Cathedral, facade, Waterford

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Waterford Cathedral facade

Image by Fergal Claddagh

THE SOLEMN TRIDUUM
A Sermon by Father Thomas N. Burke, O.P., delivered in the Pro-Cathedral, Marlborough Street, Dublin, on Sunday, September 12th, before His Eminence Cardinal Cullen and a majority of the Episcopate of Ireland, on the occasion of the Solemn Triduum to offer thanks to God for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland

At that time: The Pharisees came to Jesus; and one of them a doctor of the law, asked Him, tempting Him: Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
Jesus said to him: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to it: You shall love your neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments depends the whole law and the prophets.
And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying; what think you of Christ, whose Son is He?
They said to Him, David's.
He said to them: How then does David in spirit call Him Lord, saying: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool?
If David then called Him Lord, how is He his son?
And no man was able to answer Him a word: neither dared any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions.

May it please your Eminence, Beloved brethren,
In the important portion of the Gospel which I have just read for you we find Christ our Lord declaring the great truth, that His religion is a religion of love, its commandments and all its spirit resting upon two great duties of love, first to God, You shall love the Lord your God with your whole soul, and with your whole mind; secondly, to your neighbour, You shall love your neighbour as thyself. We are assembled here to-day, my brethren, for a specific purpose, and that is, in all humility and gratitude, to give thanks to Almighty God at His own altar, in the oblation to Him of his Divine and Adorable Son, for the great benefit which we have received, for the great blessing which has been conferred upon us as a nation, in the redress of a long-standing wrong.

It may seem that this very assembling, that this putting forth our voices in praise, is a violation of the Gospel of love which is upon our lips this day; yet it is not so. Nay, more, it is out of our love of God and of our faith; it is out of our love of our neighbour, not only of those who are in the household of the faith with us, but also of those who, separated from us by the disunion of religious belief, have not the same sacrifice, nor the same sacraments, nor the same doctrines as ours, yet are our neighbours, it is, I say, out of our love of God and of man that the Holy Church of Christ, speaking to us by the voice of our chief pastor here, assembles us this day for the purpose of offering our thanks to God.

Our love of God necessarily obliges us to rejoice when we see the cause of God, the cause of religious truth, the cause of right and justice, proclaimed before all men; yet in our love of God we do not forget the great duties that are involved in the precept, You shall love your neighbour as thyself.

These duties are three, first, ardently to desire our neighbour’s spiritual and temporal welfare; secondly, to forgive freely, generously, nobly, all injuries we have received at our neighbour’s hands; thirdly, tenderly to respect our neighbour’s feelings, even as we would have our own feelings, nay, our own prejudices, respected and considered. We do not violate the command of God in assembling before His altar to-day, for I claim for the Catholics of Ireland, during the last twelve months especially, this glory, that never have a people shown themselves more generous, more tender, more respectful to the feelings of others than they have.

A great question was brought before the Legislature of the kingdom, involving what certain members of the community considered to be their special rights and legitimate privileges, but what the vast, the overpowering majority of the Irish people looked upon as a great evil, a great insult, and a great wrong. That question was agitated warmly, passionately; it was viewed in all its relations, held up before the world in its past history, in its present influence, in its future consequences; but the Catholics of Ireland viewed it not as a great political question, but rather as a great religious question. They knew that, far more than in all political questions, in religious questions, men's feelings are tender, men's prejudices are strong, and accordingly a most singular instance has been offered to the world by the Catholics of Ireland, of forbearance, of generosity, of calmness, that amounted almost to the apathy of which we were accused by those who disputed the great question before the nation.

We stood aside. We seemed to be rather the unconcerned spectators than the people whose vital interests were at stake, and whose very existence for the future was to be decided. The Catholic bishops and clergy of Ireland spoke no word of threat, no word of violence. The Catholic people of Ireland were silent and respectful. No agitation shook the land, no menace was heard from them; the great question went forward, disputed and argued upon its own merits, and whilst every Irish Catholic heart beat with anxiety, whilst united prayers went up before the altar of God from every Catholic household in the land, whilst the people were stirred even to their very hearts' core, yet they subdued their excitement, they suppressed the violence of their emotions, they were silent; and their only motive for this extraordinary calmness and silence was their respect for the convictions, the prejudices, and, above all, the feelings of their Protestant fellow-countrymen.

