Part 5

Without having recourse, however, to this extraordinary dispensation, the hope of which would be unwarranted by anything we have yet seen, may not the hopes to which I have alluded, and which could scarcely have existed without some influence of the divine Spouse of the Church, be realized in the conversion of the children, rather than in that of the mother? May not the expectations of the Catholic world be realized by a return of English-speaking brethren in the various colonies which the mother country has planted? May _they_ not receive the graces which the latter has cast away, and thus more than compensate the Church for the loss of that one island?

Such results would be no anomaly in the experience of the Church. Several nations first learned Christianity under a heterodox form, and some of the most Catholic to-day are their descendants. Their errors were not their own faults, _as nations_, and God had pity upon them.

We may say the same thing of this, and of several other countries, where great and independent peoples will be found one day as they now are here. This nation has never apostatised from Catholic truth, simply because it never possessed it _as a nation_. At its birth it was already entangled in the meshes of heterodoxy, and it found the Catholic Church in its midst, with few adherents. Yet, at its very birth, it struck off the shackles by which she was bound. Several circumstances, it is true, aided this course of justice. But, who will say that these existed otherwise than by God’s Providence, and for the nation’s benefit, as well as for ours? This course of justice, moreover, was adopted cordially and fully by the founders of the country’s independence, and that at a time when the Church was so treated by few even of those nations on whom she had the best claims. Bigots, it is true, were not wanting, then, or since. But it is a great fact, that this nation, _as a nation_ and as a Government, has always, since its birth, treated God’s Church with justice.

A cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not be without its reward. Do we exaggerate in hoping that this mode of proceeding towards his Church shall have its reward from her Heavenly Spouse—that it will plead for this nation with the Divine Mercy, as the alms of Cornelius obtained for him the knowledge of Gospel truth and a share in its blessings? The grace of faith, with these blessings, is the greatest which God gives to man, nor is it the less valuable because it is not now appreciated or is even spurned. It is God’s grace that gives a hunger for divine things, as it is by Him that the hungry are filled.

Yes, I do not only desire, and send up the prayer, but I candidly avow the hope, that the light of faith is yet destined to shine brightly here, even amongst those who now look on it with contempt or hostility. In this I am strengthened by the desire for a knowledge of truth, which, notwithstanding the bigotry of many, is so widely spread. I am strengthened by the growth of the Church itself, which bears the marks of a higher purpose on the part of God than the mere preservation of those who came Catholics to our shores. I am strengthened by the very losses which the Church sustains in the falling away of many of her children. For surely God did not permit them to be driven hither by persecution that they might perish. He sent them forth to battle, in doing which, though many may be lost, he will grant victory to his own cause. I am strengthened by the very dangers by which we are surrounded; nor would my hope be shaken even if storms should impend. For it is according to the ways of God to reach his ends amidst contradictions.

Let it not be said that the humble condition or the faults of many of the children of the Church, forbid such a hope as this. God’s ways are not as our ways. It is not by the great or by the mighty that his truth is propagated. Flesh might otherwise glory in His sight, and men might say that, by their wisdom and their efforts was His kingdom established. So far from this being an objection, when other things inspire hope, the hope is strengthened by the humble form in which the Church presents itself. Our hope of its diffusion is better founded when we see it borne to our shores by humble labourers, than if it had come recommended exclusively by proud philosophers, cunning statesmen, or by men loaded with wealth.

What we hope for this nation, we may hope with greater reason for the other nations yet reposing in their infancy, or growing in giant proportions under British rule. I say, with greater reason, because in most of these the foundations of Catholicity are laid even more deeply than they are here. While it would be a great thing for God’s honour and glory, there is nothing to forbid the hope that these may one day be united in the true fold of the everlasting Church. The blood of Ireland and of England will mingle in their veins; and, while they will look back with shame on the apostacy of the sixteenth century, as a disgraceful chapter in the history of their forefathers, they will glory in the recollections of the saints and the heroes of religion who, for a thousand years, adorned both their mother countries. With feelings analogous to those with which we look back to the tyrants of the first centuries and their victims, they will set off the martyr heroes of one portion of their ancestors to the apostacy of the other, and the apostasy itself will be, in their history, but an episode proving how far human nature may stray, while their own conversion will be a standing monument of the power of the cross.

If these hopes be realized, the Irish race and its sufferings will have been the instruments in the hands of God by which the grand result will be accomplished; but whether they be realized or not, the main point which I have endeavoured to dwell upon seems to me to be established beyond doubt—that is, that this race has been preserved by God in the true faith in an extraordinary manner, for the purpose of spreading that faith throughout the English-speaking nations which now exist, or which are coming into being.

As Ireland owes the preservation of her faith to her being destined as the leaven of that mass, it is but assigning to God a purpose worthy of His goodness to say, that England owes her power to her mission to spread that leaven throughout so many vast regions. It will not, I presume, be considered rash to say that God, permitting her to acquire power, proposed to himself some higher object than that other nations should have cheap cotton or woollen fabrics, or that they should learn how to travel forty instead of four or ten miles an hour. In his goodness he designed that power for some purpose worthy of Heaven; and this purpose may be accomplished whether England herself will it or not, or even though she desire the very contrary. I have said before, that most learned and grave writers consider the Roman power to have been intended, in the counsels of God, to prepare a way for the diffusion of the Gospel. The rulers of Rome despised the Gospel and its heralds. Still Rome most probably owed to them her greatness, and but for this mission, she might have remained what she was in the beginning—an obscure village, a place of refuge for the thieves of the surrounding country. England may despise the Irish Catholic. Like Rome, she may look upon the professors of Catholicity as the great plague-spot of her system. Yet, in the designs of God, she most probably is indebted for her power to the part she is made to act in the diffusion of their faith. It is certain, at least, that the highest use of that power she has yet been allowed to make, is the carrying of frieze-coated Papists to distant shores, and the clearing of the forests where they are propagating, and are yet to propagate more extensively, the true faith. If a higher design in her behalf exist in the arrangements of Providence, it is yet to be made known. But for this she might have remained, as the poet described her, “a naked fisher” on her rock, and when she shall have ended her usefulness as an instrument for accomplishing this object, she may return “to her hook”, still musing, perhaps, her senseless “No Popery”, while the churches which she has unwillingly assisted to plant, will be growing up in beauty and praising God in one harmonious voice with the other children of his family throughout the world.

The value and importance of this great mission cannot be overrated. It is awful to think what would have been the condition of the English-speaking races, in a religious point of view, if Ireland had shared in the English apostacy. Scarcely a Catholic voice would be heard amongst those seventy or eighty millions now using that language, who occupy so large a portion of the Earth, and in another century, according to the ratio of their growth, may become two or four hundred millions, or even more. The very remnant that has continued faithful in England might have followed in the wake of their predecessors, had not the influence of Ireland caused the sword of persecution to be sheathed, and civil intolerance to cease at last, and thus the temptation to be removed which had proved fatal to so many. In that vast empire, or the empires that may rise out of its fragments—for, in more than one place are foundations of empires laid which would grow with giant growth, even though the power of the mother country were paralysed to-morrow—the holy sacrifice would not be offered up, and thus the prophecy not fulfilled, which foretold that a clean oblation would be offered from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. That union of the Christian family for which the Saviour prayed before he suffered, and which he left as a mark by which men would know his followers, would not be exhibited to the world. Christianity would be confounded with the products of these latter ages of so-called “light”, and be thought, like the appliances of steam and the contrivances of machinery, to owe its power to the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, instead of deriving it from Him who died on Calvary. For their Christianity, by its very name, would proclaim that the work of Christ had failed, until the press and the “march of light” had come to its aid. Religion, in a word, instead of being a divine institution, would appear and be amongst them but a brilliant work or invention of man, and, therefore, in the supernatural order, but a brilliant delusion, not an institution which the mercy of God transplanted from Heaven, and made to stand, and to grow, and to bless, and produce fruit, in every age and in every form of society.

But, in preserving the faith of the Irish race, God has provided a leaven of truth for these masses. By the side of systems of religion which men have devised, stands the everlasting Church—that Church which, as Macaulay remarked, is the only connecting link between the civilization of the ancient and modern worlds—the Church which taught the name of Christ to every nation that knows him, even to those who afterwards fell from the fullness of truth—the Church which Augustine brought to England, and Patrick to Ireland—the Church that raised the dignity of the poor, and humbled the pride of the high, placing all on the level of the Gospel—the Church that claims no new inventions, but is itself an invention of God, infinitely surpassing all inventions of man, holding out nothing to the nineteenth, which it did not present to the first, to the tenth, and to every other century, but presenting to all the faith and institutions of God, able to save all, to elevate all, to bring all into one fold, that all may be united in one happiness in Heaven.

