THE RELIGIOUS QUESTION
"I am convinced that if the void in the lay leadership of the
country be filled up by higher education of the better classes
among the Catholic laity, the power of the priests, so far as
it is abnormal or unnecessary, will pass away."
--DR. O'DEA, now Bishop of Clonfert, speaking in evidence
before the Robertson Commission on University Education, as
the representative of Maynooth College. Appendix to Third
Report, p. 296.
The scruples of George III., who although as King of Ireland he yielded
to the claims of Catholics to the suffrage by giving the Royal consent
to the enfranchising Act of Grattan's Parliament in 1793, were such that
they made him declare that his coronation oath compelled him to maintain
the Protestantism of the United Parliament of the three kingdoms and
express himself to Dundas of opinion that Pitt's emancipation proposals
were "the most Jacobinical thing ever seen."
The continuance for thirty years of these political disabilities, and
the obligation incumbent on Catholics to support an alien Church with
the full weight of endowments and tithes, did more than anything else to
maintain the wall of prejudice between the two creeds which the eighteen
years of Grattan's Parliament had done much to destroy.
It was James Anthony Froude who said that the absenteeism of her men of
genius was a worse wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her
landlords. This evil the Union accentuated by reducing Dublin from the
seat of Government, which in the middle of the eighteenth century had
been the second only to London in size and importance, to the status of
a provincial city from which were drawn the leaders of that liberal
school of Protestantism the rise of which was the marked feature of
Irish politics at the end of the eighteenth century.
The dividing line between parties in England has never been one of caste
or of creed, still less of both combined. In the past the Whigs could
claim as aristocratic and as exclusive a prestige as could the Tories.
In point of wealth there was little to choose, and, most important of
all, in respect of religion, though the minor clergy were very largely
Tory and the Dissenters were allied to the Whigs, yet the Anglicanism of
the great Whig families, and their appointments when in power to the
Episcopal bench and to other places of preferment, saved the Church of
England from being identified _in toto_ with either party in the State.
In Ireland, unfortunately, the case was far different, for there
property and the Established Church found themselves ranged side by side
in the maintenance of their respective privileges against the democracy,
which, as it happened, was Catholic, and which for many years after the
Union did not recover from the long and demoralising persecution of the
Penal Laws.
The aristocracy resisted emancipation, in spite of the fact that it was
advocated by all the greatest statesmen and orators of two generations,
and it did so quite as much because it was emancipation of the masses as
because it was emancipation of the Catholics. The Church of Ireland at
the same time dreaded the reform since it had the foresight to perceive
that the outcome would be an attack upon her prerogatives and an assault
upon her position. The anticipations of both were well founded. Nine
years after the Emancipation Act, tithe, which an English Prime Minister
had declared was as sacred as rent, was by Act of Parliament commuted
into a rent-charge no longer collected directly from the tenant, but
paid by the landlord, who, however, compensated himself for its
incidence on his shoulders by raising rents. Forty years later the
Church Act was passed, and almost simultaneously was begun the assault
on the land system which had given support to, and received it from, the
Church Establishment.
I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of
politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph
Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule
would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent
fall flat. They have based this view, not on the assumption that
Englishmen love Rome more, but rather upon the opinion that they care
for all religions less, and that hence the appeal to bigotry would make
less play.
The fact, however, remains that one meets men in England with every
sympathy for Irish claims who shrink nevertheless from the advocacy of
the principle of self-government through fear lest the Protestant
minority should suffer. This fear for the rights of minorities serves
always as the last ditch in which a losing cause entrenches itself, and
timid souls have always been found who hesitate at the approach of every
reform on the ground that the devil you know may turn out to be not so
bad as the devil you do not know. The legislative history of the House
of Lords during the last century, if examples of this were needed, would
provide them in large numbers; and as to the question of whether it is
better that the majority or the minority of a nation should be governed
against its will, one need scarcely say which is the principle adopted
in a normal system of Parliamentary government. The rapidity with which
under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be
intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is
attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather
the outcome of external causes. This view is borne out by the opinion
of Lecky, who declared that the deliberate policy of English statesmen
was "to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants," and if
proof of the allegation is needed it is to be found in the fact that in
the middle of the eighteenth century the Protestant Primate, Archbishop
Boulter, wrote to Government concerning a certain proposal that "it
united Protestants and Papists, and if that conciliation takes place,
farewell to English influence in Ireland."
Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors,
though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from
Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later
suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the
Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the
exclusion of Protestants from its halls. In the ranks of the Volunteers,
who secured free trade in 1779 and Parliamentary Independence in 1782,
Catholics and Protestants stood shoulder to shoulder, and the
independent legislature, which was the outcome of their efforts, granted
the franchise to the Catholics.
It was of course natural, when Catholics were excluded from Parliament,
that the leaders of the people should have been members of the
Protestant Church, but in view of the alleged bigotry at the present day
of the mass of the Irish people it is surely significant that Isaac Butt
and Parnell were both members of the Church of minority, that to take
three of the fiercest opponents of the maintenance of the Union John
Mitchell was a Unitarian, Thomas Davis an Episcopalian Protestant, and
Joseph Biggar a Presbyterian. At this moment of the Nationalist Members
of Parliament nine, or more than ten per cent., are Protestants, and one
may well ask if the Orangemen have ever had a like proportion of
Catholic members of their party, and _à fortiori_ what would be thought
of the suggestion that a member of that religion should lead them in
the House of Commons. The difficulty experienced in Great Britain by
would-be candidates of either party in securing their adoption by local
associations if they are Catholics is so common as to make the excessive
bigotry alleged against the Irish Catholics, one-tenth of whose
representatives are Protestants, appear very much exaggerated.
That bigotry exists among Catholics to some extent I should be the last,
albeit regretfully, to deny, but I leave it to the reader to judge how
far this is the result and the natural outcome of a policy the direct
opposite of that pursued in Scotland, where shortly after the union of
her Parliament with that of England, the Church of the majority of the
people was for the sake of peace established and has remained in this
privileged position ever since. In view of the use to which the "No
Popery" cry has been put in its bearings on the Irish question, it is
interesting to consider the relations of the English Government with the
Catholic Church throughout the last century and to see how far it throws
light on the justice and applicability of the taunt that Ireland is
priest-ridden.
