PRIESTCRAFT
Are there too many priests in Ireland? Yes. Is Dublin “black with them”?
Yes. Do they appear to be as frequent on the country side as crows? Yes.
Are they extorting from the Irish people money which is sorely needed
for secular purposes? Yes. Here you have four pertinent questions,
which invariably crop up whenever Ireland is discussed, together with
the average answers to them. “It is the priests!” cry both well and ill
informed. According to the latest critic—who, it seems, once occupied
the somewhat superfluous position of “literary editor of the _Daily
Mail_”—“one of the heaviest drags upon the life of Ireland is the
religious vocation. The monasteries and nunneries prosper and increase,
choking and interfering with the circulation of labor and of industry in
the country.” Also, “it is my profound conviction that a large proportion
of the present misery of Ireland is not only bound up with, but is
actually a result of the country’s religion.” Also, “the houses of the
people are so indecently poor and small; the houses of the Church are so
indecently rich and large. Out of the dirt and decay they rise, proud
and ugly and substantial, as though to inform the world that at least
one thing is not dying and despondent, but keeps its loins girded and
its lamps trimmed.” This, roughly, is the indictment. Appended are some
of the figures upon which it is based. Mr. Michael M’Carthy, himself a
Catholic, says, “A cardinal, 3 archbishops, 25 bishops, 2 mitred abbots,
and 2,722 secular priests, together with a host of regular priests of
all the different Orders, such as Jesuits, Franciscans, Vincentians,
Holy Ghost, Carmelites, Passionists, Augustinians, Mary Immaculate,
Dominicans, Cistercians, Marists, Redemptorists and so forth, all
of whom flourish in Ireland—such is the force which constitutes the
formidable clerical army of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and its
auxiliary forces are the numerous Orders of nuns, Christian brothers,
lay brothers attached to the regular Orders, and so forth; together with
the great body of Catholic National teachers, male and female, who are
under the control of the priests, and teach catechism in the churches;
the parish priests, as managers of the parochial National Schools, having
the power of dismissing the teachers.” “May it not be said of this great
organization,” adds Mr. M’Carthy, “that ‘it is on a scale such as few
nations would be able and willing to afford’?”
To dispose of the indictment first, we may quote a little further from
the author of it. He writes: “So far as they are individually concerned,
they [the priests] are in many cases the true friends of the people. They
help them in their affairs, settle their disputes, claim for them their
rights, comfort them in their sorrows, admonish, encourage, cherish and
watch over them. This is at the best. At the worst they are hard and
cruel, selfish and unjust, over-eating and over-drinking—a grotesque
and monstrous company. But these are the minority; and on the whole
the priests perform the duties of a dreary life as well as could be
expected of a narrow and half-educated class of men.” Now, if this means
anything at all it means that the person responsible for it believes that
the Catholic priesthood of Ireland is socially useful and necessary.
The minority of its members are “hard and cruel, selfish and unjust,”
which is true of the minority in other priesthoods besides the Irish.
But the majority “are the true friends of the people, helping them in
their affairs, settling their disputes, claiming for them their rights,
comforting them in their sorrows, admonishing, encouraging, cherishing
and watching over them.” How the majority manages to accomplish so
much, if it is composed of a “narrow and half-educated class of men,”
passes comprehension; but we have the fact that it manages it, which
is satisfactory. Further, our friend omits, in the plenitude of his
deprecation, to mention that the “religious vocation” in Ireland is by no
means the softest, easiest and rosiest of vocations, amounting, indeed,
to a species of spiritual and physical servitude of the severest kind;
and that the religious Orders, so far as they may be represented in
“monasteries and nunneries,” are self-supporting, subsisting austerely
on the labor of their own hands, and devoting themselves to the most
arduous charitable and educational work without fee or reward. And as
to “indecently rich” houses of the Church, such an epithet as applied
to the Catholic churches of Ireland is quite preposterous. There is
no “indecently rich” Catholic church in all Ireland. That there are
Protestant churches with incomes amounting to a comfortable number
of hundreds per annum and not half a dozen souls in the way of a
_bona-fide_ congregation may be granted; but the Catholic church with as
little as £100 a year and no congregation does not exist. Neither can
it be maintained that the Irish Catholic churches are “indecently rich”
in the matters of architecture or adornment—the long-drawn aisle and
fretted vault, gorgeous windows, splendid altars and vessels, or other
elaborate fitments, being the exception and not the rule. Indeed, our
author himself complains that “the ugliness of the churches in Ireland
is revolting to the healthy sense,” and that the “decorations” which
“enshrine the mysteries of the Mass” are “cheap” and “hideous,” so that
on his own showing “indecently rich” somehow fails to fit in.
Now for the figures. The population of Ireland at the last census was,
roughly, 4,500,000, and the population of England and Wales 32,500,000.
In Ireland there are 3 archbishops and 25 bishops, without reckoning
Episcopalians. In England and Wales there are 2 archbishops, 33 bishops,
8 assistant bishops, and 27 bishops suffragan, without reckoning 1 Roman
Catholic archbishop and 15 bishops, and the chiefs of the Wesleyan
Methodist, Methodist New Connexion, Primitive Methodist, Baptist,
Congregational, Free Church, Salvation Army, Church Army, Calvinistic,
Unitarian, Catholic Apostolic, and a host of other bodies. In the matter
of hierarchy, therefore, Ireland is not exactly overburdened, even if
it be admitted that she should take her pattern from England. Then, as
against Ireland’s 2,722 secular priests, England boasts the amazing total
of 23,000 beneficed and unbeneficed clergy, plus from 7,000 to 10,000
Nonconformist ministers and 20,000 Salvation Army “Officers.” So that, at
a moderate computation, while there is one priest or minister of religion
to every 500 of the population in England, there is only one priest
to every 800 of the population of Ireland. The ratios indicated may
not be exact, but they are based on Whitaker and pretty near the mark.
Taken another way the position amounts to this. In an English townlet
of from 3,000 to 4,000 population you will find, as a rule, a couple of
vicars, three or four curates, a Wesleyan minister, a Baptist minister, a
Congregational minister, a Catholic priest and a couple of Salvationists.
In an Irish townlet of the same size you have possibly six Catholic
priests and a solitary Episcopalian. Dreadful, is it not? Being mainly of
one sort, as it were, the priests of Ireland appear to be much thicker on
the ground than the clergy and ministers of England. But it is nothing
more nor less than an optical illusion—one of those many illusions
upon which judgments about Ireland are usually formed. As to places of
worship, it has been charged against the Irish Church that she builds too
much. “The traveler walking or driving across the wastes of that empty
land,” says the author previously quoted, “will nearly always find that
the first thing to break the monotony of the horizon is a spire or tower;
and when he arrives at the desolate little huddle of cabins or cottages
that makes a town he will find, dominating and shadowing it, the Catholic
chapel. Sometimes, indeed, the buildings are poor and rough: but these
are becoming fewer and fewer, and are now gradually, even in the poorest
districts, being replaced by structures strangely out of keeping with the
ruinous poverty around them. The last few years have seen in Ireland a
great activity in the building of these chapels; the very slight increase
which has taken place in the standard of living has made the movement
possible.” Assuming this to be a just statement of the case, is it not
equally true of our own England? Has not the building of churches,
chapels and general places of worship proceeded as merrily in the poorer
districts of the larger English towns during the past decade as ever it
did in Ireland? Where can you turn in England without seeing a spire?
Where is the townlet, or suburb, or slum that has not got its brand new
red-brick Anglican church, or its ruddy, stone-fronted Bethesda, or its
castellated, prison-like Salvation Barracks? Furthermore, the English
temples are seldom half full. You have to provide a sort of religious
variety entertainment, with services of song, magic-lantern sermons,
brass bands and the like to get the people in at all; whereas the
churches of Ireland are full to overflowing, and the congregations do not
require the lure of a steady succession of novelties, or, indeed, any
departure from the prescribed offices.
The fact is that the Irish Church and the Irish priesthood have been
cruelly and brutally maligned by pretty well every sand-blind writer and
carpet-bagging politician who has visited the country. We have blamed
upon the Church poverty and distress and ignorance and squalor which
are the direct outcome of bad government and not of priestly cupidity.
We have said in effect to our Irish brethren, “You are too indigent to
have a religion, or churches, or spiritual guidance. Every penny you pay
for these things is sheer waste of money, particularly as it keeps our
rents down. And inasmuch as you are of one Church and one mind—which is a
thing unthinkable in this free and enlightened England—you are slaves and
soulless.” But the Church of Ireland goes on its way, and in the words of
Archbishop Croke, which by the way Mr. M’Carthy, Irish Catholic, quotes
with a sneer, “[The Irish priesthood] holds possession of the people’s
hearts to a degree unknown to any other priesthood in the world.”