Is not this great result worth all the sufferings which Ireland has endured? The ways of God appear often circuitous. But in their circuitous course they are everywhere fraught with blessings. The children of Ireland suffered; yet, even in their sufferings they were blessed. He himself pronounced “blessed those who suffer persecution for justice’s sake”; for in their trials they redeemed their own souls. But they were doubly blessed, because they were preserving the ark of God, and carrying it through the waters of tribulation to bless more amply unborn and numerous generations. The ways of God are circuitous, and though, like the course of the planets, they sometimes seem to us to retrograde, they are always onward. The sufferings of Ireland at a time seemed without a purpose, or even the very contrary to what we might have expected for so faithful a people. But, who knows what might have been the result, if justice and humanity had marked the course of the English nation towards Ireland? Who knows but the temptation to the latter to be drawn into apostacy would have been too powerful? Had Apostate England dealt generously or justly with Catholic Ireland, who knows if, in the alliances that would have been formed, she would have been equally steadfast in her faith? And though for a long time confiscations, and plunder, and persecution, and slaughter, and even now, harsh treatment condemning her sons to famine and banishment, have been the effects of the English connection; if these have been the means of creating a barrier that prevented the spread of heresy amongst her sons, has too great a price been paid for the “pearl” that has been bought? When, particularly, the cross borne by the children of Ireland shall have been erected in the Western and Southern Hemispheres, and flourishing Churches in Catholic unity established under its shade, where, but for the fidelity of our fathers, heterodoxy alone would have had sway, shall we not say that little indeed were their sufferings compared to the value of such an Apostolate of Empires?

What is any Earthly mission compared to this? What is even the spreading of civilization with its highest privileges, compared to the spreading of the saving institutions of the Gospel? Even in this world virtue is a thing infinitely superior to mere physical power. The man who does God’s will, whose soul is adorned with grace, is an object of complacency with his Maker, and enjoys his esteem infinitely more, than he who can control the hidden powers of nature, and make them subservient to his will, but does not make his own will conform to the great law that should govern it—subjection to the will of God. When Earth, and all that is of Earth, shall have passed away, the proudest human achievements will be seen to have been as nothing, while those who shall have caused God’s name to be glorified, shall shine as bright stars “unto perpetual eternities”.

This mission, however, has its duties as well as its dignity. What will it avail us to be the sons of martyred sires who sacrificed all for God, if we barter the faith for which they died, for some paltry bauble, or fail to transmit it to those under our charge? Will not the constancy and sufferings of our fathers be a reproach to us before God and man? Will they not pronounce judgment upon us if, while we honour their heroic deeds, we ourselves display nothing but pusillanimity? And even though we preserve our faith, will not this be rather to our shame, if we do not endeavour to practise the virtues which it teaches? When the salt has lost its savour, it is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men. The higher the vocation of God, the lower will be the degradation of those who fail to correspond. They will be despised, and justly despised, by God and by men.

We can see in the fate of other nations the consequences of infidelity to a noble mission. Spain and Portugal were once great powers. They achieved great things at home and abroad. The sails of their commerce whitened every sea. The most distant lands acknowledged their might. They, too, were missionary nations. They carried the faith to the East and to the West, and in both hemispheres planted the cross on continents and islands where Christ was before unknown. God may be said to have given them power for this purpose. It was mainly through their agency that the missionary work, which repaired the losses of the Church in Europe, was carried on for two hundred years.

But the rulers of these countries listened to wicked counsels. On _one and the same_ dark day did Spain, on another did Portugal, command the most strenuous heralds of the cross to be seized and bound in chains. The galleons that were wont to bear over the deep the treasures of Asia and America, and pour them into the laps of the mother countries, or to carry their commands and the means of enforcing them to the most distant lands, were now spreading their sails over every ocean and sea, in the inglorious work of conveying to home prisons, or into exile, the truest missionaries of the cross. On that day these nations renounced their noble mission, and the power that was given to enable them to carry it out soon departed.

The immediate agencies producing their downfall, as well as those that gave rise to their power, may, indeed, be seen in operation before the existence of the causes to which I have attributed them, but not before these were known to God. Now, he frequently prepares, by a long process, the instruments both of his rewards and his punishments, and holds them ready to be conferred on the virtuous, or poured forth on the head of the criminal, long before the fidelity of the one be tested, or the guilt of the other be consummated. Spain and Portugal thus fell, if you will, by immediate agencies long in operation, but by agencies over which God ruled, and which He directed according to his own wise counsels. They fell, and in their humbled condition, mocked by the remains of ancient greatness, they teach all the important lesson, that the greater the high calling given by God, the greater the punishment of those who prove untrue.

Were we also to prove faithless to the mission which God has assigned us, we know not what punishment may await us, even in this world. The trials through which our race has passed, and is passing, may seem severe; but, they are trials permitted by a loving father. May we never deserve that he should scourge us in his _great_ anger. We might then find, like the Jewish people, that to suffer for righteousness’ sake from the hands of men, is sweet, compared to the gall and wormwood mixed in the cup of those who fall into the hands of an avenging God.

