Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 35, 7 September 1922, Page 14

Current Topics

Who. Shirked? ■ .Brazen parsons, who must be deliberately telling falsehoods if they are not ignorant beyond conception, continue to tell brainless Protestants who enable such ranters to make an easy living that Catholics were shirkers during the war. The fact is that these very parsons were doing splendidly the work of the enemy in this country by stirring up strife, protected; by Mr. . Massey's police, at the time when our priests were with the men in the trenches and rendering such service as brought unstinted praise from Sir James Allen and General Godley. But as the calumny continues to be repeated by persons who seem to have lost all sense of moral responsibility and all respect for common decency it is well once more to publish the figures given by Sir James Allen to show in what numbers and in what proportion the churches of this Dominion sent volunteers to the war. Church of England, with a population of 411,671, sent 32,760, or 46.3 per cent, of the whole; Presbyterians had a population of 234,622 and sent 16,431, or 23.3 per cent, of the whole number; Catholics, with a population of 140,523, sent 8,711, or 12.2 per cent, of the whole body; Baptists, with a population of 20,042, sent only 882, or only 1.2 per cent, of the whole. If we look at it in another way, the shirkers will be better exposed. When 70,445 -men had gone under the. voluntary system, 7 per cent, of the entire population had gone to the war. Then, each Church ought to have sent 7 per cent, of its numbers. Let us see what happened: Church of England sent - - - 7.9 per cent of its total number to the War. Presbyterians „ ... 7 percent „ their „ ~ . „ „ Catholics „ ... 6.2 percent „ „ „ „ „ „ Wesleyans and Methodists sent 5.2 per cent „ „ „ „ „ „ Baptists „ 4.4 percent „ „ „ „ „ „ Thus we see that Catholics who were denounced by Baptist parsons as disloyal and as shirkers sent 6.2 % of their number, although there were two reasons which would have made it intelligible if they had not sent one-half as many. In the first place, owing to the. fact that they live clean lives and do not practice race-suicide their families are large and the proportion of children great, and, in the second place, the treat-, ment of Ireland by England was sufficient to prevent any man of Irish blood who remembered the falsity of English pledges from going. But in spite of all this, it stands out clearly that if there is in the Dominion a Church of Shirkers .that Church is the( Baptist Church, which produced the men who were by their campaign of calumny helping the Germans to win the war".; War Against the Irish People The followers of Rory O'Connor are now. clearly at war with the Irish people. The people have expressed their will very clearly at the elections, and the voice of the united Hierarchy has made it plain that the Free State Government is the lawful Government of Ireland. Hence the armed bands sniping Free 'State soldiers,' conscripting women to work for «hem (as was done in Donegal by those Irregulars), threatening death to all who oppose them or refuse to aid them (as is proved by a letter signed by E. Alward, found in a prisoner's pocket in Kilkenny), are carrying on a war by frightfulness against the people of Ireland. Every road they destroy, every public building they burn, every bridge they blow up will be paid for by the common people throughout the country, and it is the common people of Ireland they attack when they are guilty of this useless and criminal destruction. The position taken up by these men is exactly the same as that of anarchists and law-breakers who want to im- ">»» *-*■«■ Uiiwiumuu) i*-.j._i jurn - Krx OCMM7I o WHO wailti HJ illlpose their wills on the community. If de Valera is right, if it is a lawful and a patriotic thing to say to the Irish people,, as he does: "You -are; all wrong; you do not know what is good for you Rory O'Connor

