The Roman Catholic Church and the Emergence of the Modern Irish Political System, 1874-1878

Emmet Larkin

It is impossible to exaggerate the role and influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries; and that influence was exercised at a time when the Irish question was hugely present in the politics of the United Kingdom, then at the peak of its imperial power. That church was dominated by some thirty men - the bishops, or as they were called when they acted in unison on all sorts of political, social and educational as well as moral issues, the hierarchy. 

We have biographies of a few of these individual bishops; and we have specialist monographs on a variety of the questions on which the bishops gave their attention. But no historian has studied the Church in Ireland or its episcopacy in such detail and depth as Professor Emmet Larkin. 

This present volume like its predecessors is primarily concerned with the high politics of the Irish Church. In it we gain insights, through their correspondence, into the personalities of the leaders of that Church. We see them take control over the whole of the Irish educational system and view it as exclusively their own realm. And we see them commit themselves to the Nationalist Party and its leader to become a powerful constituent element in the Irish political system. 

Emmet Larkin is the professor of British and Irish history at the University of Chicago, and the author of a multi-volume history of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th century.