Paul Cullen (bishop) - Legacy

Legacy

Cullen is most notable today for being the first Irish Cardinal after 1,400 years of Christianity on the island.

The improved condition of the Catholic Church in Ireland on his death in 1878, contrasted with what it was in 1850, afforded proof of the fruitfulness of Cullen's relentless zeal during his episcopate. Those twenty eight years marked a continuous period of ultramontane orthodoxy in matters connected with religion, discipline, government-funded education and charitable institutes.

Father Thomas N. Burke, O.P., wrote in the triumphalist language of post-Vatican I in 1878:"The guiding spirit animating, encouraging and directing the wonderful work of the Irish Catholic Church for the last twenty eight years was Paul, Cardinal Cullen, and history will record the events of his administration as, perhaps, the most wonderful and glorious epoch in the whole ecclesiastical history of Ireland."

Cullen also started the practice of Irish priests wearing Roman collars and being called "Father" (instead of "Mister") by their parishioners.

Cullen has been credited with the revival of regular Catholic devotion in Ireland and what has been considered sexual repression. An extreme Ultramontanist, he vigorously opposed secret societies with revolutionary aims, as well as the system of mixed education then in force. His opposition was largely responsible for the failure of Gladstone's Irish Universities Bill in 1873, and he is held by some historians to have frustrated Cardinal John Henry Newman's plans for setting up a Catholic university along the lines proposed in Newman's The Idea of a University.

In James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist's father mentions Cullen as one of the Catholic clergy who were very destructive to Ireland: "Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn. O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!"