Prof. Colm Lennon. Protestant-Catholic relations in seventeenth-century Ireland: A case study by History Hub

Recording of a paper by Prof. Colm Lennon (NUI Maynooth) at the 2014 Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference.

About the paper: Protestant-Catholic relations in seventeenth-century Ireland: A case study of St Audoen’s parish, Dublin

The recent publication of the vestry books of St Audoen’s, Dublin, affords us an opportunity to review the state of religious and civic relations between the Protestant and Catholic communities in this central city parish in the seventeenth century. In this context, I wish to focus on interaction between the confessional groups in the field of welfare and poor relief, as revealed in the ‘white book’ of the fraternity of St Anne (1655-1688). The long history of this wealthy devotional and charitable association within the parish acts as a barometer of the religious climate in late medieval and early modern Dublin. This case study provides a snapshot of the older associational form of communal bridging under pressure at a time of demographic and political change from the 1650s to the 1680s. In examining how the memory of the dead was invoked by their descendants, who looked to the fraternity for the continuation of their ‘pious uses and greater charity’, we observe a real sense of the Christian communion of the living and the dead, stretching across the generations and transcending confessional division. Yet the citizens’ dual role as parish activists and fraternity brothers and sisters was becoming unsustainable, as religious ideology became central to political acceptability in the 1680s and beyond.

The 2014 Tudor and Stuart Ireland conference was generously supported by UCD School of History and Archives, UCD Research, Marsh's Library, Graduate Studies at NUI Maynooth, and the Department of History at NUI Maynooth.

Recorded for podcasting by Real Smart Media (https://soundcloud.com/real-smart-media) for History Hub.