Irish in Rome Conference celebrates global impact of Irish diaspora
From early clerics to modern writers and intellectuals, the Irish in Rome have contributed to an extensive network of scholarly, artistic, and religious endeavors over the past four centuries.
The Irish in Rome Conference, which took place from May 28-30 at St. Isidore’s College and Notre Dame Rome, brought together around 25 expert speakers and academics from Europe and America to explore how the Irish formed a vibrant community and made such a lasting impact abroad.
The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies co-organized the conference with St. Isidore’s, which was established in 1625 by Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding to educate Catholic priests unable to practice in Ireland because of religious persecution.
Colin Barr, the Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute and professor of modern Irish history in the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, spoke of the grand breadth of the conference theme and presenters in his welcome address.
“In reviewing the schedule, I was struck by how the global spread of the Irish is able to bring together so many disparate and interesting strands of significant research,” Barr said. “The papers — and the conference as a whole — exemplify the Keough-Naughton Institute’s continuing commitment to scholarship across the humanities, from history to literature to art to the Irish language.”
Michael D. Higgins, the president of Ireland, sent a personal letter to St. Isidore’s recognizing the significance of the college’s 400-year anniversary and the importance of commemorating the Irish influence in Italy.
“The founding [of St. Isidore’s] remains an inspiring chapter in the story of Ireland’s offering to European thought, a reflection of the immense contribution that Irish religious and scholarly communities have made in Rome and throughout Italy over the centuries,” President Higgins wrote.
Attendees were immersed in this Irish history from the opening sessions at St. Isidore’s College.
Rev. Prof. Micheál MacCraith OFM, guardian of St. Isidore’s College and professor emeritus of modern Irish at the University of Galway, launched the conference proceedings with an energetic, passionate tour of the college. Fr. MacCraith detailed the deliberate Irish character built into the church, the only one in Rome to have a native language (instead of Latin) greeting visitors with its eighth-century, old Irish verse inscribed in the portico.
This Irish message would not have been allowed under the anti-Catholic Penal Laws enacted in Ireland at the time, but Rome and places like St. Isidore’s offered an opportunity for fuller expression and cultivation of a distinct Irish identity. As President Higgins wrote in his letter, St. Isidore’s “represented a profound assertion of hope and resilience at a time of great adversity.”
St. Isidore’s reflects the interweaving of Italian and Irish culture raised throughout the conference with its sculpture by the renowned Bernini alongside tributes to St. Patrick and other prominent Irish secular figures. One lesser-known woman buried there, portrayed in a stunning effigy in her wedding dress, is 19-year-old Octavia Catherine Bryan, who died of tuberculosis three days before her intended marriage into the prestigious Borghese family.
Bryan’s memory lives on primarily because John Henry Newman — future Cardinal, saint, and inaugural rector/president of the first Catholic university in Ireland — gave his first sermon as a Catholic seminarian at her funeral. Newman’s sermon was an unmitigated disaster by his own account and, according to an Irish student in attendance, “most ridiculous” and “gave offense to everyone” yet stands as the humble beginnings of someone who made great contributions to the growth of the global Catholic Church.
Championing Ireland to a new world
Throughout the conference, speakers empathetically discussed talented, and flawed, Irish men and women who helped shape the future vision of the Irish in Europe and beyond over the centuries. Topics covered a wide range including: Church history; Irish-Italian literary links such as early modern Irish poetry in Rome and Irish writing in translation; travel writing and art from Irish expatriates like the Curran sisters; and readings from Irish authors Joseph O’Connor and Liam MacCóil, whose fictional stories are set in Rome.
In his letter, President Higgins praised conference organizers for inviting “distinguished speakers,” whose work would be “a fitting tribute to the legacy of intellectual pursuit and cultural engagement that has been a characteristic of the Irish in Rome.”
Plenary presenter Dr. Matteo Binasco, University for Foreigners of Siena (Italy), detailed the history of Irish clergy coming to Rome and their crucial role in establishing centers of Irish Catholic education. While many of these colleges began as seminaries, Binasco stressed their importance as repositories of significant scholarly works still consulted today, and their part in forming an Irish community that spread Irish Catholicism and assisted in preserving the native Irish language in and outside of Ireland.
Professor Marian Lyons, Maynooth University (Ireland), continued the conversation in her keynote focusing on how Luke Wadding both benefited from and expanded the network of Irish scholars in Europe in his work encompassing St. Isidore’s establishment, co-founding the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, and persuading Church leaders to add the Feast of St. Patrick to the Catholic liturgical calendar.
Wadding, Lyons explained, helped bridge the gap between those who spoke English and Irish in Ireland and often had different cultural identities. Despite not speaking Irish himself, Wadding encouraged the production of Gaelic texts to help Irish speakers keep their faith.
