The secret society onslaught on the attachment of the people of Ireland
to their spiritual guides and to their ancient faith was treacherous,
deadly, and long-continued. But, thank heaven! the Church in Ireland, has
survived the shock, terrible though it was. My own Archbishop—at present,
happily for Australia, placed by the Holy Father over that extensive
portion of the vineyard—a Prelate who knows the Ireland of history
better, I would say, than any living man, and the Ireland of the present
day, as well, certainly, assured me that never since the days of St.
Patrick was the Faith stronger in the country than at the present moment.
The frequentation of the sacraments was at no past period more general—if
ever as general. Pious Confraternities spread their blessed influence
everywhere. Temperance is progressing. The clergy, numerous and well
supported by the people, enlighten all by the purity, self-denial, and
laboriousness of their lives. They visit their people in every home, no
matter how poor, in every cabin, in every garret. They are, as ever, of
and with the people. Their little means are freely given to every want of
education and religion, and, as far as these means can go, to the poor.
This is a condition of things that must continue to bind the priests to
the people, and the whole Church of Ireland to God. These holy pastors,
whom every tie of nature, affection, and duty, bind to the Irish people,
are the guides who have been with them for ages. Numerous, intelligent,
learned, patriotic in the highest degree, sons of the saints, they alone
can lead God’s people aright. They have done so, and sad must be the
hour when miserable adventurers, seeking their own gains, can so delude
a nation as to seduce them from the side of God’s anointed, to what
did prove, and must ever prove, if pursued by the Irish people against
the loving and intelligent advice of the Irish priests, “a mockery, a
delusion, and a snare.” The time is come, however, when using their own
intelligence Irishmen will everywhere be able to resist the wiles and
temptations of the secret society seducer, and think for themselves. The
leaders, the fathers who have never deceived them, whose advices are
always given for their best advantage, who suffered and died for them in
the past, and are ready to do so in the present and in the future, are
the clergy of Ireland, led by the Bishops of Ireland, and all following
the infallible teachings of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. God grant that
this guidance may never fail; that the day may never dawn when it will
not be heeded; and that the race of wretched men who have so often in the
past ensnared generous-hearted, Catholic Irishmen in Ireland, in Great
Britain, in America, and elsewhere, may end for ever. From such false
agents and from the machinations of all enemies to Irish Faith, we well
may pray, GOD SAVE IRELAND!
I have no doubt whatever, but this our prayer will be heard. We only
want a knowledge of the evil to avoid it. Even from what I have said
this evening—and I have only stated plain, unvarnished facts—it must
be evident that all secret societies and societies aiming at bad and
irreligious ends are no other than deadly Illuminated Freemasonry. Let
them be called by whatever name, they are a part of the system of secret
revolutionary fraud, invented and cast upon the earth by Satan to compass
the ruin of souls, and the destruction of the reign of Jesus Christ. They
are of the same kind as the Black Hand in Spain, as the Commune of Paris,
as the Nihilism that now dominates in Russia. With such associations
the children of God have only one duty to discharge. It is: so far from
giving them any countenance or support, to oppose them by every means
possible. I believe their strength has spent its force in Ireland. It
only remains that the Irish abroad, who have crossed the seas to find a
home, an honest living, and an honourable fortune if they can in this
and in other lands, should, as I have just advised, stand on their guard
against emissaries who, under pretexts as seductive as those used by
the Fenian leaders to lead our countrymen to ruin, or by that degraded
seducer of brave, but heedless and passionate young men, Carey, to drag
his victims to murder and the gallows, may come to whisper words of
conspiracy and lead far astray. The Catholic who hears the invitation
from any quarter, were it from an angel from heaven, were it from a
priest of God—fallen as that angel or priest should be to be able to
give it—let him beware. It is a devil that speaks to him as sure as it
was a devil that spoke to his mother Eve in the Garden of Eden. Let him
renounce that devil and his tools and his works. Let him ask aid from on
High—Good Counsel from God through the prayers of God’s Virgin Mother,
and he will triumph. He will stand firm on the side of God, and one day
be rewarded at His Right Hand with the most glorious triumph that can be
given to man to witness—the triumph of Christ coming in His Majesty to
judge the living and the dead.
All that secret organization of which we have been speaking so much, is
being framed by Satan and his emissaries for one end long foreseen—that
is, to form, and that before very many years, the vast kingdom of
Antichrist, which already spreads its ramifications over the whole earth.
