RTÉ’s apology raises questions

Excellent letter by Fr Pádraig McCarthy in today’s Irish Times  — a newspaper which gave prominent coverage to the Prime Time documentary but has been irritatingly mute about RTÉ’s recent apology to Fr Kevin Reynolds. Patsy McGarry, that newspaper’s religious affairs correspondent, has not published anything about the apology at all — despite this being an explosive news item, and despite having authored that aforelinked report about the documentary following its broadcast (but he can still find time for the comparatively trivial “Pioneers thank public for group’s survival“.)

A chara, – On October 6th and 7th October, RTÉ broadcast on television and radio an apology to Fr Kevin Reynolds for allegations made in its Prime Time Investigates programme of May 23rd of this year entitled A Mission to Prey . The apology, as given on its website, is 352 words. This is the longest apology from any media organisation that I can remember, and yet still unequal to the original broadcast.

Coming less than five months after the programme, the apology seems unusually swift, following assistance of a legal team through the Association of Catholic Priests. If Fr Kevin Reynolds did not have that assistance, would he have been left at the mercy of the might of a large corporate body and its legal team, with little hope of redress, or only after a lapse of years?

Abuse can never be undone. There is a saying about false reports that the bell cannot be unrung. I have no knowledge of the other cases covered by the programme. Any abuse of another, whether child or adult, is seriously sinful, to use an old-fashioned word. There are, however, answers still to be sought about this case at least.

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For God and Spain

Note: The Internet Archive has a CTSI pamphlet From a Gaelic Outpost by the same author.

Night Ride

Desmond Fennell criticizes legacy of Vatican II

From one of the Irish Church’s most original thinkers.

I am pleasantly surprised that this got published in the Furrow. (See also his 1962 article, Will the Irish Stay Christian?, which he kindly allowed me to republish.)

RTÉ apologizes to Fr Kevin Reynolds

(NB: Read the comments here and here for background.)

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/1006/apology.html

On the evening of the 23rd May 2011, RTÉ broadcast a Prime Time Investigates programme entitled “A Mission to Prey”.

Before this broadcast Prime Time conducted an interview with Fr. Kevin Reynolds, the then parish priest at Ahascragh in Galway.

This interview took place beside the parochial house after the annual First Holy Communion Mass.

During this interview allegations were made against Fr. Reynolds. He immediately protested his innocence and denied all the allegations.

Between the interview and the broadcast, Fr. Kevin Reynolds, through his Solicitors, repeated his protestations of innocence, asked RTÉ not to broadcast the interview and volunteered to undergo a paternity test.

Prime Time duly broadcast the programme accusing Fr. Reynolds of raping a minor named Veneranda while he was a missionary in Kenya and fathering a child named Sheila as a result of this rape.

He was also accused of secretly providing funds to Sheila.

Both Veneranda and Sheila were interviewed in the programme to corroborate the allegations.

As a result Fr. Kevin Reynolds was obliged to stand down from ministry and was removed as the parish priest of Ahascragh. He had to leave his home and his parish.

He was compelled by the actions of RTÉ to institute High Court defamation proceedings to vindicate his good name and reputation.

RTÉ acknowledges that the material in the programme concerning Fr. Reynolds ought never to have been broadcast.

RTÉ now fully and unreservedly accepts that the allegations made by Prime Time against Fr. Kevin Reynolds are baseless, without any foundation whatever and untrue and that Fr. Reynolds is a priest of the utmost integrity who has had an unblemished 40 year career in the priesthood and who has made a valuable contribution to society in Kenya and Ireland both in education and in ministry.

RTÉ acknowledges the defamation has had a devastating effect on Fr. Kevin Reynolds, his family, his peers, his parishioners in Ahascragh, those in the diocese of Kakamega in Kenya who were aware of the allegations and all those who know him or of him.

RTÉ fully and unreservedly apologises to Fr. Kevin Reynolds for this defamation and deeply regrets the serious consequences suffered by him. He was entirely innocent of the allegations broadcast about him.

A ‘Transitional’ Missal from 1968

Many thanks again to Jaykay for kindly sending me these extracts from a fascinating (and quite beautiful) hand Missal from 1968. Jaykay notes that

This was given to my mother in 1968, although as far as I recall she continued to mostly use her old 1930s one. It’s interesting in that it shows the transitional stage reached by 1968, including the ICEL translation of the Canon which remained in place, with only minor changes, right up until now. I can clearly recall that they introduced the acclamation after the consecration during 1969, which isn’t shown in this version. In those days it was just restricted to “My Lord and my God”. I’m pretty sure the last Gospel had also gone by that stage as well. I also can’t honestly recall whether they used the Douay Reims translations for the Epistle and Gospel, or whether a more modern translation was used but the versions of the Gloria, Creed and Sanctus with the “thees” and “thous” remained in place until 1975, when they went over to the (now happily obsolete!) ICEL versions.

“Such stupidity”

The following is an extract from an article (‘Laylines’) by Seán Mac Réamoinn in Doctrine and Life, April, 1996:

An old friend who died last month had made it clear to his family that he wanted a sung Requiem in Latin for his funeral. Fortunately, with more than a little help from the Dominicans, his wish was granted. And I know that all who were present were considerably moved by the liturgy. For many of us it was a reminder not just of old ways, but of the power of plainsong to shape our worship. And for those to whom it was a new experience it was, I believe, no less affecting, if at times more obscurely so…

Some of us who joined in the singing were out of practice, to put it very kindly. I hope we didn’t damage the ensemble too seriously. And I believe we didn’t for, though the Gregorian discipline demands as much careful respect, if not more, than other musical forms, it can cover a multitude of imperfections…

[L]ast month’s experience was a sharp reminder of what we have lost, or rather mislaid or thrown aside. I have written here before about the appalling philistinism which has allowed us to neglect so much of our western Catholic heritage: it is as if the Orthodox world had suddenly decided to embrace iconoclasm as a way of living and praying, and thrown all those images — which are plainsong’s rival in their deep and direct communication of the spiritual — on the ecclesiastical scrap heap. And I shudder to think what the more enthusiastic among them would have adopted as substitutes, what glossy meretricious essays in neo-sentimentality would have paralleled some of our recent hymns, post-modern effusions of sentimental pietism…

When we ignore plainsong, or for that matter, classical polyphony, to the point of banishing this great music from our churches and denying it to our younger people, we are depriving them and us of a spiritual enrichment whose value is more, far more, than aesthetic — important as that may be. It reminds me of nothing so much as the pathetic way so many of our great-(great-) grandparents believed that they must not pass the Irish language on to their children….such was the crazy logic of the time, they thought that a knowledge of Irish and of English were mutually exclusive. We now realise, or at least I hope we do, what an injustice was done in those days, from the best of motives.

Mind you, it is harder to see what has been the motivation of ‘getting rid of the oul’ Latin’ over the past thirty years or so. How can anyone have possibly seen such stupidity as an aid to liturgical renewal? Certainly the composition of vernacular settings was, and is, to be encouraged, but not to the exclusion of work of a standard which it would be difficult to emulate or approach overnight. And interestingly, the simple O’Riada Cúil Aodha Mass seems to be the most generally popular of all the new settings, not least among congregations who would be hard put to it to provide translations of the texts…The ‘poetry’ seems to get through, in spite of any verbal problems. Is there a moral here?

Our Mass, Our Life: Some Irish Traditions and Prayers

See also: The Integral Irish Tradition

The City Set on a Hill

Missionaries

TG4 has been showing an interesting four-part series on Irish missionaries  — Misinéirí Radacacha (Radical Missionaries). Fr Séan Coyle appears in the third episode, which focuses on the work of Irish missionaries in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship — to view go here, click on ‘Documentaries’ on the right-hand side (under ‘Archive’) and scroll down to the Misinéirí Radacacha episode dated 19.09.11. (The second and fourth episodes are also still available to view.)

