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Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622–1908 pp 193–211Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

For the Pope and Rome: Irish Catholic Soldiers of the Papal Battalion of St. Patrick in Italy in 1860

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Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of the main Irish contribution to the Italian Risorgimento, the Papal Battalion of St Patrick’s. This Irish unit, which arrived in Italy in the summer of 1860, was part of an international network of Catholic supporters of Pope Pius IX, and highlights the centrality of Rome’s influence on mid-nineteenth century Ireland. The wider campaign in support of the papacy in Italy was an obvious demonstration of both the global nature of Roman Catholicism, and the strength and depth of Irish Catholic nationalism, which made the temporal sovereignty of the pope such an important issue for Irish Catholics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On Irish Catholic nationalism and the Papal Army, see especially Ciarán O’Carroll, “The Papal Brigade of Saint Patrick”, in The Irish College, Rome, and its World, ed. Dáire Keogh and Albert McDonnell (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 167–187; Ciarán O’Carroll, “The Irish Papal Brigade: Origins, Objectives and Fortunes”, in Nation/Nazione: Irish Nationalism and the Italian Risorgimento , ed. Colin Barr, Michele Finelli, and Anne O’Connor (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013), 73–95. I should point out that Catholic nationalism was not the only version of Irish nationalism in existence at mid-nineteenth century. An alternative competing Irish nationalist philosophy was offered by the Young Ireland movement (1842–1849). It considered itself theoretically more inclusive of all religious persuasions, wishing to foster a non-sectarian and secular Irish society. See Richard P. Davis, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988); Robert Sloan, William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000); Cian T. McMahon, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  2. 2.

    See especially Oliver P. Rafferty, The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-Century Irish Realities (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008); Kevin Collins, Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002); Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985); Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690–1830 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992); Thomas Bartlett, “The Emergence of the Irish Catholic Nation, 1750–1850”, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed. Alvin Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 517–543.

  3. 3.

    Patrick M. Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell 1830–1847 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012); Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell 1775–1847 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). On the Great Irish Famine and links with Irish Catholicism, see Enda Delaney, The Great Irish Famine: A History in Four Lives (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2014); James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001); Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994); Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997); Ciarán Ó Murchadha, The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845–1852 (London: Continuum, 2011).

  4. 4.

    Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75”, American Historical Review 77/3 (June 1972): 625–652.

  5. 5.

    See Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey, eds., Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Dominic Pasura and Marta Bivand Erdal, eds., Migration, Transnationalism and Catholicism: Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

  6. 6.

    Anne O’Connor and Donatella Abbate Badin, “Italia Mia: Irish-European Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century”, Studi Irlandesi 6 (2016): 19–26.

  7. 7.

    Anne O’Connor and Donatella Abbate Badin, eds., “Italia Mia: Transnational Ireland in the Nineteenth Century,”, Studi Irlandesi 6 (2016), 19–192. See also Niall Whelehan, ed., Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (New York: Routledge, 2015); Brian Heffernan, ed., Life on the Fringe? Ireland and Europe, 1800–1922 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012).

  8. 8.

    Colin Barr, Michele Finelli, and Anne O’Connor, “Introduction”, in Nation/Nazione, 1–16.

  9. 9.

    O’Connor and Badin, “Irish-European Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century”, 21.

  10. 10.

    Luciano Cafagna, Cavour (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999); Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Adriano Viarengo, Cavour (Rome: Salerno, 2010); Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25–31; Anthony Cardoza, “Cavour and Piedmont”, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century 1796–1900, ed. John A. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108–131; David I. Kertzer, “Religion and Society, 1789–1892”, in ibid., 181–205.

  11. 11.

    Cardoza, “Cavour and Piedmont”, 108–131; Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 181–197.

  12. 12.

    Riall, Risorgimento, 25–36.

  13. 13.

    Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (Harlow: Longman 2002), 114–120.

  14. 14.

    Riall, Risorgimento, 152–154; Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento, 99.

  15. 15.

    Jennifer O’Brien, “Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento, 1859–60”, Irish Historical Studies 34/135 (May 2005): 289–305.

  16. 16.

    George Fitz-Hardinge Berkeley, The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army of 1860 (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1929), 18.

  17. 17.

