Learning abroad

1607-2007: THE LOUVAIN LINK:

During the reign of Elizabeth, the drive to enforce the Act of Supremacy, that is, to make Ireland Protestant, led some Old English gentlemen to set up seminaries in Catholic states on the European mainland. Irish seminarians for many centuries had crossed the Irish Sea to Oxford to complete their training. Now Oxford had become the heart of the Established Church.

The Gaelic Irish, particularly those from Ulster, found the Old English seminaries such as Douai (founded by Christopher Cusack in 1594) insufficiently political. They were keen to be in the vanguard of the Counter Reformation in close co-operation with the Spanish. They set up their own Irish College of St Anthony's in Louvain. The founder was the Franciscan friar (and later Archbishop of Tuam in exile), Florence Conry (Flaithrí Ó Maol Chonaire) from Roscommon, chaplain to Hugh O'Neill, confessor to Red Hugh O'Donnell, and the principal adviser to the Spanish Council on Irish affairs right to his death in 1629.

Under the direction of Hugh MacCaughwell (Aodh Mac Aingil), chaplain to the Irish regiment serving Philip III in Flanders from 1606, Louvain became a Franciscan power house of the Counter Reformation. A primary aim was to reinforce the faith of the native Irish and to strengthen their resistance to the heretics. The result was remarkable outpouring of texts in Irish. Most of these were devotional works, with biographies printed in simple Irish on Patrick, Brigid and other saints. Louvain also sent Franciscan preachers to Ireland who were particularly active in Ulster after the Flight of the Earls. There they preached an ascetic faith and, giving sermons in remote places such as the forests of Glenconkeyne, actively encouraged open rebellion and promised the return of Tyrconnell and Tyrone. They lived simply amongst the people and collected large sums to take back with them to fund St Anthony's.

Another task they set themselves was to rescue what they could of a disappearing Gaelic civilisation to give it value in the eyes of the world. It was for this purpose that Hugh Ward (Aodh Mac an Bhaird), professor of theology at Louvain, sent Michael O'Clery back to Ireland in 1626 to collect all the material he could for an ecclesiastical history of Ireland. The value of O'Clery's subsequent work is incalculable. He toured the island searching out Gaelic manuscripts and copied many which otherwise would have been lost forever. He even persuaded the Protestant Archbishop Ussher to allow him examine his extensive manuscript collection.

Working in the partially ruined Donegal Abbey, O'Clery and his assistants compiled an amalgam of all the Irish annals and wrote their own detailed account up to their own time. This is one of Ireland's most precious treasures, The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, popularly known as The Annals of the Four Masters. The text was completed by the Drowes River on the Donegal-Leitrim border where a memorial has been erected on "The Four Masters Bridge" in recent times.

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The Flight of the Earls

» Click here to find out more about the special commemorative events planned to mark the 400th anniversary of the Flight of the Earls