Patrician Year (1961): Archbishop McQuaid on the Conclusion of the Dublin Congress


The following letter from the Most Rev. John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, was read out in all the churches of the Archdiocese of Dublin on Sunday, July 9th, 1961:

Very Reverend and Dear Father,

I wish to thank you for your share in the success of the Dublin Congress of the Patrician Year. I am grateful for the spiritual preparation that you organised in your parish.

It is a duty, but very much more a privilege, to thank the Faithful for their most generous co-operation. The very great numbers of those who went to Confession and received Holy Communion are an immediate proof of the Faith with which our appeal was answered. The marked place in the Congress taken by young persons, boys and girls, is to me perhaps the most consoling feature of all the week, for where the youth are interested, the future is secure.
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El Batallón de San Patricio: Irish Soldiers Fighting for Mexico

Some clips below from One Man’s Hero, which tells the story of the St. Patrick’s Batallion — Irish troops who defected from the US Army to the Mexican side in the Mexican-American War. Irish Catholic immigrants suffered horrible discimination in the very Protestant, nativist climate of 19th century America, and the prospect of a fellow-Catholic nation (Mexico) loosing territory to Protestant Anglo-Saxon expansionism aroused considerable sympathy among many Irish troops, who viewed it in terms of the Irish situation. There is an excellent essay here on the Batallion at the Catholic Culture site by Michael Hogan.

The San Patricios are still revered as hereos in Mexico today, though tragically forgotten in their native homeland. (It is testimony to the poverty of modern Irish foreign policy, insomuch as such a thing exists these days, that we aren’t developing our once very strong links with Latin America.)

¡Viva México!


The Demonization of Ireland’s Past

“The need to recover a sense of ourselves is imperative. The demonization of our past has to stop, as does the cycle of blame about everything that has gone wrong in Ireland in the past hundred years. We have many important anniversaries planned between 2011 and 2016. They could be occasions of yet more recrimination, but, with good leadership in every aspect of Irish life, they will be times to begin healing, forgiveness and self-acceptance in a small island on the Atlantic edge of Europe.”

Studies editorial, Autumn, 2011

When You Pray

The Irish Zouaves at Ancona in 1860


The following account by Captain Count Roussel de Killough was first published in
Revue du Monde Catholique and subsequently republished in translation in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, December, 1869:

(For background, read this)
 
It was worthy of Catholic Ireland, that noble daughter of the church, which has preserved intact the faith of St. Patrick in the midst of struggles, trials, and persecutions of every kind, to send to the pope a legion of her sons to fight beside the generous volunteers whom every vessel brought from France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. As my thoughts revert, after an interval of eight years, to this noble band, whose organization I superintended temporarily, I love to recall the great natural qualities which redeemed their defects, and, despite their disorders and uproar, and their incessant quarrels, won for the Irish the admiration of Lamoriciére, and merited the approval of the pope, who, after the crisis, desired to form around him a guard of these valiant soldiers, these indomitable heroes, these Catholics faithful to deaths.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the fatigues and excitement of this period, amid marches and countermarches, orders and countermands, it was impossible for me to keep a journal of the thousand and one strange incidents, daily events, interesting or amusing, of which I was a witness; indeed, they would furnish Alexander Dumas abundant matter for dramas and endless tales. I must limit myself to those scenes which have left the deepest impression on my memory.
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Catching it while you can…

The follow advertisement appeared in America magazine, 15th February, 1969:

LATIN MASS

The beauty of the Latin Mass can still be yours — on record. “Missa Ave Verum,” sung by the Columbians, famous male choir, Mater Dei Council, Knights of Columbus. RCA’s finest quality 33⅓ LP, mono. 40 min. in length.

THE COMPLETE MASS SUNG IN LATIN

Appreciated by shut-ins
A wonderful gift

For prepaid delivery, send $3.50 ($3.00 each, for 5 or more) to:

LATIN MASS, Dept. L
P.O. Box 1777
Indianapolis, Ind. 46206

The Reading of the Scriptures

Letter of Dr. David Kearney, Archbishop of Cashel, to the Irish College of Salamanca, 18th July, 1612

When I was over there among you [see here - shane], I gave you a full account of the state of this our native country, and of the troubles and dangers with which we are surrounded. These have since become palpable in the cruel death inflicted on our brother, the bishop of Down, and his chaplain, the 1st day of February of the present year, which we have already detailed to you.

At present the state of our affairs is very doubtful..We have ample evidence that a Parliament is about to assemble, and this makes us very uneasy, for we may expect nothing less from it than serious injury to our faith, as in all probability the votes of the perverse will outweigh those of the Catholics, so that they may decree what they like. Within our jurisdiction some wicked men and greedy officials have appeared, who will not pass even the miserable sacristans, who have scarcely enough to eat, but lay on them fines and taxes, which if anyone will not, or cannot, pay, or if he refuses the oath of the king’s supremacy, he shall get well off with the loss of his property and the privation of his office.

Some time ago, as I am credibly informed, there came to this country that deceptive and false bishop called Knox, who in the Isles bordering on Scotland committed such cruel acts on the Catholics, and intends to do the same here, and they assure me he has a commission of martial law from the king to hang, wherever he may find him, any priest or religious, without examination of cause, or the observance of the forms of law and justice.

They are busily employed in planting their colonies, as they call them, depriving the natives and rightful owners of their lands and possessions which they inherited from their ancestors from time immemorial to the present, and giving them to strangers and heretics without law or reason. Feeling these and other grievances, some inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood of Wexford, who are regarded as the most warlike people of the kingdom, and are skilful mariners, have put to sea in a well-found ship, to lead the life of pirates, and harass the heretics.

Come what may let our adversaries plot as they will we are determined to labour as God helps us, instructing our Catholics, and exhorting them never to consent to anything prejudicial to the liberty of the Catholic religion. In other secular affairs we do not mingle, but leave to God to employ His divine providence in behalf of the church when we do what we can.

This year has been one of prodigies here, for the summer has been very dry and hot, and it has twice rained blood in two different parts of the west of Munster. In the cathedral church of this diocese a great fall of snow occurred on the day of the Holy Ghost, though it was then exceedingly hot, and it fell only within the cemetery. May God grant it be of as happy omen as what fell in Rome when the church of Our Lady, St. Mary Major, was founded.

Irish Hierarchy’s Letter to the Church in France

The Irish hierarchy resolved to send a letter of solidarity to the Church in France in 1906 at their October meeting in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. The following is the text of the letter (in translation) sent to Cardinal François-Marie-Benjamin Richard de la Vergne (in photo above), Archbishop of Paris:

Maynooth,
October 10th, 1906.

Your Eminence,

The warm friendship which has always bound the Catholics of Ireland to their brethren in France and the signal favours which we have often received from the great and generous French nation, make it a special duty for us to share in your cares and sorrows, as you shared in ours in the days of our struggles for the faith of Jesus Christ.

We take occasion, therefore, at our annual meeting to express to Your Eminence, to the venerable Episcopate of France, to the clergy and the Catholic people of your country, our deep and most fraternal sympathy in the midst of the bitter trials through which you are passing today.

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Leading Maynooth Theologian Decries Disintegration of the Irish Church

….in 1978!

Monsignor Patrick Francis Cremin, Professor of Moral Theology and Canon Law at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, gave a series of interviews to the Irish Independent in November, 1978, denouncing the doctrinal turmoil in the Irish Church and the pastoral negligence of the Irish hierarchy. A theological conservative, Mgr Cremin grew increasingly disillusioned with the liberal drift of the Irish Church following the Second Vatican Council. In his interviews, Mgr Cremin was highly critical of the implicit endorsement given by the Irish bishops for the legalization of contraception, and what he viewed as their failure to uphold Catholic doctrine on sexual morality. Appended below is the section (abbreviated) on Maynooth seminary, where he was chair of both Moral Theology and Canon Law from 1949 until 1980.

