Ahern Re-opens Irish Priest College Library in Paris

The old Irish College in Paris, where for over two centuries Catholic priests got the religious training banned in their English-dominated homeland, reopened its historic library on Saturday.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern officially reopened the library of 8,000 rare books including three volumes dating from around 1500 just returned from a Dublin bank vault where they were sent for safe keeping at the start of the Second World War.

The "College des Irlandais" in the Latin Quarter was the largest of about 30 Irish colleges launched in Europe after England began vigorously imposing Protestant supremacy in Ireland after the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I in 1570.

"During the early part of the 18th century, more than half of the Irish clergy were educated in France, and more than one-third of them here in Paris," Ahern said at the college building, which now houses the Irish Cultural Centre.

The rare leatherbound books in Latin, English, French and Irish will soon be available for scholars to consult.

Irish priests established residential colleges in France, Spain, FLanders, Portugal and Italy from the late 1500s after the English closed Irish monasteries and banned Catholic education. Seminarians studied at nearby Catholic universities.

The Paris college began in 1578 when a Waterford priest and six students arrived in the French capital. It had several different homes before acquiring the present building in 1769.

The French Revolution set the colleges into decline. France shut its Irish colleges in 1793 and closed their counterparts in neighbouring Flanders when it occupied the region in 1795.

Also in 1795, Ireland's Catholic bishops and Protestant rulers agreed to open a college west of Dublin at Maynooth to train Catholic priests far from the Continent's revolutionary ideas that both of them feared.

"That really signals the end of the predominance of the Continental colleges," said historian Thomas O'Connor at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth.

Napoleon restored the Paris Irish College in 1805, merging the city's English and Scottish colleges into it. The College continued training priests but its importance faded as Maynooth grew to eventually become the largest seminary in the world.

The Paris college closed again in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War. After a short stint housing U.S. soldiers in 1945, it reopened as a student residence and took in many Polish priests who came to study in Paris.

The young Father Karol Wojtyla lived there in 1947 and stayed there during several subsequent visits until 1977, one year before he was elected Pope John Paul II.