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(Richard King) Pope Pius XII (Kiltullagh)
Image by Fergal of Claddagh
excerpt from THE LIFE OF POPE PIUS XII
As soon as Cardinal Pacelli had been appointed Secretary of State he launched negotiations for a Concordat with the province of Baden, and continued his endeavours until the spring of 1932.
The Grand Duchy of Baden is situated in the south-western part of the German Republic, bounded by Switzerland, Alsace, the Palatinate, Hesse, and Bavaria. In 1932 it had a population of 2,125,000, two-thirds of whom were Catholics.
An incident that occurred in this province brings to mind the strange inconsistency of those who attack and oppose the Church and her divine mission. For three centuries before 1853, Catholics had been ridiculed and persecuted for offering Masses for the dead. Yet, in the year 1853, the Protestant government of Baden arrested Archbishop Hermann de Vicari of Freiburg for not saying Mass for the Protestant Grand Duke Leopold on the occasion of his death!
From the year 1530, relations between Baden and the Vatican had been badly strained. About the year 1850 there flared up between them open conflict which endured until 1932. Cardinal Pacelli’s achievement of an agreement between the two marks one of his most outstanding triumphs. The thought of the difficulties he had to overcome, the bigotry he had to break down, of the triumph that he finally accomplished, commands respect from the most indifferent of us.
The situation that confronted the Secretary of State as he worked for a solution of this tangled problem was this :
A series of constitutional decrees issued in the year 1807 abolished a great number of monasteries and charitable institutions, and led to the confiscation of others. In 1822, by order of the Grand Duke, Wanker a professor of theology in Freiburg, a candidate for the Archiepiscopal See was elected by free vote of the assembled deans. The Pope condemned the action and declared the act itself invalid. That dispute lasted until the year 1827, when the Pope’s choice, Archbishop Bernhard Boll, was consecrated and installed. In a Church Law passed in 1830, the State assumed an undue amount of power over the Church, and received a new and energetic protest from the Pope.
For a time, there was a definite religious persecution. In the face of it, the Bishops demanded that their priests be educated in seminaries without outside interference, and demanded, too, the right to conduct Catholic schools and establish religious societies. In 1853 some trivial concessions were made to the Bishops, but the main points were ignored. At the time of thisimpasse the arrest of Archbishop De Vicari for his refusal to say Mass for Duke Leopold was a signal for new attacks on the Church.
Following negotiations, a Concordat was finally signed on June 8, 1859, an( l ft went far to meet the just demands of the Church. In 1861, a radical government declared the Concordat null and void, and substituted laws inimical to the Church. In 1864, the Liberals then in power proposed a school bill that would entirely nullify the influence of the Church in education.
Three years later, the Government instituted state examinations for theological students, to be held before a civil commissioner. The Bishops ordered the seminarians to refuse to take the examinations. After the death of Archbishop De Vicari, in 1868, the Government refused seven out of a total of eight names submitted to it; since a free choice by the Holy Father was impossible, the See of Freiburg was vacant for eighteen years. Only then were measures taken to re-establish peace with the Church. These negotiations were followed by a static period.
Under ancient bulls, certain rights were reserved to the Archbishop of Freiburg. The Pope considered the bulls null and void; when the See became vacant during the reign of Pius XI, he proceeded to appoint a new Archbishop immediately the whole question was at issue again. In spite of the split in the Baden Landtag, Cardinal Pacelli carried out negotiations for the settlement of the whole problem of Vatican relations.
Of the points to be settled the Cardinal requested that the appointment of Bishops rest solely and absolutely with the Holy See; that each Bishop be free to name his parish clergy; that religious instruction rank as an ordinary subject in schools; that all rights enjoyed by the Church to give and control religious instruction and to protect it from danger be guaranteed for the future.
The adoption of the Concordat on October 12, 1932, was a miracle, for the Baden Landtag was split evenly: forty-four affirmative votes, and forty-four against. It was passed at its first reading only because the President, a Catholic, exercised his right to vote twice.
When one considers the tasks that confronted the Cardinal Secretary of State, the wisdom with which he overcame insurmountable difficulties and worked for the conclusion of pacts that gained much for the Church, it would seem that the only sane and wise thing to do would be to seek his advice as to the settlement of this present world conflict. His experience in diplomacy, his knowledge of men and nations, his understanding of their problems make him without doubt one of the wisest statesmen in the world. Is there any man or any soldier in any fox-hole who would now permit his bigotry to expose the world to another debacle of war?
Let governments judge him objectively, or even from the viewpoint of their own self-interest : his single-heartedness, his entire lack of ambition (both because there is no such failing inherent in his character, and because he now occupies for life the highest station open to man), proclaim him to the world a priest and diplomat of complete integrity. What follows accentuates this.
The duplicity and hypocrisy of the German Reich, told in the story of the Concordat with the Holy See, is unequalled in the long history of the Church. Its negotiations and signature occasioned the fulfilment of Pope Pius XFs famous statement that he would work with the devil himself if the good of the Church demanded it; he was forced to deal with satanical men in Germany.
For a clear picture of the whole situation, let us first consider the leader and his policies; secondly, the perfidious statements of Hitler in the time before the Concordat; thirdly, the Concordat itself; and finally, its violations and the Pope’s fearless denunciation of the violators and their aims.
As to Hitler and his policies, we say that it was unfortunate that such guileless men as Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli had to deal with such a person as the petty, bourgeois corporal and former house painter. Fate had nevertheless decreed that he be jockeyed into power at that time by the compromising von Hindenburg.
President von Hindenburg had defeated Hitler in the election of the year 1932. In spite of his dislike for his opponent, he invited Hitler to be Chancellor in 1933. That was the opportunity Hitler had sought^ Now he could complete his domination of Germany through revolution. The middle class became the nucleus of his movement. His natural flair for oratory and the conservative peasants’ hatred for Socialism and Communism drew legions to his standard. Note, once again, that the scourge of atheistic Communism aided the rise of Hitler and Naziism, as it did Mussolini and Fascism.
That the threat of Communism was real there can be no doubt. This familiar couplet was heard everywhere in Germany :
Hitler, give us bread Or we will go Red.
Concrete proof of Russia’s intentions to Sovietize Europe, and particularly Germany, is found in this excerpt from The Fifth Congress of the Communist International, in an abridged report of the meetings held at Moscow, June-July, 1924:
"The Third International was founded by Lenin and, in spite of all difficulties; it will force its path from Russia through Europe and through the whole world. Under the symbol of Lenin, we shall defeat the bourgeoisie of the whole world and the Red flag will fly not only over Moscow, but over Berlin and over the whole globe. Leninism will bring the victory of the world revolution."
Anyone could have rallied the German people in those days, under the guise of any crusade against Communism. It was Hitler’s chance, and he made the best of it for his own evil ends.
Hitler’s policies followed a familiar pattern the pattern of all dictators. Freedom of speech, or organization, and freedom of the press were abolished. In the field of religion, a "new Christianity" was insinuated, which intended the abolition of the Old Testament as a Jewish document.
The Jews were marked down for persecution unprecedented in barbarity, which all decent men have witnessed with fury. They were not permitted to attend church services with Gentiles. Sterilization of incurables and defectives was decreed in a measure to ensure the stupid doctrine of Nordic superiority and supremacy. Hitler blamed the Jews for the inauguration of Communism in Germany, and he branded all as traitors. While it was true that some of the Communists were Jews, it was a diabolical lie to say that all Jews were Reds. As to the charge that they were traitors, the best answer is found in the statistics of casualties in the Great War. On the basis of percentages, there were more German Jews killed -fighting for Germany in World War I than there were German Gentiles.
Regarding the Concordat between the Holy See and Germany, let it be stated here that it was Germany, not the Vatican, which made the first overtures. Pope Pius XI indicates not only the fact that Germany sought the Concordat, but, what is more important, explains just why the Concordat was really signed :
When . . . at the request of the German Government, We resumed negotiations for a Concordat on the basis of the proposals worked out several years before, and to the satisfaction of you all, We concluded a solemn agreement. We were moved by the solicitude that is incumbent in us to safeguard the liberty of the Church in her mission of salvation in Germany and the salvation of the souls entrusted to her and at the same time, by the sincere desire to render an essential service to the peaceful development and welfare of the German People.
Neither Pope Pius XI nor Cardinal Pacelli (whom he had appointed as plenipotentiary to act for the Holy See opposite Franz von Papen, the wily representative of the German Reich) was hoodwinked. Both were sceptical. They both sensed that there was political expediency and chicanery behind the whole business. Pope Pius said that "in spite of many serious misgivings" he entered the negotiations and signed the Concordat. Why he did it is clear from the following: "By Our act We wished to show all that, seeking only Christ and the things that are Christ’s, We refuse none who does not himself reject it the hand of peace of Mother Church."
On January 31, 1933, one day after Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, he issued a Proclamation to the nation: "It [the National Government] will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life."
On February 15, 1933, Hitler said: "I do not merely talk of Christianity; no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity."
Again, on March 23, 1933, he asserted: "The Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and the moral code in the nation, attaches the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See and is endeavouring to develop them."
The records show that exactly two weeks later he laid bare the depths of his machinations: "The religions are all alike. No matter what they call themselves. They have no future certainly none for the Germans. Fascism if it likes, may come to terms with the Church. So shall I, why not? That will not prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch, and annihilating it in Germany."
In this quotation from a speech made to his party followers, he voluntarily showed himself to be an incarnate liar :
"I am willing," he said, "to do anything to facilitate the success of my policy. I am prepared to guarantee all frontiers and to make non-aggression pacts and friendly alliances with anybody. It would be sheer stupidity to refuse to make use of such measures merely because one might possibly be driven into a position where a solemn promise would have to be broken. Anyone whose conscience is so tender that he will not sign a treaty unless he can be sure he can keep it in any and all circumstances is a fool. Why should one not please others and facilitate matters for one’s self by signing pacts if the others believe that something is thereby accomplished or regulated? I shall make any treaty I require. It will never prevent me from doing at any time what I regard as necessary for Germany’s interests."
Note the familiar sameness of attitude toward truth and morals in atheistic Communism as in Nazism. Lenin said: "We must be ready for sacrifices of any kind and even, if need be, to practice everything possible: ruses and tricks; illegal methods; be ready to be silent and hide the truth * ; in short, it is from the interests of the class war that we deduce our morality."
