Letters to the Irish Fr Provincial from Fr John MacErlean SJ on various matters including:
– Fr MacErlean’s censure on a Society Appeal for Funds;
– the progress of his historical research, news from Rome and news about the Society in Australia;
– the establishment of the Society in Ireland including a ‘list of whatever documents exist to my knowledge regarding the establishment of the Society in Ireland…What exactly the establishment of the Society in Ireland means I do not know. It may be a question for a canonist to solve. The canonical succession of the New Society to the Old is disputed, and Rome has never decided the point’;
– the proposed purchase of a volume consisting of ‘the indexes of the first eleven volumes of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum down to the 3rd volume of April’ and the binding which is ‘much older than the contents…the binding of a Missal that was presented to Father (Nicholas) Leynach in 1613 - 14 by Francis Bray, at a time when Fr Leynach was trying to establish a chapel or oratory of the Society in Clonmel’;
– the Irish College in Rome;
– lists of books the Province could present to ‘the library to be established for the use of the Coll(egium) Scriptorum and a ‘list of those members of our Province who might now or hereafter be fit to cooperate with the Collegium Scriptorum in the production of works’ and a
– ‘Brief Sketch of the Work of the Irish Jesuits from the foundation to the Suppression of the Society 1540 – 1773’ (11pp).

Photocopy of an extract from Annali Siculi Della Nuova Provincia, 1810, describing Irish Jesuit scholastics at Palermo in 1810. Photocopy given to Fr Fergal McGrath SJ (Irish Province Archivist until 1986) by Fr Daniel O'Connell SJ, Rome.

Biographical information on Fr Peter Kenney SJ, and material related to the early years of the Irish Vice-Province.