Michael Anthony Fleming and Ultramontanism in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850‪.‬

1 This essay is based on the author's "Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism, 1829-1850," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1997. Research for this study was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Institute for Social and Economic Research of Memorial University of Newfoundland, the University of Ottawa, and the Government of Newfoundland. In Newfoundland and Canadian Catholic historiography, it is well known that the episcopacy of Michael Anthony Fleming, the Franciscan Roman Catholic vicar apostolic and bishop of Newfoundland (1829-50) coincided with the tremendous growth of institutional Roman Catholicism in the island colony of Newfoundland. It is much less known that this expansion and cultural formation took place in the midst of a bitter intraethnic conflict which divided Fleming's St. John's congregation along Irish provincial Leinster-Munster lines, and that this dispute was exploited by the government of Britain in an attempt to control the Irish, and Roman Catholicism, in nineteenth-century Newfoundland. In good measure it was a dispute caused by Fleming's implementation of ultramontanism, the tendency to look towards Rome for centralized control and standardization of practices in the Roman Catholic Church. This conflict and its importance have been obscured by the new culture which had emerged by 1850, and by the historical attention lavished on sectarianism in Newfoundland politics.