and myself are the ones who know; and we, with, the armed lads whom we have seduced into following us, are going to make you do what we think you ought to do;" then every fanatic, every dreamer would be justified in defying the established governments of the world, and trying to make the rest of the people follow them. There is a lot of talk about the threat made by Lloyd George interfering with the elections. In reality it did not make two pins difference to the elections whether a threat was made or not. If it were never made the people would know well that they had to face the probability of war. And even when it was made we had the Republicans telling the people that it meant nothing and that England did not dare go to war again. So that, whichever way one looks at it, the argument that the will of the people has not been expressed does not hold. It is quite certain that the murder of Collins is going to bring home to de Valera the fact that the people have had enough of his war on them by this time. Nothing could have been so galling to the rebels as the welcome that greeted the Free State soldiers who came to save the towns all over the South from the Irregular enemies of the Irish people. Irish Bishops Take Action As we have said the Irish people have made it abundantly clear that they are impatient of the outrages of the bands commanded by a few men who have the audacity to tell the whole people that a little group of young men possesses all the patriotism and all the common sense in the country. The enthusiastic demonstrations that welcomed the Free 'State forces which came to deliver the towns in the South from the terror-, ists were proof enough of this fact, and further proof was to be witnessed, in the crowds of men who signified their desire to join the Nationalist forces in order to put down the Irregulars. Recent pronouncements by some of the Bishops also strengthen the -hands of the Government arid make it more impossible for the opposing gunmen to hold out much longer. The Cardinal has spoken in unmistakable language and even attached the extreme penalty of excommunication to the crimes of looting and raiding carried on in his parish of Carlingford. From his words it is plain in what light he regards the misguided youths and their leaders: The country (he said), which had never dreamt of such liberties, welcomed the terms. Then a faction arose and flouted the Government nominated by themselves, but when the people got a chance of registering their opinions they declared for the Treaty, because it gave them the widest liberties. This faction had now developed into brigandage, • and continued its opposition to the authorised Government until, at the moment, there was no law or order in many part's of the country. Those looters, who would not work, were having the times of their lives going about in stolen motor cars. ROVING PARTIES OP MEN. tf . were behaving as bandits, living on the people, and all, this tended towards the ruination of the country. . He was sorry that-things were hot as they should be in Carlingford, in which he spent so much of his time and in which he took such a deep interest. He. was sorry that'the spirit which he had just condemned was manifesting itself in the district, and this caused him great trouble. ~ . ' Outrages had been committed. Retired policemen, their wives, and families, had been ordered to leave the town, and, evidently in pursuance of that order, the house of one of them had been fired into last Friday. ',-' . .- ... .- He, deplored this. conduct, and said many of the people whom it was sought to drive out were natives of the district. 1 - ' ■/■■ r j- .''•*■; ;' \ \. : ■:■:■■ ■. ;....-. .•',;•'. '-'.-■:/■ His Eminence denounced the burning of a motorboat in Carlingford Lough a few weeks ago. That boat- was owned , by the Carlingford Lough Commissioners, and in all probability the local ratepaying community would have to pay for the loss. He referred particularly 9 to the looting of oil from

the s.s. Slieve Foy, and added emphatically that anyone looting oil in the parish, or coming into the parish from without to loot or to destroy property, or anyone ai diner or aKat finer fliftin in snob work, would bv o -------- - *“o —*“ ~ - -■■■ -J that very fact be excommunicated. Another Bishop, the Most Reverend Dr. Morrisroe, has declared the destruction of bridges and public buildings a reserved sin in his diocese and, we learn from a Republican paper, that, the Archbishop of Dublin forbade his priests to hear the confessions, of the men who were going to defend the buildings they had seized in the city. These individual indications of the mind of the Bishops emphasise powerfully the recent declaration of the whole body, denouncing the foolish position taken up by de Valera and Rory O’Connor: .. . “Principles are now being openly defended and acted upon which are in fundamental conflict with the law of God, and which, as Bishops and pastors appointed to safeguard Christian morals, we cannot allow to pass without solemn censure and reprobation. Foremost amongst these principles is the claim that the Army, or a part of it, can, without any authority from the nation as a whole, declare itself independent of all civil authority in the country. The Army as a whole, and, still more, a part of the Army, has no such moral right. ' Such a claim is a claim to military despotism and subversive of all civil liberty. It is an immoral usurpation and confiscation of the people’s rights. More than any other order in society, the Army, from the very nature of its institution, is the servant, and not the master, of the nation’s Government, and revolt against the supreme authority set up by the .people is nothing less than a sacrilege against national freedom.” Irish Dominican Nuns One day not long ago the sight of a school annual called West-wind, bearing on its cover the date 1644, recalled the glorious history of the Dominican Sisters of Galway, from whose college the publication had come all the way to New Zealand. W have to go back almost three hundred years to the time when the citizens of Galway provided a small convent for some ladies desirous of embracing the religious life under the rule of St. Dominic. Their director was Father Gregory French, O.P. The date of the foundation was 1644, and three years later it was confirmed by the famous Papal Nuncio, Rinuccini, whose name is so bright on the pages of Irish history. For eight years the little community flourished. Then came the Great Assassin, .Cromwell,- the Protestant Champion of Liberty—as a notorious Christchurch parson calls him. And as English force in _ Ireland, then and so often afterwards, meant war -on women and religious persecution, the nuns had to flee for their lives from their Galway enclosure which was called Jesus Mariae. To Spain they went, and there the . fugitives from Protestantism were royally welcomed in various convents at Toledo, Zamora, Valladolid, and Bilbao. A record left by a student of Salamanca in the sixties of the seventeenth century mentions particularly three of the exiled nuns as women of great piety and intellect. One was Mother Mary O’Hallorah, another was Madam Mary Blake, the third was Mary French who died with a reputation for sanctity at Valladolid. As years went by the exiled ladies died, until, when the accession of James 11. revived hopes in Catholic hearts only two of the Galway community were left. These were Juliana Nolan and Maria Lynch, both then living at Bilbao. Word came to them there from the Provincial, Father John Browne, telling them to return to Ireland in order to restore the foundation at Galway. So, leaving the land that had so long cherished them, in obedience to the call they went back to Galway and once more, now aged women, passed through the dear old streets which they had seen only in dreams during years of exile. They quickly secured a suitable house and resumed their cloistered life," Mother Juliana being instituted Prioress and Mother Maria Lynch subPrioress and mistress of novices. Postulants flocked to them in large numbers, and soon the foundation was flourishing.: Once more thev Divine Office was ‘ recited in Galway by Dominican .'Sisters,, whose long exile in

