Oliver Plunkett

Oliver Plunkett was born on 1 November 1625 at Loughcrew in County Meath, Ireland, into a well-connected Anglo-Norman family related to the Earls of Fingall and the Barons of Dunsany. He received his early education from a kinsman, Patrick Plunkett, later Bishop of Ardagh and of Meath. In 1647, during the wars that convulsed mid-seventeenth-century Ireland, he was sent to Rome to study at the Irish College. He was ordained a priest in 1654 and remained in Rome for many years, teaching theology at the College of Propaganda Fide and serving as an agent of the Irish bishops at the Holy See. Those decades in exile formed him as a Tridentine reformer, committed to clerical education and ecclesiastical discipline in the spirit of the post-Reformation Catholic Church.

In 1669 Pope Clement IX appointed him Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. He was consecrated at Ghent later that year and reached Ireland in 1670, after more than twenty years abroad. The Catholic Church there was then labouring under Restoration-era restrictions: public worship was constrained and the hierarchy had long been depleted. Plunkett set about reconstruction. He held synods, ordained clergy, confirmed large numbers of the faithful across Ulster and beyond, and founded schools, including a college at Drogheda in which Jesuits taught. He also sought to restore clerical discipline and to curb outlaw bands in the north, work that won him respect in some quarters and enmity in others, including among rival clergy and those who resented his insistence on order.

The fabricated Popish Plot of 1678, promoted by Titus Oates, produced a new wave of anti-Catholic panic in England and Ireland. Plunkett went into hiding but was arrested in December 1679 and confined in Dublin Castle. A first trial at Dundalk could not proceed because the principal witnesses failed to appear. He was then transferred to London and, in June 1681, tried at Westminster Hall for high treason, accused of conspiring to bring a French army into Ireland and to overthrow the government. Even contemporaries regarded the proceedings as a miscarriage of justice: he was denied adequate time to bring defence witnesses from Ireland, and the case against him rested largely on hostile or discredited informers, among them former clerics.

Convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, Plunkett was executed at Tyburn on 1 July 1681. He was the last Catholic put to death for the faith in England. His remains were first buried at St Giles-in-the-Fields and later taken to the Benedictine abbey of Lamspringe in Germany. His head was eventually enshrined at St Peter's Church in Drogheda, while much of the body later came to rest at Downside Abbey in Somerset. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 12 October 1975, the first Irish-born saint so honoured in several centuries. His feast is kept on 1 July, and he is invoked as a patron of Ireland, of peace and reconciliation there, and of the Archdiocese of Armagh.