Mgr Cremin had been appointed by Pope John XXIII as an expert to prepare for the Second Vatican Council and served on three of the Council’s commissions. He served as a peritus to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and as an expert to the Irish bishops throughout the Council (as he did at the 1956 Maynooth Plenary Council) and was charged by the papal nuncio with giving the press conference on Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae to an unreceptive Irish media, following its release in 1968. He would later become involved in drafting the new Code of Canon Law.

Mgr Cremin was an instinctively obedient churchman but felt compelled to speak out as a result of concern expressed by laity and fellow-clergy and because he felt the situation in the Irish Church had deteriorated to the point of desperation: “It should go without saying that for one in my position it is quite distasteful to make a contribution that is necessarily critical of the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs by bishops, who, in communion and subject to the Supreme Pontiff, occupy the sacred office of rulers in the Church of Christ. But I am moved to make it because of the great seriousness of the matter in question.”

There is, first, the fact that the Irish Bishops as a body, and especially some of them individually, have not taken the necessary steps to protect our Catholic Faith and Teaching, by ensuring that, in Ireland, professional theologians and pseudo-theologians (and priests influenced by them) were not permitted to propagate with impunity doctrinal and moral teaching that was misleading or unsound.

(I) But they have been permitted, and at a time when our faithful people have become particularly vulnerable to the effects of wrong or confused teaching, since the valuable, indeed the indispensable, programme of catechetical instruction, that had to be covered, in a two or three-year cycle, by priests in their sermons at Sunday Masses, has largely been abandoned.

Moreover, this has happened at a time when such systematic instruction has become particularly necessary for the reassurance of the faithful, who are disposed to think right but are bewildered because of the absence of confirmation of their religious views.

The result is that nowadays our people receive little solid instruction and rarely hear of the commandments of God, or of sin and repentance, or purgatory and hell, or of some of the great Christian truths and devotional practices, such as the sacrifice of the Mass or the value of devotion to Our Lady, especially in the Rosary.

In addition the faithful, and particularly parents of school-going children, have the further anxiety of having to try to cope with the “new catechetics”, and its delayed presentation or dilution (or worse) of the truths to be believed or of the moral principles to be followed by those who are members of the Catholic Church.

(II) There is, secondly, the fact that the Irish Bishops have not taken the necessary measures, over the past several years, to save our national seminary at Maynooth from progressive deterioration and, as I believe, in certain respects near disintegration in vital areas of the life of the seminary and of the formation of the young men being trained in it for the priesthood.

One factor that has largely contributed to this has been the ill-conceived decision taken by the Bishops in 1966 to open our national seminary, in the way it was actually opened, to non-clerical students, including male and female lay students and nuns, without any proper planning or direction then or since, as far as protecting some seminary way of life and the proper formation of its resident clerical students was concerned.

I am not directly concerned here with the National University side of Maynooth College. As regards the seminary proper, things were just allowed to happen and happen, to the detriment of the seminary itself and therefore of the Irish Church, of which this national seminary had been the nerve-centre for more than a century and a half.

And the glory that once was Maynooth, especially in the English-speaking ecclesiastical world and in missionary lands, has vanished, perhaps never to return.

There has been no evidence of order in this seminary for many years, and I am not speaking here of order based on an application of the old strict Maynooth discipline. Moreover, there has been much evidence of disorder, and of lack of due respect for the standards of community living. In fact, when the infection discernible early on in our seminary was not dealt with, it inevitably spread to the point where disorder has gradually come to be taken for granted, and accepted by many as the “order” of the day.

Not only that, but there has been what rather incredibly appears to be a permitted policy of drift and of anarchy or absence of rule. And I am not speaking of authoritarian rule, but of the exercise of that rule which, as the Second Vatican Council emphasised, consists in service that consults the best interests of the individual and of the community.

These unwelcome facts — referred to only very briefly here — concerning our national seminary cannot be discounted by the whitewashing or window-dressing that has gone on, for a number of years now, on the part of some of those who, at the different level of administration and government, have had responsibility for the situation which the facts represent.

From time to time, in publicity exercises in the press or elsewhere, the public have been given to understand by some of them that “All, or nearly all is fair in the garden,” when in actual fact there is no longer any garden but something of a wilderness.

In a situation of this kind, no ordinary business concern could survive, not to speak of an institution comparable to Maynooth College, which is not just any institution but Ireland’s national seminary for the training of young men for the priesthood. But of course the question must be asked: Has our national seminary really survived, if survival is understood to involve the preservation of essential values and standards without which it is no longer what it was?

A tragic aspect of this situation is that those seminarians, who are seriously aspiring to the priesthood, are not receiving the full essential formation for which they came to Maynooth College, even though they are not only willing but anxious to receive it. Naturally they themselves or at least many of them do not even know what they are being deprived of, since they are not aware of what their formation should be. The students themselves, therefore, are the losers and the victims of the situation in the seminary, even without their knowing it.

After all, they did expect some challenge when they came to Maynooth College to be trained for the priesthood. But for that training the only real challenge ultimately is the practice of self-denial and the cultivation of the spiritual life. As a means to that end, some silence, some spirit of contemplation, some curtailment of liberty must be insisted upon, and must be accepted by those who are aspiring to become the official representatives of Christ, who appeals even to any ordinary follower of His to deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Him.

It is not really too surprising then, if, not finding the challenge they expected in some form of curtailment of liberty and self-denial, some clerical students who did appear to have a genuine vocation to the priesthood, have left the seminary in their early years through disillusionment. Neither is it very surprising if, by reason of the confusion to which they have been exposed in some of their theological formation, other clerical students have left the seminary only at a very late stage in their course — perhaps, unfortunately, too few such students.

How many, notwithstanding some theological confusion, have been accepted by their Bishops for priesthood without their complete theological formation being assured, only to add to the confusion of bewildered members of their flock?

Even if our national seminary were to be recreated tomorrow in some appropriate, sensible form, and enabled to rise phoenix-like from its ashes; the question would still have to be asked — how badly served some Irish priests have been who were resident seminarians at Maynooth College during the past ten years. Only the passing of time in their ministry can answer that question for them or for those to whom they will have ministered.

At this stage, the reader must be asking a question he may well have asked for the first time many years ago: What ever went wrong with Maynooth College? Since this question can be answered definitely only by the Bishops responsible for governing the College, and perhaps only by those of them with first-hand knowledge of its government since it was opened to non-clerical students in 1966, one can only speculate on the answer to it.

Is it, perhaps, that the Bishops who did perceive the early ailments and the progressive sickness of our seminary, and who had the will and the courage to try to remedy them, were just not able to prevail against those, maybe only one or two, who gave a bad lead and were supported by others? Certainly, in the recent abnormal and critical years, as never before in the life of Maynooth College, a lead was needed which would be courageous as well as enlightened and wise; or was this too much to hope for in the disordered state of the Catholic Church? The lack of such a lead has cost our national seminary dearly, and therefore also the Irish Church.

For how long more, under Providence, must Maynooth College, and those who are attached to it or concerned about it, suffer in this way?

Read this for an insight into a very different Maynooth (and a very different Ireland). Mgr Cremin is actually mentioned on page 91.

See also: Anonymous Seminarians Criticise Maynooth

Lough Erne and its Shrines (Part 1)

New Rector for Pontifical Irish College in Rome

http://www.irishcollege.org/2011/09/appointment-rector/

Many congratulations to Father Ciarán O’Carroll on his appointment as Rector of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome (founded 1628). Fr O’Carroll is an ecclesiastical historian — I found his book on Cardinal Cullen very impressive and think it challenges some of the received wisdom about that prelate’s life, legacy and attitudes towards movements for political reform. Well worth reading.

Tom Kelly on the Vatican’s Response

This is from today’s Irish News (click to zoom in) — a northern nationalist paper not always sold in the south, but whose religious coverage is generally much more informed and balanced than that of its Dublin counterparts. (Incidentally, if you’re fed up with the increasing fatuity of the Irish Times and Irish Independent, it may be worth considering as an alternative.)


See also the current editorial of the Irish Catholic. Fr Gabriel Burke and Fr John Horgan also make some very good points.

See also the Thirsty Gargoyle’s excellent analysis of the response.

Letter of the Irish Hierarchy to Leo XIII

Maynooth,
January 25th, 1881.

Most Holy Father,

The bishops of Ireland assembled in Maynooth College to transact business connected with its administration deem it their duty to approach Your Holiness with the expression of love and reverence which have always animated the Irish episcopate towards the Apostolic See, and to thank Your Holiness for the fatherly letter which you have lately addressed to them through the Archbishop of Dublin.

It is needless to assure Your Holiness again that every word of counsel and advice coming from the successor of St. Peter will always receive a cheerful and prompt obedience from the children of St. Patrick; for the deepest devotion to the Roman See is Ireland’s special glory, and the proudest page of our history is that which records the unconquerable firmness and constancy with which our predecessors persevered, amid the fiercest storms of persecution, an unbroken union with the successor of Peter. That the love of the father has equalled the devotion of his children is fully attested by the vigilant and truly paternal care with which the Sovereign Pontiffs have in every age constantly watched over the interests of our country. In the letter received by us we find another proof of that fatherly solicitude, and that not the first which Your Holiness has afforded to our afflicted country.
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David Quinn on the Vatican’s Response

Here is David Quinn’s take (listen here) on the Holy See’s response to the Cloyne Report (worth reading in full).

Irish Hierarchy’s Appeal for German Catholic Refugees


The Irish hierarchy issued the following appeal in 1954 at their October meeting in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth:

Very Reverend and Reverend Fathers and dearly beloved brethren:

We desire to draw your attention to the wretched condition, especially from the spiritual standpoint, of the millions of Catholic refugees now in Western Germany.

The Potsdam Agreement in 1945 permitted the Russians to expel 14,000,000 people, mostly Germans, from the territories which came under their control at the end of the war; and of these about 9,000,000 made their way to Western Germany. This number has since been increased by a further 2,000,000, so that there are altogether in Western Germany about 11,000,000 refugees, of whom half are Catholics. The material conditions under which these refugees have to live are indeed wretched, but even more pitiable is the plight, from the spiritual standpoint, of those of them who are Catholics. Considerably more than half their priests died from the hardships which they had to endure during the period of migration, and of those that remain many are old or in delicate health and all are without material resources. The result is that large numbers of these poor Catholics are deprived of the ministrations of religion and of the consolations which Holy Mass and the sacraments could bring them.

Belgian and other Catholics have already done much to alleviate the needs of their refugee brethren in Germany; and we too, deeply sensible of their pitiable condition, have undertaken to help in founding a Mission House in Western Germany, from which priests will go out to celebrate Mass for refugees, to administer the sacraments to them and to give them sermons and instructions.

We ask you, Very Reverend and Reverend Fathers and dearly beloved brethren, to co-operate with us in this charitable work. These refugee Catholics are our brothers in Christ, they are bound to us by a bond more sacred and precious than that of humanity or fatherland; and they are in dire distress. We appeal to you then to pray that God may alleviate their condition, material as well as spiritual, and join with us in helping towards the establishment of a Mission House. Contributions for this purpose may be given to the parochial clergy or sent directly to the bishop of the diocese. No formal collection will be made.

Circular Letter of Mgr Pedro Ladislao González y Estrada, Bishop of Havana, on the Irish Situation

The following is the text of a circular letter (in translation) issued by Monsignor Pedro Ladislao González y Estrada, Bishop of Havana (Cuba), on 22nd May, 1921:

Extraordinary circular letter urging the faithful to plead Almighty God so that the sad situation of Ireland may cease.

Ireland! The country that has so justly merited the name of “Isle of Saints,” the Catholic nation by excellence, the self-denied mother of noble and heroic martyrs, finds herself to-day in great tribulation, such as has had no precedent in the history of civilised countries.

That country, chosen by the Divine Providence to bear the foundations of the fervent and glorious churches of North America and Australia, mourns at present the persecution of its religious faith.

That free and supreme country is now crushed by the most odious tyranny, while her unquestionable rights, trampled now and again, are not vindicated by the nations that recently proclaimed themselves before the world to be the support of helpless and feeble countries.
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Under Sentence of Death: A Prison Diary

The Last Monk: Monastic Beehive Huts of Skellig Michael

H/T Loyal to the Magisterium

Competing Powers: Conor O’Mahony, Spain and England

John Minahane has an interesting response (‘The Self-Confidence of the Gaels’) in the current issue of Church and State to Pat Muldowney’s review (which I posted here) of his new book on An Argument Defending the Right of the Kingdom of Ireland — authored by the Lisbon-based Jesuit theologian Conor O’Mahony in 1645. He states that O’Mahony would be more accurately described as an Irish Ilya Ehrenburg than Ireland’s Himmler. While Minahane acknowledges Muldowney’s praise of the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay as an “example of the contrast between the expansive cultures of Europe and other cultures” he also points out that the Paraguayan Jesuit Reductions presupposed an acknowledged cultural ascendancy which the Irish did not accord to their English conquerors: “They weren’t worthy of it. And they were never going to be worthy of it, no matter what they might do.”

Though already inclined to apologize politely for their community’s failings (even Hugh O’Neill did so on occasion!), the Irish had a tenacious feeling of being on an equal if not better level. I think that much can be gathered from O’Mahony’s book. Or from Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s book published a quarter of a century earlier. Or from the Remonstrance of the Irish Princes which was sent to the Pope in 1317, with its tremendous denunciation of the Anglo-Normans as wreckers of Irish civilization. Or even from Gerald of Wales’s accounts of his interchanges with Gaelic Irish prelates like the Archbishop of Cashel, right at the beginning of the conquest.

The Irish thought pretty highly of themselves. By the same token, the English feeling of cultural superiority was still undeveloped, though Francis Bacon and John Davies were working hard at it. One can feel the insecurity in someone like the writer of Pacata Hibernia, who is so obsessed with the personality and career of that great blighted talent, Florence McCarthy (whom the English twice kidnapped, for want of a better way of dealing with him), hating him like poison and yet fascinated by him.

Even the crushing material superiority of the English was only finally proved by Cromwell. Before that one might fancy the chances of the Irish side, as O’Mahony does. Actually, one major reason for this is unmentionable for O’Mahony because of his Portuguese attachments: the power of Spain. Spain was the greatest Catholic State and one could easily imagine that Spanish power would be able to establish and sustain its supporters in possession of Ireland against the English.

Supposing you were the ally of Philip II (then ruler of an empire on which the sun never set, whereas English imperial activity had hardly begun), why should you be overawed by the English? Or even supposing you were the potential ally of Philip III or Philip IV? It seems that the hope of being rescued by the power of Spain was still important in the 1640s. I cannot fill in all the details, but I think the Pope did not consider re-donating Ireland to Spain in 1647 without somebody in Ireland pressing for him to do so.

But it wasn’t only the real or intended allies of the Philips who felt no sense of inferiority. The land was full of people for whom Ireland was the measure of Ireland. It’s hard to get a feeling of that now, but in many ways it shaped all that happened.

Minahane’s aim has been to “try to restore a sense of Irish perspectives and Irish concerns, distinct from English concerns, in the 1640s and 17th century Irish history generally”.

No one has such a burden of hindsight as the historians of Ireland. How much they know, in their smug wisdom, that no one knew in 1645! With my book on O’Mahony I hoped to provoke some vestige of the sense of ignorance — that feeling of not knowing everything, of suffering some sort of lack of clear understanding, which makes us want to check all our bearings again.

Minahane’s book, which contains an introduction, explanation and translation of O’Mahony’s treatise, can be purchased from Athol Books here (scroll down to the bottom of the page) for €20. It is very well worth reading and gives a sad but exciting insight into the prospects facing the remnants of a rich and ancient civilization, just on the eve of its demise.

