January 2008 Print

The Irish Catholics, like other Christians, admit a mystery in the Holy Trinity, but they may almost be said to admit an experience in the Holy Family. Their historical experience, alas, has made it seem to them not unnatural that the Holy Family should be a homeless family. They also have found that there was no room for them at the inn, or anywhere but in the jail; they also have dragged their newborn babes out of their cradles, and trailed in despair along the road to Egypt, or at least along the road to exile. They also have heard, in the dark and the distance behind them, the noise of the horsemen of Herod.–G.K. Chesterton¹

Great Britain is the main stay of the enemies of God and his Christ; she is drunk with the blood of martyrs; and in the approaching contest [with Irish and English Catholics suffering from her persecution] the prayers of two hundred millions of Catholics throughout the world will daily and hourly ascend for their defeat. Of English descent, a warm admirer of many traits in the character of Englishmen, speaking the English language for our mother tongue, and nurtured from early childhood in English literature, we have personally no hostility to England,...but we cannot deny that we should not grieve to see her humbled, for till she is humbled we cannot hope to see her return to the bosom of Catholic unity. She is and has been the bulwark of the Protestant rebellion against the church, and of all the nations that broke the unity of faith and discipline in the 16th century she has been the most cruel and barbarous in her treatment of Catholics. How, then, should we grieve to see her weeping in sackcloth and ashes her apostasy and cruelty to the people of God? Sorry are we that she needs punishment, but since need it she does, we cannot be sorry to see it inflicted, and warmer sympathy than ours she need expect from no Catholic heart. These prayers of Catholics she may, indeed, make light of, but they will not ascend in vain. They will be heard in heaven. Not nations any more than individuals can always go on sinning with impunity.–Orestes Brownson³¹

The world had ended. Rome was dead. If no one could declare it so officially, the signs roared the message. By the late 400s the Roman Empire, whose culture and degree of civilization had so exceeded all others that it considered its boundaries to be coterminous with those of the world itself, had no longer the strength to define let alone defend those borders. Roman government and society had been sacrificed to complacency, moral degradation, corruption, sloth, and the rest of the deadly sins. In the meantime, her porous borders invited the flow of German and other barbarians, a mass of immigrants hoping for a piece of the good life that Rome had to offer, only to prove a disastrous deluge to the same. But as the empire and its civilization declined and receded, other foreigners came bearing light in the darkness that followed. They were from a distant island, one that had escaped the conquering Roman armies when the empire was at its zenith, but who had recently been converted to the Roman religion. They were the Irish. And embarking from the Island of Saints and Scholars to a benighted Europe, they spread the Catholic Faith, and they saved civilization–and untold numbers of souls.²

But the savior of civilization, like the Savior of man, would ultimately be rewarded with a passion of its own. By the end of the 17th century, Catholics in Ireland were all but slaves. They were excluded from just about every public occupation, from Parliament, from the bench and the bar, the army, navy, all civil offices, and from corporations. All members of religious orders as well as all bishops and representatives of the pope were kicked out of the country. Secular priests were allowed to stay, but they had to be registered; church steeples and bells were made illegal. Also criminalized were Catholic schools, Catholic burials, pilgrimages, and recognition of Catholic holydays. Laws placed serious restrictions on Catholic landholding and inheritance, and lest they try to protect or preserve these things, they were forbidden to own arms or ammunition. If these restrictions were not sufficient, Catholics were prohibited from owning a horse worth more than £5.³ Such were the penal laws that England imposed upon Catholics in Ireland. And such was the anti-Catholic spirit of many high-ranking English officials in the mid 1800s even after the repeal of the most onerous of these laws in the 1820s. It was to these officials that the brilliant American Catholic Orestes Brownson directed his statement at the head of this article.

Thus the question upon which this article proposes to shed some light: How did Catholic Ireland, savior of civilization, hearth of vibrant monasticism, exporter of saints and scholars, come to this woeful fate? If she had simply fallen victim to a foreign power in simple military conflict, then no mystery would there be. Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, all of Cappadocia and Northern Africa for that matter, and so many other lands historically significant to the Catholic Faith had gone that unfortunate route. But Ireland's story is frustratingly and tragically different. For she was not merely conquered by her erstwhile neighbor; as a matter of historical fact, the pope himself handed Ireland over to the English king. And that for the purpose of its spiritual and moral rejuvenation!

Oops.

So Ireland's is a tale among other things of good intentions gone awry. What follows is a brief summary of that story from the 400s to the late 1600s; from Ireland's baptism into the Catholic Faith to the "Flight of the Wild Geese" and the eviction of the last Catholic king and the Catholic nobility with all of its unhappy consequences.⁴ As the religious and political struggles between Ireland and England are so inextricably interlinked we shall examine both as we unearth the origins and history of the Passion of Ireland.

Island of Saints and Scholars

"And in that flash I remembered that the men of this island had once gone forth, not with the torches of conquerors or destroyers, but as missionaries in the very midnight of the Dark Ages; like a multitude of moving candles, that were the light of the world."–G. K. Chesterton, 1919⁵

Although many speak of the "fall" of Rome, the term exceeds the reality.⁶ Rome's decline occurred over centuries and was for the most part an internal affair. But as the core of Roman government rotted away, so too did its grip on the lands that once wrapped around the Mediterranean and across the English Channel to the south of modern Scotland. Slowly, leprosy-like, and of necessity, small areas became self-dependent and cut off from the central government and the treasures of civilization they had once known. Men, focused presently on survival, lost the leisure time provided by the protection and predictability of the old Empire. A steady degrading of all of the finer aspects of civilization followed, including primarily literacy and the production of "books."⁷ This was the Dark Ages.

