieves Rupérez, ‘The Real Colegio de San Patricio de Nobles Irlandeses of Salamanca: Its Buildings and Properties, 1572–1768’, in O’Connor, and Lyons, , eds, Ulster Earls, 223–41.Google Scholar

49 See, e.g., McBride, Ian, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), 215–45.Google Scholar

50 For a historiographical survey with some important parallels, see Bartlett, Thomas, ‘“Ormuzd Abroad … Ahriman at Home”: Some Early Historians of the “Wild Geese” in French Service, 1840–1950’, in Franco-Irish Connections: Essays, Memoirs and Poems in Honour of Pierre Joannon, ed. Conroy, Jan (Dublin, 2009), 15–30.Google Scholar