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Post by muirchertach on Mar 3, 2013 1:21:35 GMT
Hello everyone,
I'm a traditional Catholic of Irish descent. I'm looking for some apologetics assistance in responding to some anti-Catholic allegations regarding Ireland and given the nature of this forum I figured I would ask here.
I often see many apostate or lapsed Irish Catholics (typically of the atheist/agnostic/secularist persuasion) online claiming that "The Catholic Church never did anything for the Ireland when they were under the British or during the Famine." They claim that "the Church" (either meaning the Papacy or the Irish clergy itself) allegedly "did nothing" to assist the Catholic Irish in shaking off Protestant British rule and also "did nothing" to help the starving Irish during the Famine. They seem to feel (from a sort of nationalistic point-of-view) that "the Church" somehow "wronged" the Irish people; that it supposedly "betrayed" the Irish people at certain points throughout history. Typically, they cite the Laudabiliter of Pope Adrian IV, giving King Henry II of England dominion over Ireland and sparking the conflict between Ireland and England, followed by claims that "the Church" didn't help or didn't want to help Irish Catholics overthrow their Protestant oppressors when the country was under British rule. They claim that "the Church" didn't care about aiding the Irish in their fight for freedom only until after the Reformation (but, only for a brief time). They assert that "the Church" (referring to either the Papacy or the Irish clergy) after the 1600s generally didn't support either Irish Home Rule or Irish independence but, rather allegedly supported its continued union with Britain and the de-Gaelicisation / Anglicisation of the Irish people.
Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with some of these particular subjects and can't seem to find many online resources on these particular subjects mentioned. One anti-Catholic, Protestant website, which espouses this type of rhetoric, claims that, "It was only when the rest of the British Isles and the British Monarchy embraced Protestantism at the Reformation, that the Papacy changed its policy and began to pose as the champion of Irish freedom." Others of this nature argue that "the Church" is "anti-Irish" because Pope Benedict XV didn't recognize the Irish Republic in 1919 during the Irish War of Independence. Therefore, these Irish anti-Catholics assert that the Irish people shouldn't have any allegiance or loyalty to the Catholic Church for this alleged "mistreatment."
Here some claims in this vein made by one individual very critical of the Catholic Church that, ironically, claims to be 'Catholic' but, is evidently a very unorthodox one:
"We Irish had our own form of Celtic Christianity. It was Irish monks that converted the Picts, Northern Anglo-Saxons and Germans to Christianity. The Normans were more Catholic than the Irish. Orders like the Cistercians and Franciscans were mostly Norman at first and eventually replaced the Old Irish monastic system. The Irish were the original Scots. Scotia was the original name for Ireland, and it was Irish invaders that conquered the land of the Picts and established the Kingdom of Scotland which by the 12th century came under Lowland Anglo-Norman control. Ireland was known as Scotia Major and Scotland was Scotia Minor. In the 16th century the now mainly English speaking Scots appealed to the Pope to claim the rights to name Scotia. The Pope sided with Anglo-Norman Lowlanders and handed all the Irish monastries in Europe over to the Lowland thieves. In 1560 the "Scots" repaid the Papacy by becoming Presbyterian!
The Catholic Church supported Daniel O'Connell's movement for Catholic Emancipation, but did very little to support his movement to repeal the Act of Union. If the Irish had their own parliament the Great Famine would be less likely. The Catholic Church also discouraged the Irish language in Ulster because Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian ministers were coming over from Scotland to convert the native Irish, this was despite the fact that fact that it was Irish-speaking monks from the Glens of Antrim that saved the Catholic religion from extinction in the Scottish Highlands shortly after the Reformation. The Jesuits were particularly West British and encouraged Anglicisation of the middle classes so they could become British officers and civil servants. I'm a Catholic but you have to admit the Irish should have been treated a lot better by the Church given their loyalty to the Faith."
How would you counter / address these arguments or put them in their proper historical context, point-by-point in an apologetical way, in defence of the Church?
Thank you in advance.
