THE HIERARCHY AND THE IRISH QUESTION.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4445, 22 July 1887, Page 3

THE HIERARCHY AND THE IRISH QUESTION.

The Rome correspondent of a London paper referring to a somewhat hostile “Memoir” on the Irish Question writes :

Justico to the governing body of the Irish College demands that 1 should supplement my telegram of last Wednesday, give extracts from a Memoir issued in the name of that institution, by the statement that the Faculty of the College had no hand in the preparation of the document in question. It was written and issued quite independently of them, and I have now not the slightest doubt without their knowledge, as it was certainly without their approbation. At first I was assured that the Memoir was the work of an Irish Jesuit Professor at the College, but there is now very good reason to believe that it was written by an English Catholic ecclesiastic who is believed to have been inspired by the Vatican. One of the chief objects of the memior waste put an end to the secret affiliations of some of the students of the Irish College with secretaries who may be in league with Continential revoluiionaries, while another was to influence the Pope in arriving at a decision upon the Irish question. The Memoir is still only partly public,but even within the limit of its circulation it has made a great stir, as it represented a state of mind among Catholic ecclesiastics that is more general that might be supposed. If I were asked to explaiu the cause of this I should attribute it to the fact of Mr Gladstone being at the head of the Home Buie movement. It may surprise English people to hear it but it must, I fear, be confessed that the Catholic hierarchy has neither forgotten nor forgiven the ex-Premier’s famous pamphlet on Vaticanism.” The Memoir in question is a proof of this, inasuch as it alludes to that attack upon Pius IX. and the Popacy as a poisoned arrow, that, like the boomerang, rebounded and wounded the head of the man who hurled it. It only remains to be said that the Memoir has been tran slated into Italian, and sent to the College of Cardinals, and to all the ecclesiastics of the Boman Court and Congregations.