The Concordat itself, signed on July 20, 1933, ratified on September 10 of the same year, runs along the general lines of the others with its threefold significance: political, juridical, and social. It was remarkable inasmuch that never, since the Protestant Revolution, had the Church entered into a formal agreement which would regulate the condition of Catholicism throughout Germany.
"The trouble with Communists [1943 brand] is that they have dual-purpose minds. They tell you one thing and mean another." Herbert Morrison, British Labour Party leader, quoted in New York Times June 18, 1943.
An examination of the thirty-four articles of the Concordat reveals on the one hand, the clear statement of the rights of the Church; on the other, several Papal concessions, calculated to be of advantage to the government of the Reich.
There were the usual guarantees that there would be freedom to profess and practice publicly the Catholic religion. The Church would enact her own laws for her members ; the Holy See would enjoy freest liberty to correspond with the Bishops and laity; ecclesiastics would be equal to State officials insofar as the law protects them in the execution of their offices ; clerics should be exempt from public office and jury service ; the present division of dioceses would hold good for the future. Further, although the Holy See was to be free in all ecclesiasticalappointments, incumbents must be G.erman citizens; the German State would be consulted before the publication of the names of those appointed to the rank of Bishop, and these men would take a special oath of loyalty to the state before taking possession of the See. Religious instruction would be treated as an ordinary subject in elementary, professional, and higher State schools; religious orders were authorized to found private schools ; Catholic Action Associations, whose end is exclusively religious, cultural, and charitable, were to be protected by law. Liturgical prayers were to be said on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation for the prosperity of the Reich and the German people.
The historic document came to naught. When Franz von Papen was in the Eternal City during the next year, he had the extreme audacity to request an audience with Pope Piux XI. He got it one he will never forget. It is alleged that not in the memory of Vatican officials had any visitor been spoken to as the fearless Pope spoke to von Papen. He minced no words in telling him what he thought of leaders and nations whose word is unreliable. Finally, he walked from the room, leaving Franz von Papen standing there, properly rebuffed.
Depravity only can make a leader affirm one thing and act another. Hitler, in a radio speech delivered on June 20, 1933, said in part: "National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the Christian Churches under the protection of the State." And in referring to the Concordat on the same occasion: "The German Concordat which now has been signed is a second equally clear step in this sphere. It is my sincere hope that thereby for Germany, too, through free agreement there has been produced a final clarification of spheres in the function of State and the Church."
But while Hitler was publicly proclaiming his hopes for the fulfilment of the Concordat, Herr Rauschning says, in his book, that Hitler was telling his party followers at a rally that "the Church was something big. Now we are its heirs. We too are a Church. Its day is gone. It will not fight. As long as youth follows me, I don’t mind if the old people limp to the confessional. But the young ones they are different. I guarantee that. I promise you," he concluded, "that if I wished to, I could destroy the Church in a few years. It is hollow and rotten and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse."
What a fool Hitler was to think the Church would not fight! He woefully underestimated the intrepid spirit of Pius XI and the innate courage of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli. No sooner had the ink dried on the Concordat than official letters poured into Cardinal Pacelli’s office, relating immediate violations.
Hitler definitely showed his traitorous hand in January, 1934, when he appointed the notorious Alfred Rosenberg to the post of cultural and educational leader of the Reich, and Adolf Wagner, to be Minister of State. You can judge Wagner from these expressed sentiments, "In the days that lie immediately ahead of us, the fight will not be against Communists or Marxists, but against Catholicism. Everyone will find himself faced with a serious question German, or Catholic?"
On April 2, 1934, at the exact time Franz von Papen was in Rome trying to explain away the action of Baldur von Schirach in disbanding the young people’s organizations, Pius XI sent this message to the Catholic youth of Germany:
Despite all the hardships through which Providence is leading you and in the face of propaganda working with allurements and with pressure for a new outlook on life which points away from Christ and back to paganism, you have kept your pledge of love and loyalty to the Saviour and His Church.
Three times more in that same year the Pope repeated his condemnation of the new paganism with mounting emphasis. At the same time he lashed out at the persecutors of the Jews :
Abraham is called our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is not compatible with the sublime reality of that text : it is a movement which we Christians cannot share. . . . No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. We are Semites spiritually.
It is inevitable that any time we abandon the life of the Gospels, human lives perish. Toward the Israelites we are not only extremely anti-Christian and anti-civil, but inhuman. For them the misery of exile and outlawing is not enough; it goes on to pillory, beatings, wounding and death.
Propaganda against Jews assumes, wherever it is organized and led, proportions -unworthy of twenty centuries of Christian civilization.
In the light of the Pope’s denouncement of anti-Semitism, it is not surprising to hear, a few years later, a member of that persecuted race, Dr. Cecil Roth, of London, speaking before the Zionist Forum at Buffalo, say :
Only in Rome has the colony of Jews continued its existence since before the beginning of the Christian era, because of all the dynasties of Europe the Papacy not only refused to persecute the Jews of Rome and Italy, but through the ages Popes were protectors of the Jews.
Some Jews have the feeling that the Papacy has a policy of persecuting Jews. But you must remember that English history is definitely anti-Catholic and your views of Catholicism may have been coloured by English history. We Jews, who have suffered so much from prejudice, should rid our minds of prejudice and learn the facts. The truth is that the Popes and the Catholic Church from the earliest days of the Church were never responsible for physical persecution of the Jews and only Rome, among the capitals of the world, is free from having been a place of Jewish tragedy. For this we Jews must have gratitude.
Nor were the German Bishops afraid to condemn the new paganism being launched in their beloved country. On August 27, 1934, the German Bishops issued a Pastoral Letter condemning neo-paganism. They reproved the German National Church, saying it was "the invention of man, subject to human fallacy." They called it a "rebellion against Christ," and said, further :
Nor can we keep silent when a book, extremely radical in form, which makes use of innumerable disfigurements and seeks to undermine Faith in God, and the Christian religion, and respect for the authority of Christ and the Church, is spread freely in the schools, among the teaching personnel, in the "courses for leaders/* and in the employment camps, and which it is wished to make the basis of a new conception of the world, of a new code of ethics intended for an entire nation. When such writings are publicly recommended and an attempt is made to force them upon the faithful, we in the fulfilment of our watchful duty must proclaim loudly that this is a grievous sin and that, consequently, it is forbidden to read these writings which attack Christianity and undermine the foundations of Christian religion and morality.
And now we pass to another picture. While paganism is spreading its petulant propaganda, our Catholic press no longer has the freedom to discuss the great problems of these times in the light of Catholic doctrine on faith and morals, or to parry assaults upon Christianity and the Church.
Sunday, the day of God and of the family, has become so filled with routine celebrations and excursions ordained by organizations recognized by the State that no time is left for devotional participation in divine service and for the fostering of Christian family life. Narrow regulations hamper the work of our Catholic organizations and societies in the service of Church and Fatherland. In many localities Catholic youths are being persecuted for nothing more than giving public evidence of their faith in Christ and loyalty to the Church societies, protection for which was solemnly assured by the State.
We are only fulfilling our pastoral duty if, vigilant, we lift up our voices in admonishment against the seducers and the heresy which threatens destruction to the salvation of souls entrusted to us and the true happiness of our people.
You have heard and read that when one dons the uniforms, one ceases to be Catholic or Protestant. To this proposition we, your Bishops, say that even though one must practice in the service what good comradeship and mutual consideration demand religious conviction is not a coat, to be peeled off during service hours and hung on a nail. Religion is the soul of our souls, it is a sacred duty in all places and at all times ; religion, even in professional service and in the service of one’s country, is a source of strength and a most precious element of moral personality. Do not let yourselves be seduced by superficial phrases in the foolish belief that in the service one is any less Catholic.
You have heard and read that one can believe in a positive Christianity without believing in Christ, the Son of the living God, or in the Gospels. But we, your Bishops, say to you that there is a positive Christianity only when one does believe in Christ, the Son of God made Man, and accepts His Gospels and observes His Commandments.
On October 26, 1934, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber denounced publicly and fearlessly "the group of Freethinkers, new and old, who proudly declare themselves pagans, under the pretext of the ‘cult of race’ and deny the God of Christianity." He openly defined the "miserable substitute the new paganism would be for Christianity" and called the leaders "apostates."
While treating of the foreign policy of the Church regarding Nazism, we will give the whole story here. Cardinal Pacelli, who was to play such a big part in the exposition of the Nazi persecution of religion in Germany, recalled a speech Hitler had made in the very city where he himself had once resided : "If a people is to become free, it needs pride, self-will, defiance, hate, hate, and once again hate." Again, "There are two things which can unite men : common ideals and common criminality." That was some fourteen years before the massed evidences of persecution filled his files and left Pius XI and himself no choice but to proclaim to the German nation and the world at large that Nazism and Catholicism were diametrically opposed to one another.
Pope Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli collaborated in the writing of the now famous encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, which is one of the most fearless condemnations of Naziism ever written. No student of modern history can afford to miss reading it in its entirety. The following excerpt will show how comprehensive and direct it is :
If the tree of peace planted by us with pure intention in German soil has not borne the fruit We desired in the interests of your people, no one in the whole world who has eyes to see or ears to hear can say today that the fault lies with the Church and her Supreme Head. The experience of the past years fixes the responsibility. It discloses intrigues which from the beginning had no other aim than a war of extermination. In the furrows in which We had laboured to sow the seeds of true peace, others like the enemy in Holy Scripture (Matt. xiii. 25) sowed the tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny; of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church, fed from a thousand different sources and making use of every available means. On them and on them alone and on their silent and vocal protectors rests the responsibility that now on the horizon of Germany there is to be seen not the rainbow of peace but the threatening storm clouds of destructive religious war.
Whoever transposes Race or People, the State or Constitution, the executive or other fundamental elements of human society (which in the natural order have an essential and honourable place), from the scale of earthly values and makes them the ultimate norm of all things, even of religious values, and defies them with an idolatrous cult, perverts and falsifies the divinely created and appointed ardour of things, such a man is far from true belief in God and from a conception of life in conformity to it.
Only superficial minds can fall into the error of speaking of a national God, of a national religion, and of making a mad attempt to imprison within the frontiers of a single people, within the pedigree of one single race, God, the Creator of the world, the King, and lawgiver of the peoples before whose greatness the nations are as small as drops in a bucket of water.
It was, however, one thing to write the encyclical in Rome and another thing to get it into the hands of the Bishops in Germany. The resourceful Cardinal Pacelli found a way. Certain trustworthy clerics and laymen, during a pilgrimage to the Holy See, were entrusted with copies which they smuggled into Germany. Each Bishop received a copy and each in turn had it secretly printed. Then finally, one Sunday, it was read in every Catholic Church in Germany, to the astonishment and wrath of the infamous Gestapo.