The aforementioned “Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s book published a quarter of a century earlier” is a reference to Hiberni vindiciae Hibernicae contra Giraldum Cambrensem (published in Lisbon in 1625) — and more commonly known as Zoilomastix. (The Latin text is reposted in full by Fr Aubrey Gwynn SJ in the Irish Manuscript Commission’s Analecta Hibernica of November, 1934). It also gives a fascinating insight into Gaelic Irish self-conception and how Irish nobles positioned themselves within a wider continental context. Far from being insular and isolated, Irish Gaels had close and long-established commercial, fishing and even scholarly links with Spain. In the popular self-conception of Gaelic Ireland the Irish race was descended from Miles Hispaniae. (Interestingly, recent studies in genetics by Prof. Brian Sykes of Oxford University have found a high level of genetic similarity between northern Iberia and Ireland, and suggests that these myths are at least partially derived from oral tradition of actual historical events).

Exiled Irish nobles in Spain put strong emphasis on what they claimed were the Spanish origins and identity of Ireland. O’Sullivan Beare is no exception. He is keen to assert the constant loyalty of the Irish to Catholicism since the time of St. Patrick, the fused ethno-religious relationship of the Irish to the Spanish and the suffering of the Irish at the hands of the English. This sense of fellow-feeling is reciprocated by their hosts (nuestros hermanos irlandeses, los españoles del norte as the Conde de Caracena, Governor of Galicia, wrote to King Philip III, after receiving O’Donnell with the most extravagant hospitality — the local archbishop even offered him his palace!) and Irish pretences to Iberian blood purity are simply accepted at face value (The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Ford and McCafferty. [Cambridge University Press, 2005; p. 225.]) Unlike English law, Gaelic titles and social structures were upheld by the Spanish Crown; this is noteworthy given Spain’s contemporary concern with limpieza de sangre. (Incidentally, after O’Donnell died, his remains were interred with full regal honours in Valladolid Cathedral, where a monument was erected in his honour by the King of Spain.) Irish exiles were accorded a unique and privileged position in Spanish society — not without provoking resentment from some other European immigrants. This is because the Irish were viewed in Spain not as foreigners but as a northerly variant of the Spanish race — as ‘Northern Spaniards’.

This sets the context for ‘the self-confidence of the Gaels’. The destruction of Ireland was not an inevitable prospect and there is no reason why the Irish should have thought it was. Far from being isolated and militarily impotent to resist, as has often been thought, the Irish were intimate allies of what was then the most powerful country in the world – Spain.

Nothing makes for friendship like a common enemy. The political undertone and agenda of Irish appeals is easily discernible in a 1618 report on Ireland by the exiled Archbishop of Tuam, Florence Carthy, to King Philip III. Archbishop Carthy’s report offers a valuable insight into the conditions of early 17th century Ireland, and relations between the Irish and English nations. Particularly strong is his emphasis on the distinctions between the Irish and English and in his suggestions that the King should undertake an invasion of Ireland, which would be in the interests of Spain: “And the Ancient Irish, as these are descended from the Spanish, desire always to be governed by the Kings of Spain and their successors, and bear affection and love to the Spanish nation. Likewise great hate and enmity to their enemies and are sharp of wit and valiant in war, altogether like the Spaniard.” This is also seen a year later in the report of a Salamanca-educated Irish priest to the King lamenting the Stuart Plantation of Ulster, with the enterprise characterised as an attempt to undo the Milesian invasion of Ireland (the Milesian invasion is seen by the author as having been holy and beneficial) and native evictees described as ‘Catholic and Spanish Irish’. Whether factually accurate or not, the intent in both cases is not mere flattery but to convince the King of his obligation to help brethren in distress. When you’re faced with an indefinite period of persecution, the spoliation of all your property and the destruction of your entire society, it usually helps to have friends in high places. But, ultimately, not in this instance.

Sir Henry Wallop Ponders Irish Obstinacy

In a report dated June 10, 1582, Sir Henry Wallop (then Queen Elizabeth I’s Lord Justice of Ireland and soon to become a prominent figure in the Plantation of Munster) writes to William Cecil expressing frustration at the insubordination of the Irish and their refusal to conform to the Protestant religion:

The causes of rebellion, my good Lord, as I conceive them are these: — The great affection they generally bear to the Popish Religion, which agreeth with their humour, that having committed murder, incest, thefts, with other execrable offences, by hearing a mass, confessing themselves to a priest, or obtaining the Pope’s pardon, they persuade themselves they are forgiven. And hearing mass on Sunday or Holyday, they think all the week after they may do what heinous offence soever and it is dispensed withal.

They also hate our nation, partly through general mislike and disdain one nation hath to be governed by another, partly that we are contrary to them in religion, and lastly they seek to have the government among themselves.

The governours, for fear to stir them to rebellion, dare not, or have not power, to punish any outrage by any of the Irish Lords.

The Arrest of Fr James McFadden: Debate at Westminster (1889)

PART II PART III

For background to this debate see also this excellent essay: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~donegal/chapter_one.htm

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Vatican II, Liturgical Reform and the Church in Ireland

I am compiling a historical scrapbook on Vatican II and the subsequent liturgical reforms in the Church in Ireland. If you are interested, please send me an email and I’ll send it as an attachment.

Email: shanesemail2010atgmail.com (replace ‘at’ with @)

Vernacular in the Liturgy: Views of Clergy in England on the Eve of the Council

In May 1960, the Committee of The Vernacular Society of Great Britain decided to undertake a survey of priests to ascertain their opinions on the further application of the vernacular in the liturgy. The Society existed to “promote the use of the vernacular in the liturgical worship of the Catholic Church in Great Britain” and hoped the results of the survey would inform the prepatory work of the upcoming Ecumenical Council. Due to a lack of resources, the Society opted to confine the survey to one diocese — the Diocese of Portsmouth — and received the permission of Archbishop John Henry King to send a questionnaire to the clergy (both secular and regular) of that diocese.

The questionnaire was sent in July 1960 to a total of 302 priests — 137 secular and 165 regular — and replies were received from 122 priests (40%), of whom 60 were secular priests and 62 were regular.

The findings were published in the appendix section of the Clergy Review, April 1961, and are reposted below, preceded by the questions.

The questionnaire is prefaced with the observation that “the reform of the liturgy, initiated by St Pius X and continued under his successors, especially Pope Pius XII, is likely to be completed at the Second Vatican Council. In view of the interest aroused by suggestions that the Church should make greater use of the vernacular, at the expense of Latin, in the liturgy, The Vernacular Society of Great Britain, with the gracious permission of His Grace the Archbishop-Bishop of Portsmouth, has prepared this questionnaire, in the hope that the findings may assist in the prepatory work of the Council.”

PART I — Prepatory Questions

(1) If you are generally in favour of some use of English in the Mass number the following reasons in the order of their importance:

(a) The People would be made one with each other in Christ, and so formed into a community, more effectively, if they could pray aloud together and hear the Word of God in a language they understood.
(b) The liturgy would better achieve one of its own purposes, which is to teach people to know and love their Faith.
(c) In the Dialogue Mass, the people would be able to pray with their minds and hearts and not just in a mechanical way.
(d) It is more fitting that the Word of God should be proclaimed to the People of God in their own language.
(e) The Mass would be made more interesting and attractive, not only to our own people, but also to non-Catholics.
(f) The English language has its own dignity and beauty.

(2) If you are generally against any use of English at Mass, number the following reasons in the order of their importance:

(a) It would be detrimental to the unity of the Church.
(b) The Mass would no longer be so impressively the same everywhere.
(c) Such a change would be disloyal to the traditions of our martyrs in penal times.
(d) There is no popular demand.
(e) It would destroy the valuable element of mystery.
(f) It is difficult to make a fitting translation of the Latin.