Around the year 400, just as the Roman Empire was losing its grip on Britain, a 16-year-old boy was taken captive from that land and sent into slavery in Ireland. He worked–appropriately, it would turn out–as a shepherd for a local chieftain. Although raised Catholic, St. Patrick never seriously practiced his Faith. While tending the sheep, however, he was awakened by God to sincere reflection on spiritual matters, and as he relates in his autobiography, "The love and fear of God more and more inflamed my heart; my faith enlarged and my spirit augmented, so that I said a hundred prayers by day and almost as many by night."⁸

After six or seven years of slavery, St. Patrick escaped, fully imbibed with the spirit of the Irish and the Catholic Faith. He proceeded to study at Lerins and Auxerre in Gaul (modern France) for about 15 years, all the while exercising his duties as a deacon. In 432 he finally received the opportunity to fulfill a vision he had had after leaving Ireland, wherein God called him to return to spread the Faith in the land of his former masters. Consecrated a bishop en route, St. Patrick set upon his mission with gusto.

It is a myth to say that all of Ireland was pagan before the coming of St. Patrick, and all of it was Catholic thereafter. Indeed, St. Patrick was preceded by Palladius, who, the year before, was sent by Pope Celestine "to the Scots [i.e., the Irish] that believed in Christ, to be their first bishop."⁹ However, without question, St. Patrick set Ireland irresistibly on the path to becoming a wholly Catholic island. Curiously, Ireland converted without bloodshed. There was no martyrdom in store for St. Patrick or those who came after. No other nation can claim to have received the Gospel with docility surpassing the Irish. And by the late 400s the Catholic Faith in Ireland was secure.

But, like the desert Fathers before them, there was early a concern among certain devout Catholics in Ireland about the Faith coming too easy in this newly baptized land. In Roman times, when the persecutions ceased, many early Christians, disappointed that they could not drip blood for Christ, sought other means of sacrifice. In Egypt especially, some took to the desert as hermits, seeking the maximum of self-abnegation, including the sacrifice of human society. Possibly in imitation of these desert Fathers (to whose stories they had access), the Irish followed suit. It was termed a green martyrdom as opposed to the red martyrdom of physical death. Starting in the late 400s and early 500s, many Irish renounced the world and went to live in caves and rock crevices throughout the land. There they prayed and eked out a living in isolation.¹⁰

Human nature, however, is universal. And just as the common people in Egypt and elsewhere sought out the desert Fathers for their wisdom and spiritual guidance, the Irish hermits were unable to flee their fellows for long. Hermitages, morphed into monasteries, became self-sufficient population centers, and monasteries became the centers of intellectual activity throughout the island. In these monasteries, along with their religious duties, the monks set about the task of copying scripts. Thus, while the light of literacy dimmed throughout western Europe, it thrived on the Emerald Isle at the hands of humble monks. While schools and libraries across the continent disappeared, working in the scriptoria or in the yards around the monastery, the monks of Ireland rewrote the books of the ancient world, both secular and religious, and saved these gems of civilization for their own and later generations. As if to add a personal touch, many of these books they adorned with detailed and densely evocative illuminations; the most famous undoubtedly being the Book of Kells, likely¹¹ from the monastery on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland (see The Angelus, Oct. 2003).

The monastery at Iona itself was founded by the great Irish missionary St. Columcille (also known as Columba) in 563 after he had already established over 40 others throughout Ireland. From there, he would set about the conversion of the entirety of Scotland. Next came the lands that had formed the great Roman Empire. Out of Irish monasteries, missionary saints ranged all over western Europe. While St. Augustine of Canterbury (a Roman) saw to the conversion of southwest England, the northern portion of that land was evangelized by the Irish missionaries, most notably by St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, operating from Iona. Sts. Columba and Gall, meantime, rankled local bishops and civil leaders, but they and their followers also founded monasteries throughout present-day France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Whether St. Brendan sailed to the Americas in the 600s or no, his cohorts certainly went as far as Iceland.¹² Untold numbers of souls discovered the Gospel of our lord Jesus Christ at the hands of these hardy and saintly souls.

To the people of western Europe, Ireland had emerged from a land of barbarism and marauding slavers to the intellectual pinnacle of the western world. Prospective scholars flocked to her monasteries and schools from across the continent to gain an education. Once Charlemagne restored order and a strong empire to the mainland in the late 700s, Ireland in turn sent many of her own scholars back to play their part in the impressive if ephemeral Carolingian Renaissance. Even the most heralded scholar of Charlemagne's time, Alcuin, the leader of the Palatine School, was a monk from an Irish monastery in Britain. Finally, by the 800s, all across western Europe monks and others in monasteries and schools of Irish extraction were copying and discussing the books of the ages with the ideas that could now safely be considered immortal. Thusly did Ireland earn the moniker "Island of Saints and Scholars."