    Rafferty, The Catholic Church and the Protestant State; Marianne Elliott, When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland—Unfinished Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bartlett, “The Emergence of the Irish Catholic Nation, 1750–1850”.

  18. 18.

    Danilo Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento: Britain and the New Italy, 1861–1875 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Kertzer, “Religion and Society, 1789–1892”.

  19. 19.

    C. T. McIntire, England against the Papacy, 1858–1861: Tories, Liberals, and the Overthrow of Papal Temporal Power during the Italian Risorgimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Frank J. Coppa, The Modern Papacy since 1789 (New York: Longman, 1998).

  20. 20.

    Nick Carter, “Introduction: Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento”, in Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento, ed. Nick Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 7; see also Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento.

  21. 21.

    Colin Barr, “‘An Italian of the Vatican Type’: The Roman Formation of Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin”, Studi Irlandesi 6 (2016): 27–47; Dáire Keogh and Albert McDonnell, eds., Cardinal Paul Cullen and his World (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011); Ciarán O’Carroll, Paul Cardinal Cullen: Portrait of a Practical Nationalist (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2009).

  22. 22.

    Mary Jane Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento (Viterbo: Archeoares, 2011), 23. Similarly to the linking, in Irish Catholic eyes, of events in Italy in 1860 to the Crusades, Danilo Raponi and Anthony Howe have highlighted how some Protestants in Britain viewed events in Italy as another Glorious Revolution, similar in nature to 1688. See Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento, 6; Anthony Howe, “‘Friends of Moderate Opinions’: Italian Political Thought in 1859 in a British Liberal Mirror”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17/5 (2012): 608–611.

  23. 23.

    Irish Newspaper Archive (hereafter in INA), “Sympathy with the Pope”, The Freeman’s Journal, 6 January 1860, p. 3; INA, “Literature”, The Freeman’s Journal, 30 March 1860, p. 3.

  24. 24.

    For more on the foundation and recruitment of the Papal Battalion, see O’Carroll, “The Irish Papal Brigade”; Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento; Berkeley, The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army of 1860; E. R. Norman, The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–1873 (London: Longman, 1965), 49–51; Cyril P. Crean, “The Irish Battalion of St. Patrick at the Defence of Spoleto, September 1860”, The Irish Sword 4 (1959–1960): 52–60, 99–107; Patrick Maume, “Fenianism as a Global Phenomenon: Thomas O’Malley Baines, Papal Soldier and Fenian Convict”, in Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litvack and Colin Graham (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 148–159.

  25. 25.

    Berkeley, The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army of 1860; Robert Dudley Edwards, ed., Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento: Three Lectures (Dublin: Italian Institute in Dublin, 1960).

  26. 26.

    Charles A. Coulombe, The Pope’s Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento; Anne O’Connor, “Triumphant Failure: The Return of the Irish Papal Brigade”, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 114 (2009): 39–50; O’Brien, “Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento, 1859–60”; Robert Doyle, “The Pope’s Irish Battalion, 1860”, History Ireland 18/5 (September/October 2010): 26–29.

  27. 27.

    Ian Kenneally, Courage and Conflict: Forgotten Stories of the Irish at War (Cork: Collins, 2009); O’Carroll, “The Papal Brigade of Saint Patrick”; for a recent study of the letters of an individual Papal Battalion soldier, see Florry O’Driscoll, “Confounding the Garibaldian Liars: The Letters of Albert Delahoyde, Irish Soldier of the Papal Battalion of St. Patrick and Papal Zouave in Italy, 1860–1870”, Studi Irlandesi 6 (2016): 49–63.

  28. 28.

    Florry O’Driscoll, “Irish Soldiers in Risorgimento Italy and Civil War America: Nineteenth-Century Irish Nation-Building in Transnational and Comparative Perspective” (unpublished PhD dissertation: National University of Ireland, Galway, 2018).

  29. 29.

    O’Carroll, “The Papal Brigade of Saint Patrick”.

  30. 30.

    Michael Olden, “Tobias Kirby (1804–1895): The Man Who Kept the Papers”, in The Irish College, Rome, and its World, 131–148.

  31. 31.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2636, John Francis Maguire to Tobias Kirby, 1 June 1860, Cork.

  32. 32.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2603, Denis O’Donovan to Kirby, 10 May 1860, Kinsale.

  33. 33.