In 1814 the Catholics of England, in spite of the opposition of the
Irish people, secured from Mgr. Quarantotti, the Vice-Prefect of the
Propaganda in Rome, who was acting in the absence of Pope Pius VII., at
that date still a prisoner in France, a letter declaring that in his
judgment the Royal veto should be exercised on ecclesiastical
appointments in Ireland. Under O'Connell's leadership, the bishops,
clergy, and people of Ireland refused to submit to the decree, and
there, in spite of the indignation of the English Catholics as a whole
and of the Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, the proposal was allowed to
drop, which would have virtually given a right of _congé d'elire_ to the
English ministry.
In 1782 Edmund Burke had written in his letter to a peer of Ireland on
the Penal Laws--"Never were the members of a religious sect fit to
appoint the pastors of another. It is a good deal to suppose that even
the present Castle would nominate bishops for the Irish Catholic Church
with a religious regard for its welfare." If this was the case under
Grattan's Parliament, its application thirty years later was very much
more cogent. Behind the scenes, however, the wires continued to be
pulled, as is seen by what Melbourne told Greville in 1835, after the
latter had expressed the opinion that the sound course in Irish affairs
was to open a negotiation with Rome.[11] "He then told me ... that an
application had been made to the Pope very lately (through Seymour)
expressive of the particular wish of the British Government that he
would not appoint MacHale to the vacant bishopric--anyone but him. But
on this occasion the Pope made a shrewd observation. His Holiness said
that he had remarked that no place of preferment of any value ever fell
vacant in Ireland that he did not get an application from the British
Government asking for the appointment. Lord Melbourne supposed that he
was determined to show that he had the power of refusal and of opposing
the wishes of the Government, and in reply to my questions he admitted
that the Pope had generally conferred the appointment according to the
wishes of the Government."
These facts must be borne in mind on the part of those by whom the
admitted support given by the Whig Catholic "Castle Bishops" of the
early part of the nineteenth century to the Government is urged as
evidence of a consistent tendency on the part of the Church in Ireland,
the political views of the prelates of which, so soon as in the second
half of the nineteenth century Governmental lobbying ceased, were of an
entirely different colour.
At a later date Greville returned to the topic and noted that[12]
"Palmerston said there was nothing to prevent our sending a minister to
Rome; but they had not dared to do it on account of their supposed
Popish tendencies. Peel might." Melbourne was not alone among Prime
Ministers of the time in his appeals to the Holy See. In 1844 the
Government of Sir Robert Peel, when troubled with the manifestations of
sympathy which O'Connell was arousing, made an appeal to Gregory XVI. to
discourage the agitation, and three years later, when the Whigs under
Lord John Russell were in office, Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal, who was
Palmerston's father-in-law, was sent to Rome in the autumn recess to
secure the adherence of Pius IX., then in the first months of his
Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of
His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting
O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any
response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of
Disraeli on the Minto mission--that he had gone to teach diplomacy to
the countrymen of Machiavelli. The views of Palmerston, on the other
hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant,
in which, with characteristic bluntness, the Foreign Secretary wrote
that public opinion against the Irish priests at home was so exasperated
that nothing would give English people more satisfaction than to see a
few of them hanged.
"Can anything be more absurd," Greville had written concerning the
relations which Melbourne revealed to him as subsisting between Downing
Street and the Vatican, and the quotation is as appropriate to these
later overtures. "Can anything be more absurd or anomalous than such
relations as these? The law prohibits any intercourse with Rome, and the
Government, whose business it is to enforce the law, establishes a
regular, but underhand, intercourse through the medium of a diplomatic
agent, whose character cannot be avowed, and the ministers of this
Protestant kingdom are continually soliciting the Pope to confer
appointments, the validity, even the existence, of which they do not
recognise, while the Pope, who is the chief object of our abhorrence and
dread, good humouredly complies with all or nearly all their requests."
Two years after the Minto mission, and a few months before he succeeded
to power in place of Peel, Lord John Russell told Charles Greville that
the Government was "the greatest curse to Ireland," and he spoke of
"their policy of first truckling to the Orangemen, insulting, and then
making useless concessions to the Catholics, without firmness and
justice."[13] It is only fair to Lord John to say that in the following
year he ordered a Bill to be drawn up to legalise intercourse with the
Pope and to put an end to these repeated acts of _præmunire_ on the part
of Ministers of the Crown; for a large number of constitutional
authorities believed that their action amounted to this offence, which
has been defined as consisting of acts tending to introduce into the
realm some foreign power, more particularly that of the Pope, to the
diminution of the King's authority.
The Diplomatic Relations with the Court of Rome Bill was introduced and
passed into law, with one important amendment which we shall have
occasion to notice later, in 1848, less than two years after Peel's
ministry had been succeeded by that of Russell. The grounds upon which
its acceptance by Parliament was demanded were that the complications
resulting from the revolutionary crisis throughout the Continent made it
essential that the Foreign Office should be in a position, in dealing
with the chancelleries of Europe, to obtain direct recognition, and as a
result first-hand information, as to the attitude of the Holy See in any
situations which might arise; and the acceptance by Parliament of the
change of policy which the Bill was intended to effect, on the
understanding that diplomatic negotiations should be confined to foreign
affairs, may be seen in the words of Earl Fitzwilliam in the House of
Lords. In his speech in support of the Bill he declared that "the very
last subject upon which the Government should communicate with the
Court of Rome was that which had reference to relations which it should
have with its own Roman Catholic subjects."[14]
The Act was an enabling Act, and its proposals, like those as to
concurrent endowment which Russell had made three years earlier, were
forgotten in 1850, when, in the matter of the Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, the Prime Minister played the part which Leech immortalised as
that of "the little boy who chalked up 'No Popery' and then ran away."
Even in the interval before this occurred the provisions of the Act were
not put in force. No appointment pursuant to the statute was ever made,
but its object was indirectly secured by the fact that a Secretary of
Legation, nominally accredited to the Court of the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, was kept in residence in Rome, where he served as a _de facto_
Minister to the Vatican. This state of affairs was maintained until Lord
Derby recalled Jervoise, who was then Secretary, from Rome, and from
that date even this measure of diplomatic representation at the Vatican
has ceased to exist.
The Bill of 1848, as we have seen, was directed to the establishment of
relations with "the Court of Rome." An amendment on the part of the
Bishop of Winchester, which was accepted and passed into law,
substituted for these words the phrase "Sovereign of the Roman States,"
and in consequence, after the loss of the Temporal Power, the Act was
repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act, 1875, so that the law was
restored to that condition, in regard to this subject, in which it had
been before Lord John Russell introduced the Act of 1848.
All this, it will be said, is ancient history, but the fact that it is
fifty years old does not affect my point, which is this--that the
maintenance of an unnatural polity can only be secured by means of a
series of subterfuges such as these employed by Unionist Governments,
both Whig and Tory, by which, while sympathy was extended to Orangemen
in the open, the Ministry endeavoured to twitch the red sleeves of the
Roman Curia in the back stairs of the Vatican.
As Macaulay picturesquely put it, at any moment Exeter Hall might raise
its war whoop and the Orangemen would begin to bray, and there was no
choice, one must suppose, but that you should not let your right hand
know what your left hand was doing.
In 1881 Mr. Gladstone appealed to Cardinal Newman to apprise the Pope of
the violent speeches which were being delivered by certain priests in
Ireland, for whose language he said he held the Pope, if informed of it,
morally responsible, and he asked the English Cardinal for his
assistance. To this Newman replied that the Pope was not supreme in
political matters, his action as to whether a political party is
censurable is not direct, and, moreover, it lay with the bishops to
censure the clergy for their language if they thought it intemperate,
and the interposition of the Holy See was not called for by the
circumstances of the case.
The policy, however, which had been applied before was employed once
more in another direction in the teeth of British sentiment if not of
British law. A mortgage had been foreclosed on Parnell's estate, and the
Irish newspapers having obtained knowledge of the fact raised a
collection which became known as the Parnell Tribute, and which was
headed by a subscription from the Archbishop of Cashel. If precedent
were needed for this form of recognition of national services it was to
be found in the grant of £50,000--which might, had he been willing, have
been double that amount--which was made to Grattan by the emancipated
Irish House of Commons, but more exact parallels perhaps are to be found
in "O'Connel's Rent," which Greville described as "nobly paid and nobly
earned," or in the great collection which marked the popular
appreciation in Great Britain of Cobden's services in securing the
repeal of the Corn Laws. In the autumn of 1881, when the Parnell
Tribute was initiated, the Land League agitation was in full swing in
Ireland, and about the same time Mr. George Errington, an English
Catholic Whig Member of Parliament, who was about to spend the winter in
Rome, called on Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, and was given by
him an introduction to the Cardinal Secretary of State. In this wise Mr.
Errington went, in the phrase of the day, "to keep the Vatican in good
humour," and if he was not the accredited representative of Her
Brittanic Majesty--for that would have been illegal--at any rate he went
with the sanction and under the ægis of the Foreign Office.
The upshot was a Papal rescript, signed by Cardinal Simeoni, the
Prefect, and Mgr. Jacobini, the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation De
Propagatione Fide, which condemned the Tribute owing to the Land League
agitation.
"The collection called 'The Parnell Testimonial Fund,'" so ran the
rescript, "cannot be approved, and consequently it cannot be tolerated
that any ecclesiastic, much less a bishop, should take any part whatever
in recommending or promoting it."
The bishops and clergy withdrew from any further action in connection
with the Tribute Fund, but the laity gave the lie to the suggestion that
they are under the thumb of their priests in matters which are not
within the sphere of faith or morals. The rescript was promulgated in
May, and at this time the subscription list amounted to less than
£8,000. Within a month it had doubled, and by the end of the year it
amounted to £37,000. The amount of the mortgage was £13,000. As Parnell,
in a characteristically laconic way, put it in his evidence before the
Commission, "The Irish people raised a collection for me to pay off the
amount of a mortgage. The amount of the collection considerably exceeded
the amount necessary." The retort of the country to the document
"_Qualecumque de Parnellio_," had been, in the phrase then current, to
"make Peter's pence into Parnell's pounds."
Two years after the Simeoni letter Mr. Errington was again in Rome,
attempting this time to secure the exclusion from the successorship to
Cardinal M'Cabe, of Dr. Walsh of Maynooth, as Archbishop of Dublin. A
letter on the subject fell into the hands of the editor of _United
Ireland_, who published it in his paper, and so in this way thwarted the
objects of the second Errington mission. "If we want to hold Ireland by
force," said Joseph Cowen, the Radical member for Newcastle, "let us do
it ourselves; let us not call in the Pope, whom we are always attacking,
to help us."
A further instance may be recounted of the manner in which the people of
what is, after Spain, the most Catholic country in Europe, while
submitting to the Pope implicitly in matters which are _de fide_,
refused to take their cue in purely political matters from Rome.
The rejection of the Home Rule Bill and of the Land Bill of 1886, and
the return of the Conservatives to power, led to a recrudescence of the
land war, to which the hope of ameliorative legislation had temporarily
put a truce. The Plan of Campaign, which was then launched--of which it
has been said that no agrarian movement was ever so unstained by
crime--was of the following nature:--The tenants of a locality were to
form themselves into an association, each member of which was to proffer
to the landlord or his agent a sum which was estimated by the general
body as a fair rent for his holding. These sums, if refused by the
landlord, were pooled and divided by the association for the maintenance
of those tenants who were evicted.
