PRIESTS AND PEOPLE IN IBELAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 2545, 24 December 1902, Page 29

PRIESTS AND PEOPLE IN IBELAND.

'About a year ago Mr Michael J. F. ifcTCarthy, 8.A., of Trinity College, Dublin, barrister' at law, published a book entitled "Fire Years in Ireland," which was highly praised at the time, rapidly Tan through seven editions, and was pronounced by one of the most influential of the leading journals in Germany to be " one of those works which announce a revolution in public opinion and a new epoch in the history of Ireland." Mr M'Carthy haa just followed it up by another still more revolutionary in spirit, called " Priests and' People in Ireland" (Dublin: Hodges and Co. Melbourne: Melville and Mullen), in which he examines the forces wielded by the priesthood in their operation upon the daily lives ■of 'the people. In an introductory chapter, be strikes the keynote to the work in the following passage: — "I am a Catholic, I am an Irishman : I have a right to speak. I am in favour of religious equality and toleration in the fullest sense of those terms. I admire the British for their extraordinary tenderneP3 to the small Catholic minority in Great Britain. ... I condemn the policy to which our priests have now committed themselves in the plenitude of their power " ; because, as he afterwards goes on to explain, that policy promises to eventuate either in revolvition or "in the undermining of individual and corporate morality, in the emasculation of the people's character, and in the rancorous wasting or national decline." As a good Catholic and a firm believer in the verities of the Christian religion, Mr M'Carthy rejects very decidedly the doctrine that the particular form of faith so tenaciously held by ihe great bulk of the Irish nation has anything, to do with " the stagnation, decay, and hopelessness" which Professor Mlhnix, of Maynooth, recently described as having settled on Catholic Ireland. Neither can these evils, he argued, be traced to political causes, because '"the same laws prevail in prosperous Protestant Ireland as in degenerate Catholic Ireland, without an iota of difference." Nor is there any statute in force in the Green Island to prevent the Roman Catholic i Irish citizen from doing everything which is being done by the Protestant citizens of the United Kingdom. Therefore, the lamentable condition of Catholic Ireland cannot be properly attributed, in the opinion of Mr M'Carthy. to the injustice of the laws in force. The main source of the evils from which she is suffering is to be found, he declares, in priestcraft; and its absence, he reminds us, is observable in all those countries where a high degree of prosperity exists, and where manliness of character is predominant. "I am forced to the conclusion, then," he writes, " that it is folly for us Roman Catholic Irishmen to deceive ourselves by attributing Catholic Ireland degeneracy to causes which are but secondary, and are found not incompatible with progress and prosperity elsewhere. It is saoerdotal interference and domination in Catholic Ireland, beginning in the infant school and ending with the legacy for masses after death, that will be found to be the true and universal cause of that universal degeneracy upon which we so commiserate ourselves." To the expansion of this proposition and to the collection, methodical arrangement, and systematic grouping of a great mass of facts in support of it, Mr M'Carthy devoted upwards of 600 pages of letterpress, embracing a survey of the social and economic position of the whole of Ireland. By one phenomenon he appears to have been particularly struck — namely, the costliness and splendour of the churches, monasteries, convents, colleges, and cathedrals erected by the ecclesiastics *of hi 3 own denomination, and by the poverty and equalor of the population by which they are surrounded, as also by the magnitude of the sacerdotal army which is maintained by the Irish Catholics. Concurrently with a decline in the population of so many districts there is a steady increase, we are told, in the number of priests, monks, nuns, and other ecclesiastical functionaries, whose revenues are derived from the poor tillers of the soil. In the City of Armagh, where the number of inhabitants has fallen in 10 years from 10,070 to 7438, it was considered necessary to expend £30,000 upon the internal decoration of the Roman Catholic Cathedral, and that amount was raided by a bazaar and handed over to Cardinal Logue; and at Monaghan the late Bishop of Clogher raised \ sufficient money to erect and equip an enormous cathedral on the top of a lonely hill •> mile outside of the town, and immediately afterwards a church had to be erected in the place itself for the convenience of worBhippers. Monaghan contains less than 3000 inhabitants, and Mr M'Carthy evidently considers that if the sum lavished on the ornamental minster had been expended in •the establishment of some important local industry the town would not be so destitute of life, distinction, and prosperity as h« now represents it to be. At Roscommon, in Connaught, a jorgeous churoh is in course of erection, and the firm of Salviati, in Venice, has been commissioned to execute for it 12 life-sized figures of the Apostles, in order, as Moneignor M'Loughlin explains, to educate the young generation to a knowledge of the grand art of mosaic. "As if," sarcastically observe* Mr M'Caxthy, " the poor Catholic peasants of Connaught, who lack the most elementary provisions for a healthy, or even decent, bodily existence — to say nothing of their state of mental starvation — could pos•dblr derive any benefit from the «skj.eY.e-