    L. Perry Curtis Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport: Published by the Conference on British Studies at the University of Bridgeport, 1968); L. Perry Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971); Michael De Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity in the British Press, 1798–1882 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Edward R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968); D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  34. 34.

    Diary of William Kenny, 9 June–September 19, 1860, quoted in Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento, 148–155.

  35. 35.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2709, John McDevitt to Kirby, 25 July 1860, Ancona.

  36. 36.

    For more on these events, see especially Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 207–224; Lucy Riall, “Garibaldi and the South”, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 132–153; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901: From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), 187–196.

  37. 37.

    Sheridan Gilley, “The Garibaldi Riots of 1862”, The Historical Journal 16/4 (December 1973): 697–732. See also Frank Neal, “The Birkenhead Garibaldi Riots of 1862”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 131 (1982): 87–111.

  38. 38.

    Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe, “British Red Shirts: A History of the Garibaldi Volunteers (1860)”, in Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era, ed. Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 202–218.

  39. 39.

    Don H. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 68–70; John A. Davis, “Introduction: Italy’s Difficult Modernisation”, in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 13–15; Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 120–125.

  40. 40.

    Patrick Keyes O’Clery, The Making of Italy (London: Trench & Trubner, 1892), 192.

  41. 41.

    Crean, “The Irish Battalion of St Patrick at the Defence of Spoleto, September 1860”.

  42. 42.

    Doyle , “The Pope’s Irish Battalion, 1860”.

  43. 43.

    Riall, Garibaldi, 207–224; Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 198–213.

  44. 44.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2782, John McDevitt to Tobias Kirby, 12 October 1860, Genoa.

  45. 45.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2792, McDevitt to Kirby, 21 October 1860, Genoa.

  46. 46.

    O’Connor, “Triumphant Failure”, 50; Doyle, “The Pope’s Irish Battalion, 1860”.

  47. 47.

    A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland (New York: Sampson, Low & Co., 1878), 285.

  48. 48.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2812, McDevitt to Kirby, 16 November 1860, Dublin.

  49. 49.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2792, McDevitt to Kirby, 21 October 1860, Genoa.

  50. 50.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2815, D. Moriarty to Kirby, 16 November 1860, Killarney.

  51. 51.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2851, Richard Sladen to Kirby, 17 December 1860, Clonmel.

  52. 52.

    O’Connor, “Triumphant Failure”; O’Brien, “Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento, 1859–60”; Doyle, “The Pope’s Irish Battalion, 1860”.

  53. 53.

    PICR, The Kirby Collection, KIR/1836–1861/2828, Joseph J. Nowlan to Kirby, 26 November 1860, Paris.

  54. 54.

    O’Driscoll, “Confounding the Garibaldian Liars”.

  55. 55.

    O’Brien, “Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento, 1859–60”.

  56. 56.

    Kertzer, “Religion and Society, 1789–1892”.

  57. 57.

    O’Brien, “Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento, 1859–60”.

  58. 58.

    Riall, Garibaldi, 268–271. See also Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento.

  59. 59.

    Manuel Borutta, “Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy”, in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Lucy Riall and Silvana Patriarca (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 91–213. See also Manuel Borutta, “Settembrini’s World: German and Italian Anti-Catholicism in the Age of the Culture Wars”, in European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective, ed. Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 43–70; Martin Papenheim, “Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy”, in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202–226; Cardoza, “Cavour and Piedmont”.

  60. 60.

    Arielli, “Introduction”, 10.

  61. 61.

    Papenheim, “Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy”.

  62. 62.

    Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento; O’Carroll, “The Papal Brigade of Saint Patrick”; Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento, 119.

  63. 63.

    Doyle, Nations Divided, 38.

  64. 64.

    William Hughes to Kirby, 14 June, 1860, quoted in Cryan, The Irish and English in Italy’s Risorgimento, 39–40.

  65. 65.

    Barr et al., “Introduction”.

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  1. Independent Scholar, Athlone, Ireland

    Florry O’Driscoll

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  1. Foreigners University of Siena, Siena, Italy

    Matteo Binasco

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O’Driscoll, F. (2019). For the Pope and Rome: Irish Catholic Soldiers of the Papal Battalion of St. Patrick in Italy in 1860. In: Binasco, M. (eds) Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622–1908. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95975-7_9

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