The wheels were set in motion in Rome to obtain a ruling from the Holy
Office as to whether such action was justifiable or not. Mgr. Persico,
the head of the Oriental rite in the Propaganda, who had had much
experience of English speaking people in the East, was sent to Ireland
in July, 1887, to investigate the question on the spot. In April, 1888,
a rescript was issued by the Holy Office to the bishops of Ireland
condemning the Plan of Campaign and boycotting on the ground that they
were contrary to both natural justice and Christian charity. With the
Decree was sent to the bishops a circular letter, signed by Cardinal
Monaco, the Secretary of the Holy Office, which contained the following
statement:--"The justice of the decision will be readily seen by anyone
who applies his mind to consider that a rent agreed upon by mutual
consent cannot, without violation of a contract, be diminished at the
mere will of a tenant, especially when there are tribunals appointed for
settling such controversies and reducing unjust rents within the bounds
of equity after taking into account the causes which diminish the value
of the land.... Finally, it is contrary to justice and to charity to
persecute by a social interdict those who are satisfied to pay rents
agreed upon, or those who, in the exercise of their right, take vacant
lands."
The _Tablet_, the organ of English Catholicism, speaking of the
decision, said that happily there was no suspicion of politics about it,
and as to the letter of Cardinal Monaco la Valetta, it wrote--"It adds
certain reasons which perhaps may have led the Congregation to answer as
they have done, but these constitute no part of the official reply." The
next step in this episode should be well pondered by those who accuse
the Irish of a blind Ultramontanism. The bishops, with one exception,
omitted to publish the rescript to their flocks, and the Archbishop of
Cashel went so far as to send £50 to the funds of the Plan of Campaign.
Parnell, referring publicly to the rescript as "a document from a
distant country," declared that his Catholic colleagues must decide for
themselves what action to take. Mr. Dillon contradicted the statements
in Cardinal Monaco's letter to the effect that the contracts were
voluntary or that the campaign fund of the Land League had been
collected by extortion. A meeting of forty Catholic members of
Parliament assembled in Dublin, and in the Mansion House in that city
signed a document denying the allegations about free contracts, fair
rent, the Land Commission, and the rest, declared that the conclusions
had been drawn from erroneous premises, and while asserting their
complete obedience to the Holy See in spiritual matters, no less
strongly repudiated the suggestion that Rome had any right to interfere
in matters of a political nature. Mass meetings were held in the Phoenix
Park in Dublin, and in Cork, which indorsed this position by popular
vote. The Orangemen were delighted at the imminence of a schism, and the
discomfiture of the Catholics under a decree, the result of internal
division, was hailed with pleasure only by the enemies of the Church. In
the event they were doomed to disappointment, for in the closing days of
the year the Holy Father wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Dublin
concerning his action, which had been "so sadly misunderstood," in which
he wrote that "as to the counsels that we have given to the people of
Ireland from time to time and our recent decree, we were moved in these
things, not only by the consideration of what is conformable to truth
and justice, but also by the desire of advancing your interests. For
such is our affection for you that it does not suffer us to allow the
cause in which Ireland is struggling to be weakened by the introduction
of anything that could justly be brought in reproach against it."
In this manner was closed an incident which was expected by its foes to
threaten the allegiance of Ireland, and with it that of more than half
the Catholics in England, to the Holy See.
The Nationalist members at the Mansion House had flatly declared that
the decree was an instrument of the unscrupulous enemies both of Ireland
and of the Holy See. The _Tablet_, which declared that it had been
promulgated with full and intimate knowledge of all the circumstances,
retorted--"As a matter of fact we believe that the English Government
has taken no steps, direct or indirect, to obtain the pronouncement,
which is based solely on the reports of Mgr. Persico and the documents
and evidence which accompanied them." And it went on to add that Persico
was expected to return to Ireland to watch the application of the
decree.
Beyond this, until recently, nothing more was known except that it was
remarked that negotiations between the Duke of Norfolk and the Vatican
were broken off, and that the former left Rome suddenly for England
without having an audience with the Pope, for which arrangements had
been made. The forecast of the _Tablet_ as to Mgr. Persico's return to
Ireland to see that the terms of the decree were enforced and applied,
was not correct. The responsibility for the decree was everywhere laid
on his shoulders, and the _Tablet_ for April 27th, 1889, records that an
Address was presented to Mgr. Persico after his return to Rome "as an
expression of respect, and in the fervent hope that his Excellency's
mission might largely conduce to the glory of God, the increase of
charity, and the restoration of peace and goodwill among men."
It is only in the last couple of years, with the publications of
Persico's correspondence with Cardinal Manning,[15] that the real facts
of the case have been known. After spending six months in Ireland, the
envoy was obliged, for reasons of health, to move to Devonshire in
January, 1888. He had orders from Rome to remain in the British Islands,
but further, so he told the Cardinal in his letter, "I must not reside
in London so as to give not the least suspicion that I have anything to
do with the British Government." As to the promulgation of the decree,
it was done without his knowledge and, what is more, against his
judgment. Having arrived in Ireland in July, 1887, he had concluded his
investigations by the middle of the month of December of that year. His
requests that the mission might be terminated were met by the reply that
it was to continue indefinitely, and he was told that if he wished, for
reasons of health, to leave Ireland during the winter months he might do
so, but that he must remain in the British Isles.
After the issue of the rescript he wrote to the English Cardinal in
these words:--"It is known to your Eminence that I did not expect at all
the said decree, that I was never so much surprised in my life as when I
received the bare circular from Propaganda on the morning of the 28th
ulto. And fancy, I received the bare circular, as I suppose every Irish
bishop did, without a letter or a word of instruction or explanation.
And what is more unaccountable to me, only the day before I had received
a letter from the Secretary for the Extraordinary Ecclesiastical
Affairs, telling me that nothing had been done about Irish affairs, and
that my report and other letters were still _nell casetta del Emo.
Rampolla!_ And yet the whole world thinks and says that the Holy Office
has acted on my report, and that the decree is based upon the same! Not
only all the Roman correspondents but all the newspapers _avec le Tablet
en tête_ proclaim and report the same thing! I wish that my report and
all my letters had been studied and seriously considered, and that
action had been taken from the same! Above all, I had proposed and
insisted upon it, that whatever was necessary to be done ought to be
done with, and through, the bishops." Of this there is ample proof in
the earlier letters, and the proposal which he made was that the four
archbishops and one bishop for every province should be summoned to Rome
to "prepare and settle things." Writing on the Feast of the Epiphany in
1888, he said to Manning:--"I agree fully with your Eminence that the
true Nunciatura for England and Ireland is the Episcopate. If the
bishops do not know the state of the country they are not fit to be
bishops. If they do, what more can _una persona ufficiosa o ufficiale_
do for the Holy See?" And again--"I fully understand what your Eminence
adds, the English people tolerate the Catholic Church as a spiritual
body. The first sign of a political action on the Government would
rekindle all the old fears, suspicions, and hostility. It is a great
pity they do not realise this in Rome. And it is also a great pity that
English Catholics do not understand all this. I am sure that His
Holiness understands it well, but I share your fears that those about
him may harass him with the fickle and vain glory that would accrue to
the Holy See by having an accredited representative from England also."
It is impossible not to infer from this that the English Catholics were
engaged in an attempt to secure diplomatic recognition by Great Britain
of the Holy See, and that their anxiety to secure this was in some
measure connected with their desire to override the feelings and
opinions of the Irish Episcopate, but the overtures of Lord Salisbury
were as fruitless as those of Russell forty years before.
The last letter from Mgr. Persico to the English Cardinal, which has
been reprinted, reiterates the disclaimer of responsibility for the
action of the Vatican, in these words:--
"I had no idea that anything had been done about Irish affairs much less
thought that some questions had been referred to the Holy Office, and
the first knowledge I had of the decree was on the morning of the 28th
April, when I received the bare circular sent me by Propaganda. I must
add that had I known of such a thing I would have felt it my duty to
make proper representations to the Holy See."
In view of this it is interesting to read the naïve record in the
_Tablet_ of those who signed the address to Persico on the totally wrong
assumption that he and his report were the _causa causans_ of the
decree. "The signatures," says the _Tablet_, "comprise those of all the
Catholic peers in Ireland (14 in number), four Privy Councillors, ten
honourables, two Lords Lieutenants of counties, nineteen baronets,
fifty-four deputy-lieutenants, two hundred and ninety-seven magistrates,
and a large number of the learned and military professions." The
remarkable thing about this memorial was the absence of the names of any
clerics, regular or secular, parish priests or prelates.
There are in Ireland a great many more Protestant Nationalists than the
English Press allows its readers to suspect, and it is one of these who,
in a recent novel, declares in a wild hyperbole that if the bishops can
secure the continuance of English Government for the next half century
Ireland will have become the Church's property. No one, of course, with
any sense of proportion takes seriously such a statement as this, but I
allude to it as showing, in its extreme anti-clericalism, the same
tendency, very much magnified, as I have observed to a great extent in
the Protestant Nationalist as a class, who has not, as I believe, had
time to eliminate the last taint of No Popery feeling in which for
generations he and his forbears have been steeped. The existence of this
anti-clerical spirit, and, what is more to the point, its expression
with the proverbial tactlessness of the political convert, for such a
one the Protestant Nationalist usually is, make it very essential that
the Catholic clergy should walk warily and avoid giving any handle to
their detractors, for in Ireland, and perhaps most of all in the Church
in Ireland, there is need to use the prayer of the faithful
Commons--"that the best possible construction be put on one's motives."
How small is the basis for the allegation that the clergy are playing
only for the Church's hand and are prepared to sacrifice for this end
the welfare of the country is shown, I think, by the evidence which I
have adduced. But in spite of their ill success in the past there is a
persistent notion on the part of both English parties that they can drag
in ecclesiastical influence to redress the political balance in their
favour. The exposure in the Life of Lord Randolph Churchill of the
manner in which he proposed to Lord Salisbury to win over the Church to
Unionism is an example of what I mean:--[16]
"I have no objection to Sexton and Healy knowing the deliberate
intention of the Government on the subject of Irish education, but it
would not do for the letter or communication to be made public, for the
effect of publicity on Lancashire would be unfortunate.... It is the
bishops entirely to whom I look in future to mitigate or postpone the
Home Rule onslaught. Let us only be enabled to occupy a year with the
education question. By that time I am certain Parnell's party will have
become seriously disintegrated. Personal jealousies, Government
influences, Davitt and Fenian intrigues, will be at work upon the
devoted band of eighty. The bishops, who in their hearts hate Parnell,
and don't care a scrap for Home Rule, having safely acquired control of
Irish education, will, according to my calculation, complete the rout.
That is my policy, and I know it is sound and good, and the only
possible Tory policy." And again he wrote--"My opinion is that if you
approach the archbishops through proper channels, if you deal in
friendly remonstrances and active assurances ... the tremendous force of
the Catholic Church will gradually and insensibly come over to the side
of the Tory Party."
All this, of course, is perfectly consistent with the views which in
1884 the leader of the Fourth Party had expressed when, speaking on the
Franchise Bill, he declared his opinion that "the agricultural peasant
is much more under the proper and legitimate influence of the Roman
Catholic priesthood than the lower classes in the towns."[17] But how is
one to reconcile either of these declarations with his action in 1886,
when, the tremendous force of the Catholic Church not having come over
to the Tory side, he "decided to play the Orange card, which, please
God, will prove a trump," and went, with his hands red from making
overtures to what they considered the scarlet woman, to rally the
Orangemen with the haunting jingle that Home Rule would be Rome Rule.