PART II — The Mass

I would like to see the following parts in English:

(1) The Liturgy of the Word of God — The Fore-Mass

(a) the Kyrie. Yes/No
(b) the Gloria. Yes/No
(c) the Collect. Yes/No
(d) the Epistle. Yes/No
(e) the Gospel. Yes/No

(2) The Eucharistic Liturgy — The Holy Sacrifice

(a) the Secret. Yes/No
(b) the Postcommunion. Yes/No
(c) The Preface. Yes/No
(d) the Sanctus. Yes/No
(e) the Pater Noster. Yes/No
(f) the Agnus Dei. Yes/No


PART III — The Liturgy of Holy Week

I would like to see the following parts in English:

(a) the Passion. Yes/No
(b) other Scriptural lessons. Yes/No
(c) the Collects. Yes/No
(d) the Hymns. Yes/No


PART IV — The Divine Office

(a) I would like the Divine Office, when publicly celebrated, to be in English. Yes/No
(b) I would like to be able to recite the Divine Office in English. Yes/No

There is a God

Irish Hierarchy’s Resolutions on Catholic Education (1873)

The following resolutions were adopted by the Irish hierarchy at a meeting in Dublin on 15th and 16th October, 1873:

Resolution No. 1. That, with a view to the improvement of Catholic Education, and in order to make our University a great centre of Catholic education throughout Ireland, we will take immediate steps to affiliate to it the several Colleges, Seminaries, and higher schools of our respective dioceses; that we approve and adopt the scheme proposed to our meeting relative to examinations for Matriculation and Degrees in Arts, Philosophy, and Theology; and that we sanction the arrangements for the creation of Bourses and Exhibitions, and authorize the University Council to complete and carry out this scheme in all its details.

Resolution No. 2. That we pledge ourselves to have the prescribed collection for the Catholic University made every year on the third Sunday of November, in every parish of our respective dioceses, giving it precedence of all local claims.
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Cardinal Pell on ‘Authentic Catholicism vs Cafeteria Catholicism’

Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, gave an address on ‘Authentic Catholicism vs Cafeteria Catholicism’ at the Catholic Voice Annual Dinner in Cork on 29th July. The following is the text of the address (slightly edited) from the current issue of the Catholic Voice newspaper.

Where Have All the Fighters Gone?

I am not going to talk about the Church in Ireland but I am going to talk about what I am trying to do in Australia, as an archbishop, and you can draw your own conclusions on what might, or what might not, be adaptable to here in Ireland. Despite my English Protestant name (and I am proud of my English heritage) I have plenty of Irish blood, most of it Catholic, and so I think that entitles me to make the first point, and that is that we Irish Australians, and I suspect the Irish, enjoy bad news. It’s like the Englishman whose face will light up when he says, ‘Isn’t the weather terrible?’ This, then, is my question: has all the good Irish blood gone overseas into the colonies? The Irish that I grew up with were fighters: they were people who had convictions and went and battled for them. Has the spirit of Dr. Daniel Mannix — one of the greatest exports of Cork — has his spirit vanished forever from this land? Are you going to sit on your tails and let 1000 years of tradition and faith just slip away? People are saying to me the same things they were saying to me back in 1998; we need this, we need that, nobody is doing anything — well, if nobody else is doing anything then you have to get it started yourself and if help comes, as it might or might not, at least you’re doing things. I realise that your presence here tonight is evidence of your desire and determination to do something BUT things are slipping and, from what I hear, you know you are slipping; so if others won’t act then do something yourselves.
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Patrician Year (1961): Cardinal D’Alton’s Pastoral Letter

Cardinal D’Alton enters Croke Park on the final day of the Dublin Congress, 25th June, 1961

The following letter from Cardinal John D’Alton, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, was read out in all the churches of the Archdiocese of Armagh on Sunday, 12th March, 1961:

In a few days time Ireland will begin the solemn commemoration of the fifteenth centenary of the death of St. Patrick. Here in St. Patrick’s own city of Armagh the Irish people, represented by dignitaries from the four provinces of the land, will give thanks to God for the Saint who came to us over fifteen hundred years ago and brought us the gift ‘more precious than gold,’ of the Catholic faith. On that day too, Ireland will be joined by Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops from all over the world who are coming to share our joy and to unite with the Irish people in giving thanks to God for all that He has done for Ireland through Saint Patrick and for the Church through Ireland.

Above all, the occasion will be crowned with the presence of the special Legate, His Eminence Cardinal McIntyre, whom our beloved Holy Father is graciously sending to us to preside, in his name, over the solemn ceremonies. The successor of Pope Celestine who, over fifteen hundred years ago, sent his missionary to pagan Ireland, to-day sends his own Legatus a latere to an Ireland which has remained faithful through the centuries to the words of her great Apostle: ut Christiani ita et Romani sitis.
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Faith — The Virtue

Day of National Thanksgiving: Cardinal MacRory’s Statement

The following statement was issued by Cardinal Joseph MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, on 7th June, 1945:

Some days ago it was suggested to me by some of our Bishops that I should appoint a Day of National Thanksgiving to Almighty God for having saved our dear country from the horrors of war. Before doing so I thought it advisable that the members of the Standing Committee of the Bishops should be consulted, and it is only to-day that I have received the last of their replies.

All are strongly in favour of the suggestion, and I now appoint the 29th of June — the great Feast of SS. Peter and Paul — as the Day of National Thanksgiving.

Fortunately the Irish Government has just declared the 29th of June a Bank Holiday, and this will leave the great bulk of the people free to join in the religious celebration. The details of the devotions for the occasion will be arranged by the Bishops at their general meeting in Maynooth about the middle of the month and announced in due course.

Irish Hierarchy’s Statement on the Turmoil in Argentina


The following statement was issued in 1955 by the Irish hierarchy at their June meeting in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth:

The Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland, assembled at Maynooth on the occasion of their general meeting, express their deep sympathy with the great Catholic nation of Argentina in the grievous trials which it has endured during the last year.

Recalling the many links that bind our countries we ask our people to offer fervent prayers that God may restore peace, liberty of conscience and the tranquility of order to the Argentine Republic.

Given at Maynooth on 21st June, 1955.

Signed on behalf of the archbishops and bishops of Ireland.

Chairman

+JOHN D’ALTON,
Archbishop of Armagh,
Primate of All Ireland.

Secretaries

+WILLIAM MacNEELY,
Bishop of Raphoe.

+JAMES FERGUS,
Bishop of Achonry.

Letter of the Bishop of Danzig

Reports that the Bishop of Danzig, Rt. Rev. Count Edward O’Rourke, was killed by communists in January, 1940, caused a stir in his ancestral homeland. Bishop O’Rourke’s ancestors belonged to the Ua Ruairc of Bréifne, but fled to the continent with the Wild Geese in the 17th century. After first establishing themselves in France, the family eventually settled in Russia and, like many exiled Irish dynasties, could boast of distinguished military acheivements. The family maintained strong contacts with Ireland, and continued to regard themselves as Irish. During the Famine the O’Rourkes organized food relief and sent a food ship to Ireland with supplies. Bishop O’Rourke was present at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin (“I would not have missed it for anything”). In this letter to a friend in Dublin from February, 1940, he reassures him that he is still living and denies the media reports:

I have been three months in Rome awaiting in vain for a German visum to go back to Posen. The most part of September I was in Poland; practically all the time of the warfare there.

I was in Warsaw and in Siedlce during the bombardment of these cities, and came out of Poland with the help of a sympathetic German General, who sent me, with a motor car, to Eastern Prussia, and from there by sea I reached Stettin, and then Berlin and Rome.

The Germans were very kind to me, but they did not, and do not, wish me to go back to Posen.

The rumours, spread in the papers, that I was killed by the Bolshevists, were probably caused by the fact that my cousin, Count Charles O’Rourke, was arrested by the Bolshevists, and it was said that he was killed. But he was only put in prison, and is till now detained, in horrible circumstances, in a cell with 30 other prisoners. He is 78 years of age, ill, and very weak.

The President of Lithuania, Mr. Smetana, is trying to liberate him, but till now without success.

I was very amused by the cutting of the English paper. I am sorry I cannot confirm the good news it brought about me. But, fortunately, the bad news in the ‘Sunday Independent’ was not true.