It is, you see, determined to leave no people, or nation, or tribe, or
tongue, unsubjected to its influence. It seeks now the semi-civilized
empires of Asia by means of Masonic France, and other European Masonic
influences. It plants in Africa the germs of a European domination, which
must speedily subject to its authority the dark sons of Ham. I believe,
so far as I can judge, it will soon send its telegraphs and its railways
careering through that ancient Continent. Placing itself “above all that
is worshipped or called God,” it will in its pride and hate obliterate
the polytheism of these countries to make room for its own Atheism; and
that which Christianity has been hitherto unable to effect in destroying
the false gods of the heathen, it will effect, in order to plant its own
dark _non credo_ instead. It will thus one day be able to call to the
standard of whoever is to be its last, long-foretold leader, countless
millions to battle with the elect of God. It may be—I believe it will
be—checked, if but for a few years, to afford time for the Church of
Christ to manifest her glory once more, and to gather in her strength for
the final combat. But that it will advance to that combat is revealed to
us. Children of Ireland what a glorious place is reserved for you when
that struggle does come! From the beginning you have been its opponents.
When it cried—away with Christ—away with Christ’s Vicar—let him be
crucified—let his temporal and spiritual power be obliterated—and when,
in the nations of Catholic Europe, and of the world, it raised its cries
of secularism, of infidel education, of ruin to the Christian family and
every Catholic institution, who of all the people of God most withstood
it? Who best, from slender resources, in all the lands where English is
spoken, supported the Vicar of Christ and every Catholic principle? In
their island home, during these very saddest days, from the period of
the great famine till this hour, the Irish people, scattered in their
millions over this country and England; over all the rising nations
of great America; and the infant empires growing daily to maturity in
Australia and New Zealand, and other islands of the Southern, the Indian,
and the Pacific Oceans; by the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel; in the
Colonies of Southern Africa; in the islands of the Caribbean Sea; amidst
the decaying Christianity of Buenos Ayres; in Canada; and all the other
lands of the earth which give the best promise to Atheistic machinations,
the Irish people lifted up the Cross of Christ, and sustained, by the
sweat of their brow, the strong, vigorous reality of the Catholic
religion. They gave their daughters to the cloister, their sons to the
sanctuary, their all to the cause of God. Freemasons thundered and
intrigued in the legislatures round about them. Emissaries from the
secret sects assailed them in the press, on the platform, everywhere.
Fidelity to their religious principles was often visited with political,
commercial, and even social ostracism. Ridicule and abuse rained in turn
for their fidelity upon them. But the Faith of St. Patrick and the hope
of God’s bright kingdom, the smile and the prayer of Mary in Heaven, were
able to defeat and baffle all. In serried ranks with the pastors they had
themselves brought forth, and nourished, and educated, and kept, they
stood amidst the deluge of deception, allurement, and intrigue about
them, firm as their own loved, distant land amidst the billows of the
ocean, and went on advancing the mighty work of building up the Church
which other nations were pulling down, until their very enemies paused,
and wondered, and admired. And often too when these enemies saw in the
lands which the Irish had evangelized, the Cross of the Catholic Church
arise and pierce the heavens, where it had never been seen before, or
had been proscribed for generations, they cried out that Catholicity was
immortal—was divine! It comes, for instance, by the Irish into this land,
just as it was before the storm banished it, the same as their fathers
once saw it. And they say rightly, “so that Church is now and so will it
be for ever.” Masonic Anti-Christianity will advance and do more damage
than ever heresy effected. It will one day sweep the sects of heresy and
the temples of idols utterly away; but it too will have its defeat, and
in time must yield to Christ and to His cause the greatest triumph. Its
union of all men in one vast republic; its bringing together of every
people and nation; its destruction of every form of religion to make way
for its sect; its advance in science, in education, in national progress,
all will serve one day to place the Son of Mary supreme—to realize the
prophecy made to His Mother: “And he shall be great, and be called the
Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give him the throne of David
His father, and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever, and of His
kingdom there shall never be an end.”
I say that when this consummation comes, as come it surely must, few
nations shall have a more glorious record than the people of what is
called “poor Ireland.” Few nations shall have done more to prepare
for the final combat, or shall have manifested to a greater extent in
Christian heroism the last and most terrible trial. No nation whatever
shall show a grander roll call of martyrs, confessors, virgins, and souls
saved, than the land and the race evangelized by St. Patrick, whose
sacred name already adorns the most glorious and promising churches now
existing in the world.