The Holy See And The Liberty Of The
Irish Church At The Beginning Of The Present Century.

All students of
Irish Catholic affairs must feel, at every moment, that we are at a
great loss for a collection of ecclesiastical documents connected
with our Church. The past misfortunes of Ireland explain the origin
of this want. During the persecutions of Elizabeth, of James the
First, and Cromwell, our ancient manuscripts, and the archives of our
convents and monasteries, were ruthlessly destroyed. At a later
period, whilst the penal laws were in full operation, it was
dangerous to preserve official ecclesiastical papers, lest they
should be construed by the bigotry and ignorance of our enemies into
proofs of sedition or treason. Since liberty began to dawn on our
country, things have undergone a beneficial change, and recently
great efforts have been made to rescue and preserve from destruction
every remaining fragment of our ancient history, and every document
calculated to throw light on the annals of our Church. We are anxious
to coöperate in this good work, and we shall feel deeply grateful to
our friends if they forward to us any official ecclesiastical papers,
either ancient or modern, that it may be desirable to preserve.
Receiving such papers casually, we cannot insert them in the
Record in chronological
order, but by aid of an Index, to be published at the end of each
volume, the future historian will be able to avail himself of them
for his purposes.

[pg
050]

To-day we insert
in our columns two letters never published before, as far as we can
learn, in their original language. They were addressed, in the
beginning of this century, by the learned Archbishop of Myra,
Monsignore Brancadoro, Secretary of the Propaganda, to a
distinguished Dominican, Father Concanen, then agent of the Irish
bishops, who was afterwards promoted to the See of New York, and who
died at Naples, in the year 1808, before he could take possession of
his diocese.

The first letter,
dated the 7th August, 1801, refers to certain resolutions adopted by
ten Irish prelates, in January, 1799, at a sad period of our history,
when Ireland was in a state of utter prostration, and abandoned to
the fury of an Orange faction. In such circumstances, we are not to
be surprised that the Catholics of Cork, Waterford, Wexford, and many
other parts of Ireland, in the hope of preserving their lives and
property, should have petitioned to be united to England; or that
Catholic prelates, anxious to gain protection for their flocks,
should have endeavoured to propitiate those who had the power of the
government in their hands, by taking into consideration the proposals
then made—that the state should provide for the maintenance of the
clergy, and that a right should be given to the state to inquire into
the loyalty of such ecclesiastics as might be proposed for the
various sees of Ireland.

The celebrated Dr.
Milner, treating of the resolutions just referred to, observes in his
Supplementary Memoirs, p. 115,
that they had nothing in common with the veto which was afterwards
proposed by government in 1805, and several times in succeeding
years, and adds, that the prelates “stipulated for their own just influence, and also for
the consent of the Pope in this important business.”

According to the
wise determination of the prelates, the matters they had agreed to
were referred to the judgment of the Supreme Head of the Church. A
speedy answer, however, could not be obtained. At that time the great
Pontiff, Pius the Sixth, was a captive in the hands of the French
Republicans, and soon after died a martyr at Valence in France. The
Holy See was then vacant for several months, until, by the visible
interposition of Providence, Italy was freed from her invaders, and
the cardinals were enabled to assemble in conclave to elect a new
Pope. Soon after his promotion, Pius the Seventh occupied himself
with the affairs of our Church, and the secretary of the Propaganda
received instructions to communicate through Father Concanen to the
Irish Prelates the wishes of his Holiness.

The substance of
the official note of Monsignore Brancadoro is, 1. That his Holiness
is thankful to the British government for the relaxation of the penal
laws to which Catholics had been so [pg 051] long subjected, and for any other acts of
liberality or kindness conferred on them. 2. That the Irish prelates,
whilst manifesting their gratitude for the favours they had received,
should prove, by their conduct, that it was not through a feeling of
self-interest, or through hopes of temporal advantages, that they
inculcated on their flocks the necessity of obedience to the laws and
the conscientious fulfilment of the duties of good citizens; but that
they did so through a spirit of religion, and in conformity with the
dictates of the gospel. 3. That to prove how sincerely they were
animated with those feelings, the Irish prelates should refuse the
proffered pension, and continue to act and support themselves as they
have done for the past, thus giving an example of Christian
perfection which would not fail to give general edification.

The second letter
is also from the secretary of Propaganda to Father Concanen, and is
dated 25th of Sept., 1805, in which year Dr. Milner had just brought
under the notice of the Holy See some new projects of government
interference with the Catholic clergy, which had lately been
introduced into Parliament by Sir John Hippisley, at that time a
supporter of Emancipation, but who afterwards gave proofs of a great
desire to enslave the Catholic Church.

In the second
letter Monsignore Brancadoro states the apprehension felt by the S.
Congregation, lest the moment of the Catholic triumph should prove
the one most dangerous to the purity and stability of the Catholic
religion since the Reformation; that it would be no injustice to
suspect the British Government of being influenced by designs to that
very effect; that the Bishops should, therefore, as a general
principle, renounce all idea of advancing their own proper interests,
or of securing any temporal advantages, lest through human frailty
they should inadvertently be surprised into any concessions which in
course of time might prove injurious to the interests of religion.
The Secretary then goes on to say that the S. Congregation found
serious difficulties, more or less, in all the plans which, as Dr.
Milner had reported, had been proposed by the statesmen of the day in
England. These plans were:—1. The pensioning of the clergy. 2. State
interference in the nomination of Bishops. 3. The restoration of the
Hierarchy in England. 4. The concession to the ministry of the right
to examine the communications which might pass between the English
and Irish Catholics and the Holy See.

As to the plan of
pensioning the clergy, Monsignore Brancadoro points out the dangers
to which its adoption would expose them. If they accept a pension
from government, the offerings of the faithful will be undoubtedly
withdrawn, and the [pg
052]
priesthood will be left quite dependent on the caprice of those in
power. He recalls to Father Concanen’s memory, that in his previous
letter of the 7th of August, 1801, he had announced to him the Pope’s
wish that the Irish clergy should decline all pensions from the
government, and mentions that the Irish Bishops, in reply, had stated
that they willingly renounced all temporal advantages in order to
preserve religion uninjured.

The secretary of
the Propaganda next reminds his correspondent that Pius VI., in a
brief of 20th March, 1791, had condemned a decree of the National
Assembly of France, by which the clergy of that country were made
pensioners of the state; and he adds that the Holy See had resisted a
similar attempt of the English government in regard to the clergy of
Corsica, when that island had fallen into their hands.

Examining the
various vetoistical plans mentioned by Dr. Milner, Monsignore
Brancadoro quotes the authority of the great and learned Pontiff,
Benedict XIV., to show how decidedly opposed the Holy See has always
been to every project directed to vest Catholic ecclesiastical
appointments in the hands of a Protestant sovereign. This question is
discussed in a brief of that Pope addressed to the Bishop of Breslau
on the 15th of May, 1748, and his words are as follows: “There is not recorded in the whole history of the Church
a single example in which the appointment of a bishop or abbot was
conceded to a sovereign of a different religion”. He adds
“that he would not, and could not, introduce
a practice calculated to scandalize the Catholic world, and which,
besides bringing on him a dreadful judgment in another world, would
render his name odious and accursed during life, and much more so
after death”.

2. The learned
writer then proceeds to examine the various plans of granting to
government certain powers in regard to the nomination of bishops, and
explodes them all as replete with danger to religion, and well
calculated to enslave the Church.

The plans proposed
to lessen the Pope’s unwillingness to grant to the sovereign the
right of nomination were the following:—Some thought that the
nomination should be limited to a certain class of persons who should
have been approved of by the episcopal body after an examination and
trial. Such a body might be the vicars-general, of whom two should be
appointed for each diocese. The government was to be bound to choose
the bishops out of this body. This plan was rejected, first, because
it would really amount to vesting the nomination of bishops in a
non-Catholic sovereign; and secondly, on account of difficulties
created by the circumstances of the time and place.

