ABSTRACT
Racialized and considered superfluous to the needs of the British colonial state, the Famine Irish discovered that by crossing the Atlantic they attained “ideal”—that is, white citizenship in the US racial state. Early on, Famine Irish Catholic novelists concerned themselves with proving the worthiness of the Irish Catholic for ideal American citizenship and middle-class respectability. Support for the nascent parochial schools system and the Church’s hierarchal power structure were their prime concerns. Paul Cullen and John Hughes, as representatives of the ultramontane Church on either side of the Green Atlantic, personified the ways that Roman Catholic imperialism flowed through and alongside the capillaries of both British and US state organs. Americanists generally pretermit the significance of the Catholic Church as an ideological state apparatus that worked, effectively, on behalf of the nineteenth-century US state. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
