THE CHURCH AND THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

New Zealand Tablet, 22 January 1920, Page 19

THE CHURCH AND THE IRISH LANGUAGE.

At a time when the League for the Promotion of the Irish Language has been proclaimed by Dublin Castle and is supposed to be suppressed, the holding of an Irish session during the meeting of the Catholic Truth Society in Dublin will be accepted as evidence of the Church's hostility to the tyrannical policy of the Government, as well as of her desire that the old tongue should be preserved ■ (says an English exchange). It has seemed strange to many Irishmen that in the past she was much less zealous to preserve it, though she could not be ignorant of its value, for Irish, so to say, breathed of the language of ■the Church, but it should not be forgotten that the fight -to keep the faith alive was a ' long and bitter struggle, :and that under circumstances in which the salvation of souls was at stake the preservation of the language was a ■secondary "consideration. It is to-day a great benefit to the cause that : the attempt of the Government to extinguish the language in which St. Patrick and so many other great Irish saints spoke and spread the Gospel of Christ is countered by the earnest support of an organisation :so powerful for good as the Church.