Others proposed to
give the government the right of excluding from the episcopal charge
those obnoxious to itself. Monsignore [pg 053] Brancadoro says of this plan, that unless this
right of exclusion were restricted by limits, it would be equivalent
to a real power of nomination. But even so, even after due
limitation, it was an absolute novelty in the Church, and no one
could tell what its consequences might be. Besides, it was uncalled
for, since the experience of so many centuries ought to have
convinced the government that the ecclesiastics appointed to govern
dioceses were always excellent citizens. Besides, it was the custom
of the Holy See not to appoint to a vacant diocese until it had
received the recommendation of the metropolitans and the diocesan
clergy. This was a safeguard against improper appointments.

3. With respect to
the restoration of the Hierarchy in England, Monsignore Brancadoro
blames the motive which induced the English nobles to petition for
such a change of church government, namely, the desire they felt to
have bishops less bound to the Holy See. He declares that, although
differing quoad jus,
bishops and vicars-apostolic did not differ in reality, and that the
Holy See was equally well satisfied with the bishops of Ireland, and
the vicars-apostolic of England and Scotland.

4. The Secretary
condemns, as worst of all, the plan of giving to the ministers the
right to examine the communications that pass between the Holy See
and the British and Irish Catholics. Such a right has never been
allowed, even to a Catholic power, much less should it be allowed to
a Protestant government. The case of France was not to the point, for
there the right was limited to provisions of benefices alone. The
government has no reason to be afraid: the Holy See has expressly
declared to bishops and vicars-apostolic, that it does not desire any
political information from them.

The two official
notes we insert will be read in their original language with great
interest. They are noble monuments of the zeal of the holy Pontiff,
Pius VII., and of the vigilance with which the Holy See has always
endeavoured to uphold the rights and independence of our ancient
Church. Undoubtedly the wise instructions given in those letters had
no small share in arousing that spirit with which a few years later
our clergy and people resisted and defeated all the efforts of
British statesmen to deprive our Church of her liberties, and to
reduce her to the degraded condition of the Protestant establishment.
The notes of the secretary of Propaganda are a fine specimen of
ecclesiastical writing, illustrating the maxim fortiter in re, suaviter in
modo.

[pg
054]

A Recent Protestant View Of The Church
Of The Middle Ages.

The history of the
Church in the middle ages has ever forced upon Protestant minds a
difficulty which they have met by many various methods of solution.
The middle age exhibits so much of precious side by side with so much
of base, so much of the beauty of holiness in the midst of
ungodliness, so much of what all Christians admit as truth with what
Protestants call fatal error, that the character of the whole cannot
readily be taken in at first sight from the Protestant point of view.
Some there are who dwell so long on the shadows that they close their
eyes to the light, and these declare the medieval Church to have been
a scene of unmitigated evil. To their minds the whole theology of the
period is useless, or worse than useless, harmful. They connect the
middle ages with wickedness as thoroughly as the Manicheans connected
matter with the evil principle.

[pg 058]

Others there are
who honestly admit that these ages, especially their earlier part,
are not Protestant, but at the same time contend that neither are
they favourable to Roman doctrine. These believe that facts
abundantly prove that in the bosom of the Church which was then, the
two Churches were to be found, which afterwards disengaged themselves
from one another at the Reformation. This is the philosophy of
medieval history which, as we learn from the preface to his
collection of Sacred Latin Poetry,1 has
recommended itself to Dr. Trench, the present Protestant Archbishop
of Dublin. “In Romanism we have the residuum
of the middle-age Church and theology, the lees, after all, or well
nigh all the wine was drained away. But in the medieval Church we
have the wine and lees together—the truth and the error, the false
observance and yet at the same time the divine truth which should one
day be fatal to it—side by side.” For such thinkers the sum of
all the history of that period amounts to this: a long struggle
between two Churches—one a Church of truth, the other a Church of
error—a struggle which, however, ended happily in the triumph of the
Church of truth by the Reformation, in which the truth was purified
from its contact with error.

It is not without
its advantages to know what views the occupant of an Irish see so
distinguished, is led to take, of the Church to which seventy-seven
out of every hundred Irishmen belong, with all the convictions of
their intellects, and all the love of their hearts. It seems to us
that his theory is not likely to satisfy any party; it goes too far
to please some, and stops short too soon to be agreeable to others.
But what strikes us most of all in it is the fatal inconsistency of
its parts. Of this the very book to which it serves as preface is
proof enough. Dr. Trench’s position is this. He tells his Protestant
readers that whereas in the medieval Church there was a good church,
and an evil, all the good has found its resting place in
Protestantism, all the evil in tyrannical Rome. Whatever of good, of
holy, of pure, has ever been said or done within the Church,
Protestants are the rightful inheritors of it all. From the treasury
of the Church before the Reformation he proposes to draw, and to
collect in this work what his readers may live on and love, and what
he is confident will prove wholesome nourishment for their souls. He
would set before them the feelings of the Church during these
thousand years of her existence, and would summon from afar, from
remote ages, “voices in which they may utter
and embody the deepest things of their hearts”. Such, he
assures them, are the voices of the writers whose poems have found a
place in his [pg
059]
book. Now, if we are to understand that the two ante-Reformation
Churches stood out quite distinctly, one from the other, in open
antagonism, like Jerusalem and Babylon, each having its own position
more or less clearly defined, we should naturally expect to find in
Dr. Trench’s book the thoughts and words only of the Reformers before
the Reformation, of the men, that is, who never bent the knee to
Baal, but ever cherished in their hearts the true doctrine of
salvation. If his own theory be worth anything, he must have recourse
for his present purposes, to that one of the two Churches which alone
has been perpetuated, victorious after conflict, in Protestantism.
Where else shall he find sympathies that answer to those of
Protestants? But he does not do so. For in the beginning of his
preface he tells us that he has not admitted each and all of the
works of the authors whose productions he inserts. He tells us that
he has carefully excluded from his collection “all hymns which in any way imply the Romish doctrine of
transubstantiation”, or, “which
involve any creature-worship, or speak of the Mother of our Lord in
any other language than that which Scripture has sanctioned, and our
Church adopted”, or which “ask of the
suffrages of the Saints”? These certainly are not the
doctrines which have been perpetuated in Protestantism.

His own practice,
therefore, is inconsistent with his theory, if that theory means to
assert the existence of two Churches in the middle age, distinctly
antagonistic, one to the other.

