Above : Painting Of The Czar Of Russia, One Of Influence In Episcopal Appointments

By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, it had become sufficiently clear to the Government authorities that the attempt to sever the connection of the bulk of the Irish people with the Church of Rome might, for practical purposes, as well be abandoned. This being so, the prudent course appeared to be to endeavour to establish such relations between the State and the Catholic clergy as would induce these to exercise their great influence over their flocks more or less in the Government’s favour.

This relation could, it was considered, be established by a supervision of the education of the priests, by controlling, to some extent, the election of the bishops, and by a system of State-payment for the secular clergy. The permission accorded (1795) for the foundation of Maynooth College, and its endowment with an annual grant was, no doubt, influenced by these considerations. It soon appeared, however, that no control of clerical education by any outside body was possible. The history of the next century was to show that the Maynooth priest was even more whole-heartedly one with his flock, and more bold in standing by their side in the hour of their trial than had been the older generation of ecclesiastics.

In 1798, we find Castlereagh requesting the four Archbishops and six Bishops who were the clerical trustees of Maynooth College to try, at their forthcoming meeting (January, 1799), to suggest some scheme by which the Government might be satisfied of the loyalty of a person proposed by the clergy of a diocese to fill a vacant See, before the name was actually sent to Rome. The plan sketched in answer to this request would have accorded to the Irish Viceroy a certain right of objection to a proposed name, but of the validity of the objection the prelates of the ecclesiastical province would have been the final judges. In making this suggestion the Maynooth trustees spoke, of course, only for themselves. They had no authority to voice the opinion of the Irish bishops as a whole-they were careful to state that no change in the present mode of proceeding could be made without the consent of the Pope.

An influence over episcopal appointments was, as it was pointed out debates on the Catholic Question, exercised by most Continental rulers in regard to the Sees within their dominions, even when, as in the see of the Czar of Russia and the King of Prussia, the monarch himself was not a Catholic. It had been also the acknowledged right of English Kings before the Reformation.