O'Mahony, Conor, S. J.

Jesuit academic and author Conor O'Mahony was probably of Munster origin but spent much of his life in the Iberian Peninsula, where he became a professor at the University of Evora in Portugal. The experience of living in Portugal during the Braganza revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs, and, almost certainly, personal acquaintance with several of the Jesuit scholars who provided intellectual justification for the Braganza position, were of critical importance in conditioning his own reaction to rebellion in Ireland and the formation of the Confederate Catholic Association in 1642. In 1645 he published in Lisbon the text on which his historical reputation rests, the Disputatio apologetica de iure regni Hiberniae pro Catholicis Hibernis adversus haereticos Anglos (Explanatory argument concerning the authority of the kingdom of Ireland on behalf of Irish Catholics against English heretics), a two-part work consisting of a disputatio and an exhortatio.

O'Mahony's purpose was to demonstrate that the Hiberni, a generic term that he used to denote all the Catholics of the island, had the right to reject the authority of the monarchs of England over Ireland. In the disputatio he first rehearsed a series of arguments that might be advanced to legitimize English authority and then proceeded to attack them. His arguments were intensely legalistic, and the historical underpinning was somewhat weak. The second part of the disputatio was relatively stronger. It adapted the work of Bellarmine, Suarez, and Molina to build a case that even if English monarchs had once legitimately ruled over Ireland, the Irish retained the right to eliminate their authority because of the lapse into heresy of Charles I and his two predecessors. The exhortatio that followed, drawing heavily on biblical example, urged the Irish people to choose a new Catholic and native monarch and to eliminate all the remaining heretics in the island.

Although emotional resonances with O'Mahony's book can be detected in some manuscript material produced after the rebellion of 1641, it received almost no public support among the audience for which it was avowedly written, the Confederate Catholics of Ireland. The book ran counter to the dominant current in Irish Catholic political ideology, which stressed the legitimacy of Stuart rule. In 1645, the year of its publication, even the clerical convocation, the most militant group within the association, dismissed out of hand the idea that Charles was not the Confederates' legitimate king. Radical Catholics within the association opted to refer to the Confederate oath of association to justify their objectives rather than to O'Mahony's dangerously divisive argumentation. Moreover, the frank approbation in the exhortatio for the killing of tens of thousands of Protestants in the rebellion of 1641 was particularly unwelcome to the great mass of the Confederate Catholic leadership, which wished to avoid any link to these alleged atrocities.

SEE ALSO Confederation of Kilkenny; Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista; Wild Geese—The Irish Abroad from 1600 to the French Revolution

Bibliography

Canny, Nicholas. "Religion, Politics, and the Irish Rising of 1641," In Religion and Rebellion, edited by Judith Devlin and Ronan Fanning. 1997.

Ó Buachalla, Breandán. "James Our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century." In Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century, edited by George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan. 1993.

Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg. "'Though Hereticks and Politicians Should Misinterpret Their Goode Zeal': Political Ideology and Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland." In Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony, edited by Jane Ohlmeyer. 2000.

O'Mahony, Conor. Disputatio apologetica de iure regni Hiberniae pro Catholicis Hibernis adversus haereticos Anglos: Accessit eiusdem authoris ad eosdem Catholicos exhortation [Explanatory argument concerning the authority of the Kingdom of Ireland on behalf of Irish Catholics against English heretics: To which is joined the exhortation of the same author to the said Catholics]. 1645.

Silke, John J. "Primate Lombard and James I." Irish Theological Quarterly 22 (1955): 124–150.

Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin