Part 3

"After politely requesting the reader not to 'be offended on receiving this', the handbill goes on to state that the invocations of the Madonna and saints are 'pronounced by the Bible to be the awful sin of idolatry, and that all idolaters have their place in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone. Do not be hurt', continues this agreeable mentor, 'at this strong statement, but think! is it true?' Do not be hurt! And this, after a summary statement that the religion of three-fourths of the Christian world, the creed of whole generations of the best, purest, and most devoted of mankind, the hope and joy in life and death of millions of humble and faithful saints--is pronounced by the Bible to be punishable with the everlasting torments of hell fire! Verily, if this be the 'spirit and manner' of these 'true Christian pastors', the less we hear of this new Reformation the better!"

The charge of being a political and social injustice, which we have brought against the Establishment, is fully proved by what has hitherto been said. Even if there were no other arguments on which to rest our case, save the single one which we have developed above, it must be admitted that we have made good our accusation. "I hold", said Lord Palmerston in 1845, "that the revenues of the Church of Ireland were destined primarily for the religious instruction of the people of Ireland.... It is impossible, in my opinion, that the present state of things in Ireland, in regard to the establishments of the two sects, can be permanent". But there is more. Evil is ever the parent of evil; and in one comprehensive injustice like the Irish Establishment are involved a thousand minor wrongs. The effects of these wrongs in Ireland, and the mischief wrought by them on our people, we daily see with our own eyes, and hear with our own ears. But to Mr. Cunningham we are indebted for a striking and rather novel view of the Establishment, as a source of mischief to England also. The very guilt she has incurred by the perpetration of so great an injustice, is, in Mr. Cunningham's opinion, the greatest of misfortunes. "To do wrong is a far greater misfortune than to endure it. No man enjoys a wrongful privilege, tramples on his fellow-citizens, or violates fair play, without forthwith incurring a moral loss, compared with which, any external advantage is a bauble indeed". Noble words these: and most refreshingly do they fall upon Catholic ears, wearied with the noisy utilitarian philosophy of the day. Nor does the Establishment confer any external or material advantage on England. On the contrary, it is preparing for her some grievous and humiliating calamity. Who sows the wind must expect to reap the whirlwind; and no other harvest but calamity can possibly be gathered from the evil seed of disaffection on one side, and of tyranny on the other, which the Establishment has sown in Ireland. Mr. Cunningham thus describes how the chronic disaffection of Irishmen is produced:

"The church funds of Ireland belong, without the possibility of a cavil, to the Irish nation; that nation has, from one reason or another, persistently refused to follow us in deserting the general creed of Christendom. They have clung and still cling to their faith with that desperate tenacity which persecution best engenders.... But the gradual abandonment of the atrocious penal code--as one by one its provisions became revolting to the increased humanity of the age--was a virtual confession that we gave up all hope of driving the Irish Catholics within the pale of our church.... Angry at resistance, the English government, cooperating with English fanaticism, set itself deliberately to persecute, degrade, almost destroy, those whom it could not succeed in converting. All has been tried, and the Establishment remains, as of old, the privilege of a powerful minority, the badge of conquest upon a prostrate race, a perpetual source of irritation--and nothing more. So far from being Protestantised, the Irish are already the hottest Ultramontanes in Europe, and are assuming more and more the triumphant air to which their numerical ascendancy entitles them. There is not the ghost of a chance of Ireland becoming other than she is, or of the Establishment making such strides as might render her present position less transparently absurd. The one question is this, whether we choose to perpetuate a state of things condemned by all statesmen as vicious in principle, and proved by long experience to be productive of nothing but a tyrannising temper, on the one hand, and chronic disaffection on the other. Every Irish peasant has sense enough to appreciate the injustice of the arrangement which obliges him to build his chapel, pay the priest, and gives his landlord a church and parson for nothing. He may be excused too for a feeling of annoyance, as he trudges past the empty parish church, supported at the public expense, to some remote chapel crowded with peasants, out of whose abject poverty the necessary funds for its support have to be wrung. He may be excused if his notions of fair play, equal rights, and political loyalty, are somewhat indistinct, and that where the law is from the outset a manifest wrong-doer, it should be sometimes superseded by rougher and more effective expedients. He is naturally a rebel, because the state proclaims herself his enemy. He naturally thinks it monstrous that any proprietor of the soil should have it in his power to refuse the inhabitants a spot of ground on which to celebrate their religious rites; that men, women, and children should be obliged to walk five, six, and even ten miles to the nearest place of worship; that education should be constantly refused, except coupled with open and systematic proselytism; that terrorism and coercion, the mean contrivances of bigotry, should be suffered to do their worst, without the strong hand of government intervening to lighten the blow, or provide means of protection"--pages 28, 29.