the land of St. Dominic only imbued them more deeply, with the spirit of the Order. But England still ruled by force, and English faith was never worth a breath, so it is not surnrisiner. that trouble from England once X. w w more came upon the foundation. In 1698 all bishops and religious were ordered under pain of death to leave Ireland. On the vigil of SB. Philip and James in that year rough soldiers of the perjured English Government broke into the convent, smashed the grating, of the Glausura, and obliged the nuns to resume secular dress. The student to whom we referred already was now a priest in Galway, one Father O’Heyne, and he tells us what happened when the English war on women was again begun in 1698: “When these virgins were lamenting that they were deprived of their habit, she [the Prioress] like a heroine answered that Christ was entirely stripped when He was bound to the pillar at His scourging and likewise when He was crucified. . . It happened that not one of them even once asked to go out so that the Prioress was much consoled, finding all so obedient.” Then, these poor nuns had to live as best they could through the Penal Days, when England tried to make Ireland renounce the true faith as England herself had done under compulsion, sometimes of German mercenaries brought Over to murder people into submission to the religion of the German Luther. They were forced to wear secular dress but they managed to keep together most of the time, and during it all they were faithful to the recitation of the Divine Office, never asking for a dispensation from this obligation. In 1715 another raid was made on them ‘by the then champions of small nations who turned the house from which they drove the nuns into a barrack. To make provision for them, Father Hugh O’C'alanan, then Provincial, asked the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Byrne, to receive some of the expelled nuns. On the Archbishop’s invitation eight of them went to Dublin and took up residence in a house in Fisher’s Lane, removing a little later to Channel Row, Here they found peace and flourished so quickly that they were soon able to open another house. In 1748 their pupils were so numerous that they were able to rebuild both houses from the foundations. One Galway nun went to Brussels where she lived for some years until recalled to Ireland in 1722 in order to re-establish the foundation at Drogheda. Of this foundation, Fr. Coleman says: “The first house of the young community was a mud cabin near the Marsh Road, on the banks of the Boyne. Novices were received, the Divine Office recited regularly, the rule observed in spite of great difficulties, and they were ministered to in secret by one of the Dominican Fathers who used to cross the Boyne in a' little boat at an hour early enough to enable him to say Mass for them, give them Holy Communion and return before daybreak.” In time they were able to open a school in Dyer Street, where, as usual, they had many pupils who were attracted by the traditional fame of the Dominican teachers. De Burgo, writing in 1759 reports the school as then flourishing, and among the community were scions of old Irish families, such as the O’Neills and the O’Reillys, as well as some of the noble families of the Pale who became more Irish than the Irish themselves: of the latter there were Taafes, Plunketts, Balfes, Bellews, Dillons, and Baths. About the year 1735 a foundation was established at Waterford, but owing to economic pressure it was dispersed in 1758, and the Prioress, Mother Mary Wyse, died in the Dublin house : in that same year. Such is the story of the great Irish Sisterhood which survived through all the trials of the Penal' Days, sharing in the dangers of the Irish people then as they shared in their glory when persecutions had worn themselves out in vain and left the faith stronger and purer and greater than ever. From Dublin in later years Dominican Sisters went forth into new lands, following the standard of the Cross as it was borne towards the confines of the world by Irish missionaries. Fifty-two years ago they came to Dunedin with the illustrious Dr, Moran, and to-day their schools are wide-spread throughout Otago, and Southland; and in God’s memory alone is the record of all that they have accomplished . for the Church by . their prayers and

labors, and no less by their example which has Been the inspiration of so many of their pupils through New Zealand homes have been; preserved from contamina- •£—„.-,, -...„i--., _-. .1 _,/.i;'4.i .„„;___ _o_ Ti '•„ uuunuiu &CUUJLO.X ana iiia.wsi.iai t?u;viii>iiili<Jiiu.. j-ii lo not likely that the' Dominican Sisters in this country will forget their' traditions, their their glories. And it would be a bad day both for them and for New Zealand if they ever, did forget that their faith had'its roots in Irish soil ; which was stained by the blood of martyrs who died to preserve a civilisation which England tried to destroy. English history, as- told by English historians, English literature as written by Protestants, English ideals, thick in the air all round us, are still, trying to kill Irish ideals, which are Christian ideals, and the one remedy is—if we may amend St. Patrick's motto: As ye are Christians, he ye also Irish !