mexite of this Roscommon priest-architect!" Owing to this mania for church building in Ireland, the minds of the Catholio laity, the writer complains^ are kept in a state of continual unrest and discontent, ■ accompanied by a steady drain upon their very scanty resources, and the result is that they are gradually becoming poorer and poorer. " Fifty years ago," Monsignor M'Loughlin ia credited with saying, " there were 52 paupers in every thousand of the population, and to-day there are 95 in every thousand; while in the cass of England the figures were 49 fifty years ago, and to-day 'db in every thousand" — a state of things "in the Irish province v/hich justifies Mr M'Carthy, he thinks, in predicting that " if Monsignor M'Loughfin persists in his policy of squandering money on mosaics, in 50 yeaTS from this date the number of paupers in Connaught may have increased to any number up to 200 per thousand." And when he comes to speak of the great Augus- • tinian Church in Dubin on a later page, Mr M'Carthy seriously questions whether the causo of true religion is furthered by the erection and decoration of such edifices when the poorest of the worshippers in them are festering in habitations equally unfavourable to health, cleanliness and decency. " What," he asks, " does God think of this, when He must know that every , stone of this church has been procured «and put in its place by money which was required by the nation for the" bare necessaries of life? Does Gcd, tho Creator of '. this earth, with all its land and water, its , minerals below and its atmosphere above, . with He. myriad, of human beings and its > myriads of animal life, approve of this ugly, ! costly house, which has been built out of i the sweat, of His people's brows — out of their sighs, their tears, their ignorance, their cowardice, their heart-broken misery? Can He, who takes in at a single glance the ' countless mins and worlds which revolve in the plane of space, approve of this house • or approve of what goe3 on under its roof?" I And then he proceeds to describe what h* ' saw "going on there" — a crowd of shabby, wce-begone people, dirty and threadbare, rubbing t>ht backs and palms of their grimy [ hands'' against a couple of clay statues, and then rubbing those same hands against their own foreheads. "A feeling of disgust ran , through roe as I beheld," he adds, " and I i thought these are my own countrymen and { countrywomen. These are the Irish who j cannot get on. in life. This is the teach- " ing they get; this is the religion to which ' : they sacrifice their lives. This is all they ; ! know of God and God s world. Now, 1.know, and the conviction surges through my whole being, that God does not approve of the costly house and of what is done under its roof." i Visiting the rural districts of Ireland, Mr ; M'Carthy finds Eome prosperous and progressive, and others just the reverse, and he is startled by the contrasts they pre- : sent. The counties of Antrim and Down, for example, are striking illustrations of the former qualities, although they possess i great natural disadvantages. More than one- " fifth of the area of Antrim and about one- ■ seventh of that of Down, consists of waste, bog and mountain.*' Nevertheless, the first is a scene of considerable manufacturing, .commercial, and agricultural activity, and " its prosperity, he declares, "is to be entirely ascribed to Protestant energy and Protestant freedom, for the land is not a whit better than the soil of Cork and Wexford. The county is almost entirely free from the priest. There is not a single Catholio or religious institution or convent outside the neighbourhood of Belfast," with the exception of two schools which he specifies. j And so with the County of Down, in ! which, he says, " the land is in the highest ' state of cultivation, and the people are industrious and contented." With the exception of Newry and its immediate neighbourhood, he adds, this county is almost en- ' tirely " free from religious institutions and convents." Both counties are described as being prosperous beyond all the other counties in Ireland, and full of small farms, tilled with the greatest energy and industry ; ■ while there is an amount of civic and social i life nowhere else to be found in Ireland, because,' except in these two districts, "thei higher and the • lower classes do not look I upon each other as neighbours. The priest, in sullen isolation, with his occult powers and myeterious deportment, intensifies the estrangement. He himself belongs to the lower classes, but he disowns his own people, and the higher classes will not have him. on his own valuation of himself. He finds himself isolated ; he becomes a tyrant, and appears to take an uncharitable delight in setting the different classes of society at cross purposes." Pursuing his investigations, Mr M'Carthy examined the condition of the peasants in Mayo, and more particularly that of those inhabiting what are called the disturbed districts, and ho says of them: — "I never saw, in the whole course of my life — which has been all spent in Ireland — such a number of idle, well-dressed, hopeless, mysterious looking people as the peasants of those districts." They are not badly off, and the men and women and boys and girls are well clad, because the men migrate to England for six months in the year, and provide themselves with an outfit of slop clothing before they return. "Irishman as I am to the finger tips," he observes, " it was with difficulty at first that I could bring myself to regard the black-haired denizens of this region as my fellow countrymen." And the unfavourable impressions which he formed of them were confirmed by the opinions of residents, chiefly Roman Catholics, with whom he conversed concerning them. " They are the idlest people in the world," faid one man. "If you notice their trousers," said a second, " you will see them scorched brown from sitting over the fire. They do no work from November to March ; then "Uhey rush out and scratch, up the surface of the fields, just as hens do, and put in their little crops, and then the go off to England." There are no ragged or barefooted people among them, but the women and girls array themselves in parasols and gloves on Sundays, and may be seen emerging from houses tor which Mr M'Carthy can find no word but "vermin abodes,'' and the?e are surrounded by little farmyards, whose condition is one of filth, untidiness, and neglect. And he fastens the responsibility of this state of things partly upon the priesthood and partly upon what is being taught to the ignorant peasantry in the place of religion. , The subsitute for the latter he designates as "mummery," so that, "when engaged in it, they are but acting a part, like a herd of supers on the boards of a pantomime stage, and when real difficulty comes upon them their theatrical religion is of no use to them. They fly to such resources as assassination, outrage on man and beast and viragoism." They commit a crime, we are : told, mumble a confession of it, receive