On this day, when the Church calls on us to commemorate the heroic virtues and the glorious deeds of our great Apostle, I would fain say to every son of Ireland—to every one in whose veins Irish blood flows, no matter where he himself was born: Let us live worthy of our ancestry, of an ancestry which is the same for all, and is a noble one, noble in that which is the noblest thing man can rejoice in—virtue and fidelity to God. We ourselves are called in a special manner to do honour to our faith by spreading it amongst nations that are destined to occupy the highest position in the social scale. Let us be faithful to our calling. Let us show ourselves worthy sons of the martyred dead. Let us make sure, like them, whatever else we fail in, not to fail in transmitting the faith to those entrusted to our charge, never exposing it to danger for any advantage, much less for the trifling things that may be gained here by want of fidelity. Transmit, carefully, the faith, first of all, but with faith spare no effort that you yourselves, and those committed to your care, grow also in every other virtue. Nay, endeavour so to live that _all men_ may learn to love the faith which is the spring of your actions, and thus glorify and love that God who is the “Author and Finisher” of that Faith.

LITURGICAL QUESTIONS. (_FROM M. BOUIX’S __“__REVUE DES SCIENCES ECCLESIASTIQUES__”_).

1. Is it lawful or obligatory to insert, at the letter N, in the collect _A cunctis_, the name of the patron of the locality (if there be one) when the titular of the church is the Blessed Virgin or a mystery of our Saviour?

2. Is it right to place on the corner of the altar the finger-towel, which in some churches is fastened to the altar-cloth, from which it hangs suspended?

3. Is there any obligation to ring the bell at the Sanctus and at the Elevation, even when there is no one at Mass?

4. Is it lawful for a priest to use a cincture of the kind generally used by bishops?

1. The name of the titular of the church in which the Mass is said is that which ought to be inserted at the letter N in the collect _A cunctis_. In the application of this general rule various cases may occur; the title may be a mystery of our Lord or of our Blessed Lady; or it may be a saint already named in the collect—for example, Saint Peter or Saint Paul; or Mass may be said in an oratory which has no titular saint. The following are the rules to be observed in such cases:

1o. That it is the name of the titular saint which is to be inserted at the letter N is clear from the following decrees:

1 DECREE. _Question._ “In missali romano praecipitur, ut post nomina Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, in oratione _A cunctis_, etc., dicatur nomen patroni praecipui illius ecclesiae, seu diocesis. In Hispania est praecipuus illius regni patronus B. Jacobus apostolus et ex concessione Apostolica in ecclesia dioecesi Guadicensi est patronus specialis S. Torquatus, B. Jacobi apostoli discipulus, et ejusdem ecclesiae et civitatis primus episcopus. Quaeritur: An in praedicta oratione _A cunctis_ debeat dici nomen B. Jacobi apostoli, an B. Torquati?” _Answer._ “In oratione _A cunctis_ post nomina sanctorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli, nomen Torquati tanquam Ecclesiae cathedralis Guadicensis Patroni dumtaxat ponendum esse”. (Decree of 22 January, 1678, No. 2856, q. 8.)

2 DECREE. _Questions._ “... 15. S. Jacobus est patronus universalis regnorum Hispaniae, sancti vero martyres Stemeterius et Caledonius fratres sunt patroni particulares ecclesiae cathedralis, et totius dioecesis Santanderiensis rite electi, et novissime approbati a S. R. C. Quaeritur igitur: Quis ex his patronis debeat nominari ... in oratione _A cunctis_, quando in missis haec oratio dicitur in ecclesia matrice et in caeteris dioecesis? 16. In casu, quo ob dignitatis praestantiam nominari debeat S. Jacobus, quaeritur an ... exprimi etiam possint nomina SS. Stemeterii et Caledonii in praedicta oratione ..., praecipue in ecclesia matrice ubi sacra eorum capita ... venerantur? Et si negative, supplicatur pro gratia ad promovendum cultum qui ipsos decet in ecclesia cathedrali ac tota dioecesi ratione sui specialissimi patronatus”. _Answer._ “Ad 15. In qualibet ecclesia nominandum esse patronum seu titularem proprium ejusdem ecclesiae. Ad 16. Provisum in praecedenti”. (Decree of 23 January, 1793, No. 4448, q. 15 and 16.)

3 DECREE. _Question._ “An patronus nominandus in oratione _A cunctis_ intelligi debeat patronus principalis loci?” _Answer._ “Nominandus titularis Ecclesiae”. (Decree of 12 November, 1831, No. 4669, q. 31.)

2o. If the titular of the church has been already named in the collect _A cunctis_, no name is to be inserted at the letter N. The same holds if the Mass happens to be that of the same saint. This rule depends on the following decision:

“Quis nominandus sit ad litteram N. si patronus vel titularis jam nominatus sit in illa oratione, aut de eo celebrata sit missa?” _Answer._ “Si jam fuerit nominatus omittenda nova nominatio”. (Ibid.)

3_o_. If the oratory in which the Mass is said have no titular saint, the name of the patron of the locality is to be inserted. This rule is proved from a decree of 12th December, 1840, No. 4897, No. 2: