The Confederates receive modest subsidies from the monarchies of France and Spain, who want to recruit troops in Ireland but their main continental support comes from the Papacy.

Pope Innocent X strongly supports Confederate Ireland, over the objections of Mazarin and the Queen, Henrietta Maria, who in 1644 had moved to Paris.

Innocent had received the Confederation's envoy in February 1645 and resolved to send a nuncio extraordinary to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, archbishop of Fermo, who had embarked from La Rochelle with the Confederacy's secretary, Richard Bellings.

He had taken with him a large quantity of arms and military supplies and a very large sum of money.

These supplies mean that Rinuccini has a big influence on the Confederate's internal politics; he is backed by the more militant Confederates such as Owen Roe O'Neill.

Rinuccini is received at Kilkenny with great honors, asserting that the object of his mission is to sustain the King, but above all to help the Catholic people of Ireland in securing the free and public exercise of the Catholic religion, and the restoration of the churches and church property, but not any former monastic property.