The German Government retaliated by closing twelve printing offices which had published the encyclical. Religious periodicals which reproduced its text were banned for three months.
All the copies the police could lay hands on were confiscated. Men or women who had transcribed or circulated it were arrested, and Hitler himself struck back by putting a thousand more clerics on trial for alleged sexual crimes.
If there is any doubt as to just what the position of the German Hierarchy was, and is, regarding the character of Nazism, an examination of their Pastoral Letters and speeches yield an unqualified answer.
Take, for instance, the speech of Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, delivered on July 4, 1937, to the Men’s Sodality. Protesting the arrest of Father Rupert Mayer, S. J., he pleaded with his hearers not to demonstrate publicly for fear of further reprisals. "We can," he said, "afford no greater satisfaction to the State police than to give them the occasion through demonstrations to proceed with rubber hose and arrests, with censures and dismissals against hated Catholics, who are now more hated and persecuted than the Bolshevik."
The Austrian Hierarchy issued a joint Pastoral Letter on September 4, 1938, objecting to severe restrictions on Catholic education and the instruction given to Catholics as to their obligations regarding the Sacrament of Marriage. "We deeply deplore, and the Catholic people as much as we, the fact that the right to teach and to educate has been withdrawn from Catholic establishments."
On the same day, a joint Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of Bavaria was read in all Catholic churches; immediately after, the offices of the Bishops were searched by Secret Service men, who confiscated typewriters, multi-graph machines, etc.
The letter which’ roused such opposition begins: "To the bitterest affliction and persecution that our Church must suffer in our German land, belongs the banishment of the Catholic Orders from the field of education and instruction."
Again in August, 1943, the German Bishops issued a joint message in which they denounced the Nazi warfare against religion :
Unfortunately it is with profound sorrow that we must note that even now the struggle is being continued against the heritage of our Christian faith, against the faith of Jesus Christ ; that education and the school to a great extent are being used to de-Christianize the people, above all, youth ; that boys sent into the country or in camps, at boarding schools and colleges, are being refused religious instruction ; attendance at Mass and reception of the Sacraments are being hindered and sometimes made impossible ; that the constant pressure being maintained on the consciences of many Christians that are in Warthegau amounts to a complete suffocation.
With profound grief we must deplore the fact that even today in many localities the performance of religious functions is being rendered impossible or hindered so that Holy Mass after a night raid alarm is prohibited by law, and that on Christian feast days, the religious feast is subject to oppressing limitations.
How sad it is that these and other attacks on the right and liberty of Christian religion, disturb and impede the international peace and harmony of the German people even in these grave times. May God grant that in the end every oppression of the Church and of Christianity may cease and that we may be united as a German Christian people to face difficulties and dangers.
The Bishops then struck fearlessly at the deification of the State and Race, saying: "An appeal is directed to those who are formulating a god according to their own idea and desire, or a god that exists only for their own nation and their own race."
The Pastoral Letter was dated August 19, and signed by Cardinals Bertram, Faulhaber, Innitzer, and twenty-six Conference Archbishops and Bishops, as well as by six Delegates from the Warthegau Protectorate. It was one year earlier that the German Bishops made this joint protest: "We German Bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons [hostages]. Nobody’s life is safe unless the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is observed."
And Hitler had thought the Church would not fight! How he underestimated the fearless Pius XI and his courageous Secretary of State and the dauntless German Hierarchy 1 What a fool he was to think they would remain silent when such a one as Julius Streicher hurled blasphemy such as this at the Son of God:
"It is only in one or two exceptional points," he said obscenely, "that Christ and Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big to be compared with one so petty. . . . Christ mixed a good deal with women. I believe that he stayed with one who was an adulteress so I have heard."
What awful retribution waits that nation whose leaders utter such blasphemies: "And you rose up against me with your mouth and have derogated me by your words ; I have heard them. Thus saith the Lord God, when the whole earth shall rejoice I will make thee a wilderness."
Jerpoint
Image by Fergal of Claddagh
THE HISTORY OF IRELAND AS TOLD IN HER RUINS (second part)
A Lecture by Father Thomas N. Burke, O.P., delivered in the Cooper Institute, New York, on the 5th of April, 1872
The Danish invasion came, and I need not tell you that these Northern warriors who landed at the close of the eighth century, effecting their first landing near where the town of Skerries stands now, between Dublin and Balbriggan, on the eastern coast, that these men, thus coming, came as plunderers, and enemies of the religion as well as of the nationality of the people.
And for three hundred years, wherever they came, and wherever they went, the first thing they did was to put to death all the monks, and all the nuns, set fire to the schools, and banish the students; and, inflamed in this way with the blood of the peaceful, they sought to kill all the Irish friars; and a war of extermination, a war of interminable struggle and duration, was carried on for three hundred years. Ireland fought them; the Irish kings and chieftains fought them.
We read that in one battle alone, at Glenamada, in the county of Wicklow, King Malachy, he who wore the “collar of gold,” and the great King Brian, joined their forces in the cause of Ireland. In that grand day, when the morning sun arose, the battle began: and it was not until the sun set in the evening that the last Dane was swept from the field, and they withdrew to their ships, leaving six thousand dead bodies of their warriors behind them. Thus did Ireland, united, know how to deal with her Danish invaders; thus would Ireland have dealt with Fitzstephen and his Normans; but, on the day when they landed, the curse of disunion and discord was amongst the people. Finally, after three hundred years of invasion, Brian, on that Good Friday of 1014, cast out the Danes forever, and from the plains of Clontarf drove them into Dublin Bay.
Well, behind them they left the ruins of all the religion they had found. They left a people, who had, indeed, not lost their faith, but a people who were terribly shaken and demoralized by three hundred years of bloodshed and of war. One-half of it, one-sixth of it, would have been sufficient to ruin any other people; but the element that kept Ireland alive, the element that kept the Irish nationality alive in the hearts of the people, the element that preserved civilization in spite of three centuries of war, was the element of Ireland’s faith, and the traditions of the nation’s by-gone glory.
And now we arrive at the year 1134. Thirty years before, in the year 1103, the last Danish army was conquered and routed on the shores of Strangford Lough, in the North, and the last Danish King took his departure forever from the green shores of Erin. Thirty years have elapsed. Ireland is struggling to restore her shattered temples, her ruined altars, and to build up again, in all its former glory and sanctity, her nationality and monastic priesthood. Then Saint Malachy, great, glorious, and venerable name!, Saint Malachy, in whom the best blood of Ireland’s kings was mingled with the best blood of Ireland’s saints, was Archbishop of Armagh. In the year 1134, he invited into Ireland the Cistercian and the Benedictine monks. They came with all the traditions of the most exalted sanctity, with a spirit not less mild nor less holy than the spirit of a Dominic or an Augustine, and built up the glories of Lindisfarne, of Iona, of Mellifont, of Monasterboice, and of Monastereven, and all these magnificent ruins of which I spoke, the sacred monastic ruins of Ireland. Then the wondering world beheld such grand achievements as it never saw before, outrivaling in the splendour of their magnificence the grandeur of those temples which still attest the mediaeval greatness of Belgium, of France, and of Italy.
Then did the Irish people see, enshrined in these houses, the holy solitaries and monks from Clairveaux, with the light of the great Saint Bernard shining upon them from his grave. But only thirty years more passed, thirty years only; and, behold, a trumpet is heard on the eastern coast of Ireland: the shore and the hills of that Wexford coast re-echo to the shouts of the Norman, as he sets his accursed foot upon the soil of Erin. Divided as the nation was, chieftain fighting against chieftain, for, when the great King Brian was slain at Clontarf, and his son and his grandson were killed, and the three generations of the royal family thus swept away, every strong man in the land stood up and put in his claim for the sovereignty, by this division the Anglo-Norman was able to fix himself in the land. Battles were fought on every hill in Ireland; the most horrible scenes of the Danish invasion were renewed again. But Ireland is no longer able to shake the Saxon from her bosom; for Ireland is no longer able to strike him as one man.
The name of “United Irishmen” has been a name, and nothing but a name, since the day that Brian Boru was slain at Clontarf until this present moment. Would to God that this name of United Irishmen meant something more than an idle word! Would to God that, again, today, we were all united for some great and glorious purpose! Would to God that the blessing of our ancient, glorious unity was upon us! Would to God that the blessing even of a common purpose in the love of our country guided us! then, indeed, would the Celtic race and the Celtic nation be as strong as ever it was,as strong as it was upon that evening at Clontarf, which beheld Erin weeping over her martyred Brian, but beheld her with the crown still upon her brow.
Sometimes victorious, yet oftener defeated, defeated not so much by the shock of the Norman onset as by the treachery and the feuds of her own chieftains, the heart of the nation was broken; and behold, from the far sunny shores of Italy, there came to Ireland other monks and other missionaries, clothed in this very habit which I now wear, or in the sweet brown habit of Saint Francis, or the glorious dress of Saint Augustine. Unlike the monks who gave themselves up to contemplation, and who had large possessions, large houses, these men came among the people, to make themselves at home among the people, to become the sagart a rún of Ireland.
They came with a learning a’ great as that of the Irish monks of old, with a sturdy devotion, as energetic as that of Colum Cille, or of Kevin of Glendalough; they came with a message of peace, of consolation, and of hope to this heart-broken people; and they came nearly seven hundred years ago to the Irish shores. The Irish people received them with a kind of supernatural instinct that they had found their champions and their priestly heroes, and for nearly seven hundred years the Franciscan and his Dominican brother have dwelt together in the land. Instead of building up magnificent, wonderful edifices, like Holy Cross, or Mellifont, or Dunbrody; instead of covering acres with the grandeur of their buildings, these Dominicans and Franciscans went out in small companies, ten, or twelve, or twenty, and they went into remote towns and villages, and there they dwelt, and built quietly a convent for themselves; and they educated the people themselves; and, by-and-by, the people in the next generation learned to love the disciples of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, as they beheld the churches so multiplied.
In every townland of Ireland there was either a Dominican or a Franciscan church or convent. The priests of Ireland welcomed them; the holy bishops of Ireland sustained them; the ancient religious of Ireland gave them the right-hand of friendship; and the Cistercians or Benedictines gave them, very often, indeed, some of their own churches wherein to found their congregation, or to begin their missions. They came to dwell in the land early in the twelfth century, and, until the fifteenth century, strange to say, it was not yet found out what was the hidden design of Providence in bringing them there, in what was once their own true and ancient missionary Ireland.