absolution, and then emerge from the church or chapel, " believing that the debt due to outraged God, and injured society, and their demoralised selves, has been all paid . off, like a shopkeeper's account." After enumerating some of the multitudinous institutions in Ireland, in which a very large army of ecclesiastics, male and female, is well housed, well fed, and well clad, Mr M'Carthy asks: — "How would English workmen and work women like to have a thousand of such institutions dotted over the fac.e of their country, dominating it, taking precedence of all industry, living in idleness upon the sweat of people's brows, diverting the thoughts of the youth from upright work and self-helpfulness \p the gloominess and despair of hell and purgatory, and making cowards of the English race? That is what we have to bear in Catholic Ireland to-day." The author writes, as the reader is constantly reminded, under stress of very strong emotion, which occasionally reaches a high pitch in passages like the following: — "We have no faith. Our piety is an elaborate series of subterfugee by which we endeavour to escape the duty of good conduct in life, and ultimately hope to deceive t-he Divine Omniscience. That is self-deception, and it leads to failure and ruin." In fact, whatever may be- the strength or weakness of his case, into the merits or demerits of which we have neither the wish nor the inclination to enter, it is impossible not to be struck by 'the "obvious earnestness and sincerity of his convictions, the vehemence with which hi has set them forth, and the patience and labour which he must have exercised in collecting the mass of facts he ha« brought together, and marshalled in due order. Reviewing the deplorable condition of Connaught, the population of which p»cvince has fallen from 846,213 in 1871 to 649,635 iai 1901, Mr M'Carthy asks whether it is not a "standing disgrace to the <rast army of prieets and nuas who fatten upon the decaying province"? He goes still fur-ther-and. declares that "this immense clerical organisation is the primary cause of tie ■ people's ignorance and misery" ; and declares that "if the religious (orders) were removed from unhappy Connaught, the province would at once begin to advance with- ! out any further ameliorative measures %> hatever." At preeent, he says, it offers two pictures to the student of social science, j which are both impressive and instructive. , "On the one hand the reader will have ' noted the disturbed, unhappy, ignorant, and impoverished condition of the lay people ; on the other the nourishing state of the religious. How can a conscientious s f ates- j man etudy the condition of Catholic Con- ] naught and escape from the, to my mind, inevitable deduction that the priest and his helpmate, the nun. constitute a force which makes for national disturbance, discontent, degeneracy, decay, and, in the end, death itself?" The great leakage of Catholics which is yearly taking place both in Great Britain and the United States, as acknowledged and deplored *i>y Catholic writers and preachers, Mr M'Carthy appears to connect with a desire on the part of those who fall away, when the opportunity arises, to emancipate themselves from priestly domination ; and he says that those who, accord- •■ ing to Father Shinnors, are deserting the < Church "in miHions," far from being ab- ' sorbed, as he alleges, into " the irreligious and unbeliewng masses," practise a higher code of morality than their faithful brothers and sisters do who remain behind and " profess to believe in sacerdotal infallibility in Ireland." In thus offering our readers some analysis of a, book written by an educated and patriotic Irishman, who is also a Catholic-^a book which is bound to make a great stir, both at home and abroad — we have allowed Mr M'Carthy to expound his own views, without note or comment. Possibly a work of this kind may bo only a sporadic outburst of individual feeling, and may exercise only a transitory influence upon the minds of the Catholic laity in Great Britain and Ireland ; or possibly, upon the other hand, it may be the first note of a revolt of the educated classes against the " sacerdotal domination," which this writer so passionately condemns. At page 595 he makes the following startling statement: — "There are many men and women in the rich land who do not fear the priests. They ate Protest? Nt Catholics, whose ancestor? rose up for Christ against the priests, and there are 1.150.000 of them, but for whom the dreaded priests would utterly possess Ireland." An assertion of this kind, and the subtle something which may be read between the lines, would possess much lepa significance if no such thing had happened of late years as the closing of the religious houses in Italy, and the very stronjy measures which have been adopted by the French Ciovernment •for curtailincj the influence and power of Clericalism in France. All great movements of this kind are rijrhtly described as being " in the air," and when tV>py get there it is quite impossible to predict when or where they will stop. The publication of such a book at such a time is sure to provoke a storm of controversy, and this, by presenting both sides of the question, will help to educate the public mind upon a subject which is not unlikely to become a very prominent one. — Age.