The only escape
from this tangle is to reply, that Dr. Trench, although he may find
two Churches in the bosom of the middle-age Church, does not,
however, place between them a separation so sharp as to suppose the
Church of good absolutely without evil, nor the Church of evil
altogether destitute of good. In each there is good and some mixture
of evil: error relieved by a vein of truth. His favourite authors, by
whose labours he wishes to make his readers profit, are, in this last
hypothesis, men who are subject to the influence of both Churches;
men who belong partly to each in turn, whose doctrines are a pitiable
admixture of truth with falsehood—who, in one word, are visited both
by “airs from Heaven and blasts from
Hell”. At times they say what all, even Protestants, may
treasure up in their hearts, to live on and love; at times, again,
they are made to utter what all should reject and condemn, as so many
snares for unwary feet. We shall say nothing of the difficulty the
mind feels in accepting such a description of the position of these
writers, nor of the task we have to persuade ourselves that those who
teach belief in deadly heresies to be essential to salvation, can be,
at the same time, the chosen tabernacles wherein the pure spirit of
real piety can ever take up its abode. Such was not [pg 060] the feeling of the ancient Church. We
ask, instead, who are the men upon whose writings Dr. Trench would
sit in judgment, “to sunder between the holy
and profane”, to distinguish between the errors and the truth,
to decide what we are “to take warning from
and to shun, what to live upon and love”. With the exception
of the two, Alard and Buttmann, all are men highly honoured by the
whole Catholic world, and all, without exception, are praised for
their excelling virtues by Dr. Trench himself. Among the twenty-three
names we read with reverence those of Saint Ambrose, Saint
Bonaventure, Venerable Bede, Saint Bernard, Saint Peter Damian,
Thomas a-Kempis, Peter the Venerable, Jacopone, and others of great
reputation for sanctity and learning. These are the men whose
writings Dr. Trench is to parcel out into two portions; this to be
venerated as sacred, that to be condemned as profane. It needs great
faith in the censor, to accept readily his decision in such a case.
What test does he undertake to apply? what criterion is to influence
his choice? Why does he cast away the poems which celebrate St. Peter
as Prince of the Apostles, and approve of those that extol St. Paul?
Why should he style Adam of St. Victor’s hymn on the Blessed Virgin
an exaggeration, and quote as edifying his Laus S.
Scripturae? Why are St. Bonaventure’s pieces in honour
of Mary visited with censure, and his lines In Passione
Domini made the theme of praise? Dr. Trench gives us
his reasons very plainly. “If our position
mean anything”, says he (page x.), “we
are bound to believe that to us, having the Word and the Spirit, the
power has been given to distinguish things which differ…. It is our
duty to believe that to us, that to each generation which humbly and
earnestly seeks, will be given that enlightening spirit, by whose aid
it shall be enabled to read aright the past realizations of God’s
divine idea in the wise and historic Church of successive ages, and
to distinguish the human imperfections, blemishes, and errors, from
the divine truth which they obscured and overlaid, but which they
could not destroy, being, one day, rather to be destroyed by
it”. That is to say, we, as Protestants, in virtue of our
position as such, are able by the light of the Holy Spirit to discern
true from false doctrine, the fruits of the good Church from the
fruits of the evil Church. This enlightening Spirit will be given to
each generation which humbly and earnestly seeks it. But, we ask,
what are we to believe concerning the working of the same
enlightening Spirit in the hearts of the holy men whose exquisitely
devotional writings Dr. Trench sets before us? Were they men of
humility and earnestness? If they were not, Dr. Trench’s book appears
under false colours, and is not a book of edification. And if they
were, as they certainly were, who is Dr. Trench [pg 061] that he should take it on himself to
condemn those who enjoyed the very same light which he claims for
himself? And why should we not then rather believe that as these holy
men had, on his own showing, the spirit of God, Dr. Trench, in
condemning their doctrine does in truth condemn what is the doctrine
of the Church of the Holy Spirit.

The theory is
therefore as inconsistent as on historical grounds it is false. Such
as it is, however, the conclusions we may draw from it are of great
importance.

1. Dr. Trench
declares that, both by omitting and by thinning, he has carefully
removed from his selection, all doctrine implying transubstantiation,
the cultus of the Blessed Virgin, the invocation of saints, and the
veneration of the cross. Now, as the great bulk of the poems he
publishes belong to the middle ages, strictly so called, it follows,
on Dr. Trench’s authority, that these doctrines of the Roman Catholic
Church were held long before the Reformation, and that the Church was
already in possession when Luther came.

2. Since he tells
us (page vi) that he has counted inadmissible poems which breathe a
spirit foreign to that tone of piety which the English Church desires
to cherish in her children, it follows that the spirit of piety in
the Church of old is not the same as that in the present Church of
England. Now in such cases the presumption is against novelty.

3. Dr. Trench
(page vii) reminds his readers that it is unfair to try the
theological language of the middle ages by the greater strictness and
accuracy rendered necessary by the struggle, of the Reformation. A
man who holds a doctrine implicitly and in a confused manner,
is likely to use words which he would correct if the doctrine were
put before him in accurate form. This is a sound principle, and one
constantly employed by Catholic theologians, when they have to deal
with an objection urged by Protestants from some obscure or equivocal
passage of a Father. It is satisfactory to be able for the future to
claim for its use the high authority of Dr. Trench.

4. A special
assistance of the Holy Spirit is claimed for all those who humbly and
earnestly invoke him. This assistance is to enable those blessed with
it to distinguish between error and divine truth. Is this happy
privilege to be exercised either independently, without the direction
of the ministers of the Church, or is it one of the graces peculiar
to the pastoral office? In the former case, every fanatical sectary
may judge in matters of religion as securely as if he had the whole
world on his side. In the latter case, it would be interesting to
know how much does this privilege differ from the infallibility
claimed by the Catholic Church.

[pg 062]

5. Finally, the
contradictions inherent to the whole theory are most clearly to be
seen in the following passage about the noble lines which Hildebert,
Archbishop of Tours, in the beginning of the twelfth century, places
on the lip of the city of Rome:

The Mss. Remains Of Professor O’Curry
In The Catholic University. No. II.

Prayer of St. Aireran
the Wise, ob.. 664.

[pg 064]

O Deus Pater
omnipotens Deus exerce tuam misericordiam nobis!

O God the Father
Almighty! O God of Hosts, help us.

O illustrious God!
O Lord of the world! O Creator of all creatures, help us.

O indescribable
God! O Creator of all creatures, help us.

O invisible God! O
incorporeal God! O unseen God! O unimaginable God! O patient God! O
uncorrupted God! O unchangeable God! O eternal God! O perfect God! O
merciful God! O admirable God! O Golden Goodness! O Heavenly Father,
who art in Heaven, help us.

Help us, O
Almighty God! O Jesus Christ! O Son of the living God! O Son twice
born! O only begotten of the Father! O first-born of Mary the Virgin!
O Son of David! O Son of Abraham, beginning of all things! O End of
the World! O Word of God! O Jewel of the Heavenly Kingdom! O Life of
all (things)! O Eternal Truth! O Image, O Likeness, O Form of God the
Father! O Arm of God! O Hand of God! O Strength of God! O right
(hand) of God! O true Wisdom! O true Light, which enlightens all men!
O Light-giver! O Sun of Righteousness! O Star of the Morning! O
Lustre of the Divinity! O Sheen of the Eternal Light! O Fountain of
immortal Life! O Pacificator between God and Man! O Foretold of the
Church! O Faithful Shepherd of the flock! O Hope of the Faithful! O
Angel of the Great Council! O True Prophet! O True Apostle! O True
Preacher! O Master! O Friend of Souls (Spiritual Director)! O Thou of
the shining hair! O Immortal Food! O Tree of Life! O Righteous of
Heaven! O Wand from the Stem of Moses! O King of Israel! O Saviour! O
Door of Life! O Splendid Flower of the Plain! O Corner-stone! O
Heavenly Zion! O Foundation of the Faith! O Spotless Lamb! O Diadem!
O Gentle Sheep! O Redeemer of mankind! O true God! O True Man! O
Lion! O young Ox! O Eagle! O Crucified Christ! O Judge of the
Judgment Day! help us.

Help us, O
Almighty God! O Holy Spirit! O Spirit more noble than all Spirits! O
Finger of God! O Guardian of the Christians! O Protector of the
Distressed! O Co-partner of the True Wisdom! O Author of the Holy
Scripture! O Spirit of Righteousness! O Spirit of Seven Forms! O
Spirit of the Intellect! O Spirit of the Counsel! O Spirit of
Fortitude! O Spirit of Knowledge! O Spirit of Love! help us.

The Destiny Of The Irish
Race.3

That God knows and
governs all things—that whatever happens is either done or permitted
by him, and that he proposes to himself wise and beneficent ends in
all he does or permits—are truths which lie at the foundation of all
religion. The wicked may refuse to obey his commands, but they cannot
withdraw themselves from the reach of his power. While their
wickedness is entirely their own, God makes
them, however unwilling or unconscious, instruments to work out his
ends.

It is thus that
individuals and nations have each a peculiar destiny. Not that there
is a blind fate, such as Pagans imagined; but that an all-seeing and
all-governing God proposes to himself certain objects, which he is
determined to attain, despite the perversity of man.