During these three hundred years, the combat for Ireland’s nationality was still continued. The O’Neill, the O’Brien, the O’Donnell, the McGuire, the O’Moore, kept the national sword waving in the air. The Franciscans and the Dominicans cheered them, entered into their feelings, and they could only not be said to be more Irish than the Irish themselves, because they were the heart’s blood of Ireland. They were the light of the national councils of the chieftains of Ireland, as their historians were the faithful annalists of the glories of these days of combat. They saw the trouble; and yet, for three hundred years the Franciscan and the Dominican had not discovered what his real mission to Ireland was.
But at the end of the three hundred years came the fifteenth century. Then came the cloud of religious persecution over the land. All the hatred that divided the Saxon and the Celt, on the principle of nationality, was now heightened by the additional hatred of religious discord and division; and Irishmen, if they hated the Saxon before, as the enemy of Ireland’s nationality, from the fifteenth century hated him with an additional hatred, as the enemy of Ireland’s faith and Ireland’s religion. The sword was drawn. My friends, I speak not in indignation, but in sorrow; and I know that if there be one amongst you, my fellow-countrymen, here to-night, if there be a man who differs with me in religion, to that man I say: “Brother and friend, you feel as deeply as I do a feeling of indignation and of regret for the religious persecution of our native land.” No man feels it more; no man regrets more bitterly the element of religious discord, the terrible persecution of these three hundred years, through which Ireland, Catholic Ireland, has been obliged to pass; no man feels this more than the high-minded, honest, kind-hearted Irish Protestant. And why should he not feel it? If it was Catholic Ireland that had persecuted Protestant Ireland for that time, and with such intensity, I should hang my head for shame.
Well, that mild, scrupulous, holy man, Henry the Eighth, in the middle of the fifteenth century got a scruple of conscience! Perhaps it was whilst he was saying his prayers, he began to get uneasy, and to be afraid that, maybe, his wife wasn’t his wife at all! He wrote a letter to the pope, and he said: “Holy Father, I am very uneasy in my mind!“
The fact was, there was a very nice young lady in the court. Her name was Anna Boleyn. She was a great beauty. Henry got very fond of her, and he wanted to marry her. But he could not marry her, because he was already a married man. So he wrote to the pope, and he said he was uneasy in his mind, he had a scruple of conscience; and he said: “Holy Father, grant me a favour. Grant me a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. I have been married to her for several years. She has had several children by me. Just grant me this little favour. I want a divorce!“
The pope sent back word to him: “Don’t be uneasy at all in your mind! Stick to your wife like a man; and don’t be troubling me with your scruples.”
Well, Henry threw the pope over. He married the young woman whilst his former wife was living, and he should have been taken that very day and tried before the Lord Chief Justice of England, and transported for life. And why? Because if it had been any other man in England that did it but the king, that man would have been transported for life; and the king is as much bound by the laws of God, and of justice, and conscience, and morality, as any other man. When Henry separated from the pope he made himself head of the Church; and he told the people of England that he would manage their consciences for them for the future. But when he called upon Ireland to join him in this strange and indeed, I think my Protestant friends will admit, insane act, for such indeed, I think my Protestant friends will admit this act to be; for, I think, it was nothing short of insanity for any man of sense to say: “I will take the law of God as preached from the lips and illustrated in the life of Henry the Eighth, Ireland refused.
Henry drew the sword, and declared that Ireland should acknowledge him as the head of the Church; that she should part with her ancient faith, and with all the traditions of her history, to sustain him in his measures, or that he would exterminate the Irish race. Another scruple of conscience came to this tender-hearted man!
And what do you think it was?
Oh, he said, I am greatly afraid the friars and the priests are not leading good lives. So he set up what we call a commission; and he sent it to Ireland to inquire what sort of lives the monks and friars and priests and nuns were leading; and the commissioners sent back word to him, that they could not find any great fault with them; but that, on the whole, they thought it would be better to turn them out!
So they took their convents and their churches, and whatever little property they possessed, and these commissioners sold them, and put the money into their own pockets. There was a beautiful simplicity about the whole plan.
Well, my friends, then came the hour of the ruin of the dear old convents of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Their inmates were driven out at the point of the sword; they were scattered like sheep over the land. Five pounds was the price set upon the head of the friar or priest, the same price that was set upon the head of a wolf. They were hunted throughout the land; and when they fled for their lives from their convent homes, the Irish people opened their hearts, and said, “Come to us, Sagart a Rún.”
Throughout the length and breadth of the land they were scattered, with no shelter but the canopy of heaven; with no Sunday sacrifice to remind the people of God; no Mass celebrated in public, and no Gospel preached; and yet they succeeded for three hundred years in preserving the glorious Catholic faith, that is as strong in Ireland today as ever it was. These venerable ruins tell the tale of the nation’s woe, of the nation’s sorrow. As long as it was merely a question of destroying a Cistercian or a Benedictine Abbey, there were so few of these in the land, that the people did not feel it much.
But when the persecution came upon the Bráthair, as the friar was called, the men whom everybody knew, the men whom everybody came to look up to for consolation in affliction or in sorrow; when it came upon him, then it brought sorrow and affliction to every village, to every little town, to every man in Ireland. There were, at this time, upwards of eighty convents of religious, Franciscans and Dominicans, in Ireland, that numbered very close upon a thousand priests of each order. There were nearly a thousand Irish Franciscans, and nearly a thousand Irish Dominican priests, when Henry began his persecution. He was succeeded, after a brief interval of thirty years, by his daughter Elizabeth. How many Dominicans, do you think, were then left in Ireland?
There were a thousand, you say?
Oh, God of heaven!
There were only four of them left, only four!
All the rest of these heroic men had stained their white habit with the blood that they shed for God and for their country. Twenty thousand men it took Elizabeth, for as many years as there were thousands of them, to try to plant the seedling of Protestantism on Irish soil. The ground was dug as for a grave; the seed of Protestantism was cast into that soil; and the blood of the nation was poured in, to warm it and bring it forth. It never grew, it never came forth; it never bloomed! Ireland was as Catholic the day that Elizabeth died at Hampton Court, gnawing the flesh off her hands in despair, and blaspheming God, Ireland was as Catholic that day as she was the day that Henry the Eighth vainly commanded her first to become Protestant.
Then came a little breathing-time, a very short time, and in fifty years there were six hundred Irish Dominican priests in Ireland again. They studied in Spain, in France, in Italy. These were the youth, the children, of Irish fathers and mothers, who cheerfully gave them up, though they knew, almost to a certainty, that they were devoting them to a martyr’s death; but they gave them up for God. Smuggled out of the country, they studied in these foreign lands; and they came back again, by night and by stealth, and they landed upon the shores of Ireland; and when Cromwell came he found six hundred Irish Dominicans upon the Irish land. Ten years after, only ten years passed, and again the Irish Dominican preachers assembled to count up their numbers, and to tell how many survived and how many had fallen. How many do you think were left out of the six hundred?
But one hundred and fifty were left; four hundred and fifty had perished, had shed their blood for their country, or had been shipped away to Barbados as slaves. These are the tales their ruins tell. I need not speak of their noble martyrs.
Oh, if these moss-grown stones of the Irish Franciscan and Dominican ruins could speak, they would tell how the people gave up everything they had, for years and years, as wave after wave of successive per seditions and confiscations and robbery rolled over them, rather than renounce their glorious faith or their glorious priesthood.
When Elizabeth died, the Irish Catholics thought her successor, James the First., would give them at least leave to live; and accordingly, for a short time after he became king, James kept his own counsel, and he did not tell the Irish Catholics whether he would grant them any concessions or not; but he must have given them some encouragement, for they befriended him, as they had always done to the House of Stuart. But what do you think the people did? As soon as the notion that they would be allowed to live in the land took possession of them, and that they would be allowed to take possession of the estates they had been robbed of, instead of minding themselves, the very first thing they did, to the credit of Irish fidelity be it said, was to set about restoring the Franciscan and Dominican abbeys. It was thus they restored the Black Abbey in Kilkenny, a Dominican house; they restored the Dominican Convent in Waterford, Multifarnham, in Westmeath, and others; and these in a few months grew up into all their former beauty from ruin, under the loving, faithful, restoring hands of the Irish people.
But soon came a letter from the king; and it began with these notable words: “It has been told to us, that some of our Irish subjects imagined that we were about to grant them liberty of conscience.”
No such thing!
Liberty of conscience for Irish Catholics!
No!
Hordes of persecutors were let loose again, and the storms of persecution that burst over Ireland in the days of James the First. were quite as bad and as terrible as any that rained down blood upon the land in the days of Queen Elizabeth. And so, with varying fortunes, now of hope, and now of fear, this selfsame game went on. The English determined that they would make one part of Ireland, at least, Protestant, and that the fairest and the best portion of it, as they imagined, namely, the province of Ulster.
Now, mark the simple way they went about it. They made up their minds that they would make one province of Ireland Protestant, to begin with, in order that it might spread out by degrees to the others.
And what did they do?
They gave notice to every Catholic in Ulster to pack up and be gone, to leave the land.
They confiscated every single acre in the fair province of Ulster; and the Protestant Primate, the Archbishop of Armagh, a very holy man, who was always preaching to the people not to be too fond of the things of this world; he got forty-three thousand acres of the best land of these convents in fee.
Trinity College, in Dublin, got thirty thousand acres. There were certain guilds of traders in London, the skinners, tanners, the dry-salters; and what do you think these London trade associations got? They got a present of two hundred and nine thousand eight hundred acres of the finest land in Ulster! Then all the rest of the province was given in lots of one thousand, one thousand five hundred, to two thousand acres, to Scotchmen and Englishmen. But the very deed that gave it obliged them to take their oath that they would accept that land upon this condition, not so much as to give a day’s work to a labouring man, unless that labouring man took his oath that he was not a Catholic. And so Ulster was disposed of.
That remained until Cromwell came; and when the second estimate was made of the kingdom it was discovered that there were nearly five millions of acres lying still in the hands of the Catholics.
And what did Cromwell do?
He quietly made a law, and he published it; and he said, on the 1st of May, 1654, every Catholic in Ireland was to cross the Shannon, and to go into Connaught.
Now, the river Shannon cuts off five of the western counties from the rest of Ireland, and these five counties, though very large in extent, have more of waste land, of bog, and of hard, unproductive, stony soil than all the rest of Ireland. I am at liberty to say this, because I, myself, am the heart’s blood of a Connaughtman.
