Anglican Church of Ireland

“ The Catholic churches have in large measure been built by the contributions of successful emigrants, subscribed in many instances with the secondary object of providing work in building during times of distress. There are 2,400 Catholic and 1,500 Protestant churches in Ireland at the present moment, and there is one Episcopalian Protestant church for every 320 members of that creed and one Catholic church for every 1,368 Catholics. ”

“ Such is the outward visible sign of the progress of the church in Ireland for the last hundred years. What though the wind sighs mournfully through the broken arches of many a church and cloister, made sacred by the saintly men who prayed and taught fourteen centuries ago; though the fern and the ivy grow up and cement a thousand crumbling ruins, which in their desolation attest at the same time man's passion and his impotence; let them be as silent teachers of the past and of its glorious memories and bitter persecution. ”

“ Protestant England has enslaved Catholic Ireland; has for centuries put forth the most heartless and cunningly-devised efforts to extinguish in the Irish Catholics every noble and free aspiration of the human heart; and then she has turned round and appealed to the world, with the cant which is twin-born with hypocrisy, to bear witness that Ireland is in fetters because the Catholic Church is opposed to liberty; and the world, in whose eyes success is ever the highest and the best, has smiled approval. ”

“ Nor is it strange that the new religion had made such little progress in Ireland. Apart from the fact that the Irish people were thoroughly Catholic at heart, the means adopted to bring about their apostasy was not of such a kind as to ensure success. The English sovereigns, their officials in Dublin, and a section of the Anglo-Irish nobles aimed at getting possession of the ecclesiastical property and patronage, and once they had attained their object they had but scant regard for the claims of religion. ”

“ No Protestant Church will perhaps ever be the Church of Ireland, as one powerful communion with a touch of the old arrogance claims to be; yet Protestantism may add something to the national piety and progress, nay, she may be another bulwark to the Christian faith in days of strain and stress, if she can exhibit to a naturally religious people a tangible proof of the possibility of uniting the Apostolic creed with the intellectual demands of modern progress, and in this way help to save the youth of Ireland from a desolating materialism. ”

“ While the Scottish bishops were, as we have seen, released by the Pope from dependence on the see of York, the influence of the Church of England was extended both in Ireland and Wales. The Church in Ireland seems to have done little to civilize the people: it had lost the early glories of its missionary days, while it retained its lack of order and its inability to rule itself or others. ”

“ In England and Ireland the influence and authority of the popes had not been thus disregarded; the church there had been kept tolerably pure, and the affection of the people had not been alienated by the faults and crimes of prelates and priests. In Ireland to-day, after three hundred and thirty-six years of Protestant assaults upon the faith, Catholic truth remains as firmly as ever rooted in the hearts and exemplified in the lives of the people. ”

“ What we hope for this nation, we may hope with greater reason for the other nations yet reposing in their infancy, or growing in giant proportions under British rule. I say, with greater reason, because in most of these the foundations of Catholicity are laid even more deeply than they are here. While it would be a great thing for God's honour and glory, there is nothing to forbid the hope that these may one day be united in the true fold of the everlasting Church. The blood of Ireland and of England will mingle in their veins ”

“ The practice of reciting the De Profundis after each low mass, we believe, exists in all Ireland, without any exception of diocese or district, and has existed for a long period. It is the opinion of many well versed in Irish ecclesiastical matters, that it was introduced and authorised by the Holy See as a substitute for the numerous masses and suffrages for which innumerable endowments were founded by the piety of the faithful in former times, and which were taken away from the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation. ”

“ In knowledge, education, manners, commerce, industry, liberty, in all that constitutes national maturity, it is behind England. Reading, lecturing, mental activity, in Ireland are all in the back ground; and consequently the church, which there keeps alive the faith in the heart of a peasant and small farmer population, does not act indirectly on English Catholic society with that force which would belong to it under more favorable circumstances. "The centuries which have ripened England and Scotland with flower and fruit, have swept over Ireland in withering and desolation;" ”

“ Religion is a live thing in Ireland, and the Roman Catholic churches are always filled to overflowing at every service with as many men as women, which is unusual in other countries. In Ireland the situation seems to be different, and the congregations are invariably composed about equally of the two sexes. The Church of Ireland is comparatively weak in numbers, and has more houses of worship than it needs, having inherited many of them from the confiscation edicts of the English kings. ”

“ The existence of this anti-clerical spirit, and, what is more to the point, its expression with the proverbial tactlessness of the political convert, for such a one the Protestant Nationalist usually is, make it very essential that the Catholic clergy should walk warily and avoid giving any handle to their detractors, for in Ireland, and perhaps most of all in the Church in Ireland, there is need to use the prayer of the faithful Commons—"that the best possible construction be put on one's motives." ”

“ The place given to the laity in her synods has quickened in them the sense of responsibility so essential to the Church’s progress. And although there are few worldly inducements to men to take orders in Ireland, the clergy are, for the most part, the equals of their predecessors in social standing and in intellectual equipment, while the standard of clerical activity is higher than in pre-Disestablishment days. ”

“ The man who would say of it that it was 'progressing and prospering,' or that 'its work people were fully employed,' or that there existed 'a continued development of its industries,' or that its towns 'had increased in value and population,' would be set down as a madman. It is in this seven-eighths of Ireland that the growing and great organization of the Catholic Church has taken root. ”

“ Because, if you look how the Church has been connected with the State, and with the politics of the country, with the supremacy of the landed proprietors, with the supremacy of the Protestant party, with all the dark records of the past, you will see the effect has been to make Catholicism in Ireland not only a faith, but absolutely a patriotism. ”

“ A Catholic, as everybody knows, cannot be made sheriff; cannot be in parliament; cannot be a director of the Irish Bank; cannot fill the great departments of the law, the army, and the navy; is cut off from all the high objects of human ambition, and treated as a marked and degraded person.
The common admission now is that the Catholics are to the Protestants in Ireland as about four to one, of which Protestants not more than one half belong to the Church of Ireland. ”

“ Now, if it were possible, would it not be worth while to change the sentiments and improve the condition of the Irish cultivators of the soil? If we were to remove the State Church, there would still be a Church, but it would not be a supremacy Church. The Catholics of Ireland have no idea of saying that Protestantism in its various forms shall not exist in their island. There would still be a Church, but it would be a free Church of a section of a free people. ”

“ Besides these there are the Irish Evangelical Society, 'for promoting the Evangelization of Ireland, by the agency of ministers, evangelists, town missionaries, schools, etc.'; the Parochial Visitors' Society, for enabling the clergy near Dublin to 'have the assistance of fit persons to act under their direction in matters which the spirit and constitution of the United Church of England and Ireland allow its clergy to depute to such agents' ”

“ This remarkable growth of the church here during the last thirty years must be attributed to various causes, by far the most important of which is beyond all doubt the vast immigration from Ireland; to which, indeed, we must also chiefly ascribe the progress of the church during this century in all other countries throughout the world in which the English language is spoken. No other people could have done for the Catholic [Pg 449] faith in the United States what the Irish people have done. ”

“ A church which withstood calamity and survived the loss of its possessions, and flourished under three hundred years of bitter persecution, may safely be left to itself. State patronage, in any extended form, might corrupt, but could not strengthen, Irish Catholicism. Catholics in many countries are beginning to feel that freedom of action and development is of far greater value than endowments to the church. In Ireland, Catholics have long since perceived and acknowledged that liberty—not the enervating influence of court favor—is the true bulwark of Catholic worship. ”

“ Ireland has been quiet, calm, and peaceable, and though, in common with England, suffering from the commercial depression which spread from this country to them, it has shown a strong tendency to advance in prosperity. For its peace the Catholic clergy, according to the testimony of the London Times, and, as we believe, the Home-Rule party, are jointly answerable. Men who believe in God and obey the laws of the church will, with honest and able representatives, seek for no heroic measures of reform, while the legislature is fairly open to complaints. ”

“ Perhaps the greatest interest of all will be felt by those who, rejoicing in the liberty of a reformed faith and an emancipated Church, will see in Ireland the last of the Western Churches to acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope. When all other parts of Western Europe had already for centuries acknowledged his sway, Ireland was still independent. ”

“ Now it seems plain that the present Church-establishment in Ireland is contrary to reason and justice, in so far as the Church of a very small minority of the people there takes for itself all the Church-property of the Irish people. And one would think, that property, assigned for the purpose of providing for a people's religious worship when that worship was one, the State should, when that worship is split into several forms, apportion between those several forms. ”

“ He claimed that "the clergy are unwilling instruments in the hands of the Irish people, who are unconquerable even after seven hundred years of English rule. The Irish priesthood is so powerful an element of Irish life, not because it leads, but because it follows. Powerful popular movements coerce the clergy, who are bound to join the stream, or be for ever left behind. No doubt at all that, being once in, they endeavour to direct the current of opinion in the course most favourable to the Catholic religion. To do otherwise would be to deny their profession, to be traitors to the Church. ”

“ It is important to observe that, if the express words in Christum credentes were absent, this record would establish the existence of Christian communities in Ireland. For neither Rome nor any other church would have ordained a bishop for Ireland unless there had been Christian communities there to be submitted to his authority. If all parts of Ireland had been still as entirely heathen as Scandinavia, a missionary might have been sent, but he would not have been a bishop. ”

“ Oxford and Cambridge were no longer safe training-places for Irish ecclesiastics, and unless something could be done at once there was grave danger that when the bishops and clergy, who were then at work, passed away, they would leave none behind them to take their places. Fortunately the close and direct communication between Ireland and the Catholic nations of the Continent suggested a possible method of preventing such a calamity, by the establishment, namely, of Irish colleges in Rome, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. ”

“ The Church is very rich in Ireland. If Ireland is the poorest country in the world, the Irish Church is richer than any other. All the money in Ireland goes into religion. There is only one other trade that can compete with it. Heaven may be for the laity, but this world is certainly for the clergy. ”

“ Those who are not well acquainted with the condition of things in Ireland might easily suppose that the existence of the odious Established Church was the main cause of the dissatisfaction of the Irish people, and that they would, consequently, be satisfied with its disestablishment. ”

“ Then, and then only, can we hope to see Ireland a prosperous nation, her people thrifty and happy, her civilization raised to a level with other Christian countries of Europe, and her church putting forth all its native might to console and instruct its own congregations, and to aid in the work of recovering England to the faith of the Apostles. Political and social degradation, such as that which afflicts Ireland, is incompatible with a free and flourishing church, with a high moral tone, religious zeal, and exemplary lives on the part of its victims. ”