Irish Catholics

“ The Protestants listened, almost persuaded; but some sinister whisper now and again of the terrors of a “Catholic ascendency” in an Irish parliament—a reminder that Irish Catholics would vote for a nominee of their clergy right or wrong, and consequently that if the Irish Protestant minority threw off the yoke of England, they should bear the yoke of Rome—seemed to drive them, scared, from the portals of nationality. ”

“ England herself, from which the Catholic name was thought to have been almost blotted out, has been deeply affected by this exodus of Irish Catholics. In her cities, and towns, and hamlets, the Cross has been raised from the dust. At the side of the ancient monuments which remind England of her apostacy, humble spires rise in every part of the land, and tell that nation that the faith which they thought destroyed still lives, and is ready to admit them again to its wonted blessings. ”

“ No good Catholic who values the sacraments, and respects the precepts of his church, could possibly join the treasonable brotherhoods denounced by the Catholic priest from the altar, by the bishops in pastorals, and by the pope himself. There are, however, too many Irish Catholics whose obedience to their church is partial, or but nominal. Perhaps these men first learnt in Irish national schools the lesson that religion, like every thing else, has its appointed time and place ”

“ When the son of Mary, herself a martyr and sufferer, ascended the throne, his accession was hailed by the Catholic Irish with a burst of joy. A prince of their own race, they could regard him with feelings never awakened by former sovereigns of England. The memory of his mother would have bound them to him. He might have rendered Ireland a happy country. Led away by this vision, the Irish Catholics openly celebrated the long proscribed worship ”

“ For them to drift into the liberalism of the age would be to destroy them. They have gained what they now possess by having been steadfast Catholics and steadfast Irishmen. Let them so continue. We rejoice at the growing sympathy in political and social life between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. There is no harm in that; on the contrary, it is a great good. ”

“ Those greatly err who thus fancy that Great Britain will gain—either politically or religiously—by the undermining of the influence of the Catholic priesthood, or by leavening the education of Catholics with the spirit of secularization. The Irish Catholic may be taught to unlearn his faith, to neglect confession, and disobey the injunctions of his priest; but no one will say that thereby he becomes, necessarily, either a better Christian or a better subject to his sovereign. Such a one may, or may not, become a Protestant or an infidel. ”

“ Religious communities of both men and women were re-opened in Dublin, and in the principal cities throughout Ireland, and synods of the clergy were held to restore order and discipline. [75] Irish Catholics as a body were delighted with the royal edicts in favour of religious toleration, but the small Protestant minority in the country were alarmed at seeing Catholics treated as equals, and particularly at the prospect of seeing the Act of Settlement upset, and their titles to their estates questioned by the real owners whom they had despoiled twenty years before. ”

“ And in our own day let England, and Scotland, and Australia, and America, and Africa, and India, tell what part Providence has assigned to the Irish Catholics in that wonderful growth of Catholicism which refreshes the heart in these days of indifference and infidelity. To Ireland may well be applied the words used by Saint Gregory Nazianzen, of the Constantinople of the fourth century, when he calls it "the bond of union between the east and west, to which the most distant extremes from all sides come together, and to which they look up as to a common centre and emporium of the faith". ”

“ The Irish Catholics have gone still further, and to silence even the predictions of their enemies, have disclaimed, disavowed, and solemnly abjured every intention, to subvert the present Church Establishment, for the purpose of substituting a Catholic Establishment in its stead, and have solemnly sworn, that they will not exercise any privilege, to which they are, or may be entitled, to disturb, or weaken the Protestant religion in that kingdom. ”

“ So long, no doubt, as Irish Roman Catholics remain at home, in a country of sharply defined religious classes, and with a social environment and a public opinion so preponderatingly stamped with their creed, open defections from Roman Catholicism are rare. But we have only to look at the extent of the 'leakage' from Roman Catholicism amongst the Irish emigrants in the United States and in Great Britain, to realise how largely emotional and formal must be the religion of those who lapse so quickly in a non-Catholic atmosphere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is in the military history of Europe that we get the true history of the Irish Catholic gentry, and that we see those brilliant figures and events which are so conspicuously lacking in the history of the Irish Catholics in their own country. ”

“ Austrians and Hungarians are both more or less Catholic, whilst England and Ireland are bitter Protestant and bitter Catholic. It becomes no longer a political, but a religious question. There are plenty of good, honest, loyal Irish Catholics in Ireland, as well as good, loyal Protestants in the North of it. The loyalty of the English Catholic is well known; the mischief lies with the Fenian Priest, who prefers stepping into the political arena to confining himself to the more humble and obscure calling to which he is vowed, that of saying Mass, and administering the Sacraments to his fold. ”

“ In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old Irish race were to be found—men of Catholic families who had accepted Protestantism as a means of entering public life, chiefly by way of the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic ardour with their old religion; of the middle class, they were braver in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy. If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay that vast mass of their own people whose blood they shared. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was easy for Catholics to point to the number of Protestants who had been honoured and trusted leaders of the national movement, to the friendly terms upon which Protestants and Catholics for the most part lived together in the South and West of Ireland, to the Protestants who had been appointed to positions of trust and profit under boards and in institutions managed by Irish Catholics. ”

“ Amongst the Catholics, at least, religious intolerance has not been a prevailing vice, and those who have studied closely the history and character of the Irish people can hardly fail to be struck with the deep respect for sincere religion in every form which they have commonly evinced.... In spite of the fearful calamities that followed the Reformation, it is a memorable fact that not a single Protestant suffered for his religion in Ireland during all the period of the Marian persecution in England. ”

“ On our return, Captain S—— gave me a great many interesting details respecting the really atrocious and crying injustice and oppression under which the Irish Catholics labour: it is more intolerable than that which the Greeks suffer from their Turkish masters. The Catholics are not allowed to call their places of worship churches, only chapels; they must have no bells in them,—things inconsiderable in themselves, but degrading and insulting in their intent. No Catholic can, as you know, sit in Parliament, nor be general in the army, minister of state, judge, &c. ”

“ You may be an Irishman, but not a Catholic: you may be Catholics, but not Irish. It is clear you are not an Irish Catholic in either case! But when the great majority of Catholics in the United States were either Irish or of Irish descent, the force of the prejudice against the Irish Catholic bore against the Catholic religion, and the influence of this prejudice has been far [Pg 444] more mischievous than is generally believed. ”

“ Even the children in the schools, young as they were, seem to have known how to bear hardship and punishment for the sake of their religion. An eyewitness stated that often on Fridays and fast days children would not take their broth, prepared as it was with meat, and how it had to be poured down their throats against their will. Indeed there was practically no conversion to the Protestant religion among the lower class of Catholics. Persecution only drew the Irish more closely to the Catholic Church; it created close ties between them and their priests. ”

“ Under their sway great numbers of Irish [Pg 168] Catholics were put to death because they would not renounce the ancient faith; convents and monasteries were suppressed because their inmates were faithful to their vows; the parochial clergy and bishops were persecuted and spoiled, and many put to death, because they adhered to the religion of their fathers, and would not separate themselves from the communion of the Catholic Church, spread over the whole world. ”

“ They 945had nothing left but their faith, and the eternal truth of the promise that this is the victory which overcometh the world; and that our faith shall make us free was never more gloriously and wondrously made manifest than in the case of the Irish people.
Ignorance was made compulsory by this Protestant government. The statute law of Ireland forbade Catholics to open schools or to teach in them. The Irish people, of all peoples, have ever had a craving for knowledge. ”

“ The Irish Volunteer movement—a Protestant organization—had gained independence for the Irish Parliament, and, incidentally, compelled England to grant certain measures of relief to the Catholics because, with the Protestant community opposed to English misrule, it was necessary for the predominant partner to curry favour with the Catholics. ”

“ That decrease has been brought about by emigration, and that emigration has taken place mainly from the Catholic provinces of Munster and Connaught. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Catholics should have diminished more than the Protestants. The result of forty years' wastage of the Irish Catholic peasantry is that the proportions of Catholics to Protestants are now three to one, as against four to one in 1861. Allowing for the great fact of westward emigration, this means that the relations between these two forms of Christianity in Ireland are practically stationary. ”

“ A charge of another kind has of late been often brought against the Roman Catholic clergy, which has a direct bearing upon the economic aspect of this question. Although, as I read Irish history, the Roman Catholic priesthood have, in the main, used their authority with personal disinterestedness, if not always with prudence or discretion, their undoubted zeal for religion has, on occasion, assumed forms which enlightened Roman Catholics, including high dignitaries of that Church, think unjustifiable on economic grounds, and discourage even from a religious standpoint. ”

“ It is perhaps necessary to point out once again that the Roman Catholic Church is a political, as well as a religious, institution, and to remind Englishmen that it is by the first law of its being an intolerant and aggressive organisation. All Protestants in Ireland feel deep respect for much of the work which is carried on by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. They gladly acknowledge the influence of its priesthood in maintaining and upholding the traditional morality and purity of the Irish race. ”

“ Surrounded by a literature which, non-Catholic at its best, is fast losing all colour of Christianity, we have need to profit by all that modern research has anywhere contributed to the Catholic solution of the great questions of which the age has been so fertile. Nor is Catholic Ireland without her own proper treasures to give in exchange for what she receives from abroad. Not to speak of the actual labours of Irish Divines in Theology and History, it may be said that few Churches are so rich as ours in remains of ecclesiastical antiquity of the highest importance. ”

“ But there, also, as well as in America and Australia, through the economy of an admirable providence, God makes use of those Irish immigrants for the propagation and extension of the Catholic faith in the midst of English and Scotch Protestantism. What progress has not the Catholic religion made within the last thirty years in England? ”