The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat 1861-75

The revolutionary activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century posed an enormous challenge to both the Catholic Church and the state in Ireland. The Fenians not only undermined ecclesiastical authority but also sought to create a society in which church and state would be completely separate. By contrast, the British state, although ostensibly hostile to Catholicism, nonetheless tried to use ecclesiastical authority as an instrument for the preservation of the political status quo and as a means to curb the subversive propensities of the Church's adherents. Institutional Catholicism, at one level, seemed content to play such a role as a means of furthering its own influence over public affairs in Ireland. The Church regarded Fenianism as essentially a spiritual danger: it threatened to strike at the heart of the relationship between the hierarchical Church and the Irish people. Despite the very different circumstances in North America, the Church there also made strenuous efforts to combat the organization. Yet differences in approach, both internally and comparatively, reveal the Church's sensitivity to the complexity of the political circumstances in which it found itself in the United Kingdom and North America. It is clear that, in Ireland, the Fenians, by rejecting demands for political reforms disrupted the Church's efforts to promote the interests of the emerging Catholic middle classes since they wanted a complete restructuring of Irish society. Those interests were still largely bound up with Ireland's adherence to the Union. Although Church and state worked towards the same end - the eradication of Fenianism - there was, ironically, little direct cooperation: proof positive of their mutual suspicion. That said, both Church and state laboured for the papal condemnation of Fenianism in 1870. However, by then, Fenianism had effectively changed the terms of the political debate in Ireland and, ultimately, neither ecclesiastics nor governments were able to contain the ideological forces released by the Fenian organization.