In Ireland there are many happy people and I hope Ireland will remain neutral and not take part in that terrible trouble the Continent is going through.

Le catholicisme du type irlandais

An editorial in the Irish Catholic newspaper on the reaction to the Cloyne Report has harsh words on Irish Catholicism:

“Le catholicisme du type Irlandais” in many ways betrayed 14 centuries of unbroken and life-giving Christian tradition. Instead of fond memories of a nurturing Church, most remember an arrogant authoritarian Irish Church and a privileged clerical caste that obsessed over sexuality and hell fire and neglected the tender compassion of Christ.

These are not my memories. I struggle to recall even a single instance of a priest ever mentioning sex in a sermon. Perhaps that’s because I’m young — but even in the very different Church of the 1950s Irish priests rarely preached about sex (except at parish missions). I suggest most Irish Catholics could more easily relate to the experience of Eamon Ryan, leader of the Irish Green Party: “my childhood was defined more by the freedom and hope that came from the Second Vatican Council rather than any sense of religious repression.”

Attempts to isolate the peculiarities of Irish Catholicism (whether real or imagined) have a long history but recent reports have given the discussion renewed vigour. On the part of Irish Catholics themselves, this often descends into narrow, narcissistic navel-gazing. Stereotypes and prejudices about the Church in Ireland also seem to flourish on the Catholic blogosphere and I wonder if they really would survive critical scrutiny.

Has a lop-sided focus on the defects of Irish religious tradition (again, whether real or imagined) created a distorted image of its historic social role? Liberal theologian and literary professor, Fr Joseph S. O’Leary, believes so. Discussing the portrayal of priests in modern Irish literature, he expresses concern that recognition is not being given to the positive part played by clergy in Irish society:

I am afraid that the image of the clergy seen in the sombre mirror of twentieth century Irish fiction is a depressing one, more déclin than grandeur. Literature rarely flatters. If one were to portray married life in the nineteenth century on the basis of novels, it would seem an unrelieved hell. Yet the clerical reader of this literature is troubled – sua res agitur – for it chimes all too closely with the critical assault on Irish Catholicism now afoot in the real world. In both cases, justice is not being done to the admirable qualities of many Irish priests, the dedication, compassion, piety, which left a salutary mark on Irish society. The clergy, in their homilies and in their very presence held out the moral law to the Irish people. If their moral preaching fell into an abusive sexual puritanism, this was in harmony with the popular mindset of rural Ireland. If they preached Law more than Gospel, and if their sermons were theologically and biblically undernourished (as is still the case), this was compensated for by the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion, which effectively brought the mercy and peace of Christ to the faithful. Today Ireland has acquired a new reputation for corruption in political and business life and crime is rampant. The disabled clergy no longer provide a moral voice.

A recent editorial in the Irish Jesuit magazine Studies likewise points out that Catholicism was once viewed as a very important component of Irish identity and its decline has left many people confused about who they are. Studies has certainly played a valuable role in Irish society. Since its foundation in 1912, it has functioned for the greater part of its existence as Ireland’s leading intellectual journal. Its academic heritage is fascinating.

But what actually interests me more are the criticisms of Irish Catholicism from a Catholic angle, and the defects (whether of a theological, liturgical or pastoral natural) that are frequently attributed to the Irish Church. Is the very negative perception that prevails on the blogosphere really just or warranted? Personally I have found these criticisms to rarely rise above cliché or caricature. I was discussing this with commenter jaykay, who discerned some common impressions of Irish Catholicism on Anglophone Catholic blogs: “that pre-V2 people attended [Mass] in droves, because of social compulsion, Masses that were liturgically inadequate and in Victorian churches of dubious architectural merit festooned with gaudy statues, and that the Irish Church was basically a peasant Church for a peasant people producing no distinguished theologians or music or art etc. Now, some of this was true to some extent, as we know, but it by no means encapsulates the reality and I think that your site brings this out.”

I would welcome discussion on this from readers, whether Irish or not. Despite my overall positive take on Irish Catholicism, feel free to disagree.

(Note: This post and the comments will be deleted after 21 days so don’t get overly worried about saying something you might later want to revise.)

Change in Irish Catholicism: Some Reminiscences

Many thanks to Fr. Seán Coyle for these fascinating reminiscences:

Vatican II and the Church in Ireland:

The Irish bishops seemed to convey a sense of obedience: ‘This is what we’ve been asked to do so we’ll do it’. As I recall, they didn’t keep the people particularly well informed about the Council. Those who did were journalists as Kevin O’Kelly of RTE, Sean Mac Reamoinn [see here - shane] and Louis McRedmond. All of these were committed Catholics even if the first two might have leaned towards the ‘liberal’ side’. This is not a negative comment. I’m not sure about Louis McRedmond, whether he was ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. These were journalists of integrity.

My Dad was a daily Massgoer and a man of habit but I never heard him comment on the change. He was also a builder’s foreman and when the EEC, as it then was, introduced metric measures into building he took it in his stride.

In the Archdiocese of Dublin Archbishop McQuaid ordered that one Mass every Sunday be in Irish. Someone said to him ‘You are starting a revolution!’ He replied. ‘No, preventing a rebellion!’ Some criticised having a Mass in Irish. This used to raise my hackles as it was usually from the kind of person who had ‘always gone to the 9 o’clock Mass and I don’t understand this language’ and who would never consider the possibility of going to Mass at 7, 8, 10, 11 or 12! [see also: Liturgical Reform in Ireland - shane]

The introduction of English Masses in one or two breac-Gaeltacht parishes has caused great controversy on occasion.

Patrician Year (1961): Pontifical High Mass at Croke Park, 25th June

I was on duty that day outside Croke Park as a member of the Congress Volunteer Corps, a group of Fifth and Sixth Year students from Catholic boys’ schools in Dublin. I had just finished my Leaving Cert in nearby O’Connell Schools. You can see members of the CVC in the video. The uniform was simple: dark trousers and white shirt, which we provided ourselves, a beret – yellow for those without any special jobs and other colours for those with specific responsibilities – epaulettes and a stick. The stick wasn’t to beat anyone with but could be helpful in crowd control, indicating a line. One of the members of the CVC was the now Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

One memory I have of that morning is seeing Sean T. O’Kelly, then in retirement, Frank Aiken and one or two other older members of Fianna Fail getting out of a very modest car. They got a big cheer from those nearby. Sean T was a very popular man and gave a wonderfully entertaining talk at the National Stadium during the Congress. He had everyone eating out of his hand. [see also this delightful clip of President O'Kelly going to Mass and the St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin on 17th March, 1950 - shane] May they all rest in peace.

One thing I remember vividly was the 90,000 raising the roof with Credo III. I also felt an outsider, ( I don’t mean because I was outside the stadium) as I had never been taught it in 14 years in Catholic schools. The singing raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

The CVC, organised by the late Monsignor Tom Fehily, was formally disbanded by Taoiseach Sean Lemass outside Dublin Airport after Cardinal Agagianian flew back to Rome. However, it was soon to become the Archbishop’s Volunteer Corps that was to be involved in various projects in the Archdiocese of Dublin. It was later opened to girls. I’ve an idea that the AVC is no more but am not sure.

Some of us went on the Dublin Diocesan Pilgrimage to Beauraing, Belgium, that August, a wonderful experience. We were subsidised by the Archdiocese and paid only £5, which even in those days was a great bargain. We did ceremonial duty in Beauraing. The present Archbishop of Dublin was in the group that travelled.