When judged solely upon its merits, its past history, its present relations, its future consequences upon society in Ireland, the alien church was condemned; and it was decreed, in the spirit that animated Magna Charta of old, still permeating all that is glorious in the constitution of Britain, that all men should be equal in the land. When this greatest of victories over injustice and wrong was achieved, there was heard no voice of triumph or of exultation, no insulting vaunt over the conquered, no loud boast that henceforth the Catholics of Ireland should have it all their own way.

Oh, no, not a word.

Our people were silent, silent in their gratitude.

The silence of excited and anxious hopes passed into Christian calmness of hopes fulfilled.
Hence, if any voice of insult, if any voice of threat has been heard in Ireland during the contest and in the moment of victory, I assert that that voice of insult and threat has not come from Catholic bishop, priest, or layman, that it has not come from any organ of Catholic opinion.
I repeat, whenever the voice of excitement, of insult, of threat, of violence, was heard, it came not from us.

We were silent in the hour which we might, perhaps, be tempted to call an hour of national triumph for Catholic Ireland, we were silent out of respect for the feelings of our Protestant fellow-countrymen, giving them credit for all consistency and all earnestness in their opposition to us, giving credit to Protestantism for its spirit of justice and fair-play, a, it is called, recognizing with gratitude the advocacy of those of that creed who lent a hand to wipe out a great and longstanding wrong, and apparently forgetful of the mighty fact that it was Ireland's faith, that it was Ireland's patience, that it was Ireland's fortitude, planted in the hearts of the people by the grace of Almighty God, that achieved this wonderful assertion of the people's right, to perfect equality and freedom in the land in which God created them, and which He willed should be theirs.

As it was, during the twelve months of suspense, as it was, when the great act of redress was proclaimed to be the law of the land, so it is to-day; for, indeed, it would be strange if those who were so temperate, so calm, so respectful outside should come before the altar of God to speak words of vain boasting or of triumph over their fellow-men.
No, we are far more grateful to God than jubilant of ourselves; and no man can say, reading the future history of Ireland, that in the tremendous crisis through which we have passed our people ever lost the calmness, the tenderness, the generosity of the Christian charity which should animate every man in his relations with his neighbour.

Before I leave this point, let me remind you that we are not a phlegmatic race, that we are not accustomed to conceal our feelings. The Irish heart is susceptible; the Irish temperament is sanguine, even demonstrative. We are a people who have never been silent or contented under a great wrong, or under a great sorrow. We are a people not prone to suppress our emotions in the moment of national grief or joy. Therefore, the influence that was at work to restrain the exuberance of the national joy, that was able to keep an excited and excitable people calm during a period when strong emotion throbbed through every pulse in the land, must have been a powerful influence; the principle and motive must have been great, and they were no other, I say again, than respect and tenderness and generosity, springing from true Christian charity and love of our neighbour.

In the same spirit we assemble here to-day to extend our sympathy and our respect to all in the land, to offer to all the tribute which charity obliges a man to give to his neighbour, for our love for our neighbour obliges us, not only to respect his feelings, not only not to hurt them, and even to be generous to his prejudices, but it also obliges us to forgive nobly and generously whatever injuries we may have received at his hands. Such is the spirit of the Christian religion.

Revenge, deep-seated, thoughtful revenge, revenge brooding over a wrong that has been committed, and waiting only for the proper moment to avenge that wrong, this is not the spirit of Christ, nor of the spouse of Christ, the Holy Catholic Church. She, during the two thousand years of her history upon earth, has received little else than injury and insult at the hands of the world. Her whole history may be said to be of slights, wrongs, injuries, and insults, received and nobly forgiven by the holy Church of God. She is constantly going forth to seek the souls and secure the salvation even of her most ungrateful children and bitterest enemies. She knows no spirit of revenge. If the man who was her greatest enemy during his life, who had robbed her of all she had in this world, and robbed her, still more, of the souls of her children, if that man turns to her in the hour of death, and stretches out his hand to her for succour, she, forgetting all his insults, all his injuries, hastens to his side, and strives to save his soul and secure him for heaven and the joys of God.

