Archives of St Patricks College, Maynooth

Context

Creator(s): St Patricks College, Maynooth

• Administrative History ↴

  Maynooth College was founded in 1795 as a seminary for the education of priests and by 1850 had become the largest seminary in the world. Over its history it has ordained more than 11,000 priests. Many of these have ministered outside Ireland and it has inspired two major missionary societies, directed to China (1918 - the Columban Fathers) and to Africa (1932 - Saint Patrick's Missionary Society). The College was founded because it was urgently needed. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had not been possible to educate Catholic priests in Ireland. Institutions had been established in Catholic Europe, where they had become concentrated in France. The French Revolution confiscated all of these in 1792 and 1793. In Ireland the Penal Code was being dismantled, and the British Government, at war with revolutionary France, was anxious to placate Irish Catholic dissatisfactions, and certainly did not wish to see 'revolutionary' priests returning from the continent. In consequence, a petition to Parliament by the Irish Catholic Bishops was successful, and 'An Act for the better education of persons professing the Popish or Roman Catholic religion' was passed in June 1795. It provided a modest grant to establish a college. The student body has fluctuated between 500 and 600, all of them of course seminarians preparing for the priesthood. Authority to confer degrees came slowly enough to what, by the standards of the time, was a large 'third-level' institution. In the centenary year 1895 a petition was sent to Rome for authority to grant degrees in theology, philosophy and canon law, and this was granted in 1896. The problem of civil university education acceptable to Catholics was resolved by the Irish Universities Act of 1908. There was provision for Maynooth to become a 'recognised college', and this began to function in 1910, with faculties of Arts, Science, Philosophy and Celtic Studies. In 1966 it was decided to open the College courses to religious and laity, and student numbers grew. There are now about 5,000, of whom only a small minority are studying for the priesthood. Legislation in 1997 established the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, as a totally separate body.

• Archival History ↴

  Acquired directly from St Patricks College, Maynooth

• Immediate Source Acquisition ↴

  Official Transfer