Myles O'Reilly
"The Catholic people yes. The Church, no. The Church did everything and anything it could to stop independence movements. From denouncements from the pulpit, informing the British authorities and excommunication."
Are you sure thats the case? The truth is we all live in a Communist state which pumps out lies against the Catholic Church every other day, and so anyway here are a few texts to mull over.
This is an 1831 letter from the Parish Priest of Castlepollard Co. Westmeath, who is replying to a government official asking him to assist in compiling the census, after there was many killed in a tithe protest in the town:
"Sir
I have been favoured with two copies of your circular on the census of the population. I suppose the Parish Priest of Newtownbarry [Co. Wexford, where the police had killed 14 tithe protesters in 1831] received one or two more. I would wish to know what the obligation the priests of Ireland owe either to you or the Government, that we should assist you’re traveling servants and look over their work. If you want clerical bailiffs, call on those whom you pay, and who have nothing else to do. With respect to us, we have neither time nor inclination to give you gratuitous services, no more than we should be inclined to disgrace ourselves by receiving your pay. You want the census of my parish. All the information I can give you is, that its population was reduced, on the last shooting day, eleven in number, and that we have laws which forbid me to characterize that deed as it deserves. The Government, which is supported at enormous expense for the purpose, or under the pretence (which you know is the same thing) of protecting each man’s rights inviolable, calls on me to help to number the rest of my flock, without alluding in the least degree, to the eleven whom I have lost.
Does this government think I could so soon forget them, or that I can ever forget them? or that from my memory can be effaced the impression which their pallid countenances, distorted by expiring agonies, their stiffened limbs, their bodies smarting with the tepid current that gushed from their hearts, has stamped on my mind? Sir, send your Orange messengers and enumerators to those to whom they are welcome. But let them not be annoying my little place with their unwanted presence. I am too much affected by the loss of my parishioners, whom I regard more than I do you, or any one belonging to or connected with the Irish Government, to turn my attention to this display, that is so worthy of the men who take the adorers of Jupiter, Mars and Pluto, for their models in perhaps more instances than the Census.
Having no design to offer you any personal disrespect, but merely wishing to reply to your official letter.
I have the honour to remain, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
J Burke, P.P., Castlepollard"
This is an 1871 pastoral letter by the Bishop of Meath:
“Dearly beloved, in the very first year of our ministry, as a missionary priest in this diocese, we were an eye-witness of a cruel and inhuman eviction, which even still makes our heart bleed as often as we allow ourselves to think of it. Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day, and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them. And we remember well that there was not a single shilling of rent due on the estate at the time, except by one man; and the character and acts of that man made it perfectly clear that the agent and himself quite understood each other.
The Crowbar Brigade, employed on the occasion to extinguish the hearths and demolish the homes of honest, industrious men, worked away with a will at their awful calling until evening. At length an incident occurred that varied the monotony of the grim, ghastly ruin which they were spreading all around. They stopped suddenly, and recoiled panic stricken with terror from two dwellings which they were directed to destroy with the rest. They had just learned that a frightful typhus fever held those houses in its grasp, and had already brought pestilence and death to their inmates. They, therefore supplicated the agent to spare these houses a little longer; but the agent was inexorable, and insisted that the houses should come down. The ingenuity with which he extricated himself from the difficulties of the situation was characteristic alike of the heartlessness of the man and of the cruel necessities of the works in which he was engaged. He ordered a large winnowing sheet to be secured over the beds in which the fever victims lay - fortunately they happened to be perfectly delirious at the time - and then directed the houses to be unroofed cautiously and slowly, because he said, “he very much disliked the bother and discomfort of a coroner’s inquest”. I administered the last Sacrament of the Church to four of these fever victims next day; and, save the above-mentioned winnowing sheet, there was not a roof nearer to me than the canopy of heaven.
The horrid scenes I then witnessed I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women; the screams, the terror, the consternation of children; the speechless agony of honest, industrious men wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw the officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The heavy rains that usually attend the autumnal equinoxes descended in cold, copious torrents, throughout the night, and at once revealed to these houseless sufferers the awful realities of their condition. I visited them next morning, and rode from place to place administering to them all the comfort and consolation I could. The appearance of men, women, and children, as they emerged from the ruins of their former homes - saturated with rain, blackened and besmeared with soot, shivering in every member, from cold and misery - presented positively the most appalling spectacle I ever looked at.
The landed proprietors, in a circle all around - and for many miles in every direction - warned their tenantry, with threats of the direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night’s shelter. Many of these poor people were unable to emigrate with their families; while, at home, the hand of every man was thus raised against them. They were driven from the land on which Providence had placed them; and, in the state of society surrounding them every other walk of life was rigidly closed against them. What was the result? after battling in vain with privation and pestilence, they at least graduated from the workhouse to the tomb; and in little more than three years nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves. The eviction, which I have thus described and of which I was an eye-witness, must not be considered an isolated exceptional event which could occur only in a remote locality, where public opinion could not reach and expose it. The fact is quite the reverse. Every county, barony, Poor Law Union, and indeed every parish in the diocese, is perfectly familiar with evictions that are oftentimes surrounded by circumstances, and distinguished by traits of darker and more distinguished atrocity.”
(Brian Nugent, An Creideamh, A Chronological Anthology of Traditional Catholic Writing (Oldcastle, 2009), p.368-9 and 387-8.)
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