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Cullen, Paul

Paul Cullen (1803–1878), Ireland's first cardinal (1866), was born on 29 April into a strong farming family in Prospect, County Kildare. He was educated at the Quaker school at Ballitore and at Carlow College, and his out-look was marked by thirty years spent in Rome (1820–1850). There he served as rector of the Irish College beginning in 1832. He was consecrated archbishop of Armagh in 1850, in which year he was papal legate to the National Synod of Thurles. The synod condemned the third-level Queen's Colleges and called for a Catholic university to be established.

Upon the death of Archbishop Murray, Cullen transferred to Dublin as archbishop in 1852. He invited John Henry Newman to Dublin to become first rector of the Catholic University, a largely unsuccessful project. He pursued a policy of having his own candidates appointed to Irish bishoprics, favoring young and active pastors. Cullen oversaw the completion of the Tridentine model of the church in a reinvigorated post-penal and postfamine church, which was confident of its own strength for the first time since the Reformation.

In politics he was much more of a nationalist before he became archbishop than afterward. He condemned the militant nationalist Fenians, a secret oath-bound society. He pursued a policy of alliance with Liberal governments, and Irish Liberals MPs needed Cullen's goodwill to be certain of their seats. He denounced "priests in politics" who took a line contrary to his own. He had poor relations with his rival, Archbishop MacHale of Tuam.

He was suspicious of Protestants, and his pastorals condemned evangelical proselytism in Dublin. In the 1860s he argued successfully for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland. He was influential at the First Vatican Council of 1869 and 1870. Cautious and secretive by nature, he took an uncompromising line for the Catholic Church in accord with the Ultramontane policy of Pope Pius IX (1846–1878). He even regarded Maynooth College with suspicion for its alleged independence from Roman thinking. In the absence of strong lay leadership between the death of Daniel O'Connell and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell, Cullen was a dominant figure in Irish public life.

SEE ALSO Roman Catholic Church: 1829 to 1891

Bibliography

Larkin, Emmet. The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850–1860. 1980.

Larkin, Emmet. The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870. 1987.

Thomas McGrath