Muirchertach.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2013 3:00:44 GMT
Welcome Muirchertach. I''m not the historian here but whenever I hear people complaining about what the Church has ever done for us I think of this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9foi342LXQEAs an aside, I was listening to the Pope's speech at St. Mary's in Twickenham tonight and he addressed his speech to the the people of England, Scotland and Wales. I wonder would Ian Paisley have been happy or sad about that?! Hibernicus will give you a serious answer, I'm sure.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 3, 2013 14:41:27 GMT
I would argue that the main reason there was such a strong Irish national consciousness, and refusal to accept British rule, was because Ireland remained a Catholic country. So indirectly the Church is in fact made the struggle for "independence" (do we have independence now, on either side of the border?) possible.
When arguing with Catholics or Christians of any hue, I would point out that Jesus was something of a disappointment to the anti-Roman agitators of his day.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 3, 2013 22:37:35 GMT
I would say the interests of the church and of Irish nationalism did not always coincide. (For example, one of the sixteenth-century wallpaintings in the Vatican Library shows Adrian IV's granting Ireland to Henry II by the bull LAUDABILITER as an example of Papal authority, no doubt also as a slap at the English Reformation.) The Irish differed from Rome in certain practices but they were still in communion with Rome, much as the Ukrainians and Syro-Malabars are today. "Celtic Christianity" is partly the product of Protestant polemics, and partly a fantasy of modern day paganism and some forms of theological liberalism. NO government recognised the Dail government when it was set up in 1919, so singling out Benedict XV is a bit odd. There was a good deal of diplomatic jockeying in 1919-21, and the Pope resisted pressure from influential English Catholics to formally condemn the IRA; indeed I am aware of ultra-Protestant tomes which denounce Benedict as having been in league with the 1916 rebels because they sent an envoy to Rome to inform him in advance, and after being told it was useless to dissuade them he sent them a personal blessing (this was not necessarily approval of the rebellion, just a blessing for those involved). For an account of Catholic relief efforts during the Famine (by English as well as Irish Catholics) the late Fr Donal Kerr's A NATION OF BEGGARS? is a good starting point. Even Christine Kinealy, who is more secularist in her outlook, mentions that Pius IX donated to relief funds himself and issued an appeal to Catholics to assist. Worldwide, quite a few priests (and even some bishops) died of famine fever. The link below will take you to a monument to ten Liverpool priests who died of fever caught while attending famine immigrants. www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/pat01.html and here, as another example, is an account of Bishop William Riddell of Newcastle who died under similar circumstances: www.stmaryscathedral.org.uk/cathedral_life/previous_bishops/william_riddell.html I fear this gentleman's research began and ended with the Bull McCabe's speech in the film version of THE FIELD, claiming "no priests died during the Famine" and therefore the PP has no right to object to his murdering someone to secure ownership of his field. (This is an addition for the film; the Bull does not make that specific claim in the play.) i may post on this more from time to time as circumstances allow
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Post by muirchertach on Mar 3, 2013 22:48:38 GMT
Thanks everyone for the responses. I would appreciate any further commentary you may have in the future, Hibernicus.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 3, 2013 23:08:15 GMT
A few more points; the Cistercians were introduced before the Normans as part of an indigenous reform movement led by SS Malachy and Cellach, and were ethnically divided. The mediaeval Franciscans were predominantly Gaelic - one reason why the Reformation failed in the C16 was the role of Franciscans operating from friaries in areas which were controlled by Gaelic chieftains and hence outside Crown control. The old-style Irish monasteries tended to adopt the Rule of St Augustine rather than disappearing altogether (hence the later claim that St Patrick had been an Augustinian). There are a couple of recent books on mediaeval Franciscanism in Ireland which will bear this out - I believe one is by Colman O Clabaigh. The Scots who claimed the European "Scots" monasteries would have been Catholic exiles rather than Presbyterians. This was an internal row within European Catholicism (based on a genuine misunderstanding over the term "Scots"). The Repeal movement in fact enjoyed significant clerical support (though some bishops and priests opposed it, and most clerical Repealers sided with O'Connell against the more radical Young