Bryan Fanning

In Ireland, as elsewhere, many of the most vulnerable migrants – refugees, those with irregular status or people who have been trafficked – disproportionately depend on forms of informal community welfare. Much of this has been instigated by faith-based communities and organisations – centred on churches, mosques, and synagogues that have either accompanied or responded to waves of migration in ways that have been broadly similar across time and space. For example, religious missions, often led by country- of-origin clergy, have accompanied the diasporas of many countries. In many such cases the religious pastoral care of migrants has been organised along ethnic or linguistic lines.

Assisting Jewish refugees

Jewish communities in the United Kingdom established a Board of Deputies in 1760 that was comprised of representatives of many religious communities. This was given some quasi-legal powers by Parliament in 1836 and provided some degree of centralised leadership to British Jews.¹ The board and its presidents came to be recognised as representing Jews in Britian, and it provided leadership on issues affecting these. From the 1880s, it advocated on behalf of Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire and organised supports for these. For example, it assisted some of these (mostly from the Tsarist province of Kovno, which encompassed much of what is now Lithuania) to settle in Ireland, which, at the time, was part of the United Kingdom.² Some Jewish organisations were formed to provide supports for newly arrived refugees. These included the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in the East End of London, which was founded in 1885. During the First World War, it organised relief for around 5,000 Jewish refugees from Belgium.³

There was considerable cooperation between Jewish communities in New York, the main port of entry for migrants from Europe, to provide supports for refugees from the Russian Empire after 1881. Between 1881 and 1903, some 600,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in New York. Support for such refugees was initially organised by New York’s Russo-Jewish community and the United Hebrew Charities of New York, and in December 1881 a Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society was established. The overwhelming majority of those helped by these, estimated at 98 per cent in a 1903 account by Lee K. Frankel of Jewish charities in New York, which I draw on here, were first generation immigrants.⁴ During its seven-year existence the Emigrant Aid Society worked to organise accommodation and employment for the wave of Jewish refugees who arrived during the early 1880s. After it disbanded, the care of needy immigrants who remained in New York and who became impoverished after residence turned to the United Hebrew Charities. Frankel analysed the cases of 1,000 Jewish migrant families who applied to the United Hebrew Charities for assistance in October 1894. 67 families were still getting support five years later in 1899. These were ones where the wage- earner had become ill or had died, leaving a widow with small children. Some of those being helped were aged and infirm.⁵

Pastoral care of Catholic migrants

Large-scale migration from Ireland to the United States and elsewhere from the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by the development of parish schools and social organisations that were mostly organised by Irish-trained clergy. Some similar supports were provided by Church-led organisations for migrants from Italy and some other Catholic-majority countries. The ground rules for cooperation between host and country-of-origin clergy were refined by several papal decrees and encyclicals, in response to competition for influence between church leaders in Ireland, Italy, and some other countries experiencing high levels of emigration over the pastoral care of migrants from such countries. In essence, the Church allowed for the establishment of parishes to serve first-generation immigrants that were somewhat independent of host-country church administration and set the terms for how migrants would be incorporated into host country-based churches over time. For example, a 1952 papal encyclical, Exsul Familia, specified that Catholics came under the authority and responsibility of the parish in which they lived but that, in the case of migrants, country-of-origin clergy could minister to immigrants and their direct descendants.

The main reason that Catholic clergy sought to become involved in the pastoral care of migrants from their own countries was out of concern that these would cease to practise their religion or come under the influence of other faith communities. In a 1842 letter, Archbishop Paul Cullen, who led the Catholic Church in Ireland, wrote that less than 10 per cent of Liverpool’s mostly-Irish Catholic immigrant population attended Mass regularly, which he attributed to a shortage of priests. He made the case, tasking religious orders to provide pastoral care for Irish migrants and for the development of Church-run schools for their children.⁶