To learn the
purposes of God in the development of human events, to trace his hand
in the complicated movements of society, to see him overruling and
directing all to his own great ends, is one of the most sublime
objects to which the study of history can be applied. Frequently,
indeed, we may be unable fully to comprehend the designs of his
providence in the moral, as in the physical world. Fancy, or pride,
may easily have a great part in suggesting our theories. But, if we
confine ourselves to certain facts and undoubted principles, we can
often trace the design in both orders, and admire in it the wisdom,
the power, the goodness—all the attributes of God. Nay, all these
shine more brightly in the moral than in the physical order.

The history of his
chosen people is an example of this. We find empires rising and
falling, at one time to punish, at another time to try, at another to
deliver his people. The good and the wicked, the weak and the strong,
become in turn his instruments. The whole history of that people is
but a record of the acts of his overruling providence, directing all
things to the accomplishment of the designs which he had
announced.

This is, indeed,
so evident in this case that it may not be considered a fair instance
to prove my general position. For it is admitted that God’s
providence over the Jewish race was quite extraordinary. Still, it
proves that God does so intervene in human affairs, and it
illustrates many of the principles that must be kept in view in these
investigations. It shows, for example, that many, unconscious of the
fact—nay, with quite another object [pg 066] in view, acting perhaps from avarice, hatred,
or ambition, are yet instruments in the hand of God for the
accomplishment of his wise purposes. It shows how things, and
persons, considered as of little or of no value, according to human
views, may, in reality, be the pivots on which the destinies of vast
empires turn, connected, as they may be, with the accomplishment of
purposes which weigh more in the scales of Heaven than the mere
temporal condition of all the empires of the Earth.

It is in this view
that many Christian writers assert that the Roman empire obtained
universal sway, that civilized nations being thus brought closely
together, an easier way might be prepared for the spread of the
Gospel. The generals and statesmen of Rome had no doubt a very low
idea of the poor fishermen of Galilee, and of the tentmaker of
Tharsus. It may be safely presumed that they did not even allow their
names to divert their thoughts, for a moment, from the grand projects
of conquest and government by which they were engrossed. Yet, in the
designs of God, it was, most probably, to prepare a way for the work
of those fishermen, and of that tentmaker, and their associates, that
wisdom had been vouchsafed to their counsels and victory to their
arms.

The endless
invasions of the Roman empire by northern tribes is another instance
of whole races being used by God for his own purposes, without their
having any idea of the work in which they were employed. They came to
punish those who had revelled in the blood of the saints, and to
supply fresh material for the great work of the Church of God.

Towards the close
of the fifteenth century, an Italian sailor, led by some astronomical
observations and some half understood, or rather misunderstood, tales
of ancient travellers, to believe that there must be another
continent far away beyond the western waters, wandered from court to
court, in Europe, in search of means to fit up an expedition to
discover it, and he finally succeeded in making known a new world. It
requires little faith in divine Providence to believe that it was God
who was impelling him thus to open a new outlet for the energies of
the ancient world, which were then about being developed on a
gigantic scale, and, still more, to prepare a field for a more
extensive spread of the Gospel, in which the Church might repair the
losses she was about to sustain in the religious convulsions
impending in Europe.

Numberless similar
instances might be quoted. These designs of God are sometimes
manifest, sometimes hidden; sometimes they are far-reaching,
sometimes limited. Ignorance and pride may mistake or pervert them.
But they always prevail; they are always worthy of their Author; and
let me add, that the salvation [pg 067] of men being the object most highly prized by
God, it is not only rightfully considered the most noble, but it is
that to which his other works may be justly accounted
subordinate.

It is under the
light of these principles that I undertake an investigation of the
purposes of God regarding the Irish race. These purposes seem to me
no longer matter of speculation; they may be pronounced manifest; for
they are written in unmistakable characters in the development of
events.

The history of
Ireland is, in many respects, peculiar. Few nations received the
faith so readily, and no other preserved it amidst similar struggles.
St. Patrick first announced the Gospel to the assembled states of the
realm at Tara. He received permission to preach it, unmolested,
throughout the length and breadth of the land. By his indomitable
zeal and heroic virtue, he succeeded in winning over the natives so
effectually, that at his death few pagans remained in Ireland. Not a
drop of blood was shed when Christianity was first announced. Heroism
was displayed only by the exalted virtues of the Apostle and of the
neophytes. Nowhere else did the Gospel take root so quickly and so
firmly, and produce fruits so immediate and so abundant. Catholic
Ireland soon became the home of the saints and sages of the Christian
world. To many of the nations of the continent her apostles went
forth, charged with the embassy of eternal truth. In every realm of
Europe her children established sanctuaries of piety and learning;
and to her own hospitable shores the natives of other lands flocked
to receive education, and even support, from her gratuitous bounty.
Homes of virtue dotted her hills and valleys; and thus were laid deep
the roots of that strong attachment to the faith, which, later, was
to be exposed to trials the most severe.

We thus find God
preparing Ireland for a future, then hidden to all but Himself. For
the day of trial came at last. She was reposing in peace, under the
shadow of the Gospel, when the barbaric invasion, that swept before
it every vestige of learning and religion in many parts of Europe,
reached her shores. Ireland was the only country that rolled back its
wave. But she did this at the cost of her life’s blood. For two
centuries the Dane trampled her sons under foot. His cruelties yet
re-echo in the national traditions. But the Irish race at last arose
in its might, and drove the barbarian from its shores. The churches
of the country had been pillaged, its monasteries plundered, its
institutions of learning destroyed—everything that the sword could
smite, or fire consume, had perished; but the Irish race came out of
the ordeal preserving its own integrity, and the jewel which it
prized above all else—its glorious faith.

Not long after
this deliverance, and before Ireland had succeeded [pg 068] in obliterating the traces of Danish
cruelty, another invader set his foot on her shores. Availing himself
of the discords naturally arising from the disorganized state of
society, he succeeded in gaining a foothold. By fanning these
discords, he kept possession and gained strength. The rule of the
Saxon became thus almost as severe a calamity as had been the
oppression of the Dane. To the hatred, which is generally greater in
the oppressor than in the oppressed, were added, in time, religious
fanaticism and the desire of plunder, which became its associate and
assumed its garb. The mere Irishman, who was hated under
any circumstances on account of his race, was now hunted in his own
country as if he were a wild beast. The property of the Catholic
people was confiscated, and most stringent laws were enacted to
prevent its renewed acquisitions. Priests, wherever found, were put
to death, and the severest penalties were inflicted on those who
would harbour any that escaped detection. Extermination by fire and
sword was ordered in so many words, and was attempted. When this
failed, a system of penal laws was established, which were in full
force until lately, and which a Protestant writer of deservedly high
repute (Burke) calls a “machine of wise and
elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression,
impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in
them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted
ingenuity of man”. Upon the partial abandonment of this form
of oppression, a system of proselytism was adopted, and is yet in
full vigour (for it has become an institution, and the best supported
institution in Ireland), which, by bribes to the high and the low,
appeals to every base instinct to draw men away from the faith.

Yet neither
confiscation of property, nor famine, nor disgrace, nor death in its
most hideous forms, could make Ireland waver in that faith which our
forefathers received from St. Patrick. There were, of course, from
time to time, and there are, a few exceptions. Did not these occur,
the Irish must have been more than men. But, as a general rule, the
places that could not be procured or retained, except by apostacy,
were resigned. The rich allowed their property to be torn from them,
and they willingly became poor; the poor bore hunger and all other
consequences of wretched poverty; and though every Earthly good was
arrayed temptingly before them, they scorned to purchase comfort at
the price of apostacy. During the four years from 1846 to 1850,
nearly two millions either perished from hunger or its attendant
pestilence, or were forced to leave their native land to escape both.
In the midst of the dead and the dying, proselytisers showed
themselves everywhere, well provided with food and money, and Bibles,
and every one of the sufferers felt, [pg 069] and was made to feel, that all his sufferings
might have been spared had he been willing to barter his faith for
bread. Yet the masses could bear hunger and face pestilence, or fly
from their native land; but they would not eat the bread of apostacy.
They died, or they fled; but they clung to their faith.