All this is well said: nor is the author less happy in his description of the tyrannising temper which it fosters on the part of the Protestants.

"And if the Establishment works ill as regards the Catholic masses, its effects on the privileged minority seem to us scarcely less disastrous. It engenders a tone of arrogant, violent, uncharitable bigotry, which happily is unknown in this country beyond the precincts of Exeter Hall and the columns of the 'religious' newspapers. Indeed, we have only to turn to 'Good News from Ireland', to assure ourselves of the detestable temper in which these modern Reformers set about the process of evangelisation, and of the extraordinary hardihood of assertion by which their ministrations are characterised. The creed of an Irish peasant may be superstitious--where is the peasant whose creed is anything else?--but religion in Ireland has at any rate, in the true spirit of Christianity, found its way to the wretched, the degraded, the despairing: it has refined, comforted, ennobled those whom external circumstances seemed expressly designed to crush them into absolute brutality. The Irish peasant is never the mere animal that for centuries English legislators tried to make him. He is a troublesome subject, indeed, and has a code of his own as to the 'wild justice' to which the oppressed may, in the last instance, resort; but in the domestic virtues, chastity, kindliness, hospitality, he stands, at least, as well as English or Scotch of the same condition in life. As regards domestic purity, indeed, Ireland, by universal confession, rises as much above the ordinary standard as Scotland falls below it: and as regards intemperance, there has been in Ireland of late years a marked improvement, for which unhappily no counterpart is to be found in any other part of the United Kingdom. Yet we are gravely invited to believe, on the testimony of a few hot-brained fanatics, that the whole Catholic system in Ireland is one vast conspiracy against piety, happiness, and civilisation....

"That Protestants are perfectly well aware of the mortification entailed upon their Catholic fellow-subjects by the existing state of things, and regard it with complacent acquiescence, is not the least painful feature of the case. The Irish Church is bad, not only in itself, but as being the last of a long series of oppressions which fear, passion, or necessity have at various times led the English to inflict upon their feeble neighbour. There have been periods when the deliberate idea of even intelligent politicians was, that the one population should exterminate the other; and Burke has pointed out how the religious animosities, which seem now the great cause of dispute, are in reality only a new phase of far earlier hostility, grounded originally on conquest, and strengthened by the cruelties which conquest involved. It is to some such fierce mood, traditionally familiar to the ruling race, that an institution so unjust in principle, so troublesome in practice, so incurably barren of all useful result, can appeal for sanction and support. The blind and almost ferocious bigotry of Irish Presbyterians is owing, one would fain hope, less to personal temperament than to the tastes and convictions of a ruder age, embodied in evil customs and a conventionally violent phraseology. And the same is more or less true of their Episcopalian brethren. It is from the calmer feelings and more discriminating judgment of the English nation that any remedial measure is expected"--pages 33-37.

We have nothing to add to this. Every Catholic will recognize the truth of the picture thus ably drawn. Our obligations to Mr. Cunningham do not, however, end here. There is still another lesson which, although he does not mean to teach it, we are glad to learn from him. It is this. Speaking of the paid clergy of the Establishment, he says:--

"So far from assisting the government in its schemes, they are among its bitterest opponents. Dr. Cullen himself is hardly more hostile to the National Education System than these paid officials of the state, for whom the one possible excuse would be an unflinching support of state measures. The Church Education Society numbers something like two-thirds of the Established clergy among its adherents, and is one of the most serious difficulties with which at present the cause of National Education has to contend. What shall be done with these spaniels that forget to cringe, but bark and snap at the hand that feeds them? Might they not, at any rate, be scourged and starved into a more submissive mood?"--page 43.

These words reveal to us the position which men of the world would expect a clergy paid by the state to assume towards the state. From being ministers of God, they are to become paid officials of the state; from being the stewards of things divine, they are to recommend themselves to their masters by an unflinching support of the state measures. And if conscience should at any time call upon them to refuse the support demanded at their hands, the government has the power and the will to scourge and starve them into a more submissive mood. What a practical commentary does Mr. Cunningham here offer on the words used by Mgr. Brancadoro,[C] in declining the pension offered by the British Government in 1805! Better, far better, poverty with the liberty of the sanctuary, than rich endowments with slavery. We demand the abolition of the Establishment on the broad grounds of social equality and justice, and not because we wish to enrich ourselves with its spoils. We are rich enough in the love of that noble Irish race, than which none other ever gave more blessed consolation to the ministers of Christ.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: I. E. RECORD, No. II., page 50-55.]

ANCIENT RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF ARDAGH.

I.

SAINT BRIGID'S DOMINICAN CONVENT, LONGFORD.

The early history of the See of Ardagh is involved in much obscurity and some little confusion. After Saint Mel, its first bishop, and Melchuo, his brother and successor, for several centuries there is little available information of the state of the diocese, the succession of its bishops, or the condition of its religious foundations. For the most part, up to the twelfth century, we find only the names of the bishops, of which the meagre list is very incomplete and defective; in some instances whole centuries are passed over, of which we have no published record at all.

In the absence of other ecclesiastical monuments, the history of this See, like many others, can be traced only in a fragmentary manner, as it is found mixed up with the history of the several religious houses scattered over it, or as it may be unravelled from the various legends and traditions connected with them. These Religious foundations were numerous in Ardagh, and some of them rank among the most ancient in the island; thus, in the _Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick_, we find that the two daughters of the Saint's old master, Milcho, after the death of their father, took the veil in the convent of Augustin nuns, founded by Saint Patrick at Cluain Bronach, near Granard in Teffia (Clonbroncy, County Longford), which must, therefore, have been one of the most ancient foundations for Religious women in Ireland. Time, and the hand of the spoiler have dealt hardly with these old houses, and few traces can be found of them to-day. The same may be said even of those more modern ones, which, like the Dominican Convent of Saint Brigid, Longford, or the Cistercian Abbey of Saint Mary, Granard, border more nearly on the times of authentic and known history.

In the spoliations of Henry and Elizabeth, the convent lands were granted away to laymen, and the edifices either razed to the ground, or perverted to the uses of the new creed. The few that escaped confiscation were soon deserted under the penal and relentless persecution that followed, and the departing Religious carried with them the records of most of our old foundations, which, if existing, are now to be found only in the MSS. of the Munich, Barberini, Vatican, and other continental libraries. Yet, from the earliest foundation of Saint Mel, at Ardagh, or of Saint Columba, in Innismore, Lough Gowna, down to the latest convent in the islands of Lough Ree, each has its story, its legends and traditions, which we, perhaps, may live to tell. Of some extensive ruins still remain, and about their ivied walls there clings many an old legend and oft-told tradition, that yet may help to clear up the obscure history of those times. In many instances, however, we must confess, that few vestiges have escaped the ruthless hand of the spoiler, and save a few crumbling ivy-covered walls, and the green mounds that mark the last resting place of their dead, there is little left, either of storied arch or cloistered aisle to tell of the extent of the edifices, or of the zeal and labours of the pious souls who dwelt within them.

The Dominican Convent of Saint Brigid, at Longford, was one of the most modern of the religious foundations of Ardagh, having been founded by one of the O'Ferralls in 1400. A sketch of its history will, however, serve as a first contribution towards the early history of that ancient church, and may perhaps prove interesting to the reader, as from local circumstances it has been to us.

O'Heyne tells us, "This convent was built for the Dominicans in 1400, by O'Ferrall, a very illustrious, ancient, and, for those times, powerful dynast of Annaly". Harris, in his edition of _Sir James Ware's Antiquities_, distinctly names Cornelius O'Ferrall, the Dominican Bishop of Ardagh, as the founder. De Burgo, in his _Hibernia Dominicana_, from which most of our information is taken, shows that in the year 1400, in which the Convent of Saint Brigid was founded, Adam Lyons, a Dominican Friar, succeeded Gilbert MacBrady in the See of Ardagh; that Adam Lyons died in 1416, and was succeeded by Cornelius O'Ferrall, who was consecrated in February, 1418, when the Convent of Saint Brigid had been built and inhabited nearly eighteen years. Hence, it is very clear, that if Cornelius O'Ferrall was the founder, it must have been before his consecration as bishop, and very probably before his admission to Religion as a Dominican. It is not improbable that, like others of his name, he was dynast of Annaly before he assumed the mitre of Ardagh, and that having in his boyhood been a pupil of the Dominicans, as we learn from the Bull of his consecration, he had founded this convent for them long before he thought of joining the order himself.

Cornelius O'Ferrall died, "celebrated for his liberality to the poor", as Ware tells us, for which he was popularly known by the name "_Eleemosynarius_", or the "_Almsgiver_", and he was buried in the Abbey of Saint Brigid in 1424. The family of the O'Ferralls made repeated and ample grants to the convent, and, after the example of Bishop Cornelius, made the abbey their family burial place.

The church attached to the convent stood on the site now occupied by the Protestant parochial church of Longford, on the north side of the river Camlin. From it a raised causeway or road led through the meadows by the river side, to the coenobium, or convent proper, which stood on the opposite, or south side of the river, about a quarter of a mile distant. This church was destroyed by fire, and the convent reduced to ruins in 1428. The extent and character of this first convent may be gathered from O'Heyne, who says, it was a most extensive and magnificent structure, as shown by the magnitude of the ruins still remaining in his day (1750). The importance and influence which, in a very few years, the abbey had been able to attain, may be inferred from the fact, that Bulls were issued by several popes, granting indulgences to the faithful who would contribute to its restoration.

Of these the Bull of Martin V., March 1429, informs us, that the convent was of the "Strict Observance". From the Bull of Eugene IV., March, 1433, in the relation of the motives for granting the Indulgence, we learn the character and extent of the disaster which had befallen Saint Brigid's. "In consequence of the wars prevailing in these parts, especially during the last six years, the church of St. Brigid at Longford had been destroyed by fire, and all the other buildings of the convent reduced to ruins. The necessary ornaments for decent celebration of divine worship were wanting, and the Religious had been of necessity compelled to pass to other houses". In a second Bull of the same pope, July 1438, we are told, "the Church of Saint Brigid had been consumed by fire, and _most_ of the convent buildings laid in ruins". The devastation is thus in some sort limited, which in the first was described as total.

The church was rebuilt, and the convent restored, but not at all on the same scale of magnificence that O'Heyne so extols in the first. For several centuries, however, it continued to exercise a great influence on religion in the district, and to send forth able, fervent, and illustrious pupils, to maintain and defend the faith, at home and abroad. Thus we find Doctor Gregory O'Ferrall, an alumnus of Saint Brigid's, Provincial of Ireland in 1644. Afterwards we find him lending energetic aid to the confederate Catholics at Kilkenny. When the treachery and intrigues of Ormond had seduced the Catholic chiefs into a deceitful peace, without any guarantee for the free exercise of their religion, the name of the Dominican provincial Gregory O'Ferrall is one of the signatures to the spirited and indignant protest of the national synod convened at Waterford in 1646, by the celebrated John Baptist Rinuccini, to condemn the conduct of the men who had agreed to such a peace, at once unjust, iniquitous, and pernicious to the Catholic cause, which they had sworn to defend. "Gregory O'Ferrall", says O'Heyne, "was a man of most meek and mortified appearance, and was esteemed by the people a mirror of every virtue". He died in 1672.

Anthony O'Molloy, another alumnus of Saint Brigid's, was about the same time procurator-general of the Dominicans in Ireland. For about forty years he discharged, with wonderful zeal and ability, the dangerous duty of conducting the newly-professed Dominicans of Ireland to Spain, and then aiding and directing their return after the completion of their ecclesiastical studies. This was at the time penal, and the delicate and difficult task was performed at the constant risk of his life. His labours, however, were crowned with singular success. He was known by the name of Father Antony of the Rosary, because of his admirable devotion to that pious exercise and to everything tending to the service of the Blessed Mother of God, through whose intercession, in moments of danger and difficulty, he is said, several times to have obtained miraculous deliverance. He died about 1680.

Laurence O'Ferrall was, about the same time, sent from Saint Brigid's as missionary apostolic into England, when the penal persecution of the times left the flock stripped of a pastor. He was arrested and flung into prison at London, where for more than a year he suffered many hardships. After a time, through the mercy of God, he was discharged, and fled to Belgium, where he long laboured under grievous illness, brought on by this imprisonment. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he set out again for England, but he was a second time arrested and flung into prison as a returned friar. Through the intercession of the Archduke Charles, afterwards Emperor Charles the Sixth, who was then in England, he obtained his discharge as a German subject, and was permitted to leave for Portugal. From thence he passed into Spain, where he was appointed chaplain to the Irish Brigade serving under Fitzjames Duke of Berwick. He died in 1708.

The names of other remarkable men, alumni of Saint Brigid's, might be cited if space permitted. Even so late as 1756, not more than a century ago, De Burgo speaks of James O'Ferrall, the prior, Nicholas Travers, and Francis O'Ferrall, as surviving representatives of that convent.