Devastation of the Vineyard–the Viking Invasion

At the end of the eighth century and beginning of the ninth, Viking hordes crashed upon the shores and the riverways of Charlemagne's Empire, of Britain, and of Ireland (not to mention virtually everywhere else in Europe) almost simultaneously. Ireland's golden age was doomed. Preserved for centuries from the destructiveness of war and barbarian intrusion, she was to feel the wrath of 200 years of merciless amphibious Viking assaults which were eventually followed by invasion and settlement. Iona, by way of example, was attacked first in 794; it was put to the torch in 802; rebuilt, it was attacked again in 806 at which time the Vikings slaughtered 68 of its inhabitants. Finally, like many other coastal and island communities, the members moved inland; in this case to Kells, taking the famous illuminated codex to the place from which it gets its name.¹³ Iona's story was repeated throughout Ireland. For over 50 years, every Irish monastery close to water felt the fury of the Norwegian boatmen. While the Vikings settled down and formed Ireland's first cities, including Dublin, in the late 800s, another breed of Vikings, the Danes, commenced a new series of brutal raids that lasted through the first half of the tenth century. Eventually, these invaders also settled down. In time, the Vikings adopted the Irish tongue and the Irish adopted Viking shipbuilding and trading practices. In short, after threatening its utter destruction, the Vikings were amalgamated into Irish society. Unfortunately, this assimilation involved their engagement in the historic dynastic disputes among the clans of Ireland as well.

It must be understood that Ireland, much like the rest of Europe at this time, was highly decentralized politically. Although there was a High King of Tara who theoretically had authority over the island, his power was imaginary and his position symbolic. So while the people of the island increasingly identified themselves as Irish, they gave loyalty not to an Irish king or an Irish state but to their local king and clan. This fragmentation not only led to inner-island squabbles, but it thwarted unified Irish efforts against foreign foes for the entire time frame of this article. Enter Brian Boru. A determined, wise, and courageous king from Munster, through a phenomenal series of alliances, sieges, and successful battles, Boru finally gained the military submission of all of the Vikings at the turn of the millennium. At the same time he conquered the multitudinous feuding Irish chieftains and proclaimed himself "Emperor of the Irish." He was the last Irishman to ever make any such claim with any legitimacy. Unfortunately, at the famous Battle of Clontarf in 1014—a victory for Brian and his forces against some local Irish clans who rejected his kingship—he, his son, and his grandson were killed. The united and free Irish kingdom lasted one decade. In its wake came 150 years of internecine warfare among the clans of Ireland, all vying for the high kingship in the style of Brian Boru.

Traditionally, the dark years of plunder and warfare during the Viking onslaught, combined with the civil wars that followed, have been blamed for the disintegration of the holy citadel that Ireland had been. On the other hand, some scholars of late suggest that the problems of the Irish church and society (to be described below) that manifested themselves to the resurgent Church of the High Middle Ages originated much earlier, even during the golden age of the Emerald Isle. They suggest that the Irish Church was always the black sheep, flying, full of warts, under the radar for centuries while the Church on the continent dealt with troubles there. Whatever the case, the Viking invasions destroyed the momentum that the Irish built up since the time of St. Patrick. Ireland lost her cultural and spiritual leadership role amidst the plunder and rapine; her guiding light was smothered by the smoke of centuries of war.

But this was not all. Ireland's Church had not only fallen from her post up front, she arguably had fallen into de facto schism. The origins of this situation run deep. When the Church organized its hierarchy on the continent they followed the civil organization that had pre-existed in the Roman Empire. In other words, the archbishoprics were in the big cities, bishoprics in the smaller, and so forth, and all maintained some contact with Rome. A degree of uniformity of development, teaching, and practice was ensured by this arrangement. As we have seen, however, Ireland had no cities until the coming of the Vikings and after the fall of the Roman Empire, when Ireland was first baptized, little contact with Rome. Because political power rested with the multitudes of clans, there was no significant central power around which to develop a diocesan system and the normal hierarchy. Instead, the population grew around the monasteries, and consequently, the abbots who led them had tremendous power; the bishops, whose jurisdiction remained cloudy, much less. When cut off from the continent and Rome, this situation lent itself to a unique divergence in maturation¹⁴ and eventually to serious abuse. The civil wars among the various clan leaders took advantage of the former to maximize the latter. To illustrate the consequences, we have a most noteworthy chronicler who detailed the scene in Ireland at this time.

St. Malachy O'More (perhaps most famous now for his papal prophecies), the great archbishop of St. Patrick's former see of Armagh, arrived at legendary Clairvaux in 1139 to pay his respects to St. Bernard. He was on his way to Rome to report on the status of the Church in Ireland and to seek approval for some of his reforms and appointments there. His story was a tale of woe. After the death of Brian Boru, when the civil wars tore apart Ireland during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the local chieftains (kings) consolidated their provincial power. As St. Malachy was to relate: In many cases the local king took over the churches and their revenues; they installed their own bishops and abbots at will; hereditary succession (among bishops and abbots who were married laymen!) was the rule in many places, including eight generations in Armagh itself prior to St. Malachy's immediate predecessor; simony and corrupt bishops without sees were common occurrences; abbots ruled over bishops; and many of the sacraments were administered improperly. By the end of a century and a half of civil war, the Island of Saints and Scholars was adrift in a sea of corruption.¹⁵

Introduction of the English—the Norman Invasion

I've learned all my life, cruel England to blame
So now I'm a part of the Patriot Game.
—Dominic Behan¹⁶

 

Most all of Irish descent (and all in Ireland proper) have been catechized on the historic cruelty of the English landlords and government toward the Irish. But how did the English become involved in Ireland in the first place? How did they come into possession of the land such that they could so mishandle the people upon it? The answer lies in a conspiracy of the political and religious events on the Emerald Isle that we have just related. For the religious problems of Ireland cried out for resolution. The answer came, sadly as things would turn out, from across the Irish Sea.

As a human instrument the Church has had periods of great success in her monumental mission and periods of scandal and decadence. In the case of the latter, almost without fail, the monasteries have been the leaven of reform that pulls the Church back into focus and reinvigorates its members. The ninth and tenth centuries were not just bad for Ireland, but for the Church as a whole. The papacy lived through the period known as its "Iron Age," where simony, murder, and state interference ruled the day. One pope, Formosus, had his body dug up, dressed up, tried, and finally condemned to an unadorned grave—by his successor, Pope Stephen VII. But Formosus got the last laugh, if laughter could overcome the shame, when Stephen was chained and strangled to death while Formosus' corpse was resurrected for yet another burial, this time with solemn rites.¹⁷ Onto such a scene burst the monastery of Cluny, founded in 910, to meet the challenge thus posed by the decaying institutions around her. As Dom Gueranger wrote, "there alone could be found zeal for the liberty of the Church, and the genuine traditions of monastic life. It was there that...God had been secretly providing for the regeneration of Christian morals."¹⁸ In short order, over 2,000 abbeys across Europe were affiliated with Cluny. From these monasteries arose Hildebrand, the future Pope St. Gregory VII, the greatest reformer of the Church of his day. Much as the Irish monasteries brought light to the Dark Ages, Cluny was to bring the same to the Iron Ages. During and shortly after Gregory's reign the Carthusians (1084) and Cistercians (1098) also came into existence full of the spirit of reform. The Cistercians first house was at Citeaux, where they formed as an offshoot of the Cluny family. Drawn by the austerity practiced there, it was to Citeaux that St. Bernard and his compatriots applied for admission in 1112. Within a few years St. Bernard founded a daughterhouse of Citeaux at Clairvaux or "valley of light." It was the turn of the continent to bring light to Ireland. Clairvaux would be the staging area.

St. Malachy and his predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, St. Celsus, had spent decades attempting to reverse the scandalous activities of churchman and chieftain in Ireland. In 1139, St. Malachy visited both St. Bernard and Pope Innocent II. When Malachy arrived at Clairvaux, he was so taken in that he even requested entrance to the order. But the pope refused; he wanted Malachy to remain where he was, continuing his indispensable, if grueling, work of reform. Malachy left behind some of his coterie, however, and shortly thereafter, they returned to Ireland to begin the founding of the Cistercian monasteries that would soon bespeckle the Irish landscape. But this was not all that the papacy had in store for righting the ship of Ireland.

By 1155, word had arrived in Rome of the defects in the Irish Church not just from St. Malachy, but other sources as well, including John of Salisbury, the secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury. John reiterated and amplified all of the horrors described by St. Malachy, the likes of which continued in spite of the heroic efforts of the latter, who had died in 1148. In consequence, the new pope, Adrian IV, the only English pope in the history of the Church, determined that greater effort had to be made to bring about the Gregorian reforms in Ireland. To accomplish his goals, he turned over Ireland to the English king Henry II. "With a view to...restraining the downward course of vice, correcting evil customs and planting virtue, and for the increase of the Christian religion, you shall enter that island and execute whatsoever may tend to the honour of God and the welfare of the land," declared the Papal Bull Laudabiliter to King Henry. Significantly, the king was also expected to preserve "the rights of the churches...whole and inviolate."¹⁹ Since for centuries the papacy claimed Ireland as her own, and the Irish in general acknowledged the same, in a concrete, if distant and formerly inconsequential way, there was no question of the pope's authority to make this land a fiefdom of Henry's. The consequences would prove tragic. In the meantime, the religious portion of the conspiracy of circumstances that brought England to Ireland had played out.

By 1169 it was time for the political part to come into play. Ever since the renowned Brian Boru ascended to the kingship of Ireland by violence at the turn of the 1000s, Ireland had been ravaged by wars among the chieftains in search of the same position.²⁰ These ugly, vicious, fratricidal wars generally stayed in house. Until 1169. Prior to that fateful year—17 years before, in fact—a war had erupted between the Irish High King Rory O'Connor and the Irish King of Leinster (southeastern Ireland), Dermot Macmurrough. Macmurrough was by all accounts a violent man and treacherous leader. In 1152 he dragged off and raped the wife of another provincial leader, thus setting the present conflict in motion. By the mid 1160s Macmurrough had been thoroughly routed and banished from the country. He fled to England and implored the aid of Henry II. So, in 1169 began the Anglo-Norman (called Norman because the Normans²¹ had recently conquered Britain) Invasion.²² Thus we see completed the very pinnacle of historical irony. The Irish Catholics who have suffered so horribly at the hands of the English, upon consulting their history, will find that the English entrance into Ireland came at the behest of an Irish king and a Catholic Pope!

The initial English assault by a small band of knights and archers caught the Irish by surprise, as they had never witnessed the use of military armor or archery. The next year the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare (or Strongbow) arrived to complete the mission. (In return for his efforts Strongbow had been promised by Macmurrough the kingship of Leinster upon MacMurrough's death, thus consummating the English conquest of Irish land.) Soon after King Henry arrived on the Emerald Isle in person the next year (1171), almost every king on the island, including the High King Rory O'Connor, granted him submission and fealty. Only the kings of Tyrone and Tyrconnell²³ in the northern province of Ulster held out. The next year, at the Council of Cashel, the Irish Catholic hierarchy acknowledged Henry's position as lord of Ireland and confirmed the existence of the various ills that he was come to correct. The English were in Ireland to stay.