In vain, I think,
will history be searched for another example of such vast numbers,
generation after generation, calmly, silently facing an unhonoured
death, without any support on earth but the approving voice of
conscience.

This fidelity can
be predicated with truth of the whole Irish race, notwithstanding the
numbers of those in Ireland who are not Catholics. For these, besides
being a minority of the inhabitants, are but an exotic, planted in
Ireland by the sword. They were imported, being already, and because
they were, of another faith, for the purpose of supplanting that of
the inhabitants. Many of them adopted the faith of the old race, so
that the names that indicate their origin are not a certain test of
their religion. But so steadily has the old stock adhered to its
faith, that an Irish “O”, or
“Mac”, or any other old Celtic name,
is almost sure to designate a Catholic. Indeed, such names are
usually called “Catholic names”.
Whenever an exception is found, it is so rare an occurrence that the
party is considered a renegade from his race as well as from his
religion.

It would, however,
be not only unfounded to flatter ourselves that this stability in the
faith is the result of anything peculiar in the Irish nature, but it
would be, I may say, a blasphemy to assert it. God alone can preserve
any one in the paths of truth and virtue; how much more must we
attribute to Him the fidelity of a whole race, under the trying
circumstances here enumerated?

Such grace may
have been given, as many believe, in reward of the readiness and the
fulness with which our ancestors first received the faith of the
Gospel, and it is hoped that God will to the end grant the same grace
of fidelity to their descendants. Our great Apostle is said to have
asked this favour from God for the nation which so readily responded
to his call. Let us unite our prayers with his, and, like Solomon,
ask for our race not riches, nor power, but true wisdom, which is,
above all and before all, allegiance to the true faith. This was the
prayer, no doubt, which the millions of our martyred ancestors poured
out. They themselves sacrificed property and liberty; they gave up
everything that man could take away, that they might preserve this
precious jewel. They believed that in doing this they were following
the dictates of true wisdom, and, in their fondest love for their
remotest posterity, they wished and prayed that similar wisdom might
be displayed by them. May their prayer be heard to the
end.

[pg 070]

This prayer has
been heard, or at least this grace has been granted, up to the
present. When the sons of Ireland on this day return in thought to
the homes of their fathers, they may indeed look back upon a land
inferior to many in the elements of material greatness. They may
behold her castles and rich domains in the possession of the
stranger. They may view the masses of their race with scarcely a
foothold in the land of their fathers, liable to be ejected from the
farm, and driven out on the public highways, and from the highways
into the crowded town, and from the hovels of the crowded town into
the poorhouse, and even at the poorhouse denied the right of
admission. But amidst all the miseries of those who yet dwell in the
old land—in spite of the wiles of unscrupulous governments, and
heartless and tyrannical landlords, and hypocritical proselytizers—in
spite of open violence and covert bribes, their undying attachment to
the faith remains unaltered, unshaken—a monument of national virtue
more honourable than any which wealth or power could erect, or
flattery devise.

But all this is a
grace, a great grace of God. It reveals a purpose of Heaven more
bountiful in regard to this people than if he had raised them to the
highest place in material power amongst the nations of the Earth.

Temporal
prosperity, in its various forms, though a favour from God, is not
his most precious blessing. He himself selected the way of the Cross.
In abjection and suffering he came into the world; he lived in it
despised and persecuted, he died amidst excruciating torments. To
those whom he loved in a special manner, he says, “Can you drink the chalice which I am to drink, and be
baptized with the baptism with which I shall be baptized?” and
when they reply, they can, the promise that this shall be fulfilled,
his leading them to follow him in the way of the Cross, his calling
them to suffer for righteousness, is the best pledge of his greatest
love.

This grace he has
given to Ireland. Her children have received and accepted the call;
they have reaped the reward. Indeed, I have found the opinion
entertained by many clergymen of extensive experience, that there is
not probably a people on this Earth of whom more, in proportion to
their number, leave this world with well grounded hopes of a happy
eternity. They do not, it is true, display a boastful assurance that
they are about to ascend at once into Heaven. But vast masses serve
God with humble fidelity in life, and, at death, acknowledging and
sorry for their sins, doing all they can to comply with his
requirements, they throw themselves, with resignation to his will,
into the arms of his mercy.

Were nothing else
apparent in the purposes of God, we might [pg 071] stop here. We would find a great and worthy
object for all that Ireland has suffered, and cause to thank the
Almighty Ruler for having given her the grace to suffer in union with
and for the sake of his Son.

But God’s graces
are often given for ulterior purposes; and it may be asked whether
the extraordinary preservation of this nation’s faith has not another
object in his wise and merciful counsels.

It appears to me
that this is now clear in the case of Ireland. But, to understand it
properly, we must reflect more closely on her connection with
England, and on the condition of this latter country.

In the sixteenth
century England abandoned the faith to which she had adhered for a
thousand years. Her apostacy, though consummated by degrees, may be
said to have become at last complete. The blood of her best sons
flowed at Tyburn. The priests that were not of the number were
banished, or forced to seek safety in hiding places. The same price
was put on the head of a priest as on that of a wolf. The property of
Catholics was confiscated, their children were taken from them, and
educated in the religion of the establishment. These and analogous
measures produced their effect at last. Were it not for these things,
a great part of that nation, if not a majority, would be Catholic
to-day. Though they desired no share in the plunder of the Church,
and had no fancy for the new theories of the Reformers, they were
weak enough to yield to a pressure, under which compromise first, and
then apostacy, afforded the only means of escaping confiscation and
the loss of every social advantage, frequently the only means of
escaping death. The old faith stamped, indeed, its mark on the
institutions of the kingdom in a manner that could not be blotted
out. It left its memorials everywhere throughout the land. The noble
universities, the gorgeous cathedrals, and the splendid ruins
scattered over the surface of the country, are witnesses of its
departed power; but it is itself effectually blotted out from the
hearts of the people. Though the most noble kings and princes of the
land had delighted in honouring Catholicity, though England had sent
her apostles and her saints into many a clime, though her hills and
valleys had re-echoed for centuries with the sweet songs of Catholic
devotion, her people now know nothing more hateful than the faith
under the auspices of which their fathers were civilized. They
nickname it “Popery”, and the name
expresses that which is to them most hateful.

Yet this England,
this Catholic-hating England, has become one of the greatest nations
of the Earth in the material order. Her fleets are mirrored in every
sea; her banner floats on every [pg 072] continent. It has been truly said that the
sound of her drums, calling her soldiers from slumber, goes before
and greets the rising sun in its circuit around the globe.

But what is most
remarkable, and certainly not without some great purpose in the order
of divine Providence, England has become in our day the great hive
from which colonies go out to people islands and continents in
distant parts of the world; lands which were before vast wastes,
tenanted only by the wild beast, or by the savage scarcely less
ferocious. Indeed, she is the only nation in our day that seems to
have received such a mission.

And is it then to
an apostate nation exclusively that God has given the mission to fill
up these wastes? Is it a corrupted faith only which is to be borne to
these savage nations, and to be planted in those vast regions, which
God has made known to civilized man in these latter days? Were this
the case, we might tremble, though we should adore it as one of the
inscrutable judgments of God, dealing with nations in his great
wrath.

But is such the
fact? It would indeed be the fact were it not for faithful Ireland.
But, united as England is with Ireland, the result is quite
otherwise. The very ambition and desire for gain which impel England
to extend her power and plant her colonies in the most distant
countries of the globe, become the instruments for carrying also the
undying faith of Ireland to the regions which England has
conquered.

Saul went to seek
Samuel, thinking only of finding his father’s asses. God was sending
him to be anointed king over his people. England sends her ships all
over the world, thinking only of markets for the produce of her
forges and her looms. God is sending her that she may spread
everywhere the faith of the Irish people.