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Commenting on a previous post, Keiran Fagan also helpfully noted:

I was there too, only I had a red beret, as I was a “minder”, aide de camp Fr Tom Fehilly called it, for Cardinal Paolo Marella. It was a seriously cool gig for a 16-year-old, riding around in the front of a big Austin Princess limo, opening doors for the cardinal and making sure nobody, not even a reverend mother, got to put milk in his inevitable cup of tea. I saw up close John Charles McQuaid and Eamon de Valera who was totally blind by then. John Charles had three great cars, a Citroen Light 15 (Maigret had one) a Hudson Fluid Drive limo with eight cylinders I think, and a beautiful Citroen DS. I even got to sit in the back of Dev’s 1947 or 8 blue Rolls Royce ZJ 5000 while it was parked in the yard in Dublin Castle. Great times, but I don’t recall any religious epiphany moments. Says more about me than anything else I reckon.

Writing in 1974, John Feeney (the late journalist and editor of The Catholic Standard) described the Patrician Year Congress as the summit of Dr. McQuaid’s tenure as Archbishop of Dublin. Feeney was very much a Vatican II Catholic. At UCD he founded the ecumenical Student Christian Movement. He also became chairman of Pax Romana and leader of Grille, a left-wing Christian movement. As a leading Catholic radical, Feeney had reason more than most to resent McQuaid’s conservative views. Nevertheless in a critically sympathetic biography, he gives a largely positive assessment of the archbishop’s legacy and challenges some of the lazy caricatures then being propounded by vituperative critics.

Feeney contrasts the pre-revolutionary tranquility that characterized the Patrician Year celebrations in 1961 with the post-conciliar chaos soon to emerge. He believed that the Irish Catholic laity and hierarchy were deeply attached to the old order and were ‘oblivious to the vast changes in the whole world outlook of Catholics which was to come’: “There was little evidence after the election in 1958 of Pope John that the nature of Catholicism would change greatly…matters were much the same as ever for the majority of Irish Catholics. They had a saintly, loveable Pope who commanded respect but there was little understanding of the new thinking he was initiating…almost three years after the election of Pope John, there seemed to be little change in Dublin…the success and triumphs of the 1950s continued.” The faithful, Feeney asserts, responded enthusiastically to the Congress with “a mixture of nationalism, religious fervour and civic pride” and he quotes the pious report of the Irish Catholic Directory: “A majestic carillon pealed, a silver-voiced fanfare of military trumpets sounded in Royal Salute, ninety thousand lips moved in silent prayer.” For Feeney, the Patrician Year celebrations give “a glittering bejewelled spectacle of Catholic life just before the Council — it was a garden party before the outbreak of war, before the realities of the Church in the world impinged too strongly on Ireland.”

Archbishop McQuaid’s Letter on the Silver Jubilee of Pope Pius XII

The following letter from the Most Rev. John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, was read out in all the churches of the Diocese of Dublin on Sunday, 10th May, 1942:

On the 13th May will occur the 25th anniversary of the Episcopal Consecration of His Holiness Pope Pius XII. The whole Catholic world will celebrate the event with an intimate fervour that finds its explanation in the words of Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ: “Thou are Peter and upon this Rock I will build My Church.” (S. Matt. xvi, 18.) We salute in Pius XII the Vicar on earth of Jesus Christ Himself.

At all times, Catholics offer to his august person the tribute of a faith and love which recognize in him the Father of Christendom, the infallible Guardian of Christian revelation and the supreme Judge of Christian morality.

In this event, however, of the Pope’s Episcopal Jubilee, all the faithful will see a providential occasion of asserting, in these days of confusion and fear, their unity of mind with the teachings of the Holy Father and their eagerness to co-operate with his efforts to re-establish Christian life. In the unique loneliness of his sacred office, Pius XII must surely be gladdened by the expression of firm loyalty and filial sympathy which this Jubilee will evoke.

In this city and diocese of Dublin, where the life of prayer and charity is so marked, our faithful people will welcome this opportunity of manifesting their union with the Holy See and their affection for the present Holy Father.

The better to provide for the worthy celebration of the Jubilee, we exhort all the faithful, in particular the children, to approach the Sacrament of Penance and to receive Holy Communion on the 17th May, the Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension. In this Diocese, Exposition of the Most Blessed Sacrament is hereby prescribed for at least some hours on that day, in all Churches and Oratories where the May Devotions are usually held.

It is indeed fitting that the Jubilee of the Holy Father should fall in the month of Mary. To her has been committed by God the task of confounding the powers of evil; to her also it belongs, under God, to lead men gently to the true knowledge and love of her Divine Son.

We would urge you, then, to ask all the Faithful who gather this month about the feet of Mary, to beseech God to bless the Sovereign Pontiff with the gifts of wisdom and strength demanded by his most difficult office. Obedient to the instructions of the Holy Father, let us pray in particular for a just and Christian peace, in which full honour will be paid to the absolute rights of Our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ.

You will, in fine, remind the faithful that we must endeavour, each in his own life, to prepare that peace by strict adherence to the supernatural standards of Christian living; in particular, by the practice of justice and charity towards all men without exception, by an effective compassion for the poor, by willing self-denial in the special duties of our state, and by the generous acceptance of the sufferings that may be our lot.

Letter of Pope Pius XII to Cardinal MacRory

To Our Beloved Son,

JOSEPH MacRORY,

Cardinal Priest of the Holy Roman Church under the title of St. John before the Latin Gate,

Archbishop of Armagh.

PIUS PP. XII.

Beloved Son, health and Apostolic Benediction.

We have been recently informed that you are about to complete the twenty-fifth year since your appointment as Bishop. This happy and truly sacred event provides Us with a most welcome occasion of paternally rejoicing with you, and of manifesting publicly and gladly the goodwill which We have always entertained towards you.

Well known indeed is the pastoral solicitude with which, first during your reign in Down and Connor and then in your present illustrious Metropolitan See, you have earnestly striven to promote and guard the salvation of souls. Equally known, too, is the simple faith and filial devotion to God of your people, whom you hold deeply attached to you by the closest bonds of charity.

Wherefore, Beloved Son, while we extol with paternal praise your outstanding merits in relation to the Church, We publicly and earnestly give expression to Our congratulations, and take part in the celebration of the sacred occasion with Our fervent wishes and hopes. We do this the more gladly because We are fully aware of your fidelity to, and veneration for the Holy See; nor do We doubt that from the happiness of your Episcopal Jubilee you will derive even new strength to do greater things day by day for the flock committed to your charge.

But in order that the coming feast may prove more beneficial to your faithful children We spontaneously authorize that on an appointed day, after the Holy Sacrifice has been celebrated with Pontifical rite, you bless in Our name and by Our authority all present, and announce a Plenary Indulgence, to be gained on all the usual conditions prescribed by the Church.

Finally, to yourself soon to complete your eightieth year, We wish an abundance of health and happiness, earnestly beseeching God by the riches of His heavenly consolations to preserve and guard you for many a day, and win for you more and more the respectful esteem and affection of the faithful.

May the Apostolic Benediction, which We impart most lovingly in the Lord to you, Our Beloved Son, and to all the clergy and people entrusted to your care, herald and call down these heavenly favours and be a witness of Our special esteem.

Given at Rome, at St. Peter’s, July 15, 1940, second year of Our Pontificate.

PIUS PP. XII

Letter of Pope Pius XI to the Archbishop of Cashel


The following letter was sent by Pope Pius XI to the Most Rev. John Mary Harty, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, on 18th January, 1939. It was the last letter that pope sent to Ireland, before his death a few weeks later.

Venerable Brother, health and Apostolic Benediction.

When We learned that the solemn day of the 25th anniversary of your Episcopal consecration was at hand we immediately had Our paternal congratulations on the happy event conveyed to you by telegram, but We feel that you have deserved so well of the Church and have so faithfully served with filial devotion this Apostolic See that some clearer and more lively expression is called for, so We decided to send you this letter also to affirm Our special friendship for you and to convey more explicitly Our good wishes.

Meanwhile We earnestly pray the Giver of all good gifts that He may preserve and guard you for many long and fruitful years filled with heavenly gifts.

Let Our Apostolic Blessing be the promise and pledge of these gifts from above and a witness of Our special love for you. We give it most lovingly to you Venerable Brother, and to the clergy and faithful entrusted to your care.

PIUS PP. XI

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