foreign missions

foreign missions. Ireland played little part in Christian missionary activity from the end of its European mission in the 9th century until the post‐Reformation period. From the 16th century, the Catholic church was preoccupied with survival, the papacy regarding the kingdom as ‘mission’ territory. Despite its own domestic problems the Church of Ireland took foreign mission initiatives. The ‘Irish Auxiliary’ to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was founded in 1714, followed by the Hibernian Church Missionary Society (1817), an Irish offshoot of the evangelically inspired Church Mission Movement. In 1874 the Leprosy Mission was established while in 1885 the Dublin University Far Eastern Mission was set up. There was also an Irish Presbyterian Mission. Many Irish Protestants were involved in English or international missionary agencies. Today a General Synod Council for the Church Overseas co‐ordinates Anglican missionary activity.

Although many Irish Catholic priests worked in ancien régime Europe, modern Catholic foreign missions were essentially a post‐Catholic emancipation phenomenon. The orders of female religious came first. Nano Nagle's Sisters of the Presentation were active in Newfoundland from 1833 and in India from 1841. Catherine McAuley's Irish Sisters of Mercy had apostolates among Aborigine, Maori, and native American communities, as well as in South Africa, Belize, and Jamaica, beginning in 1839. Frances Teresa Ball's Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loreto Sisters) had members active in India from 1841 and in South Africa from 1879. Male missionaries came later. While Maynooth did found a mission to India in 1838, its attention, like that of the remaining continental colleges, was on the domestic church. The growing Irish diaspora's clerical needs were catered for by the local diocesan seminaries at Kilkenny (1782), Carlow (1793), Waterford (1807), Wexford (1819), and All Hallows, Dublin (1842).

The Irish Christian Brothers, from 1825, and the Patrician Brothers from 1848, served on the diaspora mission. Later in the century, under continental influences, came a drive to produce priests for non‐Christian populations, mostly within the British empire. It was the introduction of French missionary congregations like the Holy Ghost Fathers (1859) and the Society of African Missions (1877) which marked the beginning of a larger mission effort. Native foreign mission movements emerged, notably John Blowick and John Galvin's Maynooth Mission to China (1916) and St Patrick's Society for African Missions (1932). Parallel female missionary congregations flourished, like Lady Frances Maloney's Missionary Sisters of St Columban (1922), Agnes Ryan's Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary (1924), and Mary Martin's Medical Missionaries of Mary (1937). Lay organizations like the Apostolic Work Society, founded in France in 1838, the Legion of Mary's Viatores Christi movement, formally established in 1964, and Edwina Gateley's lay Volunteer Missionary Movement, which spread to Ireland in 1972, were also active.

Very recent mission activity has been affected by the growing autonomy of native churches, involvement in justice issues, the growth of government foreign aid programmes, and a decline in the numbers coming forward for missionary work.

Bibliography

Hogan, Edmund , The Irish Missionary Movement (1990)

Thomas O'Connor