Lynch, Patrick Neison (Neisen, Neeson, Niessen) (1817–82), catholic bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, and confederate diplomat, was born 10 March 1817 in the townland of Kibberidogue, in the catholic parish of Clones, Co. Monaghan, the eldest son of Conlaw Peter Lynch and Eleanor Lynch (née Neison). They emigrated to Cheraw, South Carolina, USA, in 1819. Other children were born there; Patrick had at least four younger siblings. After local schooling at the Cheraw Academy, he entered the St John the Baptist Seminary in Charleston in 1829 at the age of 12. In 1834 he went on to the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, where he distinguished himself as a scholar and linguist, and was befriended by Dr Paul Cullen (qv), rector of the Irish College. He completed his DD degree and was ordained 5 April 1840 when he returned to Charleston. He was appointed an assistant in the cathedral of St Finbar, editor of the diocesan newspaper, the United States Catholic Miscellany, and professor at St John the Baptist Seminary. When Bishop John England (qv) died in 1842, Lynch, England's protégé, was considered a possible successor, even though he was still only in his twenties; he was asked with other priests to collect and edit England's writings.
Lynch was parish priest of St Mary's in Charleston in 1845. He served as rector of the cathedral of St Finbar (1847–57) and of St John the Baptist Seminary until it was closed in 1851. During the great Irish famine of the late 1840s, Lynch helped raise money for relief, and South Carolinians sent some $20,000 to Ireland. When epidemics of yellow fever struck the city in 1848 and in 1871, Lynch worked among the sick. He also became chaplain and treasurer of St Mary's Relief Hospital, administering the funds donated for fever victims. In 1850, the year he was appointed vicar general of the diocese of Charleston, Lynch supervised the construction of the new cathedral of St John and St Finbar.
Recognising Lynch's strengths as an administrator and as an effective writer and preacher, Bishop Ignatius Reynolds, when he fell ill in November 1854, appointed Lynch as diocesan administrator. On Reynolds's death (1855), Lynch was appointed his successor (11 December 1857) and consecrated bishop of Charleston on 14 March 1858. As such he was responsible for fourteen parishes in North and South Carolina.
Like his Florida contemporary Bishop Augustin, who wrote his apologia A tract for the times (1861), Lynch, who himself owned ninety-five slaves, condemned slave trading but defended domestic slavery in his Letters of a missionary on domestic slavery in the Confederate States of America. He believed that slavery was a reciprocal relationship between slave and master, with masters responsible for their slaves’ health and welfare, including promoting and upholding marriage and family life. His letter of 6 January 1861, to John Mullaly, New York Metropolitan Record editor, expressed his anxiety about the suffering a civil war would bring, but he believed conditions were such that the sooner the South was out of the union the better. Once the war came, Lynch added the welfare of union prisoners to his other pastoral duties. When the union army laid siege to Charleston in July 1863 to recover Fort Sumter, Lynch worked to negotiate an exchange of wounded prisoners. His letter of 25 July 1863 to Timothy Bermingham, bishop of Richmond, gives some insight into Lynch's magnanimous character as he felt ‘somewhat mortified’ that the forty exchanged confederate prisoners had been better cared for than the 104 union prisoners in their charge.
On 11 December 1861 a factory fire in Charleston destroyed some 600 buildings, including the newly completed cathedral, Lynch's residence, the seminary, and other diocesan property. The shelling of the city in 1863 and the later occupation by union forces caused further destruction. The cathedral in Charleston was not replaced in Lynch's lifetime. After three decades of fund-raising, the cornerstone of the new cathedral of St John the Baptist was laid in January 1890.
As the most important catholic in the confederate states, Lynch was the foil for the union's catholic spokesman, Archbishop John Hughes (qv) of New York. The two prelates were friends; both agreed about domestic slavery, and both opposed abolitionists for their anti-catholic nativism; however, when the war came, Hughes defended the union and served as President Abraham Lincoln's emissary to European governments, urging them not to recognise the Confederacy, while Lynch, at President Jefferson Davis's request early in 1864, served as ‘commissioner of the Confederate States of America to the states of the church’ to seek Vatican and catholic Europe's recognition of the Southern cause. His 15 April 1864 letter to his sister Ellen Lynch (Mother Baptista, superior of the South Carolina Ursulines), written from Bermuda, describes his harrowing passage, a combination of high seas and evading Yankee gunboats. He stopped for a time in Ireland where he joined Fr John Bannon (qv), the confederate emissary to Ireland, in discouraging Irishmen from emigrating into the hands of union army recruiters in the US. By the time Lynch reached Rome, it was clear that the confederate cause was doomed, so his diplomatic mission was unsuccessful. He met Pius IX as bishop of Charleston but not as a confederate diplomat.
Realising that slavery was a problem for Europeans who might otherwise be receptive to the case for the confederacy, Lynch wrote A few words on the domestic slavery in the Confederate States of America, a tract that was translated into Italian, German and French but which was not published in English until 1999 (part 1) and 2000 (part 2). Lynch's call for the church to initiate programmes for the education and welfare of freed African-Americans reflected his realisation, even from Europe, that the union would win the war. His mission was not only unsuccessful, but he also required a pardon from President Andrew Johnson (4 August 1865) to permit him return to the US.
Lynch returned to a ruined city and a diocese whose property was destroyed or damaged and more than $300,000 in debt. He worked tirelessly from 1865 until his death in 1882 to clear the diocesan debt and rebuild his diocese by visiting northern catholics and appealing to them to help their southern brethren rebuild their parishes. The visits reestablished relations with northern clergy and laity. His wider concerns were with the post-war south. Lynch wrote in an undated letter to an unidentified correspondent reporting that that since the war ended, South Carolina was ‘in a state of social revolution, which is called reconstruction’. As he had written in his Few words, he was especially concerned with the welfare of newly freed slaves. In 1866 he established St Peter's church, the first black parish in the South. He recruited the Josephite priests to work in the African-American community. He also developed a plan to establish the ‘Paraguay village of catholic negroes’, a community of freed men and their families on Folly Island that would be led by two Belgian Capuchin missionaries. Few freed African-Americans joined the community, and the discouraged priests returned to Europe. An 1867 pastoral letter expressed Lynch's frustration that the resources of the diocese were insufficient to provide for freed slaves.
Lynch's pastoral duties did not preclude his other responsibilities as bishop of Charleston. He attended the second plenary council in Baltimore (1866), helped establish the vicariate of North Carolina (1868), and attended the first Vatican council in Rome (1869–70). Lynch published in Catholic World his letters with James Gibbons (bishop of Richmond, 1872, archbishop of Baltimore 1877) from the council. He continued to write on catholic thought, on church buildings, and even on science – astronomy and especially geology – until his health failed, requiring two serious operations in 1877. He died in Charleston 26 February 1882. Lynch's papers and the files of the United States Catholic Miscellany are in the archives of the diocese of Charleston; David C. R. Heisser is his biographer.