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.

This chapter traces how payments made by the laity to the Church changed across the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of the total amount of money given to the Church in the period, and of various attempts to formally regulate dues and fees on the part of the state, the Church, and sections of the laity, is followed by the analysis of some of the most fundamental, day-to-day methods of funding the Church and its personnel. This chapter traces first, at parish level, the evolution of Easter and Christmas dues payments and pew rents. Second, the varied funding of a raft of religious orders that emerged and grew in the period will be dealt with. Finally, the use of Sunday collections of various kinds and their connection to emerging national and international Catholic funding campaigns will be discussed. The key argument here is that this enormous diversification of the Church’s fundraising was a response to changes in the broader economy, including increased access to cash and growing consumption opportunities on the part of the laity.

This chapter explores sacramental fees in respect of baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other life cycle events. One of the most significant aspects of clerical income, these fees were equally a substantial, but vital, financial outlay for the laity, which had meanings that were social, cultural, religious, and personal. This chapter argues that those on either side of the transaction could often value the money involved very differently, a finding that has an important bearing on our understanding of where the balance of power lay between Church and people. This chapter will also emphasise, through its varied examples, that sacramental fees were highly regionalised and could operate very differently depending on the parish or diocese involved.

This chapter argues that by the latter half of the nineteenth century, priests, bishops, and other religious had immense latitude within the diffuse structures of the Church not only to raise money by different means but also to act as the central financial administrator and expert within their own parishes, dioceses, and religious houses, and that this power gave them an influential role in shaping the wider economic culture of Catholic Ireland in the period under review. It first explores levels of accounting and financial management knowledge among clergy and then situates their economic activity, including managing of debt and investments, within a wider transactional framework with wealthy and professional lay Catholics. It finally analyses how clergy were frequently afforded a significant role as arbiters of financial disputes and stewards of financial resources by the laity.

This chapter concentrates on church buildings, arguing that while they were one of the most significant products of the Catholic Church’s fundraising in this period, they were also, in themselves, important sites of both highly public and deeply intimate fundraising. Taking a material culture approach, the chapter treats a sample of churches built in the post-Famine era as sources that illuminate important aspects of the financial relationship between people and priests. It first discusses the widespread understanding of the church as the ‘house of God’. It then analyses the phenomenon of sponsorship of material and sacred items in the church interior via memorial inscriptions, as well as the interaction of lay people with shrines and a variety of collecting boxes commonly located inside chapels.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.

This chapter introduces the book by placing it in a wider historiographical context, first in terms of an older body of work on the Catholic Church’s finances, second in terms of an emerging material focus in Irish religious history, and finally in terms of a wider new trend towards ‘intimate economic history’. It outlines the aims and driving questions of the study and, by way of a methodological discussion, explains the personal origins of the study, musing on how the historian’s own background and relationship to their subject matter influences their work. It ends by outlining the content of each chapter.

Apart from the myth that he failed his theology exam in the Society of Jesus, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s scholastic training is largely unstudied. This chapter outlines Hopkins’s philosophy course at Roehampton and his theology course at St Beuno’s, identifies his various teachers, and assesses his modest contribution to Catholic theology. Taking into account the ways the Society of Jesus modified and updated its curriculum in the second half of the nineteenth century, it argues that in Hopkins’s day the Society of Jesus was never merely ‘Suárezian’ – even at St Beuno’s – but rather diverse and at times even genuinely creative.

This chapter claims that the language of rights was central to Catholic thought in the long nineteenth century. Rather than rejecting the concept of human rights, Catholic social theorists, theologians, and church leaders embraced it, and utilized it in their effort to update the Church’s teachings to the era of upheavals. The chapter highlights three spheres in which rights proved especially important. First, in response to the French Revolution and the discourse of individual rights, Catholics argued that rights must be understood alongside correlative duties. Theorists like Nicola Spedalieri and Antonio Rosmini claimed that only the Church’s supervision could secure an order in which individual and communal freedoms were secured. Second, Catholics utilized human rights in their evolving struggle against socialism and its challenge to social hierarchies. Influential writers such as Matteo Liberatore claimed that “true” rights required the preservation of “natural” inequality between employers and workers, ideas that were codified in Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Finally, rights were useful for Catholic mobilization against feminism and sex reform movements in the late nineteenth century. Popular experts of sexuality such as Joseph Mausbach and Friedrich Wilhelm Förster maintained that only heterosexual marriage and the wife’s submission to the husband could realize the two sexes’ “true” rights.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

This chapter aims to define the limits of religious toleration of the Eastern Orthodox Church in those areas of Europe which remained outside of direct Ottoman or Muscovite rule in the early modern period. The rudimentary confessional balance that had obtained between the Eastern and the Latin Churches in the kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Transylvanian principality and the kingdom of Hungary was disturbed by the arrival of Protestantism in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The growing numerical strength and political influence of Evangelical nobles and burgesses necessitated the introduction of toleration as a state policy. When it was set in place, however, the politically emasculated believers of the Eastern Church were either effectively excluded from, or found themselves on the bottom rung of a tiered system of, official toleration. The survival of Orthodox privilege in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the full religious toleration granted by the Habsburgs to the South Slav peoples in exchange for their support in defending the imperial frontiers from the Ottomans, underscore the significance of political authority and instruments of violence in the hands of local élites for the preservation of traditional Orthodox identity.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.