This was before the general election of 1886. Seven years later, when
another election was approaching, he returned to the charge, this time
in a letter to Lord Justice FitzGibbon:--"What is the great feature," he
wrote, "of the political situation in Ireland now? The resurrection in
great force of priestly domination in political matters. Now I would
cool the ardour of these potentates for Mr. G. by at once offering them
the largest concessions on education--primary, intermediate, and
university--which justice and generosity could admit of. I would not
give them everything before the general election, but I would give a
good lot, and keep a good lot for the new Parliament. I do not think
they could resist the bribe, and the soothing effect of such a policy on
the Irish vote and attitude would be marked. Of course the concessions
would have to be very large--almost as large as what the bishops have
ever asked for, but preserving intact Trinity College. It would assume
the material shape of a money subsidy."[18]
I have set down without omissions and with nothing extenuate the data on
which is based the indictment that the clergy have been, and are,
anti-national, and I ask the reader to say whether the charge is
unsupported or not. That overtures have again and again been made _sub
rosa_ to the clergy to wean them from the popular side is proved up to
the hilt, but that in any single instance they have closed with the
offers or been forced by the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline into
compliance, appears to me not proven, as is also the imputation that the
people have in any degree departed from the lines of O'Connell's
dictum--that we take our theology from Rome, but our politics we prefer
of home manufacture. If the action of Cardinal Cullen with regard to the
Tenant League in 1855 be adduced as an argument in favour of the
proposition, it must be remembered that though as Primate his voice was
preponderant and his policy was affected, in Dr. MacHale, the Archbishop
of Tuam, an exponent of opposite views was to be found, and that it is
on the lines laid down by MacHale, and not those advocated by Cullen,
that the policy of the Catholic Church in Ireland has as a rule been
based.
The clergy in the early part of the nineteenth century were brought up
in foreign seminaries, where passive obedience to the established order
was inculcated, and where, as was natural in such places, a horror of
the Jacobinical principles of the French revolution created among them
an antagonism to any violent agitation, which admittedly or not drew its
inspiration from that source, but the names of Dr. Doyle of Kildare, of
Dr. Duggan of Clonfert, of Dr. Croke of Cashel, of Dr. M'Cormick, to
name only four, show how much support was given to the popular cause in
Ireland by a considerable section of the higher clergy.
To Protestant Nationalists I would commend that expression of opinion of
the greatest of their number--Edmund Burke--who, speaking of the
religion of the mass of his countrymen, declared that in his opinion "it
ought to be cherished as a good, though not the most preferable good if
a choice was now to be made, and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. It
is extraordinary that there should still be need to emphasise the fact
that the Catholicism of Ireland is inevitable and that there is no hope
of making the country abjure it--but this is the case."
Half a century ago, when proselytism was in full swing in a country
weakened by famine, Protestants were sanguine on this point. Sir
Francis Head, in a volume which bears the very naïve title of "A
Fortnight in Ireland," declared that within a couple of years there can
exist no doubt whatever that the Protestant population of Ireland will
form the majority, and Rev. A.R. Dallas, one of the leading
proselytisers in the country, borrowing a Biblical metaphor, announced
that "the walls of Irish Romanism had been circumvented again and
again, and at the trumpet blast that sounded in the wailings of the
famine they may be said to have fallen flat. This is the point of hope
in Ireland's present crisis."
With the maintenance by the Church of her hold over the people
governments have recognised the influence of the priests, and have tried
to turn it to their own use by methods into which they have been afraid
to let the light of day; and for the rest, with every trouble and every
discontent, has arisen the parrot cry of _cherchez le prêtre_.
Conscientious objections to certain forms of education are respected in
England when they are emphasised by passive resistance. How many times
have the same objections in Ireland been put down to clerical
obscurantism? The priest in politics we have been told _ad nauseam_ is
the curse of Ireland, but clerical interference is not unknown in
English villages, and one has heard of dissenting ministers whose hands
are not quite unstained by the defilement of political partisanship. It
is not the habit that makes the monk, and it is possible for
sacerdotalism to be as rampant among the most rigid of dissenters as in
Church itself. An example of the falsehoods which have at intervals to
be nailed to the counter was the one which declared that under the
compulsion of their priests a considerable part of the Irish electorate
falsely declared themselves to be illiterate, so that the secrecy of the
ballot might be avoided and their votes might be regulated by the
clergy. On a comparison of the statistics of illiterate voters and the
Census of illiteracy a similar proportion was found to exist as that
between the total number of voters and the whole population, in this way
completely disproving the allegation.
A great deal of capital has of late been made of the alleged excessive
church building in Ireland during the last few years. In the light of
the fact that less than forty years have passed since the money of these
same peasants for the expenditure of which so much concern is now
expressed, was devoted to the maintenance of what Disraeli admitted to
be an alien Church, it is a little surprising to hear this taunt from
Englishmen and Protestants. Relieved, as the people have been only in
the last generation, from this obligation it is not strange that the
work of providing churches for their own worship should have been
undertaken. The Catholic churches have in large measure been built by
the contributions of successful emigrants, subscribed in many instances
with the secondary object of providing work in building during times of
distress. There are 2,400 Catholic and 1,500 Protestant churches in
Ireland at the present moment, and there is one Episcopalian Protestant
church for every 320 members of that creed and one Catholic church for
every 1,368 Catholics.
Sir Horace Plunkett, who started this new fashion of attack by giving it
the cachet of respectability in the first edition of "Ireland in the New
Century," after declaring that he has "come to the conclusion that the
immense power of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy has been singularly
little abused," goes on to add in connection with the topic on which we
are touching that "without a doubt a good many motives are unfortunately
at work in the church-building movement which have but remote connection
with religion." What is meant by this I cannot pretend to say. It seems
to me unworthy of a gentleman in Sir Horace's position, and with his
acknowledged good intentions to adopt an attitude which can only be
compared to that which Pope satirised in the lines:--
"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer,
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike."
But the remarkable part of the facts about this unframed charge is that
in the popular edition of Sir Horace's book, published in 1905, the
passage which I have quoted is omitted, and in spite of the fact that
nearly forty pages are devoted to an Epilogue containing answers to his
critics, the author makes no mention of its omission, and gives no
reason for the implied retractation of what may be interpreted as being
a very grave charge.
The books of one or two writers on the abuses of clericalism in Ireland,
written in violent, unmeasured invective, and innocent--which is more
important--of all notion of the value of evidence, are, I understand,
eagerly snapped up and readily believed by pious Protestants in England,
and it is from these books that many Englishmen have learnt all that
they know to-day about the Church in Ireland.
