Fr. Oliver Plunkett Rafferty is widely known as a historian of the Catholic church in modern Ireland and modern Europe. Born in Belfast in 1956, Fr. Rafferty is a member of the Society of Jesus. He has taught at the National University of Ireland-Maynooth and is currently Visiting Professor of History at Loyola University of Chicago. He holds the degrees of M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin in ecumenical studies, M.Sc. from Oxford University in applied social studies, and M.Th. from London University in church history. He is the author of Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983: An Interpretive History (1994) and The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-Century Irish Realities (forthcoming early in 2008).