Editing Thomas Moore (section)

===''Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin''===
[[File:Terrrors of Catholic Emancipation.jpg|thumb|right|"Terrors of Emancipation" – The Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1829]]
Since within a united kingdom, Irish Catholics would be reduced to a distinct minority, Castlereagh's promises of their parliamentary emancipation seemed credible at the time of the Union. But the provision was stripped out of the union bills when in England the admission of Catholics to the "Protestant Constitution" encountered the standard objection: that as subject to political direction from Rome, Catholics could not be entrusted with the defence of constitutional liberties. Moore rallied to the "liberal compromise" proposed by [[Henry Grattan]], who had moved the enfranchisement of Catholics in the old Irish parliament. Fears of "Popery" were to be allayed by according the Crown a "negative control", a veto, on the appointment of Catholic bishops.

In an open ''Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin'' (1810), Moore noted that the Irish bishops (legally resident in Ireland only from 1782) had themselves been willing to comply with a practice otherwise universal in Europe. Conceding a temporal check of papal authority, he argued, was in Ireland's [[Gallicanism|Gallican]] tradition. In the time of "her native monarchy", the Pope had had no share in the election of Irish bishops. "Slavish notions of papal authority" developed only as a consequence of the English conquest. The native aristocracy had sought in Rome a "spiritual alliance" against the new "temporal tyranny" at home.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Thomas |title=Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin |date=1810 |publisher=Gilbert and Hodges |location=Dublin |pages=12–13 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cbnARspo3BwC}}</ref>

In resisting royal assent and in placing "their whole hierarchy at the disposal of the Roman court", Irish Catholics would "unnecessarily" be acting in "remembrance of times, which it is the interest of all parties [Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English] to forget". Such argument made little headway against the man Moore decried as a [[demagogue]],<ref name=":6" />{{rp|504}} but who, as a result of his uncompromising stand, was to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Catholic interest in Ireland, [[Daniel O’Connell]].

Even when, in 1814, the [[Roman Curia|Curia]] itself (then still in silent alliance with Britain against [[Napoleon]]) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", O'Connell was opposed. Better, he declared, that Irish Catholics "remain for ever without emancipation" rather than allow the king and his ministers "to interfere" with the Pope's appointment of Irish prelates. At stake was the unity of church and people. "Licensed" by the government, the bishops and their priests would be no more regarded than the ministers of the established Church of Ireland.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=MacDonagh |first1=Oliver |title=The Politicization of the Irish Catholic Bishops, 1800–1850 |journal=The Historical Journal |date=1975 |volume=18 |issue=1 |page=40 |doi=10.1017/S0018246X00008669 |jstor=2638467|s2cid=159877081 }}</ref>

When final emancipation came in 1829, the price O'Connell paid was the disenfranchisement of the [[Forty-shilling freeholders]] – those who, in the decisive protest against Catholics exclusion, defied their landlords in voting O'Connell in the [[1828 Clare by-election]]. The "purity" of the Irish church was sustained. Moore lived to see the exceptional papal discretion thus confirmed reshaping the Irish hierarchy culminating in 1850 with the appointment of the Rector of the [[Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples|Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith]] in Rome, Paul Cullen, as [[Primacy of Ireland|Primate Archbishop of Armagh]].