The ascent to establishment status: the Irish Catholic hierarchy of the mid-seventeenth century

Many factors distinguished Irish from British Catholicism in the course of the seventeenth century. Most importantly, Ireland was unique within the archipelago in the fact that Catholicism was the religion of the great majority of the island's inhabitants. The sheer size of the Catholic population also created both opportunities and administrative difficulties for the church of Rome in Ireland and in the course of the seventeenth century the island acquired a Catholic organisational apparatus which rendered it unique, not merely within the archipelago, but in the entire area defined in Rome as in partibus infidelium, that is those areas of the world not within the jurisdiction of a Catholic state. In Jacobean and Caroline Ireland a shadow church-in-waiting was created, which for a brief period during the 1640s effectively replaced the state church in much of the island. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace the evolution and chief characteristics of this alternative ecclesiastical establishment, concentrating in particular on what emerged as the hierarchical apex of Catholic clerical organisation, the episcopate.