Under the
“Union Jack”, on which the crosses of
St. George and St. Andrew are blended, but so blended as to prevent
any Christian symbol being recognized (a fit emblem of the effect of
the union of jarring sects, each professing to proclaim Christianity,
but between them only obscuring and obstructing it)—the Irishman,
too, is borne to the distant colony. He goes, probably, before the
mast or in the forecastle, but he bears with him the true faith; and
when he lands he hastens to raise its symbol. This may be at first
over a rude chapel. But it is a signal to other way-farers, and they
gather under its shade to offer up the sacred mysteries. As soon as
his means permit, even before he can build a good dwelling for
himself, he takes care that the house of God be, in every possible
degree, worthy of its sacred character. And so the Church creeps on
and grows, and regions that sat in darkness are now blessed by the
offering of the Adorable Sacrifice and the announcement of the true
faith.

[pg
073]

The Irishman,
generally speaking, did not leave home through ambition, or for
conquest. He departed with sorrow from the shade of that hawthorn
around which the dearest memories of childhood clustered. He would
have remained content with the humble lot of his father had he been
allowed to dwell there in peace. But the bailiff came, and, to make
wider pastures for sheep and bullocks, his humble cottage was
levelled, and he himself sent to wander through the world in search
of a home. But in his wanderings he carries his faith with him, and
he becomes the means of spreading everywhere the true Church of
God.

It is thus that
the tempest, which seems but to destroy the flower, catches up its
seeds and scatters them far and near, and these seeds produce other
flowers as beautiful as that from which they were torn, so that some
fair spot of the prairie, when despoiled of its loveliness, but
affords the means of covering the vast expanse with new and
variegated beauties.

It is thus that
the famine, and the pestilence, and the inhuman evictions of Irish
landlords, have spread the faith of Christ far and near, and planted
it in new colonies, which, when they shall have grown out of their
tutelage, will look back to the departed power of England and the
undying faith of Ireland as, in the hands of Providence, the combined
causes of their greatness and their orthodoxy. Macaulay’s traveller
from New Zealand, who will, on some future day, “from a broken arch of London Bridge, take a sketch of
the ruins of St. Paul’s”, may be some Irish “O’” or “Mac” on a
pilgrimage to the Eternal City, who passes that way—having first
landed on the shores from which his ancestors were driven by the
“crowbar brigade”, and visited with
reverence the hallowed graves under whose humble sod lie the bones of
his martyred forefathers.

It is thus that
the Catholic faith is being planted in the British colonies of North
America; it is thus it is carried to India, and to Australia, and to
the islands of the South Sea. Thus are laid the foundations of
flourishing churches, which promise, at no distant day, to renew, and
even to surpass, the work done by Ireland in the palmiest days of
faith, when her sons planted the Cross, and caused Christ to be
adored, as he wished to be adored, in the most distant regions of the
earth.

The magnitude of
this work is not to be measured even by the importance of these
transplanted churches at the present moment. The countries to which I
have alluded are but in their infancy. We can see on this continent
the rapid strides of such infant colonies. Within three quarters of a
century this country has advanced in population from three to over
thirty millions, and in most other elements of greatness in still
grander proportions. If it continue to increase, as it has done
regularly from [pg
074] the
beginning, at the end of this century, or soon after, it will have a
population of over one hundred millions—that is, as great as is now
the population of France, and Spain, and Italy, and Great Britain
combined. If this be expected in this country in forty years, what
will the case be in one or two hundred, in this and so many others
similarly situated?

Australia starts
with all the advantages of this country, and some peculiar to itself,
and is following it with giant strides. It may overtake it before
long, if not outstrip it. But the position of Catholicity there is
very different from what it was at the commencement, or even at an
advanced period, in the United States. The Catholics in Australia
occupy a position of practical social equality with others. They will
grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength of their
adopted country, and have their fair share in its importance.

England herself,
from which the Catholic name was thought to have been almost blotted
out, has been deeply affected by this exodus of Irish Catholics. In
her cities, and towns, and hamlets, the Cross has been raised from
the dust. At the side of the ancient monuments which remind England
of her apostacy, humble spires rise in every part of the land, and
tell that nation that the faith which they thought destroyed still
lives, and is ready to admit them again to its wonted blessings. They
stand there, and betoken the unity and stability of that faith of
which they are the symbols—of that faith which reclaimed the fathers
of that people from barbarism, and continued to be the faith of the
land for a thousand years, and is yet a faith, and the only faith, in
which men of every tongue and every clime are united. The English
people see its unity and stability, while they are forced to witness
the ever shifting and clashing forms of the religion that was
substituted for it. For, in the name of the one Christ and the one
Bible, altar is everywhere erected against altar, pulpit thunders
against pulpit, the teaching of to-day is contradicted in the same
pulpit on the morrow; yet each one proclaims his own device as the
plain teaching of Scripture.

This confronting
of unity with confusion, of steady adherence to truth with the ever
varying shifts of error, of the mild but bright glory of an
everlasting Church with the frivolities of the proudest inventions of
men, is a grace, and a great grace, which God grants. It is a grace
for the use of which that people will give strict account. And oh!
may that use be, that they will make it fructify to their salvation.
For while we appreciate the blessings granted to ourselves, we have
no other feeling in their regard than a wish that they, too, may
share in these blessings, and be like unto us in everything
“except these chains”.

But whether well
used or abused, whether unto “the
ruin” or [pg
075]
“salvation” of many in that country,
this grace is given chiefly through the Irish emigration.

I am not unaware
of, nor do I undervalue, the importance of the faithful remnant that
has in England steadfastly continued in the faith once delivered to
the saints, nor of the accession made to their numbers by the
conversion of so many noble souls, to whom God gave light and
strength to overcome the many difficulties that would have fain
prevented their following that light. But of both we might not
inaptly ask, “What are these amongst so
many?” They are like those few tints that gild the skies here
and there, when the sun’s light has all but departed; or like those
stars that pierce at night the cumbered heavens—bright, indeed, and
beautiful—but only showing forth more clearly the dark outlines of
the heavy and murky clouds that shroud the horizon. They make us feel
only more sensibly, and keep fresh in our memory, the loss of the sun
that has set.

It is the Irish
emigration that has chiefly supplied the multitudes who flock around
English altars, that has made churches and schools spring up, that
has finally called for the restoration of a numerous hierarchy; and,
as if to mark this fact, and point out the great part that Ireland
had in restoring Catholic life to England, God has so arranged it
that the first head and brightest ornament of that new hierarchy
should be the son of Irish emigrants; for such is the great and
illustrious Cardinal Wiseman.

And even in these
United States, let people say what they please, has not the Irish
race held the first place in planting the cross throughout the length
and breadth of the land?

In this, and
wherever else I speak of the Irish race, I do not, of course, confine
myself to those born in Ireland. The work which a race is called to
do is to be done by those who now live, and by their children and
their children’s children, wherever they happen to be born. Indeed,
it would be a contradiction in terms to consider the father and son,
wherever born, as belonging to different races. Be it for weal or for
woe, be it unto honour or unto shame, the fathers cannot disown the
children nor the children the fathers. If it depended on feeling or
wishes, I, for one, would be very glad to dissolve connection with
any one who insists that he owes nothing to the race that gave him a
father or a mother. I would readily leave such a one to his proud
claim of owning no paternity but the land on which he vegetates, and
I only regret that he will scarcely bring to it much credit or
advantage. He who is unwilling to acknowledge the father that begot
him, or the mother that gave him suck, is not a prize worth
contending for. But whatever we or he may wish, whatever be the
results to us or to him, he is flesh of our flesh and bone of our
bone. What God has united, neither he nor we can put
asunder.

[pg
076]

It is not that we
should form separate classes or castes, or that we claim other rights
or privileges, or have other duties than those of other races; but
the one to which each man belongs has been fixed by the Almighty
Provider in the very act of giving him being, and he who would fain
conceal, or disown, or be ashamed of his race—that is, of the order
of Providence to which he owes his existence—could succeed in nothing
else but in proving himself unworthy the esteem of men of any
race.