It would not be a happy stay as evidence immediately made clear. Several times in the history of English-Irish relations the leaders of Ireland have consented to a decision that they quickly regretted. Each time it has led to further violence. It happened when the Irish Parliament declared Henry VIII king of Ireland in 1541; it occurred in the 20th century when they agreed to the dismemberment of Ireland and the creation of the Irish Free State;²⁴ it happened here in 1172. Several united chieftains resumed arms, and within three years the English King Henry was coaxed into signing the Treaty of Windsor according to which over 80 percent of Ireland was under the symbolic overlordship of High King Rory O'Connor (although he was subject to Henry), and the rest left directly in English hands and run by English authorities.

Over the course of the next two centuries the English followed a policy of expanding their direct holdings in Ireland while the Irish opposed this intrusion, each chieftain in his own way and to his own particular extent. The English strategy consisted of three major tactics: encastlement, enfeoffdom, and colonization. The first referred to the classic Norman policy of building castles as an offensive military maneuver. The second referred to forcing the Irish "nobles" to submit to a continental form of feudalism with the English king at the top of the pyramid, and the third to the importation of foreigners, usually Scots or English to do the work of peasants or artisans alongside the newly enserfed native Irish. These tactics met with fairly peaceful success through the reign and until the death of King John in 1216. But events would turn in the favor of the Irish by mid-century. To dramatically oversimplify, conflict resumed between the Irish and the English, between the English and the English, between the Irish and the Irish, and amongst all kinds of combinations of the two. In addition, the English colonists and nobles often found themselves at odds with the English crown. Among the native Irish, at various times a sort of primitive nationalism flared up, at others it was subdued to political and economic ambition or prudence. Perhaps the most famous campaign occurred when Edward Bruce, brother of the famous Scottish king Robert Bruce, joined the fray in 1315, taking as his title, "King of Ireland." His effort to bring independence to Ireland (as his brother eventually brought to Scotland) died with him in battle in 1318.²⁵ But by this time the tide of the conflict had clearly turned and momentum shifted back to the Irish. ²⁶

For while the battles raged intermittently across the countryside, the Irish were conquering the English by assimilation, much as they had the Vikings before them. Although at first the Norman-English invaders despised the Irish culture, language, and traditions, they came in time to accept them as their own. Through intermarriage, fostering (the nursing of another's child, which thus resulted in foster-siblings), and Gossipred ("the relationship forged by standing Godparent at a baptism"),²⁷ the two races became united in all but ancient origin. Many of the great English nobles altered their names to an Irish form as if to give symbol to the convergence of manners, customs, and general culture. So revolting were these circumstances to the more chauvinistic English, the Kilkenny Parliament, at the urging of the son and lieutenant of the English King Edward, passed statutes in 1366 bemoaning the fact that the English in Ireland had discarded "the English tongue, manners, style of riding, laws and usages," all the while taking up Irish variations of the same, all to the exaltation of their "Irish enemies," and "contrary to reason." In an effort to retard these developments, intermarriage with the Irish, Gossipred, and fosterage were made illegal, as were Irish minstrels (or bards), Irish law and judges, and just about anything else smacking of Irish culture. If the temporal punishment was insufficient, the English Bishops, who systematically replaced the Irish-born in those areas under direct English control, declared excommunication on those who failed to comply with the law. ²⁸

To a large extent, the Statutes of 1366 made law the discriminatory policies that English authorities had desired in Ireland long beforehand as a means of civilizing that land.²⁹ The pope tried to intervene with the English king Edward to bring fairness and justice to Ireland, but alas, to no avail. Out of necessity then the Irish took matters into their own hands, taking advantage of the conflicts that diverted the attention of the English. For throughout the 14th and 15th centuries England was awash in two epic wars; the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) with France, and the War of the Roses (1455-1487), a civil war between competing claimants to the throne. During that period, King Richard II alone among her monarchs went to Ireland to try to pacify that beleaguered island. He failed. No one else could overcome the distractions long enough to try. In the meantime, by assimilation and conquest, and by simply swallowing up the lands from which the English colonists retreated and from which the English rulers were absent,³⁰ the Irish chieftains regained their sway. By the time Henry Tudor, the victor in the War of the Roses, acceded to the throne of England, so reduced was the power of the English authorities that they were compelled to resort to bribing the Irish chieftains (what were called "blackrents") in exchange for peace. Direct English authority remained only over the area (of approximately 1,000 square miles) surrounding Dublin, on the east coast. In retreat, the English had built a defensive rampart around this area, which came to be known as the Pale. Outside the Pale, Ireland, fractured as ever, was effectively ruled by 60 chiefs of Irish descent and 30 of English descent, the English—commonly referred to as Anglo-Irish—having been greatly assimilated.³²

In the meantime, arguably in spite of the English and the Bull Laudabiliter, the monasteries in Gaelic (as opposed to English-Norman) Ireland sprung up in force. The years 1420-1530 witnessed about 100 new religious foundations (Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans) sprout up across the Emerald Isle, but almost exclusively in those areas where the English and the English bishops held no sway.³³ So, while England generally failed in its role of reviving Faith and reforming the Church in Ireland, the monks from the continent were actually doing the job.

