'America' on Ireland: Essays from the Archives

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Any casual reader of America’s one hundred-plus years of publication will likely note that the “Irish Question” in one form or another was never long neglected by the editors. There are historical reasons for this, of course. Because the Irish people’s sorrowful history of persecution, starvation, emigration, civil war and exile is inexorably intertwined with the Roman Catholic faith of most of its populace, it was obviously a topic of interest for a Catholic magazine. The American Catholic Church, furthermore, has been long dominated by Irish influence, particularly in the Eastern cities and remarkably so among its clergy and episcopacy, and so what was going on “on the other side” was always interesting to readers. Finally the simple fact remains that most of America’s editors and staff over the past century had roots in the Emerald Isle.

Such an embarrassment of riches requires a ruthless editorial hand when it comes to what is selected for a representative volume of America’s coverage. The articles that follow are therefore in no way a comprehensive package, but instead a sampling from different eras and different voices of America’s coverage of Ireland’s politics, religion, history, and heritage. They begin in April 1909, just a week after the magazine’s first issue, and are bracketed by two essays from recent years by America’s current editor in chief, another man of Hibernian extraction, Fr. Matthew Malone, S.J.