The picture which is presented of the Irish priest as a money-grabbing
martinet, whom his flock regard with mingled sentiments of detestation
and fear, is a caricature as libellous as it is grotesque. Even the high
standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as
being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood
thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way depicted
as being nothing but the bye-product of grasping avarice. I would not
have thought it necessary to have touched on this subject if I were not
assured of the vast circulation of the type of books to which I refer,
which are not worth powder and shot, more particularly in dissenting and
evangelical circles in England. The reiterated assertion by their
author that he is a Catholic produces the entirely false impression
that he is the spokesman of a considerable body of Catholics in Ireland
whose mouths are closed by the fear of consequences.
One fact which shows how bitter is the hatred towards the religion of
Ireland on the part of a section of the population of England is
this--that there is no more certain method by which a book on that
country can be assured of advertisement and quotation in the English
party Press of the baser kind, which for partisan reasons plays on the
bigotry of English people by the booming of such books, no matter how
scurrilous or how vile are their innuendoes. The comment of M.
Paul-Dubois on these attempts to foist on the Catholic Church
responsibility for the evil case in which Ireland finds herself,
deserves quotation:--"Cette thèse grossière et fanatique ne vaut
l'honneur d'un devellopment ni d'une discussion: contentons nous de
remarquer comme il est habile et simple de rejeter sur Rome la
responsabilité des malheurs d'Erin en disculpant ainsi et l'Angleterre
et la colonie anglaise en Irlande!"
The energy of the Irish priesthood in the advocacy of temperance--an
energy which in a climate like that of Ireland can never be excessive;
their social work in the encouragement of the industrial revival by the
starting of agricultural and co-operative societies, and, most of all at
this time, of the Industrial Development Association; their
whole-hearted assistance in the work of the Gaelic League, and their aid
in the discouragement of emigration--all these, apart from their
spiritual labours, are factors which have increased their claims to the
affection of the people to whom they minister and the respect of their
non-Catholic fellow-countrymen. They have discouraged violence, and the
weight of their Church has always been directed against secret
societies, and if their power has been great it is only because they
have been in full sympathy with their flocks. In 1848 the clergy made
such efforts to check the excesses of the abortive insurrection of that
year that Lord Clarendon, the Viceroy, wrote to Lord John Russell to
tell him that something must be done for the clergy, but the bigotry of
the English and Scottish people stood in the way. The No Rent Manifesto
of 1881 fell flat owing to the ecclesiastical condemnation which it
incurred on the ground that it involved repudiation of debts. Every
article in the Press of Europe and America on the problem of "race
suicide" contained a well-deserved tribute to the moral influence of the
Irish clergy on their flocks in this direction, and the figures of
illegitimacy show the same results of their inculcation of sexual
morality. In 1904 there were 3.9 per cent. of such births in England and
Wales, in Scotland 6.46, and in Ireland 2.5. The highest rate in
Ireland--3.4 in Ulster--is almost the same as the lowest in Scotland--in
Dumbartonshire--and the contrast between the Scottish maximum of 14.3 in
Kincardine and the Irish minimum of .7 in Connacht needs no comment.
With regard to ecclesiasticism in the lower branches of education, while
convinced that popular control over the secular branches, leaving the
religious branches of such education completely in the hands of the
clergy, is the ideal arrangement, one must admit that there is a
striking testimony contained in the Report on Primary Education drawn up
in 1904 by Mr. F.H. Dale, as to the efficiency and good management of
the Convent Schools in Ireland, which, it should be noted, are at the
same time those of least expense to the State. The cleanliness and
neatness of the premises, the supervision and management on the part of
the Community, the order and tone of the children, are all highly
praised; and in a further Report on Intermediate Education, prepared by
the same Inspector of Schools jointly with a colleague, will be found
equally strong insistence on the well-known success and efficiency of
the three hundred schools of the Christian Brothers, in which, without
a penny of State aid, are educated some 30,000 pupils; and it was no
doubt to the education given by the Christian Brothers that the
Protestant Bishop of Killaloe referred when, in an address to his
diocesan synod five years ago, he generously recognised the superiority
of the Catholic over the Protestant schools in Ireland.
It was Lord Lytton, I think, who described the Established Church in
Ireland as the greatest bull in the language, since it was so called
because it was a church not for the Irish. All who are acquainted with
those masterpieces of Swift's satire--the Drapier Letters--and who
appreciate the fact that Berkeley--the most distinguished of Irish
Protestant bishops--was refused the Primacy of Ireland because he was an
Irishman, and that to appoint any but an Englishman or a Scotsman would
be to depart from the policy followed throughout the whole of the
eighteenth century, will see that at that time, at any rate, it deserved
the censure which it has received as a foreign body maintained for
denationalising purposes.
The maintenance until thirty-eight years ago of the Established Church,
which raised its mitred head in a country where its adherents formed
one-eighth of the population, but where its funds were extorted from
those who regarded its doctrines as heresy, was, I verily believe, the
_fons et origo_ of the sectarian bitterness which still persists among
Catholics, "Lui demander," wrote a French observer of the position of
the Catholic Church in the days before 1870, "de s'associer a une telle
entreprise lui parait une injure; lui forcer est une violence; la
continuance de cette violence est une persecution." You would find it
hard to make me believe that had England been the scene of a similar
anomaly, with the _rôles_, of course, exchanged, the feelings towards
the Catholic Church, even forty years after its disestablishment, would
be the most cordial. The proposals of Pitt for the State payment of
the Catholic priesthood were constantly revived and advocated throughout
the century. Lord Clarendon's views, which have just been quoted, were a
mere echo of the opinion expressed by Lord John Russell in favour of
concurrent endowment in 1844, and there is a significant allusion on the
part of Charles Greville fourteen years earlier to the feeling of that
time, in which, after speaking about Irish disaffection, he shows the
results which were expected from concurrent endowment by commenting
unfavourably on the policy which the Government pursued "instead of
depriving him (O'Connell) of half his influence by paying the priests
and so getting them under the influence of the Government."[19]
The whole question was considered merely in the abstract until the
Fenian outburst of the sixties--as Mr. Gladstone freely admitted--opened
men's eyes to this among the other serious problems of Irish government.
