AHC: An Irish Pope

Challenge accepted and won: My Chaos TL has a PoD in 1200 (Genghis' early death), and ITTL our Australia has a decisive Irish-Catholic majority; at some point, the pope has to flee there, and the church gets dominated by Irish. When they find gold and gems in Australia, they also have the means to do missionary work. Current (1993) pope is Patricius XII.
 
Would, say, the son of a Wild Goose born in France or Italy count or does Pope Patrick have to be born in Eire?
 

Philip

Donor
Challenge accepted and won: My Chaos TL has a PoD in 1200 (Genghis' early death), and ITTL our Australia has a decisive Irish-Catholic majority; at some point, the pope has to flee there, and the church gets dominated by Irish. When they find gold and gems in Australia, they also have the means to do missionary work. Current (1993) pope is Patricius XII.

I don't recall that detail. It's been a while.
 
Now why were there no Cardinals from Ireland till 1866?

After the reformation, blame the Protestant English. In the Netherlands during the Dutch Republic, the Catholic church provinces were suppressed and the bishoprics, most prominently the illustrious seat of Willibrord and Boniface (Utrecht) was in state of sede vacante from 1580 till 1853. A disgrace, since nominally Dutch Roman Catholics had regained full citizenship in 1795.....

As for before the reformation, Ireland was not a unified and even then, it would have lacked the political clout of kingdoms like France or the Holy Roman Empire. Were there many Scottish Cardinals?
 
Now why were there no Cardinals from Ireland till 1866?

There are not that many cardinals. For a long time there were only 70, and Ireland is not a large country. Also, Catholicism was suppressed by the English and I imagine contacts with Rome were limited.
 
I think one of the best bets would be Luke Wadding. He was a Franciscan friar, historian and the man responsible for the feast day of St. Patrick. He also organized papal aid for the Irish during the English Civil War. This lead him to actually receive votes during the papal conclave in 1645.

There were also petitions to have him named a Cardinal for Ireland, but he really didn't want the position and managed to intercept the papers before they got to the Pope!
 
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For reasons I don't completely understand, only Italians were elected Pope between the Reformation and Vatican 2 (after Adrian VI and before John Paul II). When the Papacy becomes more international, there is no particular reason for the conclave not to select an Irish Cardinal, though you probably also need to get much better leadership in the Irish Catholic Church in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century than they actually had.

In the Middle Ages, have an Irish born priest or monk leave Ireland and become a prominent theologian at Paris or Bologna, or a senior bureaucrat in the Curia.
 
For reasons I don't completely understand, only Italians were elected Pope between the Reformation and Vatican 2 (after Adrian VI and before John Paul II).

A compromise to discourage France and the HRE from supporting rival popes?
In the Middle Ages, have an Irish born priest or monk leave Ireland and become a prominent theologian at Paris or Bologna, or a senior bureaucrat in the Curia.

The days of prominent Irish theologians on the Continent were well before 1014. John Scotus Eriugenu might have made an interesting Pope, but I can't think of any candidate between 1014 and the Norman invasion.
 
The Irish church was not consider to be standard Roman catholic for a long time. Irish church was consider to be Insular Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Christianity
Celtic Christianity isn't a real thing, as the article itself notes
The term "Celtic Church" is deprecated by many historians as it implies a unified and identifiable entity entirely separate from the mainstream of Western Christendom...Celtic-speaking areas were part of Latin Christendom as a whole at a time in which there was significant regional variation of liturgy and structure with a general collective veneration of the Bishop of Romethat was no less intense in Celtic-speaking areas.

So asides from the quarterodecimalist issues (which went away fairly quickly), there aren't any real doctrinal or ritual issues that would prevent an irish pope. If it was the case that you had to have followed the Roman Rite identically to those in Rome then there wouldn't have been popes who had practiced the ambrosian rite
 
The Irish church was not consider to be standard Roman catholic for a long time. Irish church was consider to be Insular Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Christianity

Well, I think the reason has a bit more to do with modern and early modern history. For much of the Reformation Era, Ireland was not in an adventitious position - dominated by England/Britain and useful only as a political tool to other major powers. Although the Papacy would, and did, intervene as can be seen by Wadding's ability to get at least some support for the Irish Confederation during the English Civil Wars - this was usually pretty minimal. To make matters worse, despite the reputation which Irish churchmen had during the Middle Ages for being intellectuals, by the Early Modern period the Irish were largely seen as backwards and out of the intellectual mainstream of European Christianity. This isn't to say that there weren't prominent Irish intellectuals in the Church during this era - see Wadding - but the general consensus was that the Irish Church was primitive.

Then, as we move forward in time, there was a strong strain of Jansenism within the Irish Church; despite it having been condemned by the Church beginning with Innocent X and later under Clement XI. And, although I've spoken to Church Historians who argue that the strength of Jansenism amongst the Irish Clergy is overstated, the fact remains that it was present and the stereotype existed well into the 19th century.

Turning our attention away from the Irish in particular to look at the rest of the Catholic Church; this was also an era when the center of Church power was focused more upon France, Spain and, to a lesser extent, Austria and the Italian States. Ireland was a periphery region which was dominated by a hostile power and though there would be reapproachment between the British government and the Catholic Church (especially in Ireland) during the 19th century, Ireland was on the outskirts of Catholicism - and so there was very little reason to name many Cardinals in Ireland. It would be interesting to see how many Cardinals were named from the 17th - 19th century in other periphery regions such as Poland, Hungary, Croatia, etc and compare that to Ireland.
 
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