I know and
gratefully acknowledge the important services rendered to Catholicity
in the United States by persons of other races. There was, first of
all, the Maryland colony, with whose noble history that of few, if
any, of the other colonies can compare. By their justice and humanity
in treating with the native tribes, by similar justice and fair
dealing with other colonists, of every religion and every race, by
their domestic virtues and patriotic course, the men of that colony
deserved and received a high place in the esteem of their countrymen
and of the world.

But their number
is small, too small—indeed. Would that they were more. Were they all
put together they would not form one average diocese of the forty-six
now existing in this country.

God has sent us
many illustrious men from France, and Belgium, and Italy, who have
occupied the foremost ranks in the ministry, whose heroic virtues and
zealous works are even now as beacon lights to all who labour for
God’s glory. But as to the people from these countries, they are not
many more than those from the Maryland stock. Germany has sent many
of her hardy sons to labour with the steadfastness of their
countrymen in building up the walls of the sanctuary. These are,
indeed, a most important element, and are destined to become more and
more important every day. They may yet exercise a greater influence
on the destiny of the Church in this country than the Irish race. But
so far, I think, no one will claim that they can be compared with it
in numbers, or as to the results hitherto obtained. Of the converts
in this country we may say the same thing as of those in England.

Giving all,
therefore, what belongs to them—for there is not, nor should there be
here, any room for jealousy—I think it will be admitted that it is
above all others to the sons of Ireland and to their children that
the spread of Catholicity is due in this land. No matter who
ministered at the altar (though there, too, the sons of Ireland have
had their share), in the body of the church you will find that, in
the majority of places, they constitute the bulk, and in many the
whole of the congregation. Their hard earned dollars were foremost in
supplying means to buy the lot and raise the building from which the
Catholic faith [pg
077] is
announced. The priest, no matter what his own nationality, was
nowhere more confident of finding help and support than among the
Irish emigrants or their children. Wherever a railway, or a canal, or
a hive of industry invited their sturdy labour, the cross soon sprang
up to bear witness to their generosity and their faith.

Even the old
Maryland colony, though consisting chiefly of English Catholics,
seeking here a freedom of conscience denied them at home, had its
Irish element, and that not the least noble in deeds nor the least
conspicuous in virtue.

When at the period
of the Revolution the noblest men of this land stood together,
shoulder to shoulder, and issued that Declaration of Independence to
which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred
honours, it was a Catholic of the Irish race who affixed his
signature for Maryland. In doing this he pledged an honour as pure,
and a life as precious as any of the rest, but he staked a fortune
equal to, if not greater than, that of all the others put together.
When he signed his name, one standing by said, “There go some millions”. Another remarked,
“There are many Carrolls; he will not be
known”. He overheard the remark, and to avoid all
misconception, wrote down in full, “Charles Carroll, of
Carrollton”.

Yet this noble
scion of the Irish race, for so many years the pride and the ornament
of his native state, while fulfilling all the duties of an
illustrious citizen, was not ashamed of the race from which he
sprang. Instead of selecting amongst French villes or English parks or
towns a name for his princely
estate, he stamped on it a title with the good old Celtic ring. He
called it after a property of one of his Irish ancestors,
Doughoregan
Manor, thereby telling his posterity and his countrymen
that if they feel any pride in his name, they must associate him with
a race which so many affect to despise.

Let all the sons,
and the sons of the sons, of Ireland be, like him, faithful to their
duties as citizens, ready to sacrifice their all for their country,
whether that all be little, or as great as was his vast wealth; just
and respectful and charitable to men of all races and creeds, not
anxious either to conceal or obtrude their own, but rather to live
worthy of both; determined, in a word, faithfully to discharge all
their civil and Christian duties, let them be earnest in elevating
the one by greater fidelity to the other. Acting thus, they will
imitate Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, and fulfil all I would wish
them to do out of fidelity to their country, their religion, and
their race.

It was also one of
the Maryland stock, but of this same Irish race—another Carroll—who
was chosen the first bishop, and the founder of the hierarchy, of the
young American Church; as if [pg 078] Providence here too wished to indicate from
which race the chief strength of Catholicity was to be derived in
this land.

Would it be
overstraining matters to say, that a hint of this was also given by
Providence in the Irish name of the future metropolitan see of the
United States—the first in time, and always to be the first in
dignity? The word Baltimore is an Irish word, and,
through the founder of the colony, was derived from an Irish hamlet,
which from the extreme south-west coast of Ireland, is looking, as it
were, over the waters of the Atlantic to this continent for the full
realization of its name. The word, in the Irish language, means
“the town of the great house”, and it
was beyond the Atlantic that Baltimore, in becoming the chief see of
a great church, has truly become “the town of
the great house”, for the church, or house at the head of
which it stands, extends probably over a wider surface than any other
church or churches amongst which any one bishop holds pre-eminence,
excepting only the church governed by the Vicar of Jesus Christ, to
whom is committed the care of all the sheep and lambs of God’s
fold, that is, the whole of Christ’s Church. In names, which God has
given, or permitted to be given, he has frequently foreshadowed the
destinies of individuals and races. Would it be superstitious to
suppose that in the Irish name of this American ecclesiastical
metropolis—the only important city in this country that has an Irish
name—Providence pointed, on the one hand, to its future position in
the Christian hierarchy, and on the other to the character of the
chief portion of the family of that house or church?

But, be this as it
may, it was a scion of the Irish race who was the founder of the new
American hierarchy. For some time he held the crozier alone. The
whole country was his diocese. But he did not depart until he saw
suffragans around him forming a regular hierarchy, that was destined
to multiply and, mainly on Irish shoulders, carry, everywhere, the
ark that would spread blessings throughout the land.

The work that has
thus been commenced is no doubt destined to prosper. It is not
without a motive that in this country the lines are drawn, and the
foundations laid by Providence for a noble church. Its beginnings
(for we may say it is yet in its infancy) bear many of the marks of
the process by which the work was effected, It is destined to grow,
and may it grow, particularly in the mild beauty of Christian virtue,
and win, by love, the homage of all the children of the land, that
all may receive through it the graces of Heaven, and even their
Earthly prosperity be consolidated and become the means of their
acquiring higher blessings.

But whatever be
said of the United States, the Irish race is [pg 079] certainly almost alone in the work of diffusing
Catholicity in the various other countries in which the English
language is spoken.

The sufferings of
Ireland were, therefore, the means, and evidently intended by God as
the means to preserve her in the faith, to give her its rewards in a
high degree; and this preservation of her faith was as evidently
intended to make her and her sons instruments in spreading that faith
throughout the English-speaking world. This is, therefore, what I
claim to be, in the counsels of God, the destiny of the
Irish Race.

Did we endeavour
to draw this conclusion by far-fetched arguments, we might fear the
delusions of fancy, but I think it is plainly written in the facts to
which I have alluded, when looked at with faith in an overruling
Providence. The diffusion of the true faith enters too closely, and
is too primary a thing in the designs of God, to suppose it for a
moment to be the work of accident. It is his work first of all. Where
it exists it exists because he so willed it. The instruments that
effected it must be those which he has chosen and placed to the work
with this very view. When, therefore, the results obtained, and those
we see in the certain future, and the means by which they are
obtained, are a matter of intuition, rather than of reasoning, the
conclusion drawn seems to me to have all the force of demonstration,
and in no way liable to be considered the product of fancy or of
national pride.

This
interpretation of the facts of history will, by some, be considered a
complicated theory, and therefore unworthy of God. But the simplicity
of God’s operations by no means excludes multiplicity and combination
of agents in themselves most inadequate or discordant. Our
inclination to exclude these, though we imagine the very contrary, is
the result of the consciousness of our own weakness, which we would
fain attribute to God. We may, indeed, be overwhelmed, or
at least embarrassed, by many instruments; and therefore we think it
wise to avoid their use. But, it is as easy for God to use and direct
many as few, or to produce results by his own immediate action. Nay,
though sometimes he performs wonderful works in a moment, he is more
often pleased to act through numerous and far-reaching instruments,
which, at times, seem even to work in opposition to his designs, and
by overruling and directing them, to prove that he is Ruler and
Master over all things in action, as well as the Author of their
being.