If any other man said this of Connaught, I would have to say my prayers, and keep a very sharp eye about me, to try to keep my temper. But it is quite true; with all our love for our native land, with all my love for my native province, all that love won’t put a blade of grass on an acre of limestone; and that there are acres of such, we all know. It was an acre of this sort that a poor fellow was building a wall around.
“What are you building that wall for?” says the landlord. “Are you afraid the cattle will get out?”
“No, your honour, indeed I am not,” says the poor man; “but I was afraid the poor brutes might get in.”
Then Cromwell sent the Catholics of Ireland to Connaught; and, remember, he gave them their choice. He said, “Now, if you don’t like to go to Connaught, I will send you to hell!“
So the Catholic Irish put their heads together, and they said: “It is better for us to go to Connaught. He may want the other place for himself.” God forbid that I should condemn any man to hell; but I cannot help thinking of what the poor car man said to myself in Dublin once. Going along, he saw a likeness of Cromwell, and he says, “At all events, Cromwell has gone to the devil.”
I said, “My man, don’t be uncharitable. Don’t say that; it is uncharitable to say it.”
“Thunder and turf!” says he, “sure if he is not gone to the devil, where is the use of having a devil at all?”
At any rate, my friends, wherever he is gone to, he confiscated at one act five millions of acres of Irish land; with one stroke of his pen, he handed over to his Cromwellian soldiers five million acres of the best land in Ireland, the golden vale of Tipperary included. Forty years later, the Catholics began to creep out of Connaught, and to buy little lots here and there, and they got a few lots here and there given to them by their Protestant friends. But, at any rate, it was discovered by the government of England, that the Catholics in Ireland were beginning to get a little bit of the land again; and they issued another commission to inquire into the titles to these properties, and they found that there was a million two hundred thousand acres of the land recurred to the Catholics; and they found, also, that that land belonged to the crown; and the million two hundred thousand acres were again confiscated.
So that, as soon as the people began to take hold of the land at all, down came the sword of persecution and of confiscation upon them. And Cromwell himself avowed with the greatest solemnity that as Ireland would not become Protestant, Ireland should be destroyed. Now, is it to excite your feelings of hatred against England that I say these things? No, no; I don’t want any man to hate his neighbour I don’t want to excite these feelings. Nor I don’t believe it is necessary for me to excite them. I believe, sincerely I believe, that an effort to excite an Irishman to a dislike of England would be something like an effort to encourage a cat to take a mouse. I mention these facts just because these are the things that Ireland’s ruins tell us; because these are at once the history of the weakness and the sadness, yet of the strength and of the glory, of which these ruins tell us. I mention these things because they are matter of history; and because, though we are the party that were on the ground, prostrate, there is nothing in the history of our fathers at which the Irishman of today need be ashamed, or hang his head.
But if you want to know in what spirit our people dealt with all this persecution, if you want to know how we met those who were thus terrible in their persecution of us, I appeal to the history of my country, and I will state to you three great facts that will show you what was the glorious spirit of the Irish people, even in the midst of their sorrows; how Christian it was and how patient it was; how forgiving and loving even to our persecutors it was; how grandly they illustrated the spirit of duty at the command of their Lord and Saviour; and how magnificently they returned good for evil. The first of these facts is this: At the time that England invaded Ireland, towards the close of the twelfth century, there were a number of Englishmen in slavery in Ireland. They were taken prisoners of war; they had come over with the Danes, from Wales, and from North Britain, with their Danish superiors; and when Ireland conquered them, the rude, terrible custom of the times, and the shocks that all peaceful spirit had got by these wars, had bred so much ferocity in the people, that they actually made slaves of these Englishmen! And they were everywhere in the land. When the English landed in Ireland, and when the first Irish blood was shed by them, the nation assembled by its bishops and archbishops in the synod at Armagh, there said, “Perhaps the Almighty God is angry with us because we have these captive Christians and Saxons amongst us, and punishes us for having these slaves amongst us. In the name of God we will set them free.”
And on that day every soul in Ireland that was in slavery received his freedom. Oh, what a grand and glorious sight before heaven! A nation fit to be free, yet enslaved, yet, with the very hand on which others try to fasten their chains, striking off the chains from these English slaves! Never was there a more glorious illustration of the heavenly influence of Christianity since Christianity was preached amongst the nations.
The next incident is rather a ludicrous one, and I am afraid that it will make you laugh. My friends, I know the English people well. Some of the best friends that I have in the world are in England. They have a great many fine qualities. But there is a secret, quiet, passive contempt for Ireland; and I really believe it exists amongst the very best of them, with very few exceptions. An Englishman will not, as a general rule, hate an Irishman joined to him in faith; but he will quietly despise us If we rise and become fractious, then, perhaps, he will fear us but, generally speaking, in the English heart there is, no doubt a contempt for Ireland and for Irishmen. Now, that showed itself remarkably in 1666. In that year the Catholics of Ireland were ground into the very dust. That year saw one hundred thousand Irishmen, six thousand of them beautiful boys, sent off to be sold as slaves in the sugar-plantations of Barbados. That year London was burned, just as Chicago was burned the other day. The people were left in misery. The Catholics of Ireland, hunted, persecuted, scarcely able to live, actually came together, and, out of pure charity, they made up for the famishing people of London a present, a grand present. They sent them over fifteen thousand fat bullocks! They knew John Bull’s taste for beef. They knew his liking for a good beefsteak, and they actually sent him the best beef in the world, Irish beef. The bullocks arrived in London. The people took them, slaughtered them, and ate them, and the Irish Catholics said, “Much good may they do you!” Now comes the funny part of it.
When the bullocks were all killed and eaten, the people of London got up a petition to the Houses of Parliament, and they got Parliament to act on that petition; it was to the effect that this importation of Irish oxen was a nuisance; and it should be abated. But they had taken good care to eat the meat before they voted it a nuisance.
The third great instance of Ireland’s magnanimous Christianity, and of the magnanimity with which this brave and grand old people knew how to return good for evil, was in the time of King James. In the year 1689, exactly twenty years after the Irish bullocks had been voted a nuisance in London, in that year there happened to be, for a short time, a Catholic king in England. The tables were turned. The king went to work and he turned out the Irish lord chancellor because he was a Protestant, and he put in a Catholic chancellor in his place. He turned out two Irish judges because they were Protestants, and he put in two Englishmen, Catholics, as judges in their place. He did various actions of this kind, persecuting men because they were Protestants and he was a Catholic. And now, mark. We have it on the evidence of history that the Catholic archbishop of Armagh and the Catholic pope of Rome wrote to James the Second, through the lord lieutenant over the Irish Catholics there, that he had no right to do that, and that it was very wrong.
Oh, what a contrast!
When Charles the First wished to grant some little remission of the persecution in Ireland, because he was in want of money, the Irish Catholics sent him word that they would give him two hundred thousand pounds if he would only give them leave to worship God as their own consciences directed. What encouragement the king gave them we know not; at any rate, they sent him a sum of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, by way of instalment. But the moment it became rumoured abroad, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin got up in the pulpit of Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and he declared that a curse would fall upon the land and upon the king, because of these anticipated concessions to the Catholics.
What a contrast is here presented between the action of the Catholic people of Ireland and the action of their oppressors! And in these instances have we not presented to us the strongest evidence that the people who can act so by their enemies were incapable of being crushed? Yes, Ireland can never be crushed nor conquered; Ireland can never lose her nationality so long as she retains so high and so glorious a faith, and presents so magnificent an illustration of it in her national life. Never she has not lost it! She has it today. She will have it if the higher and more perfect form of complete and entire national freedom; for God does not abandon a race who not only cling to Him with an unchanging faith, but who also know how, in the midst of their sufferings, to illustrate that faith by so glorious, so liberal, so grand a spirit of Christian charity.
And now, my friends, it is for me simply to draw one conclusion, and to have done. Is there a man amongst us here tonight who is ashamed of his race or his native land, if that man has the high honour to be an Irishman? Is there a man living that can point to a more glorious and a purer source whence he draws the blood in his veins, than the man who can point to the bravery of his Irish forefathers, or the immaculate purity of his Irish mother! We glory in them, and we glory in the faith for which our ancestors have died. We glory in the love of a country that never, never, for an instant, admitted that Ireland was a mere province, that Ireland was merely a “West Britain.” Never, in our darkest hour, was that idea adapted to the Irish mind, or adopted by the will of the Irish people.
And, therefore, I say, if we glory in that faith, if we glory in the history of their national conduct and of their national love, oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, I say it, as well as a priest as an Irishman, let us emulate their example; let us learn to be generous to those who differ from us, and let us learn to be charitable, even to those who would fain injure us. We can thus conquer them. We can thus assure to the future of Ireland the blessings that have been denied to her past, the blessing of religious equality, the blessing of religious liberty, the blessing of religious unity, which, one day or other, will spring up in Ireland again. I have often heard words of bitterness, aye, and of insult, addressed to myself in the North of Ireland, coming from Orange lips; but I have always said to myself, He is an Irishman; though he is an Orangeman, he is an Irishman. If he lives long enough, he will learn to love the priest that represents Ireland’s old faith; but, if he die in his Orange dispositions, his son or his grandson will yet shake hands with and bless the priest, when he and I are both in our graves. And why do I say this? Because nothing bad, nothing uncharitable, nothing harsh or venomous ever yet lasted long upon the green soil of Ireland. If you throw a poisonous snake into the grass of Ireland, he will be sweetened, so as to lose his poison, or else he will die. Even the English people, when they landed, were not two hundred and fifty years in the land, until they were part of it; the very Normans who invaded us became “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” They became so fond of the country, that they were thoroughly imbued with its spirit. And so, any evil that we have in Ireland, is only a temporary and a passing evil, if we are only faithful to our traditions, and to the history of our country. Today there is religious disunion; but, thanks be to God, I have lived to see religious, disabilities destroyed. And, if I were now in the position of addressing Irish Orangemen, I would say, “Men of Erin, three cheers for the Church disestablishment! “And if they should ask me, “Why? “I would answer, “It was right and proper to disestablish the Church, because the Established Church was put in between you and me, and we ought to love each other, for we are both Irish!
