6 - Jolly Begging

Summary

This chapter concentrates on another significant element of the Irish Catholic Church’s transnational fundraising, namely the collecting tours on behalf of church-building projects that Irish clerics regularly conducted in diaspora destinations, including but not limited to the US. Based on close analysis of a series of surviving personal diaries and letters produced by collecting priests in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the difficulties, including hostile resident clergy, that collecting priests faced, explores the emotions of religious fundraising, for both giver and receiver, and assesses the place that such epic fundraising tours have in the narratives that surrounded Ireland’s newly built Catholic infrastructure.