A King for Ireland—the Anglican Invasion and Irish Counterrevolution (1500-1695)

"The Catholic, reading his history...notes the keenness of the fight [when the new Anglican religion was foisted upon the English people] in England and its long endurance....Ultimately he sees the great nobles and merchants victorious and the people cut off, apparently forever, from the life by which they had lived, the food upon which they had fed. Side by side with all this he notes that, next to Britain, one land only that was never Roman land, by an accident inexplicable or miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as Britain is lost, he sees side by side with that loss the preservation of Ireland." (Hilaire Belloc, 1920)³⁴

By 1485 when the Tudors had come to reign over England as kings and Ireland (at least in theory) as lords, Ireland's difficulties with English authorities were mainly political, resulting from English antipathy toward Irish ways and their efforts at subduing the island. The next 200 years would witness the conflation of this conflict with the sectarian struggle with which we are familiar to this day.

It should be remembered that Laudabiliter had two principle objectives for Ireland: the restoration of civil order and promotion of the Catholic religion. The Pope's Bull implied both a political and a religious dimension, and so the relation between England and Ireland would be a two-dimensional affair. No religious reform was ever speculated upon without a concomitant political conquest. Unfortunately, in practice the latter required Irish acquiescence to the imposition of a foreign culture under foreign rule upon a people with a proud and storied heritage—in short, it begged for the violent response we have seen above. The religious prerogative arguably should not have been disastrous since the same Faith was common to both parties. Moreover, when England first subjugated portions of Ireland politically, not only were both Catholic, but with the rest of Christendom they could not even fathom a world that was not integrally and exclusively so. To the extent that religious friction existed, as we have seen, it was more a result of personnel disputes and ethnic rivalry as English clergy replaced the native-born, and human jealousies and prejudices encroached (as they always do) on the divine mission. Among fallible men, such squabbling must have been expected; but no one could have anticipated the cleaving of the papally appointed promoters of the Faith (the English government) from that very Faith and its catastrophic consequences. When high astride the English throne, Henry VIII betrayed Mother Church and commenced the Anglican schism, demanding that all of his subjects, Irish as well as English, accept him as the head of the Church;³⁵ he plunged the loyal Catholics of Ireland (whether Gaelic or Anglo-Irish) into centuries of "war and death, plundering and pillage,"³⁶ famine, eviction, and privation of every sort. Never content to accept foreign domination in the first place, Ireland's revolt against and revulsion to political suppression gained added urgency with the introduction of this religious division. Ireland's society and sovereignty had long been under siege; as of the 16th century so too was her soul. If she had suffered since the English invasion, Ireland was now to be martyred for Jesus Christ and His holy Church at the hands initially of the English Judas-king and the interests of royal power, and later those of the reigning oligarchs of England.

But her fate was not immediately decided; her submission to this foreign horde did not come without a fight. The decision was 150 years in the making. Four major wars led by Irish nobles and kings between 1575 and 1691 crowned the undying efforts of the Irish peasantry to maintain the Faith in the face of their oppressors and all the machinery of the English government. For 150 years, individuals, parishes, clans, and the Emerald Isle as a practical whole, unsheathed their respective swords in defense of home and religion against the violent onslaught of the impostor Anglican intruders.

As noted above, the new state of affairs commenced in 1534 when Henry VIII had himself proclaimed head of the Church of England. As with all of the Protestant "reformer" kings and princes on the continent, among his first acts was to ban the religious orders, shut down the monasteries, and confiscate Church lands in England. He required an Oath of Allegiance to himself of all other clerics and quickly substituted his own hierarchy for those who remained loyal to the Pope. Martyrdom was in store for St. John Fischer (the only bishop who refused the oath), St. Thomas More, and many others, but the gradual extension of the new religious order in England continued inexorably. Henry planned the same routine in Ireland. Shockingly, he almost succeeded.

The motivations behind Henry's schism are well known. The inspiration behind an Irish parliament's decision to make the schismatic Henry their official king on the other hand is baffling. And yet, in 1541, in a startling sacrifice of Faith to political expediency, the ruler of England was raised up from his status as lord over Ireland to its king. This decision is most onerous in light of the prevailing law of nations in Europe at that time, which was concisely summed up in the soon to be coined phrase, cuius regio, eius religio—"whose rule, his religion." In other words the religion of the king is the religion of the land. Ireland seemed poised to be a repeat performance of what had occurred in England with the imposition of Anglicanism and its so-called reforms. But it was not to be. Almost immediately, the kings and people of Ireland effectively reversed their parliament's decision and rejected Henry's kingship and his attempted reforms. Refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance was nearly universal. While the bishops of England quickly traded allegiance to the Church of Christ for the Church of Henry VIII, the bishops of Ireland and their faithful as quickly smelled the rat and evicted him from their house. Anglican bishops who attempted to replace the legitimate Catholic prelates were sent scurrying for their lives. Meanwhile, having closed all the Catholic monasteries in Ireland (at least those within his grasp) and stolen their land, Henry attempted to buy support from the Irish with his loot as he had in England; but almost without exception they snubbed the offer, refusing to trade their souls for sacrilegiously begotten land. By standing for the True Faith, by rejecting the errors of their new English king, the Irish had placed themselves in a state of de facto rebellion. The unrelenting force of the monarchy was to bear down on them as a consequence. But not yet.