Every class in Ireland will be drawn closer to the other by this disestablishment; and the honest Protestant man will begin to know a little more of his Catholic brother, and to admire him; and the Catholic will begin to know a little more of the Orangeman, and, perhaps, to say, “After all, he is not half so bad as he appears.” And believe me, my friends, that, breathing the air of Ireland, which is Catholic, eating the bread made out of the wheat which grows out on Irish soil, they get so infused with Catholic blood, that as soon as the Orangeman begins to have the slightest regard or love for his Catholic fellow-countryman, he is on the highway to become a Catholic, for a Catholic he will be, some time or other. As a man said to me very emphatically once: They will all be Catholics one day, surely, sir, if they only stay long enough in the country!
I say, my friends, that the past is the best guarantee for the future. We have seen the past in /some of its glories. What is the future to be? What is the future that is yet to dawn on this dearly-loved land of ours? Oh, how glorious will that future be, when all Irishmen shall be united in one common faith and one common love! Oh, how fair will our beloved Erin be, when, clothed in religious unity, religious equality and freedom, she shall rise out of the ocean wave, as fair, as lovely, in the end of time, as she was in the glorious ‘days when the world, entranced by her beauty, proclaimed her to be the mother of saints and sages. Yes, I see her rising emancipated; no trace of blood or persecution on her virgin face; the crown, so long lost to her, resting again upon her fair brow! I see her in peace and concord with all the nations around her, and with her own children within her. I see her venerated by the nations afar off, and, most of all, by the mighty nation which, in that day, in its strength, and in its youth, and in its vigour, shall sway the destinies of the world. I see her as Columbia salutes her across the ocean waves. But the light of freedom coming from around my mother’s face will reflect the light of freedom coming from the face of that nation which has been nursed in freedom, cradled in freedom, and which has never violated the sacred principles of religious freedom and religious equality. I see her with the light of faith shining upon her face; and I see her revered, beloved, and cherished by the nations, as an ancient and a most precious thing! I behold her rising in the energy of a second birth, when nations that have held their heads high are humbled in the dust! And so I hail you, O, mother Erin! And I say to you,
The nations have fallen, but you still art young;
Your sun is but rising when others have set;
And though slavery’s clouds round your morning have hung,
The full noon of Freedom shall beam round you yet
Norman Window
Image by Fergal of Claddagh
THE HISTORY OF IRELAND AS TOLD IN HER RUINS (second part)
A Lecture by Father Thomas N. Burke, O.P., delivered in the Cooper Institute, New York, on the 5th of April, 1872
The Danish invasion came, and I need not tell you that these Northern warriors who landed at the close of the eighth century, effecting their first landing near where the town of Skerries stands now, between Dublin and Balbriggan, on the eastern coast, that these men, thus coming, came as plunderers, and enemies of the religion as well as of the nationality of the people.
And for three hundred years, wherever they came, and wherever they went, the first thing they did was to put to death all the monks, and all the nuns, set fire to the schools, and banish the students; and, inflamed in this way with the blood of the peaceful, they sought to kill all the Irish friars; and a war of extermination, a war of interminable struggle and duration, was carried on for three hundred years. Ireland fought them; the Irish kings and chieftains fought them.
We read that in one battle alone, at Glenamada, in the county of Wicklow, King Malachy, he who wore the “collar of gold,” and the great King Brian, joined their forces in the cause of Ireland. In that grand day, when the morning sun arose, the battle began: and it was not until the sun set in the evening that the last Dane was swept from the field, and they withdrew to their ships, leaving six thousand dead bodies of their warriors behind them. Thus did Ireland, united, know how to deal with her Danish invaders; thus would Ireland have dealt with Fitzstephen and his Normans; but, on the day when they landed, the curse of disunion and discord was amongst the people. Finally, after three hundred years of invasion, Brian, on that Good Friday of 1014, cast out the Danes forever, and from the plains of Clontarf drove them into Dublin Bay.
Well, behind them they left the ruins of all the religion they had found. They left a people, who had, indeed, not lost their faith, but a people who were terribly shaken and demoralized by three hundred years of bloodshed and of war. One-half of it, one-sixth of it, would have been sufficient to ruin any other people; but the element that kept Ireland alive, the element that kept the Irish nationality alive in the hearts of the people, the element that preserved civilization in spite of three centuries of war, was the element of Ireland’s faith, and the traditions of the nation’s by-gone glory.
And now we arrive at the year 1134. Thirty years before, in the year 1103, the last Danish army was conquered and routed on the shores of Strangford Lough, in the North, and the last Danish King took his departure forever from the green shores of Erin. Thirty years have elapsed. Ireland is struggling to restore her shattered temples, her ruined altars, and to build up again, in all its former glory and sanctity, her nationality and monastic priesthood. Then Saint Malachy, great, glorious, and venerable name!, Saint Malachy, in whom the best blood of Ireland’s kings was mingled with the best blood of Ireland’s saints, was Archbishop of Armagh. In the year 1134, he invited into Ireland the Cistercian and the Benedictine monks. They came with all the traditions of the most exalted sanctity, with a spirit not less mild nor less holy than the spirit of a Dominic or an Augustine, and built up the glories of Lindisfarne, of Iona, of Mellifont, of Monasterboice, and of Monastereven, and all these magnificent ruins of which I spoke, the sacred monastic ruins of Ireland. Then the wondering world beheld such grand achievements as it never saw before, outrivaling in the splendour of their magnificence the grandeur of those temples which still attest the mediaeval greatness of Belgium, of France, and of Italy.
Then did the Irish people see, enshrined in these houses, the holy solitaries and monks from Clairveaux, with the light of the great Saint Bernard shining upon them from his grave. But only thirty years more passed, thirty years only; and, behold, a trumpet is heard on the eastern coast of Ireland: the shore and the hills of that Wexford coast re-echo to the shouts of the Norman, as he sets his accursed foot upon the soil of Erin. Divided as the nation was, chieftain fighting against chieftain, for, when the great King Brian was slain at Clontarf, and his son and his grandson were killed, and the three generations of the royal family thus swept away, every strong man in the land stood up and put in his claim for the sovereignty, by this division the Anglo-Norman was able to fix himself in the land. Battles were fought on every hill in Ireland; the most horrible scenes of the Danish invasion were renewed again. But Ireland is no longer able to shake the Saxon from her bosom; for Ireland is no longer able to strike him as one man.
The name of “United Irishmen” has been a name, and nothing but a name, since the day that Brian Boru was slain at Clontarf until this present moment. Would to God that this name of United Irishmen meant something more than an idle word! Would to God that, again, today, we were all united for some great and glorious purpose! Would to God that the blessing of our ancient, glorious unity was upon us! Would to God that the blessing even of a common purpose in the love of our country guided us! then, indeed, would the Celtic race and the Celtic nation be as strong as ever it was,as strong as it was upon that evening at Clontarf, which beheld Erin weeping over her martyred Brian, but beheld her with the crown still upon her brow.
Sometimes victorious, yet oftener defeated, defeated not so much by the shock of the Norman onset as by the treachery and the feuds of her own chieftains, the heart of the nation was broken; and behold, from the far sunny shores of Italy, there came to Ireland other monks and other missionaries, clothed in this very habit which I now wear, or in the sweet brown habit of Saint Francis, or the glorious dress of Saint Augustine. Unlike the monks who gave themselves up to contemplation, and who had large possessions, large houses, these men came among the people, to make themselves at home among the people, to become the sagart a rún of Ireland.
They came with a learning a’ great as that of the Irish monks of old, with a sturdy devotion, as energetic as that of Colum Cille, or of Kevin of Glendalough; they came with a message of peace, of consolation, and of hope to this heart-broken people; and they came nearly seven hundred years ago to the Irish shores. The Irish people received them with a kind of supernatural instinct that they had found their champions and their priestly heroes, and for nearly seven hundred years the Franciscan and his Dominican brother have dwelt together in the land. Instead of building up magnificent, wonderful edifices, like Holy Cross, or Mellifont, or Dunbrody; instead of covering acres with the grandeur of their buildings, these Dominicans and Franciscans went out in small companies, ten, or twelve, or twenty, and they went into remote towns and villages, and there they dwelt, and built quietly a convent for themselves; and they educated the people themselves; and, by-and-by, the people in the next generation learned to love the disciples of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, as they beheld the churches so multiplied.
In every townland of Ireland there was either a Dominican or a Franciscan church or convent. The priests of Ireland welcomed them; the holy bishops of Ireland sustained them; the ancient religious of Ireland gave them the right-hand of friendship; and the Cistercians or Benedictines gave them, very often, indeed, some of their own churches wherein to found their congregation, or to begin their missions. They came to dwell in the land early in the twelfth century, and, until the fifteenth century, strange to say, it was not yet found out what was the hidden design of Providence in bringing them there, in what was once their own true and ancient missionary Ireland.
During these three hundred years, the combat for Ireland’s nationality was still continued. The O’Neill, the O’Brien, the O’Donnell, the McGuire, the O’Moore, kept the national sword waving in the air. The Franciscans and the Dominicans cheered them, entered into their feelings, and they could only not be said to be more Irish than the Irish themselves, because they were the heart’s blood of Ireland. They were the light of the national councils of the chieftains of Ireland, as their historians were the faithful annalists of the glories of these days of combat. They saw the trouble; and yet, for three hundred years the Franciscan and the Dominican had not discovered what his real mission to Ireland was.
But at the end of the three hundred years came the fifteenth century. Then came the cloud of religious persecution over the land. All the hatred that divided the Saxon and the Celt, on the principle of nationality, was now heightened by the additional hatred of religious discord and division; and Irishmen, if they hated the Saxon before, as the enemy of Ireland’s nationality, from the fifteenth century hated him with an additional hatred, as the enemy of Ireland’s faith and Ireland’s religion. The sword was drawn. My friends, I speak not in indignation, but in sorrow; and I know that if there be one amongst you, my fellow-countrymen, here to-night, if there be a man who differs with me in religion, to that man I say: “Brother and friend, you feel as deeply as I do a feeling of indignation and of regret for the religious persecution of our native land.” No man feels it more; no man regrets more bitterly the element of religious discord, the terrible persecution of these three hundred years, through which Ireland, Catholic Ireland, has been obliged to pass; no man feels this more than the high-minded, honest, kind-hearted Irish Protestant. And why should he not feel it? If it was Catholic Ireland that had persecuted Protestant Ireland for that time, and with such intensity, I should hang my head for shame.
Well, that mild, scrupulous, holy man, Henry the Eighth, in the middle of the fifteenth century got a scruple of conscience! Perhaps it was whilst he was saying his prayers, he began to get uneasy, and to be afraid that, maybe, his wife wasn’t his wife at all! He wrote a letter to the pope, and he said: “Holy Father, I am very uneasy in my mind!“
The fact was, there was a very nice young lady in the court. Her name was Anna Boleyn. She was a great beauty. Henry got very fond of her, and he wanted to marry her. But he could not marry her, because he was already a married man. So he wrote to the pope, and he said he was uneasy in his mind, he had a scruple of conscience; and he said: “Holy Father, grant me a favour. Grant me a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. I have been married to her for several years. She has had several children by me. Just grant me this little favour. I want a divorce!“
The pope sent back word to him: “Don’t be uneasy at all in your mind! Stick to your wife like a man; and don’t be troubling me with your scruples.”
Well, Henry threw the pope over. He married the young woman whilst his former wife was living, and he should have been taken that very day and tried before the Lord Chief Justice of England, and transported for life. And why? Because if it had been any other man in England that did it but the king, that man would have been transported for life; and the king is as much bound by the laws of God, and of justice, and conscience, and morality, as any other man. When Henry separated from the pope he made himself head of the Church; and he told the people of England that he would manage their consciences for them for the future. But when he called upon Ireland to join him in this strange and indeed, I think my Protestant friends will admit, insane act, for such indeed, I think my Protestant friends will admit this act to be; for, I think, it was nothing short of insanity for any man of sense to say: “I will take the law of God as preached from the lips and illustrated in the life of Henry the Eighth, Ireland refused.
Henry drew the sword, and declared that Ireland should acknowledge him as the head of the Church; that she should part with her ancient faith, and with all the traditions of her history, to sustain him in his measures, or that he would exterminate the Irish race. Another scruple of conscience came to this tender-hearted man!
And what do you think it was?
Oh, he said, I am greatly afraid the friars and the priests are not leading good lives. So he set up what we call a commission; and he sent it to Ireland to inquire what sort of lives the monks and friars and priests and nuns were leading; and the commissioners sent back word to him, that they could not find any great fault with them; but that, on the whole, they thought it would be better to turn them out!
So they took their convents and their churches, and whatever little property they possessed, and these commissioners sold them, and put the money into their own pockets. There was a beautiful simplicity about the whole plan.
Well, my friends, then came the hour of the ruin of the dear old convents of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Their inmates were driven out at the point of the sword; they were scattered like sheep over the land. Five pounds was the price set upon the head of the friar or priest, the same price that was set upon the head of a wolf. They were hunted throughout the land; and when they fled for their lives from their convent homes, the Irish people opened their hearts, and said, “Come to us, Sagart a Rún.”
Throughout the length and breadth of the land they were scattered, with no shelter but the canopy of heaven; with no Sunday sacrifice to remind the people of God; no Mass celebrated in public, and no Gospel preached; and yet they succeeded for three hundred years in preserving the glorious Catholic faith, that is as strong in Ireland today as ever it was. These venerable ruins tell the tale of the nation’s woe, of the nation’s sorrow. As long as it was merely a question of destroying a Cistercian or a Benedictine Abbey, there were so few of these in the land, that the people did not feel it much.
But when the persecution came upon the Bráthair, as the friar was called, the men whom everybody knew, the men whom everybody came to look up to for consolation in affliction or in sorrow; when it came upon him, then it brought sorrow and affliction to every village, to every little town, to every man in Ireland. There were, at this time, upwards of eighty convents of religious, Franciscans and Dominicans, in Ireland, that numbered very close upon a thousand priests of each order. There were nearly a thousand Irish Franciscans, and nearly a thousand Irish Dominican priests, when Henry began his persecution. He was succeeded, after a brief interval of thirty years, by his daughter Elizabeth. How many Dominicans, do you think, were then left in Ireland?
There were a thousand, you say?
Oh, God of heaven!
There were only four of them left, only four!
All the rest of these heroic men had stained their white habit with the blood that they shed for God and for their country. Twenty thousand men it took Elizabeth, for as many years as there were thousands of them, to try to plant the seedling of Protestantism on Irish soil. The ground was dug as for a grave; the seed of Protestantism was cast into that soil; and the blood of the nation was poured in, to warm it and bring it forth. It never grew, it never came forth; it never bloomed! Ireland was as Catholic the day that Elizabeth died at Hampton Court, gnawing the flesh off her hands in despair, and blaspheming God, Ireland was as Catholic that day as she was the day that Henry the Eighth vainly commanded her first to become Protestant.
Then came a little breathing-time, a very short time, and in fifty years there were six hundred Irish Dominican priests in Ireland again. They studied in Spain, in France, in Italy. These were the youth, the children, of Irish fathers and mothers, who cheerfully gave them up, though they knew, almost to a certainty, that they were devoting them to a martyr’s death; but they gave them up for God. Smuggled out of the country, they studied in these foreign lands; and they came back again, by night and by stealth, and they landed upon the shores of Ireland; and when Cromwell came he found six hundred Irish Dominicans upon the Irish land. Ten years after, only ten years passed, and again the Irish Dominican preachers assembled to count up their numbers, and to tell how many survived and how many had fallen. How many do you think were left out of the six hundred?
But one hundred and fifty were left; four hundred and fifty had perished, had shed their blood for their country, or had been shipped away to Barbados as slaves. These are the tales their ruins tell. I need not speak of their noble martyrs.
Oh, if these moss-grown stones of the Irish Franciscan and Dominican ruins could speak, they would tell how the people gave up everything they had, for years and years, as wave after wave of successive per seditions and confiscations and robbery rolled over them, rather than renounce their glorious faith or their glorious priesthood.
When Elizabeth died, the Irish Catholics thought her successor, James the First., would give them at least leave to live; and accordingly, for a short time after he became king, James kept his own counsel, and he did not tell the Irish Catholics whether he would grant them any concessions or not; but he must have given them some encouragement, for they befriended him, as they had always done to the House of Stuart. But what do you think the people did? As soon as the notion that they would be allowed to live in the land took possession of them, and that they would be allowed to take possession of the estates they had been robbed of, instead of minding themselves, the very first thing they did, to the credit of Irish fidelity be it said, was to set about restoring the Franciscan and Dominican abbeys. It was thus they restored the Black Abbey in Kilkenny, a Dominican house; they restored the Dominican Convent in Waterford, Multifarnham, in Westmeath, and others; and these in a few months grew up into all their former beauty from ruin, under the loving, faithful, restoring hands of the Irish people.
But soon came a letter from the king; and it began with these notable words: “It has been told to us, that some of our Irish subjects imagined that we were about to grant them liberty of conscience.”
No such thing!
Liberty of conscience for Irish Catholics!
No!
Hordes of persecutors were let loose again, and the storms of persecution that burst over Ireland in the days of James the First. were quite as bad and as terrible as any that rained down blood upon the land in the days of Queen Elizabeth. And so, with varying fortunes, now of hope, and now of fear, this selfsame game went on. The English determined that they would make one part of Ireland, at least, Protestant, and that the fairest and the best portion of it, as they imagined, namely, the province of Ulster.
Now, mark the simple way they went about it. They made up their minds that they would make one province of Ireland Protestant, to begin with, in order that it might spread out by degrees to the others.
And what did they do?
They gave notice to every Catholic in Ulster to pack up and be gone, to leave the land.
They confiscated every single acre in the fair province of Ulster; and the Protestant Primate, the Archbishop of Armagh, a very holy man, who was always preaching to the people not to be too fond of the things of this world; he got forty-three thousand acres of the best land of these convents in fee.
Trinity College, in Dublin, got thirty thousand acres. There were certain guilds of traders in London, the skinners, tanners, the dry-salters; and what do you think these London trade associations got? They got a present of two hundred and nine thousand eight hundred acres of the finest land in Ulster! Then all the rest of the province was given in lots of one thousand, one thousand five hundred, to two thousand acres, to Scotchmen and Englishmen. But the very deed that gave it obliged them to take their oath that they would accept that land upon this condition, not so much as to give a day’s work to a labouring man, unless that labouring man took his oath that he was not a Catholic. And so Ulster was disposed of.
That remained until Cromwell came; and when the second estimate was made of the kingdom it was discovered that there were nearly five millions of acres lying still in the hands of the Catholics.
And what did Cromwell do?
He quietly made a law, and he published it; and he said, on the 1st of May, 1654, every Catholic in Ireland was to cross the Shannon, and to go into Connaught.
Now, the river Shannon cuts off five of the western counties from the rest of Ireland, and these five counties, though very large in extent, have more of waste land, of bog, and of hard, unproductive, stony soil than all the rest of Ireland. I am at liberty to say this, because I, myself, am the heart’s blood of a Connaughtman.
If any other man said this of Connaught, I would have to say my prayers, and keep a very sharp eye about me, to try to keep my temper. But it is quite true; with all our love for our native land, with all my love for my native province, all that love won’t put a blade of grass on an acre of limestone; and that there are acres of such, we all know. It was an acre of this sort that a poor fellow was building a wall around.
“What are you building that wall for?” says the landlord. “Are you afraid the cattle will get out?”
“No, your honour, indeed I am not,” says the poor man; “but I was afraid the poor brutes might get in.”
Then Cromwell sent the Catholics of Ireland to Connaught; and, remember, he gave them their choice. He said, “Now, if you don’t like to go to Connaught, I will send you to hell!“
So the Catholic Irish put their heads together, and they said: “It is better for us to go to Connaught. He may want the other place for himself.” God forbid that I should condemn any man to hell; but I cannot help thinking of what the poor car man said to myself in Dublin once. Going along, he saw a likeness of Cromwell, and he says, “At all events, Cromwell has gone to the devil.”
I said, “My man, don’t be uncharitable. Don’t say that; it is uncharitable to say it.”
“Thunder and turf!” says he, “sure if he is not gone to the devil, where is the use of having a devil at all?”
At any rate, my friends, wherever he is gone to, he confiscated at one act five millions of acres of Irish land; with one stroke of his pen, he handed over to his Cromwellian soldiers five million acres of the best land in Ireland, the golden vale of Tipperary included. Forty years later, the Catholics began to creep out of Connaught, and to buy little lots here and there, and they got a few lots here and there given to them by their Protestant friends. But, at any rate, it was discovered by the government of England, that the Catholics in Ireland were beginning to get a little bit of the land again; and they issued another commission to inquire into the titles to these properties, and they found that there was a million two hundred thousand acres of the land recurred to the Catholics; and they found, also, that that land belonged to the crown; and the million two hundred thousand acres were again confiscated.