So we are come here to-day to give thanks for the great benefit we have received, which will result in this, that we can extend to our Protestant fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen the hand of friendship and of brotherly love. For three hundred years ascendency in religion has been the curse and the division of this country of ours; ascendency in religion, by which a small minority of the people, scarcely one-tenth of them, holding all the religious endowments of the country, holding all the political power of the country, holding the keys of the Legislature, demanded to be recognized as the church of the country; and nine-tenths of the people, the vast majority of the nation, were excluded from all recognition, from all consideration in the laws, from all the possessions and endowments granted for religious purposes, excluded from place and power, excluded from a thousand prerogatives and privileges; and who can wonder that this proud, massive ascendency, pressing thus on the great body of the people, should create a spirit of bitterness, of alienation, of contempt on part of the privileged few, and of a strong temptation to indignation and rage on part of the thousand is, the millions, thus excluded and despised, a spirit that found its way into every relation of life, and, above all, a spirit which was a perfect obstacle to that Christian friendship, to that social union, to that equality which is the next greatest blessing when the grace of religious unity is not there.

Friendship exists only between equals; a man does not make a friend of his servant or of his slave. All the value of friendship, all the value of the union that springs from it, depends on the equality of the two men who join hands for some common purpose, and who have a mutual sympathy, the tribute of one man to the other. Therefore, so long as the baneful ascendency, now happily swept away, existed in this land, there could not be between the Catholic and the Protestant equality of friendship; for the Protestant was legally, civilly, socially, in almost every relation, superior to his Catholic fellow-countryman. The consequence was a spirit of disunion pervading everywhere in social life, and unfortunately too in the public councils, with most evil influence on the destinies of the country which was the common mother of all, Catholic and Protestant alike.

To-day this long maintained ascendency has been swept away; and to-day, while we offer our thanks to God that this fatal source of disunion, this curse on our land, has disappeared, we at the same time offer to our Protestant fellow-citizens the sacred tribute which our love of our neighbour obliges us to give, namely, a true, a noble, a generous, a forgetful forgiveness of the past.

But, perhaps, men may say, what have we to forgive?

During the time the question of the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church was before the Parliament, if we consulted the Protestant press of the country, we might be inclined to think that all the injury was inflicted by us on them, and consequently that it is they who have to forgive, not the Catholics.

Let us go back, if we have to answer the question, what have we to forgive? What have the Catholics of Ireland to forgive?

We shall have to turn back page after page of a bloodstained history of wrong and of crime for three hundred years, we shall have to recall these sad annals to which history produces no equal, we shall have to turn back on that history, written in the tears and in the blood of our afflicted and downtrodden people, who have suffered more wrong, who have endured more injury than any people of whom history bears its record since the creation of the world.

What have we to forgive?

Three hundred years ago the Irish people were united in faith as one man, the Irish people, out of whose faith and love came the splendour of that holy religion which was as dear to them as their life, out of whose faith and love came the noble cathedrals and colleges, and monasteries and churches which covered the land, and made Ireland, even in the hour of her national fall, the glory of Christendom, the land of saints, Catholic amongst all the Catholic.

This was the state of the land three hundred years ago. Chieftains and people alike were Catholic to their hearts' core. The daily Mass, the sacrifice, the sacraments of the Catholic Church, were the very spiritual life of Ireland, and in every clime the voice of the Irish missionary was heard perpetuating the glorious faith of Jesus Christ, so cherished by their nation and countrymen at home. Thus was Ireland, with her Church full of faith and zeal, endowed and splendidly gifted, when suddenly she is called upon, by a power humanly far superior to her own, to perform an act of religious apostasy, to forswear and abandon the faith which for twelve hundred years had been engrained into the very blood of her children. The Irish people were called upon to pull down the image of Jesus Christ from its place, to tear open the tabernacle, and take out the Son of God and trample him under their feet; they were called on to put away every symbol that told the world of their Christianity; they were called upon to give up the Holy Sacraments of the Church, so that the young man or the young maiden could no longer kneel to receive the pardon of Jesus Christ in the confessional, the aged man, dying, no longer should have the holy oils of the Church to strengthen him in his last hour, that the Irish grave no longer should be hallowed by the shadow of the Cross, nor consecrated by the prayers of a faithful and loving people.

All these were the Irish people called upon to give up, and with sacrilegious hands to pull down the glorious temples which our fathers and our saints had built up in the land of their ancestors. Ireland solemnly refused. The people, represented by their bishops and their clergy, speaking by the voice of their chieftains, standing as one man, cemented and united together by the glorious bond of unity of belief, declared that they would rather die than surrender one doctrine of their holy religion, or give up the essential practice of the faith of their fathers. Then did the world behold the strange and terrible sight of one nation, powerful, even then, perhaps, the most powerful nation in the world, sitting in council, and deliberately weighing Ireland's fate in the balance, and the conclusion, deliberate and calm, of that mighty nation under whose bondage we had fallen was, that Ireland should renounce the Catholic faith or the Irish people be exterminated.

Think not for a moment that I am giving way to excitement of thought or imagination, or indulging in a mere rhetorical exaggeration. I assert and will prove that the calm, quiet, well-considered determination at which England arrived three hundred years ago was either to make us Protestants or to destroy us utterly, and that the world beheld the strange spectacle of a whole nation girding up its loins and standing to be martyred for the faith that was in them.

This was the spirit that animated the viceroys and rulers of the land from the days of Elizabeth, when the English armies came over to Ireland, and this the spirit that animated the great northern chieftains as they rose up in arms for the national faith. England's army, no longer Catholic, overspread the land; laws were made which were deliberately directed either to the destruction of Ireland's faith or the extermination of her people. To be a priest was death, to celebrate Mass was death, to shelter a priest was ruin and exile, to make provision for the Catholic faith was to surrender all worldly goods, and go forth houseless and beggared, to be found assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was confiscation and exile.

Then did Ireland behold her faithful bishops and clergy driven from their cathedrals, and their churches, and their colleges, her priests hunted over the land like wild beasts, and a price set on their heads, all the externals of her holy religion utterly abolished, no symbol of her Christianity permitted in the land; and then did Elizabeth and her English Protestant legislature calmly and coolly undertake the gigantic warfare in which she failed, a warfare by which either Ireland should be Protestantized or the Irish people destroyed. We resisted. Every hamlet in the land, almost every family, had its martyrs, and you ask us what we have to forgive?

Ask the martyred dead!

The first wave of religious persecution swept over the land in 1558, under Elizabeth. In the October of 1585, Richard Creagh, Archbishop of Armagh, was poisoned in the Tower of London, after great and prolonged sufferings, nobly endured for the Catholic faith.

In the preceding year, Dublin witnessed a fearful sight. Dermot O'Hurley, Archbishop of Cashel, who was arrested at Carrick-on-Suir, was brought into the city a prisoner, in September, 1583, and kept bound there in chains in a dark and loathsome prison, up to Holy Thursday of the following year. He was offered a free pardon and promotion in the Church if he denied the spiritual power of the pope, and acknowledged the queen's supremacy.
He had resolved, he said, never to abandon, for any temporal reward, the Catholic Church, the Vicar of Christ, and the true faith. The holy prelate was then bound to the trunk of a large tree with his hands and feet chained, and his legs forced into long boots reaching up to the knees. The boots were filled with salt butter, oil, hemp, and pitch and the martyr's body stretched on an iron grate over a fire, and cruelly tortured for more than an hour. The pitch, oil, and other materials boiled over; the skin was torn off the feet, and even large pieces of flesh, so as to leave the bones quite bare. The muscles and veins contracted; and when the boots were pulled off, no one could bear to look at the mangled body. He was then carried back to the same dark and noisome dungeon, to make him suffer still greater torments, if such could be devised. Finally, he was sentenced to be dragged to the place of execution, there to be hanged, his head cut off, his body quartered, and the quarters hung up on the four gates of the city. The holy martyr was accordingly executed in Stephen's Green, on Friday, the 6th of May, 1584.

A few years later, the faithful citizens of Dublin beheld the heroic Bishop of Down and Connor, Cornelius Dovany, led through their streets to the same place of execution. For three years had he lain in the dungeons of Dublin Castle and suffered the horrors of starvation. At length came the sentence that Cornelius Dovany, Bishop of Down and Connor, should be taken back to prison, and then drawn in a cart to the place of execution, there hanged on the gallows and cut down whilst alive, embowelled, his heart and bowels burned, his head cut off, and his body divided into four parts. When he was led to execution, the people poured out in a dense crowd from every door into the streets, and in the sight of the councillors, and to the indignation of the viceroy, fell on their knees and begged the Pontifical blessing as he passed. The moment the bishop mounted the first step of the ladder and his head was seen above the crowd, a great shout of groans burst from all the spectators.

Thus were our archbishops and bishops slaughtered in the midst of a heart-broken people, and we are asked, What have we to forgive?

The hand of persecution spared not the priests and religious, but fell upon them as heavily as on the prelates of the Church. The annals of Elizabeth's reign teem with the records of their sufferings; and, as Peter Talbot, the learned Archbishop of Dublin, observes, “they are written in bloody characters; they are deeply stained with the innocent and noble blood of many learned and loyal subjects, only because they would not abjure the faith of their Christian ancestors.”

“It exceeds all belief,” says another historian of the time, O'Mahony, to what persecutions our Irish Catholics were subjected; “many of our bishops suffered death, and all of them were obliged to seek their safety in concealment or flight; very many priests, both secular and religious, and innumerable individuals of both sexes, as well nobles as plebeians, were also put to death, to say nothing of confiscation of property, exile, imprisonment, and other like evils, all of which our country suffered, as is known to heaven, and as I myself have partly witnessed.”

To take one of numberless instances of our sufferings at this time â€" about the year 1580, a band of English Protestant soldiers entered the monastery church of Saint Mary of Maggio, in the diocese of Limerick, whilst the Cistercian monks were at prayer in the choir. Like hungry wolves, says the historian, they flung themselves on the defenceless religious; in a few moments forty glorious names were added to the long list of Ireland's martyrs, and the sanctuary flowed with their blood.

Years passed away, and Ireland undergoes again a persecution from England that gathered strength and consistency from intense religious hatred. The sect of the Puritans, the most violent of all the forms in which Protestantism has shown itself, arose and gained strength in England; and it was represented by a great and powerful man, who succeeded in taking the reins of government into his hands. This spirit of Puritanism looked with eyes of more than human hatred upon the spectacle of Irish fidelity; and seeing that all the penal laws, all the terrors of Elizabeth and Edward VI. were not equal to the destruction of the Irish clergy and the Irish faith, Cromwell came over to this country, at the head of a great army, to effect that in which his predecessors had failed, namely, either to destroy the religion of the Irish people or destroy the Irish people themselves. Now, I assert that Cromwell's whole determination was to utterly and entirely exterminate the Irish race; and I will call up in evidence one of the greatest enemies of Ireland, yet one of the greatest writers of the day, I mean the English statesman and historian, Macaulay.

Macaulay, speaking of Cromwell and of his coming to Ireland, says, “He had vanquished the Irish people; he knew that they were in his power; and he regarded them as a band of malefactors and idolaters, who were mercifully treated if they were not smitten with the edge of the sword.”

His administration in Ireland was an administration on what are now called Orange principles, followed out most ably, most steadily, most undauntedly, most unrelentingly, to every extreme consequence to which those principles lead, and it would, if continued, inevitably have produced the effect which he contemplated, an entire decomposition and reconstruction of society.

He had a great and definite object in view, to make Ireland thoroughly English, to make Ireland another Yorkshire or Norfolk. And he adds, “The native race were driven back before the advancing van of Anglo-Saxon population, as the American Indians or the tribes of Southern Africa are now driven back before the white settlers. Those fearful phenomena which have almost invariably attended the planting of civilized colonies in uncivilized countries, and which had been known to the nations of Europe only by distant and questionable rumour, were now publicly exhibited in their sight.”

The words extirpation and eradication were often in the mouths of the English back-settlers of Leinster and Munster, cruel words, yet in their cruelty containing more mercy than much softer expressions which have since been sanctioned by universities and cheered by parliaments; for it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations.

Again, speaking of a distinguished Englishman who had settled in Ireland, Macaulay says, He troubled himself as little about the welfare of the remains of the old Celtic population as an English farmer on the Swan River troubles himself about the New Hollanders, or a Dutch Boer at the Cape thinks about the Kaffirs. The determination, therefore, was to sweep away the Irish clergy and utterly exterminate the Irish people.

They failed; but they ask us what we have to forgive?

What have we to forgive?

I, standing here, appearing in this habit, which may recall the traditions and recollections of nearly seven hundred years, of an order united in interest, and bound together with the Irish people, what have I to forgive?

In the year 1650 there were six hundred Dominicans in Ireland. In the year 1660, nearly ten years later, out of the six hundred how many were left?
One hundred and fifty; and four hundred and fifty priests were either massacred, burned, or taken, put into the slave-ship, and sent to Barbados and Jamaica, where they died, after working in the sugar-plantations as slaves, working out their unhappy lives under the lash of the slave-driver; and they were the best, the most devoted, the noblest of Irishmen.

In this fatal interval, whilst the whole island streamed with Catholic blood, we read, amongst many others, of a certain Dominican, Father Richard Barry, who was publicly burned on the Rock of Cashel, in the midst of a horror-stricken and most afflicted people.

A few years later the troubled wave of conquest, swollen with the same religious hatred, swept over Ireland. Cities, of treaties violated, opened their gates to the invaders, and had the stones of their streets wetted with the best blood of their women and their children. Penal laws were again enacted and re-enacted, making it death to preach or to administer the sacraments to Catholics; and these laws did their work. Catholic priests filled all the prisons of Ireland, and you ask us what we have to forgive?

It was not only war against one faith, but it was war against everything that could sustain that faith. Two things were regarded as great sustaining powers of Catholic faith in Ireland, namely, the wealth of the people, and the education of the people.

The help, the assistance of wealth, was cut off. The noble families of the land were driven forth beggars into exile, deprived of all their land and of all their property, for their religion. The whole province of Ulster was planted, as it is called, by colonists from the north of England and from Scotland, who brought their Protestantism with them, and the original holders of the soil, because they were Catholics, were driven back farther into the island.

Cromwell gave orders that the Irish Catholics should depart from their homes, and a few barren mountains in Connaught, overlooking the Western Sea, were assigned to them as their only hold on the land. They were to choose between hell, through a cruel death, or exile in the distant and barren tracts of the West. Thus were the whole people driven forth from the land which was theirs; thus was a great and monstrous wrong inflicted, not upon one, or upon two, or upon a thousand, but upon the whole nation; and the people, unable to resist, gave up all rather than the faith which the Almighty God had given them.

The second great sustaining power of our faith was education. Our people, from the beginning, were lovers of knowledge, they cultivated knowledge. Irish teachers were to be found in every university in Europe. The greatest doctor of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, had for his teacher in that philosophy in which he excelled, an Irishman. When kings and emperors wanted to found great universities, they sent to Ireland for the first scholars of the age, and they got them; and thus was knowledge, and the love of knowledge, spread by Irishmen all over the world.

England saw that in Ireland flourished the strongest faith, side by side with the very highest intellectual culture; and in order to destroy that faith, if possible, by destroying education, she made it penal for a Catholic father to have his son instructed, thinking that by brutalizing the people by ignorance, she would reduce them to an acceptance of her own errors. Ireland uneducated, Ireland shut out from the schools, Irish youth uninstructed betook themselves to the halls of learning, retaining their holy religion; and because that is an intellectual religion, an eminently intellectual religion, it kept the fire of intellectual knowledge and the sacred light of education still burning in the land in spite of all the penal laws, in spite of all the brute terrors brought to bear for its extinction. You have asked us what we have to forgive?

The Catholic Church to-day, after standing in her own blood and pouring forth the best blood of her children for more than two hundred years, sees the chains fall from her noble and queenly figure, and the Catholic Church to-day, forgetting all the evils that were inflicted upon her, forgetting all her injuries, turns with disdain from the offer of a portion of that which was once her own, from a portion of that which was confiscated from her three hundred years ago; and to those who would endow her and enrich her with a portion of that which was once all her own, she says:
“For three hundred years I have lived in the land,
And I have suffered with my people,
For three hundred years the love of the Irish people has been a sufficient endowment for me,
For me, who, having food and clothing, am content to labour and, if necessary, to die,
For three hundred years I have found my endowment in the hearts of my people,
I prize them more than all the wealth this world could lay at my feet;
And therefore, I say,
Whatever portion of this church property might be mine I am willing to give up to the Irish people for their national purposes.
I will cast my bread, as of old, upon the running waters,
And I will lean on the faith and generosity of Irish hearts for my existence in this land.”

And, my brethren, whilst she thus speaks to us, she turns to her enemies; she turns to those who for three hundred years have laid the scourge of persecution upon her, and says;
“I am willing to forget all,
I am willing never to remind you, or remind my own people,
Of a single injury I have sustained;
I forgive you with all my heart and soul,
And I only ask you to join hands with me and say,
Let us be united in all the civil bonds of friendship and equality,
For our own welfare and the good of our common country”

This is the language which we hold to-day; and 'if I took a review before you of our past wrongs, it is not to fling them into the faces of those who inflicted them.

Oh, no!

It is to tell them that we exercise the virtue of forgiveness, of love of our neighbour. We have much to forgive, more than any people on the face of the world. We have much to forgive, and therefore our love which prompts us to forgive must be correspondingly great. We offer them the pledge of our friendship if they will accept it.

Finally, my brethren, our love of our neighbour obliges us to ardently desire his spiritual and temporal welfare, and it is this also that brings us here to-day. I do not conceal that one great feeling which fills the Catholic heart is the hope that the great measure of redress which has just passed will prepare the way, and open the road, to obtain for Ireland again, at no distant day, the heavenly blessing of religious unity.

It was for unity in faith that Christ our Lord prayed to His Father the evening before He suffered. It was for unity in faith that He offered His prayers for His apostles at the Last Supper.

It was for unity of faith, and that men might be of one mind, that He established His Church upon earth, and set upon that Church the seal of infallibility of doctrine, that all men might know His word, and have confidence in accepting it from her lips.

This unity was the blessing of Ireland for twelve hundred years: from the day she took Catholic truths from the teachings of her own apostle, down to the sad and terrible day when she was told that the Church was no longer one, and that she must disunite herself from Peter's Chair. We know, as Catholics, that the Holy Catholic Church is the one depository of divine truth, the one infallible witness to God's creed upon earth. We know this. Our Protestant fellow-countrymen will not receive it.

We respect their very error, but we would not love them, we could not love them as our neighbours, we could not fulfil the Gospel in their regard, if we did not ardently and earnestly pray to Almighty God to open their eyes to this great truth, that it is necessary to be in body as well as in spirit members of the Catholic Church in order to be pleasing to God, and have that faith without which it is impossible to be saved. We hope that our aspirations for religious unity will be forwarded by the destruction of the fatal ascendency which so long reigned amongst us.

Therefore do we hail it out of the love we have for our Protestant fellow-citizens; therefore do we hail it as the dawning of the day when once more this land will partake of the blessings of religious unity, when all Irishmen will come to kneel at the same altar, shall receive into faithful and loving hearts the same sacramental God, and be united as brothers in the land by every bond of love, not merely civic friendship, but in the higher national bond of union, which is identity of faith.

We say that we hope this day is dawning, and we see the first stroke of its coming light on the horizon of our history in this great act of amelioration which is passed. We could not be loving man, we could not have either love of our neighbour, which is the mark of Christians, if we did not hail this blessing as the first light of a coming glorious day, if we did not cry out to God in thanksgiving for the past,
Oh, come, O Lord!
Come in the unity of faith,
Oh! Come in the strength of that love which triumphed in the sacrifice on the Cross!
Oh, come, and delay not!
Beam on all those who are in darkness or in the shadow of death; fill them with the light of your presence and of your grace:
Beam on their intellects with the light of faith;
Beam on their hearts with the ardour of divine love; that so, my brethren, we may all unite, bound together in faith, in hope, and in charity;
And thus, seeking first that union which is the kingdom of God, all other things, all temporal blessings, all greatness, which might hereafter follow, if we were a united people, according to the Word of our Heavenly Father, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all other things shall be added unto you.”




Come Here Often?




Image by sylvia@intrigue

We were in a pub in Blackpool, I saw the dispensing machine in the Women's toilets. I blinked and then went out to our table.

"Do you have any change," I whispered to Cliff. He looked at me suspiciously. I promised that I had no intention of buying cigarettes and he gave me a pound coin.

I went back to the machine to find another three girls there, collecting change together to buy one for themselves. I waited and then got one of my own, sure that no one would believe me if I didn't get photographic evidence.

One of the guys checked the Men's room to confirm our suspicions: there were no such cute condoms available there. No man would buy this. I wondered if it was a modern variation of "Will you still love me tomorrow?" Prove that I am special by showing me how much humiliation will you endure to be able to have sex with me.

I didn't even notice the warning on the box until much later: Not For Barrier Use.

That's OK, I only used it for photographic purposes. No male egos were damaged in this process.




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