This book evaluates the supply of priests to Ireland from two Irish colleges in Rome, and to the Irish in the West Indies, down to about 1670. In integrating the West Indies into the story of Irish pastoral distribution, the author explores the ecclesiastical dimension to the recent Irish Atlantic migration of the mid seventeenth century.
As editor of Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic world, 1622–1908 (2018), and of Luke Wadding, the Irish Franciscans, and global Catholicism (2020), the author comes well-prepared for his task. The towering figure of the Waterford-born Franciscan, Luke Wadding, emerges as pivotal in the foundation in Rome of both the Irish Franciscan college of St Isidore's (1625) and of the Irish seminary for diocesan priests (Irish College, 1628). His prestige as theologian and author, together with his networking and fundraising skills, ensured for him a prominent role on the Roman scene until his death in 1657. However, the institutions which he instigated enjoyed contrasting fortunes. Clare Carroll (in Exiles in a global city: the Irish and early modern Rome, 1609–1783) has expertly described the flourishing cultural role played by St Isidore's in seventeenth-century Roman art and culture. Further, as Binasco illustrates, it was integrated within the wider Franciscan college network especially in Italy, which facilitated the exchange of students and teaching staff.
By contrast, for the half-century covered in the present volume, the Irish College remained a small, underfunded and struggling institution on the margins of Roman and Irish life. Institutional instability characterised its early years, culminating in a change of administration from Franciscan to Jesuit in 1635. Thereafter rectors included both Italian and Irish Jesuits. Among these, William Malone (rector, 1637–42), and John Young (rector, 1656–64) stand out as contributing significantly to the stability of the college. The chronic under-representation of students from Ulster and Connacht in both colleges further divided the Irish clerical exiles. These rivalries were exacerbated by political recriminations arising from the collapse of the Catholic Confederation in 1648–9, and touched Wadding's position in particular.
Even with numbers in single figures, the suitability of candidates in the Irish College was often problematic. While the author gives judicious weight to noteworthy contributions, and brings to light individual careers, his statistical approach ensures that a group evaluation is offered. For the two colleges, we learn of numbers entering, ordained, and returning to the mission in Ireland. St Isidore's consistently had larger numbers, though the proportion of those ordained who returned to Ireland was largely the same for both colleges, at about one-third. The disastrous impact of the Cromwellian era in both recruitment and return to Ireland is delineated. The author contrasts the statistically-modest pastoral contribution of the Irish College to the home country with that of the English College, Rome. However, the English College had been established almost fifty years earlier than its Irish counterpart and as successor to the medieval hospice it rested on a stronger institutional and financial foundation.
In two chapters, Binasco explores the Catholic pastoral response to the emerging Irish community in the English West Indies. In the 1630s Irish young people in considerable number went to the island of St Christopher (Leeward Islands) to work on the sugar plantations and in 1634 a visiting English Jesuit noted Irish Catholics also on the island of Montserrat. Thanks to the initiative of Archbishop Malachy O'Queely of Tuam, two Irish priests went to St Christopher in the mid 1630s. With their demise the Irish mission ended. In the early 1640s, the Jesuit Matthew O'Hartegan requested to go to the West Indies to serve the Irish there, citing his relevant languages (English, Irish and French), but he was not sent.
A second phase opened in the mid 1650s, when the Cromwellian regime initiated a transportation scheme for various undesirable groups, including the poor, and those deemed politically suspect. Thus 12,000 young Irish people were transported chiefly to Barbados as indentured servants on the sugar plantations. By law, Catholic priests were also to be exiled to Barbados, though in fact merely seven were transported, and most returned to Europe after a short time. In the period c.1650–c.1680, about five Irish priests may be identified who were active as pastors among the Irish in the West Indies.
Distance, the lack of detailed reports from correspondents based in the West Indies and the absence of a strong figure as patron ensured an ineffectual response of Propaganda Fide in Rome to several individual initiatives in the 1660s from Irish clerics for a mission to their countrymen in the Caribbean. This failure highlights the limits of Propaganda in responding to pastoral need, and to the marginal status of the West Indies for Catholic policymakers, together with the domestic concerns of Irish ecclesiastics as Catholic structures were being rebuilt in Restoration Ireland.
With a geographical range embracing Ireland, Rome and the West Indies, the lack of maps in this publication is a serious lacuna. The volume exemplifies the increasing engagement of scholars of various linguistic backgrounds with the Irish diaspora in the early modern era — a welcome development. However, in this book the quality of English is at times poor, and the text suffers as a result. A more rigorous language check is required.
Based on exhaustive archival research, and comprehensive use of secondary literature, the volume delineates the limited contribution of two Irish colleges in Rome to priestly supply in mid seventeenth century Ireland, and offers a similar analysis for the Irish in the West Indies. It thus marks a significant contribution to the study of the Irish Catholic community, and of pastoral provision in an English Atlantic setting, in the seventeenth century.
