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Cardinal Paul Cullen

1803–1878

 

At the Vatican Council held in Rome in 1870, Cardinal Cullen is said to have drafted the terms of the dogma of papal infallibility.  This was typical of the man, who since he had been appointed archbishop of Armagh in 1850 had sought to impose on the Catholic church in Ireland a rigid and unquestioning obedience to authority.

      Paul Cullen was born at Ballitore in County Kildare on 29th April 1803, just after the Act of Union.  His first studies were at a nearby Quaker school and then at Carlow College.  In 1820 he went to Rome to study at the College of Propaganda in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1822.  His first appointment was as professor of sacred scripture and Hebrew in the college.  He was then made rector of the Irish College in Rome in 1829.  The influence of British diplomats was very strong in the Vatican, for the popes were, at all times, keen to secure the favour of the great powers.  In Ireland this was seen as a distinct disadvantage.  Cullen acted as the Roman agent of the Irish and Australian bishops in making their views, which did not always coincide with those of the British government, known to the Vatican.

      One of these issues, which arose in 1840, was the question of the national school system, which the government proposed.  This would have provided for a type of school in which the bishops thought that state influence might overwhelm any Catholic or Irish ethos.  Cullen cautiously proposed to Rome that each bishop should be free in his own diocese to choose whether or not to join the scheme.  In the end, the schools passed under the management of the local parish priests (or rectors in the case of those for the Protestant communities).  A secularizing scheme was defeated.

      Cullen, however, opposed the Queen's Colleges; Rome duly condemned these, and urged the Irish bishops to establish a Catholic university.  In Rome he witnessed the excess of the Italian revolution of 1848.  When the Roman republic was established and overthrew the papal government, Cullen was made rector of the College of Propaganda.  When the republican authorities ordered the closure of the college, Cullen called upon the protection of the US minister to protect his American students and so saved the institution.  But this experience gave Cullen an abiding distaste for revolutionary republicans of any kind, especially in Ireland.

      For the rest of his life he sternly countered any revolutionary action in Ireland, while supporting the constitutional parties that respected the position of the church.  He was appointed archbishop of Armagh in 1850, despite the fact that he had absolutely no pastoral or administrative experience of the country.  At Thurles in 1850, the year from which the reorganized church in Ireland can be dated, he called the first synod of the church in Ireland since the twelfth century.

      Cullen was the chief architect of what is now thought of as the 'traditional' Irish Catholic church, with its discipline, modes of devotion, and social and political attitudes.  He was often at odds with other leaders, such as John McHale of Tuam, but Cullen had the ear of Rome, and that was what counted.

      His activities were varied and of consequence.  He defended tenants' rights, championed poorhouse reforms, advocated the creation of industrial schools, and sought to raise the quality of education.  He brought Newman to Ireland to help establish the Catholic University that he had urged upon the hierarchy.  Because it could not grant degrees this was a failure, though it medical school survived and flourished.  He founded Clonliffe College to improve the training of Irish priests.

      To generations of Irish nationalists, the theme of Cullen's whole career, to make the Catholic Church the dominant force in Irish society, was one to be approved.  But it has left the country was a tragic heritage.  Before Cullen there had been a growing sense of accommodation between the different churches and traditions in Ireland.  Cullen's extreme ultra-montanism thwarted this and threw up barriers between them.  Cullen, it has been said, had no political theories, but only the interest of his own church at heart.

      'Once Ireland began to be regarded as a Catholic nation,' Professor F.S.L. Lyons wrote, 'there was built into the separate identity an element of puritanical exclusiveness very far from the vision of a WOLFE  TONE [11], or a THOMAS  DAVIS [23], of an Ireland in which the different cultures would eventually be reconciled.

      Though it would have appalled Cullen to think of it, in due course his brooding influence brought about the long, quarter century of war in Northern Ireland.  Seeking only to ensure the influence of his own church, he cast his country into the hands of revolutionaries merely interested in using the Catholic identity of their community as a mask for ambitions that stood totally opposed to his.

      By seeking to make the Catholic Church ascendant in Ireland, Cullen had contributed to its decline.  His contemporaries in the United States, who sought to benefit from the protection offered by the constitution of a pluralist republican society, were much wiser.

      Cardinal Cullen died in Dublin on 24th October 1878.  He left a church outwardly powerful, triumphantly self-satisfied.  But his policies had sowed within it the seeds of its own decline a century later.