The Roman Catholic Church and the Poor in Mid-Victorian Ireland

In mid-nineteenth-century Ireland two entities provided the vast majority of what relief there was available to the large majority of the Irish poor.  The British State and the Roman Catholic Church both collaborated and competed to provide services, and grappled with conceptions of Irish poverty that at times overlapped and at times starkly contrasted.           The present paper examines how the largest non-governmental actor in Irish society, the Catholic Church, conceived poverty, and, acting on that understanding, sought to alleviate it. 

In the wake of the Famine, the Irish Catholic Church rapidly gained confidence and social and political power.  One manifestation of that confidence was a massive institutional expansion, in education, medicine, and in what are now called social services for the poor.   In addition to “bricks and mortar”, the Catholic Church in Ireland also undertook a substantial re-allocation of personnel and resources to deal with issues of poverty.  Despite a general policy of religious segregation in all areas of society, the Catholic Church was forced to interact with the British State and its conceptions of poverty, most obviously in the context of the workhouse and the administration of the Poor Law.    This paper sets out how the Church at every level understood both poverty and its own and the State’s role in alleviating it.  Attention is paid to both the episcopate that ruled the Church and the religious orders (many of them of women) who provided the services – to both Archbishop Cullen’s attempts to force the State to segregate the moral and immoral poor in the workhouse, and, for example, to the struggles faced by the Holy Faith sisters to establish charitable institutions in competition to those provided by the State.