The reign of Henry VIII initiated, but did not effectively implant Anglicanism in Ireland. That was left to his daughter, Elizabeth I, whose reign lasted from 1558 through 1603. However, in Henry's time, two major steps were taken in the enduring efforts at conquest of the island. The first was the eviction of the religious orders and the theft of their land, the doling out of which to the rich of England (the Irish, as we have seen, having rejected the offer) resulted in a new group of landholders in Ireland beholden to the English throne. It was the beginning of the decline of the Irish Catholic landholder.³⁷ The second was his policy of "surrender and regrant," begun in 1541. According to this policy, Irish "kings" promised loyalty to the English monarch and surrendered their centuries-long contests with the monarch over ownership of their land in return for "officially recognized" control of that land and an English title (usually Earl of whatever). On the whole and in spite of these efforts, however, the rule of Henry witnessed the general recession of English sway over the affairs of Ireland.

By the time Elizabeth came to the throne (1558), the Anglican religion was practically unknown in Ireland, and the English government had virtually no say over the overwhelming majority of the land. In the next century and a half, English efforts to impose their new religion (Anglicanism when the monarchs ruled, Puritanism during the Cromwellian dictatorship) and to compel Irish acquiescence to their rule intensified. Their vigor was matched by that of the Irish (again, both native and Anglo-Irish) in opposition to those goals. The Irish resisted the English onslaught in four major wars between 1575 and 1691. In these conflicts, freedom for the True Church and True Faith topped every list of Irish demands, eventually followed by self-determination for the island. And in spite of the ancient Bull, Laudabiliter, which placed Ireland under English rule in the first place, demand for self-determination did not contradict any Catholic obligations to honor the legitimate rulers. For in 1570 Pope St. Pius V issued his Bull, Regnans in excelsis, excommunicating Queen Elizabeth. This act of its very nature, and as explicitly stated in its text, freed all of the queen's Catholic subjects from any loyalty they formerly owed to her. Thus, after 400 years the English lost the papal sanction of their efforts in Ireland. Pius V's bull of excommunication left Laudabiliter obsolete.

On the other hand, with this act of excommunication as its greatest impetus, the monarchs of England came to see a conspiracy to overthrow them beneath every priest's cassock and inside every loyal Catholic's cupboards. As determined as the Irish were to maintain the True religion, then, the English government was determined to snuff it out—as a matter of unity and self-aggrandizement, but also of self-preservation.³⁸

Swords first clashed in 1579 in Munster. The Geraldine Uprising (aka Desmond War) started in the southwest of Ireland and continued through four years. Fighting, "not against the lawful scepter and honorable throne of England, but against a tyrant who refuses to hear Christ speaking through His Vicar,"³⁹ James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald inspired his growing band with unmatched personal bravery and the cry of "Papa Abu!" (the Pope to victory!). As usual, the rebellion was hampered by a lack of unity among the Irish clans, chieftains and nobles, which contributed to its remaining only a provincial affair. Fitzmaurice's untimely death in battle in 1580 hurt the effort further, but the rebellion continued under the leadership of the Earl of Desmond. When he too was hunted down and killed in 1583, the papal crusade died. Munster was laid waste. Illustrative of the chronic disunity among the Irish was the fact that one of the principal allies of the British in the Geraldine Uprising was Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone. This chief from the northern part of the island would see the light, and along with the spirited Red Hugh O'Donnell⁴⁰ he led another uprising in the 1590s. During the Nine Years' War, as it came to be known, the two Hughs swept across the isle, inspiring and almost miraculously uniting their countrymen. With Spanish aid in the form of supplies and eventually troops (albeit too little, too late, and far short of expectations) the united Irish effort secured victory after victory and dominance on the island until finally it too fell, exhausted in 1603. The terms of peace, however, were happy ones in at least one sense. The English guaranteed to the Irish free practice of the Catholic Faith. Prospects seemed ever happier when the treacherous Queen Elizabeth died and brought an end to the Tudor dynasty. The new Stuart king, James I, buoyed Catholic hopes in Ireland with his sympathetic words and pacific actions. Within two years, however he donned the cloak of his predecessors and shot his lance through the hearts and hopes of the Irish Catholics. On September 28, 1605, James officially proclaimed:

"We hereby make known to our subjects in Ireland that no toleration shall ever be granted by us. This we do for the purpose of cutting off all hope that any other religion shall be allowed, save that which is in consonant to the laws and statutes of this realm."⁴¹

English magistrates in Ireland proceeded to enforce this decree with rapacious, vengeful glee, imprisoning and torturing multitudes, while stealing valuables on bogus pretexts. The terms of the peace of Melifont having been defied and their security seriously jeopardized, a number of Irish nobles, particularly Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell (Red Hugh's younger brother and successor), fled to the continent for their lives, with hopes of an eventual return. The event came to be known as the Flight of the Earls. The Earls never returned but died and were buried in Rome where they had lived in exile, having sacrificed all for their beloved Faith.

