The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-famine Ireland, 1750-1850

Book excerpt: In this new volume, noted Irish historian Emmet Larkin turns hisattention to the pastoral challenges the Roman Catholic Church faced inministering to an exploding population of Irish Catholics in the yearsbefore the Great Famine of 1847. The extraordinary increase in thepopulation of Ireland from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenthcentury combined with a lack of financial resources available to thechurch as well as a shortage of clergy and sacred space proved to becrucial for adopting new methods of ministering to the Irish Catholiccommunity. How the Irish Church attempted to respond to these variouschallenges, and how it was thus uniquely shaped by them, is thecentral theme of this study.