In Search of a "Catholic Atlantic": French-Irish Missionary Collaboration in the Seventeenth Century English Caribbean

In 1650 John Stritch, an Irish Jesuit, established a chapel near Point Sable, St. Christopher with the intended purpose of serving the sacred needs of Catholics living under English rule. Over the next five years, supported by the French Jesuit mission on St. Christopher, Stritch visited and cared for a congregation of English and Irish Catholics scattered throughout the English Leeward Islands. Stritch’s mission represents one example of a number of Irish and French missionary enterprises that endeavored to sustain the Catholic faith in the English Caribbean and, in so-doing, created a local community of Catholic believers that spanned confessional, national, and imperial borders.

This paper reconstructs Irish and French missionary enterprises to the English Leewards and Barbados in the seventeenth century. It examines how and why these missionaries collaborated across confessional, national, and imperial borders to provide pastoral care to Catholics living under Protestant rule in the English territories. French and Irish  missionary endeavors in the English Caribbean stand in sharp contrast to the French and English mission fields in North America in the seventeenth century, which avoided collaboration and sought to draw strict national boundaries between missionary enterprises. Drawing a comparison between these two divergent models of missionary enterprise to the English world, this paper seeks to assess the concept of a “Catholic Atlantic” and to investigate the historical value of understanding Catholic missionary expansion as an Atlantic, or indeed a global phenomenon, in the early modern period. Did a "Catholic Atlantic" exist in the seventeenth-century Atlantic and, if so, what form did it take, was it global or local, and did it transcend larger imperial systems premised on confessional opposition and competition? Ultimately, do terms like "Catholic Atlantic" or "Protestant Empire" adequately capture the shape of European religious expansion in the early modern world?