In the final plenary session, Professor Thomas O’Connor, Maynooth University, reiterated the idea of Wadding’s struggle with his fragmented identity, and how it embodied the complexity of Ireland in this time. By emphasizing commonalities and downplaying differences, Lyons claimed, Wadding’s vision displays the early formation of the Irish nation. Fellow keynote speaker Professor Clare Connell, City University of New York, Queens College, agreed that Wadding’s legacy included this ambassadorial role of representing and championing Ireland to a new world.
Ambassador Frances Collins, Embassy of Ireland to the Holy See, eloquently portrayed Wadding as the first unofficial ambassador in Rome in her introduction to Lyons’ paper. Ambassador Collins spoke of Wadding as a “man of faith, passion, and humility” who possessed the three characteristics of a great diplomat: a global vision, excellent networking skills, and understanding he was there to serve.
Shining a light on minority voices
Novelist Joseph O’Connor highlighted another fascinating Irishman with a “remarkable gift for friendship” and forming relationships in reading from his Rome Escape Line trilogy. O’Connor’s historical fiction follows Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who helped form an escape line for people fleeing during the Nazi occupation of Rome. Through extensive research in Irish religious archives in Rome, O’Connor discovered that Monsignor O’Flaherty saw the humanity in everyone: “If there was a blade of grass of common ground, he would find it.”
O’Connor’s lyrical language also captures the Irish voice indicative of Ireland’s impressive literary legacy. “The musicality of prose has become more important to me and is a major part of Irish literary heritage,” he explained.
O’Connor hinted that the final book in the trilogy may be titled “The Lost Waters of Rome” from a G.K. Chesterton quote shared with O’Connor by Fr. Paul Lawlor OP, prior of San Clemente Community and basilica rector. Fr. Lawlor’s conference speech explored the work of Fr. Mullooly, a 19th-century priest and archaeologist responsible for uncovering the layers of previous churches underneath the 12th-century Basilica of San Clemente, dating back to a pagan first-century temple dedicated to the Cult of Mithras.
Chesterton wrote of his San Clemente experience, “Under all there is a dark cavern carved with the mystery of Mithras; and I have heard, standing before that strange altar, the noise of the Lost Waters of Rome.”
Other conference panels similarly shone a light on historical and literary Irish minority voices in Italy, confirming O’Connor’s claim that “people who leave their tribe are always very interesting.” Irish language author Liam MacCóil read from his swashbuckling tale of a 17th-century young Irish student’s adventures in Rome in Bealach na Spáinneach (“The Spanish Way”), the last book in his Lúcás Ó Briain trilogy. Professor Jane Grogan, University College Dublin, shared entertaining travel writing from the same time period where visitors to Italy suffered seasickness and were even pelted with eggs as they went about transforming the new world with maps of ancient Rome and stories of the religious and modern, secular sides of the city.
Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane, Trinity College Dublin, in her paper on the largely absent history of 16th-century Irish nuns in Rome who were “everywhere and nowhere” noted the value in commemorating “lives lived on the margins of record-keeping.”
The theme of recognizing the marginalized was echoed in a panel on the Curran sisters. Dr. Angela Byrne, Royal Irish Academy, convincingly argued that Irish travel writer and musician Sarah Curran deserved to be remembered in her own right and not just as the fiancée of the executed Irish rebel leader Robert Emmet. Dr. Laura McKenna, University College Cork, explained that Amelia Curran, Sarah’s sister and an accomplished artist, was likewise narrowly defined by her association with the literary Mary and Percy Shelley family.
As McShane thoughtfully questioned, “Whose stories were excluded from the archive and why? How do we define presence in the historical record?” The Irish in Rome Conference underscored how even those “insignificant” figures mattered to the long reach and positive global contributions of the Irish.
The work of Rosangela Barone — translator of copious Irish literature into Italian — accentuated by Professor Irene di Angelis, University of Turin, encapsulates the Irish image abroad. Author and theater critic John McRae described Barone in this way: “She had that delightful sense of the musicality of the language, of deadly gallows humor, that distrust of authority, and that absolute devotion to creativity and art that the Irish have given with such joy to the world.”
In St. Isidore’s great hall, a mural of Luke Wadding and other Irish scholars researching in the college library covers one wall, with an empty seat facing viewers to invite them to join the effort. Their enduring legacy shows many answered that call and others will continue to spread the scholarship and artistry of the Irish throughout the world.
To learn more about the Irish in Italy, explore this map of Ireland’s religious and cultural connections in Rome.
Photo credits: Federica Palummieri and Victor Sokolowicz.
Originally published by at irishstudies.nd.edu on June 16, 2025.