Remembering the Irish College in Salamanca, Spain, and the evacuation of seminarians

 

Dublin, Ireland, Aug 5, 2025 / 12:28 pm (CNA).

On Aug. 4, 1936, the last seminarians at the Irish College in Salamanca, Spain, were put on a British Navy destroyer from the Irish College’s summer coastal retreat in Pendueles in Asturias, northern Spain. The Spanish Civil War had escalated, and for their safety, the students were evacuated, never to return.

The evacuation began a sequence that led to the eventual closure of the Irish College in 1951, ending a rich tradition of Irish clerical training and formation in Spain stretching back to the late 1500s.

The Real Colegio de San Patricio de Nobles Irlandeses in Salamanca was the foremost Irish College on the Iberian peninsula and the last to close. It boasted an impressive roll of honor.

In 1595, the first seminarians registered at the Irish College in Salamanca, which was founded by Jesuit Father Thomas White. The documents establishing the college included direct intervention by King Philip of Spain and a papal bull from Pope Clementine, demonstrating the value they placed upon Ireland and its Catholic people.

“Sometimes the brighter men were chosen to go abroad to study,” Jesuit historian Father Fergus O’Donoghue told CNA. “There was also that important thing of doing some of your priestly formation in a country that spoke another language.”

The eventual closure in 1951, brokered by General Francisco Franco and agreed upon by the Irish bishops and the Spanish Church, meant the Irish College property returned to Spanish ownership. Funds from lands sold went to the Irish College in Rome, and valuable college archives dating from 1595 were transferred to St. Patrick’s Maynooth in Ireland. The elegant building that housed the Irish students, the Colegio del Arzobispo Fonseca, is now part of the University of Salamanca.

Art Hughes, professor of Irish at Ulster University, told CNA: “In Ireland, in the late 16th century, there was a political upheaval and a religious upheaval. Although the Spanish tried to help the Irish, the defeat at Kinsale and the flight of the Earls to Europe was the beginning of the end and a very turbulent decade for Gaelic Ireland.”

“The English did not allow priests to be ordained in Ireland. So we had this network of more than 30 Irish Colleges in Europe at one time — one of the main ones was in Salamanca, very near the Spanish court. These colleges formed a massive nexus of scholarship; for example, one significant outcome was the printing of the first Irish-language book in 1610, a catechism.”

For 20th-century Salamanca seminarians, O’Donoghue explained, the brand of teaching and formation was different from Maynooth.

“So you studied theology out of a manual; you’d have a manual for moral theology, a manual for fundamental theology, and so on. And then Scripture was studied in what we would consider a very old-fashioned way,” he explained.

O’Donoghue said he believes that despite the Spanish turmoil, Irish bishops would have supported the Irish College on historical grounds. “Then with so many seminaries founded in Ireland, the idea of sending people to Salamanca or Paris became less practical or necessary,” he said.

Father Alexander McCabe, a Cavan, Ireland-born priest who studied at the college, was college rector from 1936 until its closure. During that time, he worked assiduously to keep the college buildings intact, preserve its function as a place of learning, and placate a range of temporary residents from Franco’s officials to Nazi diplomats to SS propagandists.

McCabe’s “Salamanca Diaries” are the subject of an insightful biography by Irish author Tim Fanning.

“Undoubtedly, McCabe was the right person to steer the Irish College through the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and the difficult postwar years that followed. He was deliberate, unemotional, and was a shrewd judge of character,” Fanning said.

“He was able to ward off various different institutions which hoped to lay their hands on the college in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the Irish bishops were not committed to retaining the link with Salamanca, and he was unable to reopen it to students. His tragedy was that he spent nearly the whole of his rectorship in the college without students.”

“I would have thought that those priests who studied at Salamanca would have had a broader view of the world than Maynooth would have given them,” Fanning added. “In his diaries, McCabe ruminates often on the differences between the Irish and Spanish Churches. McCabe valued the historical connection between Ireland and the Irish Colleges in Spain. But back home in Ireland, there were many who were suspicious of the idea of training Irish priests abroad when there was a national seminary.”

“Given his erudition and natural diplomatic skills, it is a pity that the hierarchy could not have a more suitable position for him, perhaps in the United States or one of the colleges in Ireland,” Fanning noted.

“Neither did certain figures in the Department of Foreign Affairs make good use of the intelligence he was able to provide on the situation in Spain in the years leading up to, during, and after the Spanish Civil War.”

For O’Donoghue, McCabe’s skills were at odds with the postwar Irish hierarchy. “The typical attitude was that in the Irish Church in general was that people who were very adventurous were not encouraged,” he said.

Despite McCabe’s optimism and efforts, the closure of the college in 1951 terminated a rich 350-year Spanish connection that had survived the French Revolution, the Peninsular War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.

On his return to Ireland he experienced health and personal difficulties to which his bishop appeared indifferent. He recovered his well-being in his latter years, dying in 1988, having left an invaluable insight into Irish-Iberian relations. He was always repelled by the repression and bloodshed he witnessed.

In 1986, McCabe was invited to deliver an address of welcome to King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain during their visit to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. It was a belated and fitting recognition of a remarkable man and a fascinating postscript to an enduring relationship between two Catholic countries.