By one word he
made the Earth produce “every green
herb” and “every fruit-tree yielding
fruit according to its kind”; but he is now pleased to make
the fertility of the earth, and the various ingredients of the air,
and the heat and light of the sun, labour through a whole season to
produce the flower, that for a [pg 080] few days wastes its fragrance on the meadow. At
one time he sends his angel to strike down in one night myriads of
the enemies of his people; at another he is pleased “to hiss for the fly, that is in the uttermost parts of
the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of
Assyria” (Is., vii. 18), that they may come
and be the instruments of his vengeance. At one time he rains down
bread from Heaven to feed a whole multitude; at another, he sends his
angel to take the prophet by the hair of his head from Judea, even
unto Babylon, that he may supply food to his servant.

It is not for us
to prescribe ways to Providence, but to study His design in the
events which we witness, and to bow down and adore his Power, his
Wisdom, and his Goodness.

To give power to
an apostate and persecuting nation, and the grace of fidelity to
another; to use and even to create the material resources of the
first as the instrument of his design over the latter, may appear a
circuitous course, but it is only another instance of that unity of
purpose and multiplicity, variety and apparent incongruity of means,
which we witness in almost all his works.

When the people of
God were carried away into captivity, “the
priests took the fire from the altar, and hid it in a valley where
there was a pit without water”. There “they kept it safe”, while the Gentile hosts
reigned triumphant in the land. But “when
many years had passed”, and the people returned, they sought
the fire, but found only “thick
water”. This they sprinkled on the new sacrifices that were
prepared, and “when the sun shone out, which
before was in a cloud, there was a great fire kindled so that all
wondered”. (II. Mach., i. 19, 22).

An analogous
phenomenon, methinks, has been presented in Ireland. That combination
of frenzy and irreligion, which men have called “The Reformation”, swept before it almost every
vestige of faith from many of the northern countries of Europe, and
seemed in a special manner to have enveloped in darkness the islands
of the West. Men were like “raging waves of
the sea, foaming out their own confusion”, boasting of liberty
and light, but treating the faithful with savage cruelty, and showing
their own inability to hold fast any positive principles which they
proclaimed as truth. The ancient faith of these islands, overwhelmed
in the waters of tribulation, seemed hidden in the hearts of the
Irish people, saddened by persecution and sufferings of every
kind.

But the day has
come for pouring forth this water on nations. By their sufferings,
the Irish race, driven into many lands, mingles with the progeny of
its oppressors. The sun of God’s grace, which seems under a cloud, is
now shining forth, and a great [pg 081] fire is enkindled and is spreading its light
and its heat far and near. The Church of God is everywhere showing
itself again in its pristine beauty. English-speaking nations that
were the ramparts of heresy, are beginning again to fall into the
ranks of Catholic unity, and, as happened once before, the light of
faith that took refuge in the most distant island of the West, is,
from that sacred spot, sending forth its beams and gladdening the
Church by giving her whole people as her children.

So far we are led,
I may say, by the mere logic of facts. Were we to indulge in
speculation, but in a speculation quite in conformity with the
beneficent designs of God, we might expect still more from these
effects of the steadfastness of Ireland.

Notwithstanding
all the faults of England, the Catholic heart throughout the world
has never lost its interest in that land, once so faithful. Other
nations, once as Catholic, have been lost, and they are almost
forgotten. The land where the Saviour Himself lived is, indeed,
remembered on account of the sacred spots which he trod; but no hopes
are entertained for the conversion of its people. The Churches
planted by the Apostles have been destroyed. We cherish the memory of
the holy confessors and martyrs who adorned them; but despair of
their return to the truth is the only feeling in their regard that we
can discover in the Catholic world.

But in one way or
another the Catholic heart seems never to have despaired of the
return of England. Opinions and expectations which are, probably,
nothing more than an expression of the intensity of this feeling, are
everywhere to be met. They exist among the learned and the high, as
well as amongst the humble children of the Church, and are found to
be cherished in different lands. England, with her long catalogue of
saints, seems to be considered, not as an outcast, on whom the
sentence of spiritual death has been executed, but rather as the
prodigal, who in a moment of thoughtlessness demanded, what he called
his own share, and wandered from his father’s house. The father is
looking out, expecting every day to see the wayward one return, and
is ever ready to kill the fatted calf, and to call on his friends and
neighbours to rejoice and be merry, for “he
that was dead is come to life again, and he that was lost is
found”.

But, alas! there
is much reason to fear that such joy is not to be expected. We know
of no instance of a whole nation once fully and deliberately
apostatising from the faith ever again returning. The grace of faith,
if lost by individuals by formal apostacy, is seldom recovered. It
has never yet been recovered by any nation that once enjoyed its full
light, and deliberately abandoned it. It is not for us, to be sure,
to place bounds to the mercies of God. Who knows but that in these
latter ages God [pg
082] may
do a work which he never did before? and, now that the Church has
encircled the globe, and announced the Gospel to every nation under
the sun, God may send her back on another mission more glorious than
the first, showing forth his power in giving new life to fallen
nations as he did before in converting those who knew not his name.
His first work might be compared to that which he performed when he
took the clay and breathed into it the breath of life; this, to his
raising up the dead already mouldering in the tomb. But he has done
both in the physical, and he may do both in the moral order.

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 [pg 083] 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 [pg 084] 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, [pg
085] 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.

[pg
086]

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 [pg 087] 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.

[pg 088]

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
[pg 089] 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:

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:

3o. 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:

4o. If
the titular of the church be a mystery of the life of our Lord, or of
our Lady, authors differ in opinion whether the name of the patron of
the locality is to be inserted at the letter [pg 091] N, or whether no addition should be made. M. de
Conny is for the latter opinion, and his authority is a safe guide
for us. The second rule we have laid down is sufficient to show that
no name is to be inserted in cases where the title of the church is a
mystery of the Blessed Virgin, seeing that the august Mother of God
is always named in the body of the prayer. The words of the
conclusion are enough perhaps to excuse from the obligation of naming
the patron of the locality in cases where the church is dedicated to
a mystery of the life of our Lord.

2. The usage here
alluded to is not only not becoming, but it is also contrary to the
Rubric of the Missal. (part i., tit. xx.):

3. The sole reason
for ringing a bell at Mass is to give a signal to the faithful.
“Ad excitandos circumstantes”, says
Gavantus (t. i. part i., tit. XX., l. c.), “ad laetitiam exprimendam et ad cultum sanctissimi
Sacramenti adhibetur campanula”. Other writers coincide with
this opinion. It seems but natural, therefore, not to ring the bell
when there are no assistants present, and when there is no need of
any signal. Besides, it is clearly the teaching of authors, and even
of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, that whenever a signal is not
required, the bell is not to be rung. Thus, the following decision
forbids the bell to be rung during the celebration of the divine
office in the choir, at least in certain circumstances:

Nor, as a general
rule, is the bell rung when the Blessed Sacrament is exposed, for
then it is unnecessary to summon the faithful to adore the Eucharist.
“During the private Masses”, says the
Instructio
Clementina, “that are
celebrated during the exposition, the bell is not to be rung”.
Cavalieri, commenting on this passage, [pg 092] says: “Ex rubricarum
praescripto … interdicuntur”. He is of opinion that this
rule of the Instructio regards only low
Masses, but Gardellini holds that it refers also to High Masses:

From all this it
is clear that the bell is not to be rung whenever there is no signal
to be given. This is certainly the case when there is no one to
assist at Mass.

4. The cincture
for the use of a priest does not differ from that for the use of a
bishop. It may be made either of linen thread or silk, but it is
better that it should be of linen. It may be either white or of the
colour of the vestments. These rules are drawn from two decrees of
the Sacred Congregation:

Documents.

Notices Of Books.