So that, as soon as the people began to take hold of the land at all, down came the sword of persecution and of confiscation upon them. And Cromwell himself avowed with the greatest solemnity that as Ireland would not become Protestant, Ireland should be destroyed. Now, is it to excite your feelings of hatred against England that I say these things? No, no; I don’t want any man to hate his neighbour I don’t want to excite these feelings. Nor I don’t believe it is necessary for me to excite them. I believe, sincerely I believe, that an effort to excite an Irishman to a dislike of England would be something like an effort to encourage a cat to take a mouse. I mention these facts just because these are the things that Ireland’s ruins tell us; because these are at once the history of the weakness and the sadness, yet of the strength and of the glory, of which these ruins tell us. I mention these things because they are matter of history; and because, though we are the party that were on the ground, prostrate, there is nothing in the history of our fathers at which the Irishman of today need be ashamed, or hang his head.
But if you want to know in what spirit our people dealt with all this persecution, if you want to know how we met those who were thus terrible in their persecution of us, I appeal to the history of my country, and I will state to you three great facts that will show you what was the glorious spirit of the Irish people, even in the midst of their sorrows; how Christian it was and how patient it was; how forgiving and loving even to our persecutors it was; how grandly they illustrated the spirit of duty at the command of their Lord and Saviour; and how magnificently they returned good for evil. The first of these facts is this: At the time that England invaded Ireland, towards the close of the twelfth century, there were a number of Englishmen in slavery in Ireland. They were taken prisoners of war; they had come over with the Danes, from Wales, and from North Britain, with their Danish superiors; and when Ireland conquered them, the rude, terrible custom of the times, and the shocks that all peaceful spirit had got by these wars, had bred so much ferocity in the people, that they actually made slaves of these Englishmen! And they were everywhere in the land. When the English landed in Ireland, and when the first Irish blood was shed by them, the nation assembled by its bishops and archbishops in the synod at Armagh, there said, “Perhaps the Almighty God is angry with us because we have these captive Christians and Saxons amongst us, and punishes us for having these slaves amongst us. In the name of God we will set them free.”
And on that day every soul in Ireland that was in slavery received his freedom. Oh, what a grand and glorious sight before heaven! A nation fit to be free, yet enslaved, yet, with the very hand on which others try to fasten their chains, striking off the chains from these English slaves! Never was there a more glorious illustration of the heavenly influence of Christianity since Christianity was preached amongst the nations.
The next incident is rather a ludicrous one, and I am afraid that it will make you laugh. My friends, I know the English people well. Some of the best friends that I have in the world are in England. They have a great many fine qualities. But there is a secret, quiet, passive contempt for Ireland; and I really believe it exists amongst the very best of them, with very few exceptions. An Englishman will not, as a general rule, hate an Irishman joined to him in faith; but he will quietly despise us If we rise and become fractious, then, perhaps, he will fear us but, generally speaking, in the English heart there is, no doubt a contempt for Ireland and for Irishmen. Now, that showed itself remarkably in 1666. In that year the Catholics of Ireland were ground into the very dust. That year saw one hundred thousand Irishmen, six thousand of them beautiful boys, sent off to be sold as slaves in the sugar-plantations of Barbados. That year London was burned, just as Chicago was burned the other day. The people were left in misery. The Catholics of Ireland, hunted, persecuted, scarcely able to live, actually came together, and, out of pure charity, they made up for the famishing people of London a present, a grand present. They sent them over fifteen thousand fat bullocks! They knew John Bull’s taste for beef. They knew his liking for a good beefsteak, and they actually sent him the best beef in the world, Irish beef. The bullocks arrived in London. The people took them, slaughtered them, and ate them, and the Irish Catholics said, “Much good may they do you!” Now comes the funny part of it.
When the bullocks were all killed and eaten, the people of London got up a petition to the Houses of Parliament, and they got Parliament to act on that petition; it was to the effect that this importation of Irish oxen was a nuisance; and it should be abated. But they had taken good care to eat the meat before they voted it a nuisance.
The third great instance of Ireland’s magnanimous Christianity, and of the magnanimity with which this brave and grand old people knew how to return good for evil, was in the time of King James. In the year 1689, exactly twenty years after the Irish bullocks had been voted a nuisance in London, in that year there happened to be, for a short time, a Catholic king in England. The tables were turned. The king went to work and he turned out the Irish lord chancellor because he was a Protestant, and he put in a Catholic chancellor in his place. He turned out two Irish judges because they were Protestants, and he put in two Englishmen, Catholics, as judges in their place. He did various actions of this kind, persecuting men because they were Protestants and he was a Catholic. And now, mark. We have it on the evidence of history that the Catholic archbishop of Armagh and the Catholic pope of Rome wrote to James the Second, through the lord lieutenant over the Irish Catholics there, that he had no right to do that, and that it was very wrong.
Oh, what a contrast!
When Charles the First wished to grant some little remission of the persecution in Ireland, because he was in want of money, the Irish Catholics sent him word that they would give him two hundred thousand pounds if he would only give them leave to worship God as their own consciences directed. What encouragement the king gave them we know not; at any rate, they sent him a sum of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, by way of instalment. But the moment it became rumoured abroad, the Protestant archbishop of Dublin got up in the pulpit of Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and he declared that a curse would fall upon the land and upon the king, because of these anticipated concessions to the Catholics.
What a contrast is here presented between the action of the Catholic people of Ireland and the action of their oppressors! And in these instances have we not presented to us the strongest evidence that the people who can act so by their enemies were incapable of being crushed? Yes, Ireland can never be crushed nor conquered; Ireland can never lose her nationality so long as she retains so high and so glorious a faith, and presents so magnificent an illustration of it in her national life. Never she has not lost it! She has it today. She will have it if the higher and more perfect form of complete and entire national freedom; for God does not abandon a race who not only cling to Him with an unchanging faith, but who also know how, in the midst of their sufferings, to illustrate that faith by so glorious, so liberal, so grand a spirit of Christian charity.
And now, my friends, it is for me simply to draw one conclusion, and to have done. Is there a man amongst us here tonight who is ashamed of his race or his native land, if that man has the high honour to be an Irishman? Is there a man living that can point to a more glorious and a purer source whence he draws the blood in his veins, than the man who can point to the bravery of his Irish forefathers, or the immaculate purity of his Irish mother! We glory in them, and we glory in the faith for which our ancestors have died. We glory in the love of a country that never, never, for an instant, admitted that Ireland was a mere province, that Ireland was merely a “West Britain.” Never, in our darkest hour, was that idea adapted to the Irish mind, or adopted by the will of the Irish people.
And, therefore, I say, if we glory in that faith, if we glory in the history of their national conduct and of their national love, oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, I say it, as well as a priest as an Irishman, let us emulate their example; let us learn to be generous to those who differ from us, and let us learn to be charitable, even to those who would fain injure us. We can thus conquer them. We can thus assure to the future of Ireland the blessings that have been denied to her past, the blessing of religious equality, the blessing of religious liberty, the blessing of religious unity, which, one day or other, will spring up in Ireland again. I have often heard words of bitterness, aye, and of insult, addressed to myself in the North of Ireland, coming from Orange lips; but I have always said to myself, He is an Irishman; though he is an Orangeman, he is an Irishman. If he lives long enough, he will learn to love the priest that represents Ireland’s old faith; but, if he die in his Orange dispositions, his son or his grandson will yet shake hands with and bless the priest, when he and I are both in our graves. And why do I say this? Because nothing bad, nothing uncharitable, nothing harsh or venomous ever yet lasted long upon the green soil of Ireland. If you throw a poisonous snake into the grass of Ireland, he will be sweetened, so as to lose his poison, or else he will die. Even the English people, when they landed, were not two hundred and fifty years in the land, until they were part of it; the very Normans who invaded us became “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” They became so fond of the country, that they were thoroughly imbued with its spirit. And so, any evil that we have in Ireland, is only a temporary and a passing evil, if we are only faithful to our traditions, and to the history of our country. Today there is religious disunion; but, thanks be to God, I have lived to see religious, disabilities destroyed. And, if I were now in the position of addressing Irish Orangemen, I would say, “Men of Erin, three cheers for the Church disestablishment! “And if they should ask me, “Why? “I would answer, “It was right and proper to disestablish the Church, because the Established Church was put in between you and me, and we ought to love each other, for we are both Irish!
Every class in Ireland will be drawn closer to the other by this disestablishment; and the honest Protestant man will begin to know a little more of his Catholic brother, and to admire him; and the Catholic will begin to know a little more of the Orangeman, and, perhaps, to say, “After all, he is not half so bad as he appears.” And believe me, my friends, that, breathing the air of Ireland, which is Catholic, eating the bread made out of the wheat which grows out on Irish soil, they get so infused with Catholic blood, that as soon as the Orangeman begins to have the slightest regard or love for his Catholic fellow-countryman, he is on the highway to become a Catholic, for a Catholic he will be, some time or other. As a man said to me very emphatically once: They will all be Catholics one day, surely, sir, if they only stay long enough in the country!
I say, my friends, that the past is the best guarantee for the future. We have seen the past in /some of its glories. What is the future to be? What is the future that is yet to dawn on this dearly-loved land of ours? Oh, how glorious will that future be, when all Irishmen shall be united in one common faith and one common love! Oh, how fair will our beloved Erin be, when, clothed in religious unity, religious equality and freedom, she shall rise out of the ocean wave, as fair, as lovely, in the end of time, as she was in the glorious ‘days when the world, entranced by her beauty, proclaimed her to be the mother of saints and sages. Yes, I see her rising emancipated; no trace of blood or persecution on her virgin face; the crown, so long lost to her, resting again upon her fair brow! I see her in peace and concord with all the nations around her, and with her own children within her. I see her venerated by the nations afar off, and, most of all, by the mighty nation which, in that day, in its strength, and in its youth, and in its vigour, shall sway the destinies of the world. I see her as Columbia salutes her across the ocean waves. But the light of freedom coming from around my mother’s face will reflect the light of freedom coming from the face of that nation which has been nursed in freedom, cradled in freedom, and which has never violated the sacred principles of religious freedom and religious equality. I see her with the light of faith shining upon her face; and I see her revered, beloved, and cherished by the nations, as an ancient and a most precious thing! I behold her rising in the energy of a second birth, when nations that have held their heads high are humbled in the dust! And so I hail you, O, mother Erin! And I say to you,
The nations have fallen, but you still art young;
Your sun is but rising when others have set;
And though slavery’s clouds round your morning have hung,
The full noon of Freedom shall beam round you yet
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