Again, in the 1640s, the Irish made an effort to regain control of their island. By this time, the English had confiscated even more Irish land—especially in Ulster after the Earls had fled—and were promising to confiscate much more. These policies created a rich Protestant foreign minority and a resentful Catholic native majority that had been dispossessed of their land and means of free sustenance. The uprising broke out in 1641 just as tensions in England between King Charles I and Parliament were catapulting that island into the English Civil War. The Puritan parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell, who had taken control of England after winning the Civil War, saw to the murder of Charles I in 1649 and then set his sights on finally subduing Ireland. In the decade of Cromwellian rule, the Puritans proved themselves even more despicable than the Anglicans. After they laid waste to the town of Drogheda, they compelled the submission of the remainder of the island. They then evicted all Catholic Irish landowners from Ulster and placed them on a form of reservation in the western province of Connaught. The division between the Protestant aristocracy and the Catholic poor grew more acute. Finally, with the monarchy restored and the eventual ascension of the Catholic James II to the throne the Irish anticipated relief. Their hopes were buoyed when James began the restoration of lands stolen in the 1650s under Cromwell and appointed Catholic officials in Ireland; they were dashed when James was deposed by the anti-Catholic parliament in the "Glorious Revolution"; revived again when he staged a comeback in a war fought in Ireland with Irish support for the legitimate English king over his usurping son-in-law, William of Orange; and destroyed with the failure of that effort-in-arms. And the Wild Geese fled,⁴² but not before securing a promise of religious freedom for the Catholics of Ireland in the 1691 Treaty of Limerick, ending the war. With the Anti-Catholic English Parliament back dominating English policy-making, and an Irish Parliament stacked with rabidly anti-Catholic Protestants, the Treaty of Limerick proved as worthless as any other treaty to which the English were signatories in this epic affair, and the Catholic freedom of worship was illusory as ever. Instead, the great Passion of Ireland continued. Far from being free, she paid dearly in blood and privation for her religion for two more centuries.

When this chapter (1535-1714) of Ireland's saga closed, her Catholics owned less than 10 percent of her land—the rest living generally under tyrannical English landlords, and all crawling under the Satanic penal laws mentioned at the beginning of this article; her population had dropped by a quarter from 2,300,000 in the 1550s to 1,700,000 in 1702; her natural leaders left in droves during the 1610 Flight of the Earls; and her army at the end chose service on the continent to subservience in Ireland in the 1691 Flight of the Wild Geese. England's domination of Ireland's land and government was complete.

Thus was the Emerald Isle subjugated beneath the iron fist of English tyranny. Several times in ensuing centuries she attempted to shake the yoke by violence, but to no appreciable avail. Increasingly her pleas for self-rule and religious freedom came to be couched in Enlightenment terms. The appeal to political liberalism had some fruits in time, and the British gradually backpedaled on the religious front in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Finally, in the 1920s, three-quarters of Ireland attained the political freedom sought by so many of their forebears in centuries gone by. The Catholic Faith resumed its proper place in the public sphere, and a genuinely Catholic polity was put in place.

The Silver Lining—The Good Old Days!?

When it was poor, Ireland's main export was people. Among them were many priests. Irish seminaries produced far more priests than the country needed....These days, Irish seminaries are nearly empty. Last year, for the first time, the Dublin archdiocese ordained no priests. —Tom Hundley (Chicago Tribune, July 14, 2006)

"The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians." Thus spoke Tertullian in regard to the Roman persecutions that failed during the first few centuries AD to stymie the new Catholic religion, but gave birth to thousands more converts. Persecution often provides focus and dispels lukewarmness among the faithful. The holy zeal of many traditional Catholics today under the persecution of the Conciliar Church and society at large bears modern witness to this phenomenon. Similarly, for centuries Ireland's faithful clung heroically to their dear Catholic Faith in the face of monumental assaults. Yet today, outside of the six counties of the north still "under John Bull's tyranny,"⁴³ the Faith in Ireland is free. But free at what cost?

In the years of persecution, England had control of Irish government, land and bodies, but like the devil, she had no power over the Irish souls. Through it all, the Irish faithful persevered. And the Catholic Faith thrived. It lived unhampered by the various heresies and "isms" that swept across all or part of Christendom at one time or another. Ireland's sons and daughters left their homeland in droves to join religious orders throughout the world. Blood was willingly shed for the Faith and in defense of the rights of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Church. Souls, unhappy in this world, surely found their eternal home well worth the wear. In 1920, Hilaire Belloc could exult:

The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part or time of the world. They have failed....For the Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect integrity and has kept serene, without internal reactions and without their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe which is the Catholic Church.⁴⁴

In persecution's absence, the Faith has decayed. Legislation completely at odds with Catholic religious and social tenets has swept like a tidal wave onto the law books of Mammon in Dublin. Mass attendance has dropped to 25 percent, and Ireland, once filled with vocations, has been forced to accept priests from foreign countries. Referring to the morass of the late 20th century, Archbishop Martin of Dublin recognized that "the Church wasn't able to maintain its own sense of purpose....The faith of the Church had become rather shallow. It didn't seem to have the roots that were needed at the time."⁴⁵ What is missing from this analysis is a clear and uncompromising acceptance that the modern hierarchy was largely responsible for that "shallow faith" that they now bewail. The archbishop's solution to this crisis involves not a call to the example and sacrifice of the Mass Rocks, to the penitential pilgrimages of Loch Dearg and Croagh Patrick, to a courageous Irish Catholic patriotism, but to erect a system of lay parish councils and create a spiritual community that emphasizes to the faithful its desire for them "to be free, responsible and fully human."⁴⁶ This solution is no solution at all, but is merely the public acknowledgement of the Irish hierarchy's final betrayal of the Irish people who shed oceans of blood and tears for the sake of the Faith in dark days, whilst the modern hierarchy is shedding a puddle of crocodile tears. But Ireland still has real men and women in its ranks. They want the return of the monks and the Mass, and they retain the tenacity of "the fighting Irish" that once shook a World Empire to its foundations—and which can do so again.

 

Jason T. Winschel is a high school European History teacher in the North Allegheny School District in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He holds degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Along with his wife Christina and their six children, he assists at Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Carnegie, Pennsylvania.