During the nineteenth century, Irish clergy and those in some other European countries secured permission from Rome to organise specific supports for their diasporas. The numbers of clergy who migrated from Ireland and the United States and to other Anglophone countries exceeded those from other such Catholic countries, such as Italy and Poland. There had been just 480 Catholic priests in the entire United States in 1840. The number of Catholics in the United States rose from 663,000 in 1840 to 3,103,000 by 1860. Catholic parishes in urban America became the epicentre of migrant communal life. By the end of the nineteenth century, a single seminary in Dublin (All Hallows) had dispatched 1,500 Irish priests across the Atlantic to minister to Irish emigrants.⁷ By the 1880s, the Catholic Church in United States was dominated by Irish bishops. Many had been proteges of Cullen. Church leadership in the United States remained dominated by Irish- Americans during the late nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century.⁸ Irish bishops similarly came to dominate the Catholic Church in Australia.⁹

Somewhat similarly, Italian Catholic clergy were mobilised to support migrants from Italy in the United States and South America. For example, an ‘Italian Schools Abroad Scheme’ established in 1862 relied on Catholic missionaries who taught Italian language and culture and, in the US, national parishes paired with parochial schools to simultaneously foster religious and Italian identity. Many Italian religious orders administered schools, charitable institutions and social services aimed at Italian immigrants in the United States and elsewhere.¹⁰ An Italian bishop, John Baptist Scalabrini (1839– 1905), founded a congregation of missionaries to accompany migrants to the Ameicas, where, in the United States and elsewhere, these ministered to some Italian migrant parishes. Like their Irish equivalents, these promoted home-country nationalism and ethnic solidarity as well as Catholicism.¹¹ However, unlike these, Italian priests were for the most part excluded from church leadership roles within American dioceses and parishes, even in Chicago where the diocese permitted the establishment of six Italian parishes run by the Scalabrinians.¹²

Home-country migrant support

In 1929, Mexico’s Catholic bishops began to organise pastoral supports for migrants in the United States. These included a ‘ binational liaison office’ to bring Mexican priests to parishes in the United States where there were Mexican migrants. A pastoral concern that Mexican Catholics living in the mostly Protestant and more cosmopolitan and more secular places would abandon their faith overlapped with concern that they might convert to Protestantism and lose their Mexican identity. The same motives that drove Irish Church efforts to develop missions for migrants to the United Kingdom were also behind what drove the development of supports for Catholic migrants from Mexico to the United States. Much more so than in the Irish case, there were not enough Mexican or Spanish-speaking priests in the United States to minister effectively to migrants. Although the Catholic Church was a transnational ‘universal’ Church, Mexican clergy saw their mission as supporting Mexican migrants just as Irish or Italian ones were dedicated to their own co-ethnics. There was a strong ethnonational aspect to the Mexican bishops’ 1929 plan. As put in an Archdiocese of Guadalajara document, ‘With the loss of their religion, [emigrants] often lose their love of the motherland.’ Mexican clergy encouraged migrants to join ‘Guadalupano’ clubs in the United States that would ‘sustain their faith and love of their nationality’.¹³

In 1939, Catholic Church authorities in Mexico and the United States agreed that, in principle at least, Spanish-speaking priests should be available to minister to Mexicans in the United States. Mexican clergy were encouraged to keep registers of their parishioners who had migrated to the United States and to keep in contact with these by, for instance, sending them invitations to the patron saint fiestas along with exhortations to keep their religious obligations.¹⁴ The concern was that migrants who had lost contact with their parishes of origin might abandon their religion.

Similar concerns drove Irish church leaders to develop pastoral and welfare services for Catholics who had migrated to the United Kingdom. For example, the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau (CSWB) was established by Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid in 1942 to assist Irish migrants travelling to England. It cooperated with parishes and Catholic organisations in England to provide advice on suitable accommodation and employment to prospective migrants. In addition to providing pastoral care for migrants, Irish clergy founded a number of welfare organisations, including housing associations and shelters for homeless migrants. By 1969, Shelter, a homeless organisation founded by an Irish priest, Fr Eamonn Casey, had 220 branches in England and Wales. ¹⁵

Muslims in Europe

The arrival of Catholic guest workers in France after the Second World War led to the creation of some migrant churches and chaplaincies. Spanish, Portuguese and Polish migrants in Paris clustered in Spanish, Portuguese and Polish ‘parishes’, where they could interact with others who shared their ethnicity and spoke the same language. Between 1945 and 1975, the Catholic Church developed some housing and social services for Catholics amongst the post-war wave of migrant workers.¹⁶ During the same period, Muslims who also arrived in Europe as guestworkers established mosques that also offered some faith-based welfare services. For example, more than 200 mosques in France are affiliated to Secours Islamique de France, which provides similar supports for vulnerable co-religionists and migrants.¹⁷ Muslims in Germany, who include a large wave of post-war guestworkers, their descendants, and Muslims from many other countries have become the country’s third-largest faith-based community. Faith-based organisations attached to mosques generally provide educational and some social welfare services.¹⁸

The pace of decline of religiosity in Europe and in some other parts of the Global North has, to some extent, been ameliorated by migrants who have either joined the churches of host-country faith communities, provided clerics for these, or established migrant churches in ways that resemble how nineteenth-century European diasporas were accompanied by home-country and co-ethnic clergy. Notable examples include churches established by Sub-Saharan Africans, Latin American and other Pentecostal Christians and mosques established by migrants from many Muslim-majority countries.

Some Muslim faith-based diasporic mobilisation has occurred on a scale equivalent to some of the Catholic examples described above. For example, more than 800 mosques in Germany, established to serve Turkish migrants, are part of a diasporic network administered by the Turkish state. Since 1983, the Turkish state Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği) has overseen the regulation of mosques catering to its citizens and their descendants living in Germany, the Netherlands and some other European countries. By 2014 Diyanet (aka DITIB) coordinated a network of some 870 mosques through a religious attaché attached to the Turkish embassy in Germany.

The Turkish state provides training for religious scholars and DITIB administrators.¹⁹ One of the main aims of Diyanet has been to protect Turkish Muslim identities from competition from other strains of Islam. In essence Diyanet is a diasporic religious organisation that has influence over the religious affairs of Turkish Muslims in Germany to a degree that is equivalent to that of the Catholic Church over the pastoral care and welfare of Catholic migrants. Diyanet’s aims were somewhat similar to those of Irish Catholic leaders: foster a specific religious and cultural diasporic identity and provide some practical supports as well as pastoral care.

Several other transnational Muslim networks, representing different stands of Islam, can be identified in Europe. These include the establishment of Muslim Brotherhood-founded Sunni Islamic centres, Saudia Arabian-funded Wahhabi mosques, and South-Asian Tablighi Jamatt (Sufi) organisations. Wahhabism became the state doctrine of Saudi Arabia and was politically opposed to the version of Islam promoted by the Turkish state. It is also opposed to the Arab nationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood.²⁰ As in the case of Christian Churches, different strains of Islam compete for influence. For example, both Turkish Diyanet and Saudi Arabian Wahhabi state-sponsored networks have been established in Bulgaria. Some high schools, supported by Diyanet, follow a Turkish Islamic curriculum, while Wahhabi mosques and religious foundations have been established in many parts of the country.²¹

The first mosque serving Arabic-speaking Muslims in Ireland – these were mostly doctors and medical students – was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, part-funded by the parents of students and various Muslim organisations in Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, United Arab Emirates (UEA), Jordan, and the United Kingdom. ²² What became the Dublin Islamic Centre, which combined a mosque, school, and community facilities, was modelled on the Muslim Brotherhood-founded Islamic Centre in Geneva, which provided a template for other such combinations of mosque, school, and community facilities in a number of European countries.²³ Much of the subsequent funding to expand the Dublin Islamic Centre was provided by Sheikh Hamdan Ben Rashid al-Maktoum, who was minister of finance and industry in the United Arab Emirates. The al-Maktoum family had substantial investments in the Irish horse racing industry. The construction of a purpose- built mosque and Islamic cultural centre was subsequently funded by the al-Maktoum foundation, which also provided support to other mosques in Ireland serving Arabic-speaking migrants.²⁴

As Ireland’s Muslim communities expanded due to migration by Urdu- speaking, South Asia-origin and other non-Arabic speaking Muslims from several countries, these came to be served by a network of prayer rooms and smaller mosques, often located in industrial states (as were many migrant Pentecostal churches). Some of these were founded by and served migrant communities from particular countries of origin and different strains of Islam – Sunni, Sufi, Shite – but many of these attracted migrants from many countries of origin.

Pentecostal churches in Europe

Many Pentecostal churches in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and in other European countries are diasporic organisations that serve congregations from the same countries and places of origin. One instance of this is the several Ghanaian-led Pentecostal Churches in London with close links to co- religionists from Ghana living in other countries. For example, the Freedom Centre International, which was founded by a London pastor, funded the establishment of a seminary and established churches in Ghana. The similarly named Freedom Centre International, which was founded in Accra in Ghana, had branches in Spain and Australia as well as in London. And the International Central Gospel, also based in Accra, established a network of churches in the United States as well as one in London. Like many of the Catholic religious orders that supported the Irish diaspora it had its own seminary. This then developed into a university.²⁵ As described in a 2015 study of four Ghanaian churches in London, the kinds of practical supports these provided included:

Welfare assistance to migrants in the form of financial handouts; holding immigration and nationality forums to inform members about how to regularise their stay and avoid falling foul of the law; organising personal development and leadership training for members to give them the necessary tools for personal development and effectiveness in leadership, and to increase their confidence, which they consider key to success in every area of endeavour; and financial empowerment and business workshops.²⁶

Pentecostal churches established by Nigerian refugees in Ireland also provided very similar supports to migrants and co-religionists.²⁷ Some of these Irish-Nigerian churches, such as Redeemed Christian Church, Church of God, Mountain of Fire were affiliated to churches in Nigeria. The most-prominent of the these, the Redeemed Christian Church, established branches in several Irish cities and towns where Nigerian asylum seekers had settled. However, some other Pentecostal churches were founded by Irish-based African pastors to serve congregations that had recently arrived as asylum seekers. ²⁸ All such churches in Ireland sought to provide very similar kinds of practical supports to their members as offered by Ghanian ones in London.

Cities with diverse immigrant populations have seen the development of multi-faith religious voluntary sectors that are sometimes also organised along ethnic lines, and sometimes the result of specific initiatives to ensure that migrants from a particular country of origin remain attached both to their faith and to their home-country national identity. Many of these provide similar kinds of informal welfare to migrant co-religionists. For example, a 2021 study in Milan examined how six Christian migrant churches facilitated the integration of migrants from the Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia (a Pentecostal church), Peru and Ecuador (both Pentecostal and Catholic), El Salvador (Catholic), the Philippines (Catholic), and Korea (Baptist Evangelical) by proving informal welfare ‘from below’. As well as providing pastoral care, these helped migrants to develop networks and to find employment and childcare. Some provided food, clothing, and shelter to homeless migrants.²⁹

Defending the migrant

Diasporic welfare, with its emphasis on ethnic and linguistic solidarities, is unsustainable without sufficiently large emigrant communities. Host-country faith communities in countries where these are declining in membership have, in some cases, been reinvigorated by migrant co-religionists. As well as facilitating ethnic or linguistic diasporic pastoral care and welfare, the Catholic Church has also promoted transnational social justice ideals in its response to refugees and other vulnerable migrants. Church teaching defends the right of people to migrate as a fundamental human right. For example, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), Pope John XXIII declared that every human being has the right to freedom of movement and of residence within the confines of his own country; and, when there are just reasons for it, the right to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there.³⁰ In 1970, Pope Paul VI established a Pontifical Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrants.³¹ In 2020, Pope Francis, in effect, criticised the exclusion of many such migrants from citizenship rights and host-country welfare solidarities:

‘Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person … No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human.’³²

Bryan Fanning is Professor of Migration and Social Policy at University College Dublin. His most recent book, on which this essay is based, is Migration and Social Policy in a Changing World: Histories, challenges and dilemmas (Manchester University Press), due out in 2026.

Notes

1. William D. Rubinstein, ‘The Decline and Fall of Anglo-Jewry?’, Jewish Historical Studies, 38 (2002), pp. 13–21 (p. 13).
2. Bryan Fanning, Migration and the Making of Ireland, (Indiana University Press, 2021), p. 120.
3. Sam Johnson, ‘Breaking or Making the Silence? British Jews and East European Jewish Relief, 1914–1917’, Modern Judaism, 30:1 (2010), pp. 95–119 (p. 101).
4. Lee K. Frankel, ‘Jewish Charities’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 21:3 (1903), pp. 47–64 (p. 49).
5. Frankel, Jewish Charities, p. 51.
6. Gerard Moran, ‘Paul Cullen and the Irish Emigrant World’, in Keogh and McDonnell (eds) Cardinal Paul Cullen and His World(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), pp. 166–178 (p. 168).
7. Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (London: Pearson, 2000), p. 113.
8. Moran, ‘Cullen and the Irish Emigrant World’, p. 172.
9. Rory Sweetman, ‘Paul Cullen and the Remaking of Catholicism in the Antipodes’, in Keogh and McDonnell (eds), Cardinal Paul Cullen and His World, pp. 378–379.
10. Breda Gray and Peggy Levitt, ‘Social Welfare versus Transnational Social Protection Regimes: The Changing Roles of Church and State’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48:11 (2022), pp. 2721–2739 (p. 2730).
11. Peter R. D’Agostino, ‘The Scalabrini Fathers, the Italian Emigrant Church, and Ethnic Nationalism in America’, Religion and American Culture, 7:1 (1997), pp. 121–159 (p. 122).
12. D’Agostino, The Scalabrini Fathers, p. 129.
13. David Fitzgerald, ‘Emigration’s Challenge to the “Nation-Church”: Mexican-Catholic Emigration Policies, 1920–2004’, Global Fellows Seminar, 2005, p. 7, https://escholarship.org/uc/ item/9nv2t3z9
14. Fitzgerald, ‘Emigration’s Challenge to the “Nation-Church”’, p. 8.
15. Patricia Kennedy, Welcoming the Stranger: Irish Migrant Welfare in Britain since 1957 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014), p. 69.
16. Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, ‘The Catholic Church in the Lives of Irregular Migrant Filipinas in France: Identity Formation, Empowerment and Social Control’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 11:3–4 (2010), pp. 345–361 (pp. 348–49).
17. İpek Gocmen, ‘The Role of Faith-Based Organisations in Social Welfare Systems’, Non profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 42:3 (2013), pp. 495–516 (p. 509).
18. Gocmen, Role of Faith-Based Organisations’, p. 507.
19. Selcen Oner, ‘Turkish Community in Germany and the Role of Turkish Community Organisations’, European Scientific Journal, 10:29 (2014), p. 82.
20. Hansjörg Schmid, Noemi Trucco, and Federico Biasca, Swiss Muslim Communities in Transnational and Local Interactions (Fribourg: SZIG/CSIS, 2022), pp. 35–41.
21. Ismail Numan Telci and Aydzhan Yordanova Peneva, ‘Turkey and Saudi Arabia as Theo-political Actors in the Balkans’, Insight Turkey, 21