It required all the violence of desperate men to call, attention to a
condition of things in which the Church which was established numbered
less than one-eighth of the inhabitants of the country among its
adherents.
The part of the country in which the greatest proportion of Episcopalian
Protestants was to be found was Ulster, and there they were only 20 per
cent. of the people, while in Munster and Connacht they were only 5 and
4 per cent. respectively. In 199 out of 2,428 parishes in Ireland there
was not a single member of the Established Church. The net revenue of
the Church was £600,000, and of this two archbishops and ten bishops
received one-tenth. The mode of solving the inequitable state of affairs
which produced least resistance lay in the direction of concurrent
endowment. Earl Russell suggested the endowment of Catholics and
Presbyterians and the reduction of Episcopalian revenues to one-eighth
of their existing amount. To the Presbyterians his plan would have
entailed a gain, in so far as the Regium Donum would have been
increased, but the opposition to it of the Catholics, in spite of the
fact that levelling up rather than planing down appealed not only to
Russell but to Grey and Disraeli, resulted in its abandonment, and the
question of disestablishment became the recognised solution of the
difficulty.
With the introduction of the Bill in 1869 began those dire prophecies
and grim forebodings which have formed a running accompaniment to every
Irish reform, and Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were denounced for
having sanctioned sacrilege. In the end the Church saved from the
burning more than in any equitable sense she was entitled to claim. The
Representative Body, which was incorporated in 1870, received about nine
millions for commuted salaries, half a million in lieu of private
endowments, and another three-quarters of a million was handed over to
lay patrons.
The commutation paid to the Non-Conformists for the Regium Donum and
other payments was nearly £800,000, and in lieu of the Maynooth grant
the Catholic Church received less than £400,000, the income from which
fund only covers about one-third of the annual cost of maintenance of
Maynooth. The history of this grant dates from the £9,000 given to the
College by the Irish Parliament, which was increased by Peel in 1844 to
£26,000 a year. When in the following year he brought in a Bill to make
it a vote of,£30,000 for building purposes, the _Times_, according to
Greville, "kept pegging away at Peel in a series of articles as
mischievous as malignity could make them, and by far the most
disgraceful that have ever appeared on a political subject in any public
journal."
That on the purely financial side the Catholic Church in Ireland would
have gained by concurrent endowment these figures, which represent the
whole of her receipts from public funds, amply bear witness, but that
she gained in a moral sense far more than in a material sense she might
have secured, no one will for one moment deny.
The glaring discrepancy between the amount of public funds at her
disposal and the amount held by the other religious bodies from public
sources did not abate the virulence with which the Church Act was
assailed, but at this day what is of interest is that the jeremiads of
the Protestants as to the consequences either to the country at large or
to their Church in particular were in every respect uncalled for, as was
acknowledged by no less a person than Lord Plunket, at a later time
Archbishop of Dublin, who, when in that position, admitted that the
Church Act had proved not a curse, as was expected, but a blessing to
the Episcopalian Protestant Church. This body has at the present moment
in Ireland 1,500 churches, to which 1,600 clergy minister, and as the
population of that sect amounts to very little more than half a million
it appears that there is one parson for every 363 parishioners, 800
Presbyterian ministers serve nearly a half million of people in the
proportion of one for every 554 of that communion. 250 Methodist
ministers are sufficient for 62,000 people in the ratio of one for every
248, and the 3,711 Catholic priests, who serve nearly four million of
souls, are in the proportion of one for every 891, while in England the
priests of the same communion amount to one for every 542. These figures
show the measure of truth in the alleged swamping of Ireland with
priests. In proportion to the number of their flocks all the other
denominations have a much larger relative number of clergy in the
country, and until the very much more flagrant drainage due to
emigration has ceased, it is to be hoped that we shall hear a good deal
less about the danger in an increase of celibates in Ireland, a
danger--if it be one--which after all she shares with every other
Catholic country in the world. The alleged extortion of money by the
clergy from a poverty-stricken peasantry is scarcely borne out by the
evidence before the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations, in
which Dr. O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe, calculated that the average
contribution to the clergy in the West of Ireland, including
subscriptions for the building and maintenance of churches, is 6s. or
7s. a year per family.
That strange accusation of Sir Horace Plunkett, that "the clergy are
taking the joy--the innocent joy--from the social side of the home
life," was, I think, sufficiently answered by the apposite reply of M.
Paul-Dubois, that this is a strange reproach in the mouth of a
Protestant who has undergone the experience of spending a Sunday in
Belfast. The truth is that attacks on the Irish priesthood came ill from
Englishmen or Anglo-Irishmen who have found in the Catholic Church the
most powerful agent of social peace in the country. That Irishmen have
on this ground any reason to blame the priesthood for lack of patriotism
I as strongly deny, for though one may not think necessarily that God is
on the side of the big battalions, armed resistance, which from the
nature of things must be borne down by sheer force of weight, is as
insensate as it is destructive.
The figure of Father O'Flynn, drawn by the son of a bishop of the
Protestant Church, professes to be as much a picture of a type as the
French _curé_ whom Mr. Austin Dobson has so gracefully depicted, and it
is difficult to see how such a figure of genial kindliness could have
been portrayed in such a quarter or have received such general
acceptance if there were to be found in any number worth considering the
hard and worldly beggars on horseback whom their enemies allege
constitute the characteristic type of the Irish clergy.
If in the religious nature of the Irish people is to be found one reason
for the influence of the clergy in secular matters, a far more potent
factor is to be seen in the historical fact that the priest has for
centuries been the only guide, counsellor, and friend of the Irish
peasant. The absence of a well-educated middle class, which, failing a
sympathetic aristocracy, would, in a normal condition of things, provide
popular leaders, is the only thing which has maintained any such undue
predominance on the part of the clergy in secular affairs as exists.
With the development of an educated Catholic laity, among some members
of which one may expect to see evolved that critical acumen and balanced
judgment which are what the fine flower of a university culture is
supposed to produce, this preponderance will disappear, but in the
meanwhile, be it noted, it is the refusal of Englishmen to found an
acceptable university which is maintaining the very state of affairs in
this direction against which they protest.