Who is Michael J. McCarthy ?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 52, 25 December 1902, Page 1

Who is Michael J. McCarthy ?

And who is this Michael J. McCarthy, whose work is, according to the imaginative Melbourne reviewer, going to shake the Papacy to its very foundations. Our contemporary, the Sydney ' Freeman,' gives the following biographical particulars regarding this latest Protestant hero :—: — • Michael J. F. McCarthy is the son of a man who won great favor with Nationalists about Middleton, County Cork, for the prominent part he took in the Land League movement 20 years ago. The people who were his admirers in those days will tell you now that later on his prudence got the better of his patriotism, and he joined the party he had previously denounced as thieves and tyrants. In those early days Michael McCarthy knelt at the feet of the Vincentian Fathers at Cork to receive the twofold gift of piety and knowledge. He was evidently not equipped with watertight compartments, however, and he seems to have discarded the piety for the knowledge. He was a little later able to acquire the one without bothering about the other at the Queen's College, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, with just the proper disposition to •' get on " in that famous Elizabethan hall for the perversion of Irish faith and patriotism. The great test of Catholicity is conformity with the Church's precepts ; and, according to one of these, one passes out of communion who neglects his duties for a year and more. McCarthy, if common report is to be trusted, had no practical communion with the Church for many years. But many who forfeit practical communion retain the Catholic instinct. McCarthy proved his possession of the instinct, which brings a flush of pride to the cheeks of many hardened sinners, by coming into collision with his nominal pastor. He had not only lost communion ; he had lost the faith.'

Since then his career has been that of a briefless barrister, who has earned a permy — honest or otherwise — by publishing purple stories of the Church and people to which he still claims to belong.