What was the background to Newman’s rectorship of the Catholic University in Dublin? In 1845 the British government proposed to establish three non-denominational colleges in Ireland; some of the Irish bishops felt that it would be possible to work out a modus vivendi with the government. A slight majority of the bishops, however, opposed these so-called “godless” colleges and voted at the Synod of Thurles in 1850, to found a Catholic University in Ireland—a country that had been repeatedly decimated by (...) poverty and oppression, and a few years earlier the potato famine (1845-48). (shrink)