Irelanders). The claim that an Irish Parliament could have prevented the Famine is debatable - it might have been more responsive or it might have gone bankrupt. The statement about the Jesuits is pretty much correct but there is another side to the coin - it is at least arguable that the Catholic administrative class educated in these schools was more responsive to popular opinion, and its existence made possible the functioning of the post-independence state, than any likely alternative. The suspicion of the Irish language as a tool of Protestant proselytism was not unique to Ulster - in the decades before the Famine there was a concerted and well-funded attempt to proselytise Irish-speakers through bodies such as the Irish Church Missions throughout the country (Dingle and Achill were notable centres). It is unfortunate that this led to clerical suspicion of the language per se, but it reflected something which was actually happening. Is the author suggesting that the Catholic clergy (and indeed the Catholic population, who were busily abandoning Irish for utilitarian reasons of their own) should have placed the survival of the language above the survival of the faith? Would any religious body do so under those circumstances? I may toss out a few more ideas if I find time. I am surprised this gentleman has not mentioned the general tendency for the C19 and C20 Catholic hierarchy to support conservative forms of nationalism against more radical ones, but perhaps this would require him to face up to the fact that "the Irish" themselves were often divided about the best course to pursue.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 5, 2013 9:08:03 GMT
If I was to answer all Muirchertach's questions, we would be here years. If I have criticised the 'Pro-Western Christianity' certain traditional Catholics embrace on one thread, we are seeing the alternative view in the stuff Muirchertach is advancing. Basically, Catholicism does not equal feudalism.
In regard to early Irish Christianity, the Irish are often described as the habitores ultimi mundi, the dwellers of the edge of the world. This is a quote from a letter from St Columbanus to the pope of his day (one of the Pope Bonifaces) in which he states we (the Irish) have kept the faith of Peter and Paul unbroken and there was never a heretic or schismatic among us. There were disciplinary differences between the Celtic and Roman Churches - the date of Easter and the tonsure are the two most often cited; the significance of the abbot in relation to the bishop was another. But many of the developing western Churches had their idiosyncracies (some preserved in the Mozarabs in Spain, for example) - it was only the drive towards uniformity in Carolingian Europe that created a uniformity.
As Hibernicus observes, the Irish Church themselves attempted to reform themselves in line with the Roman Church on the continent, largely through the introduction of new orders such as the Cistercians and Augustinian Canons Regular, but also by forming territorial dioceses. Blessed Eugene III recognised this by awarding pallia not just to the new archdioceses of Armagh and Cashel as the Irish Church petitioned in 1152, but also to Dublin and Tuam - showing an acute awareness of the political situation in Ireland of the day (the importance of Dublin and also that the High King of the day was based in Connaught).
It took Henry II about 15 years to act on Laudabiliter and at that time, he was under excommunication for the murder of St Thomas a' Beckett. How far the Anglo-Normans attempted to 'reform' the Irish Church is seen in the protests lodged by St Lorcan Ua Tuathail to the Holy See in the decade after the invasion.
The advent of the four mendicant orders, but especially the Franciscans, saw a new vigour in Gaelic Ireland. At the time of the Bruce Invasion in the 1310s, theologians and canonists from these orders sent a protest called the Remonstrance to the Pope of the day in Avignon. The Fifteenth century also saw a tremendous religious revival in Ireland spearheaded by the reformed branches of the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian (Friars) Orders which were also largely Irish-speaking. This reflected movements in Europe in the post-schism period.
So, in short, there is a lot of material there. I'll leave the modern period to Hibernicus. But to remark the Catholic Church supported the Stuart until the death of James Francis Stuart (James III) in 1766, which was the focus of nationalist Ireland at the time. The reason they recognised the Hanoverians was that they support for the Stuarts as counter-productive. The previous century saw the Gaelic Irish and Norman Irish divided over strategy in Kilkenny, so nothing is clear cut.
I will probably address these themes again.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Mar 5, 2013 11:50:26 GMT
Didn't Pius IX personally raise funds for Famine victims?
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Mar 5, 2013 11:52:42 GMT
One of the reasons why Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin didn't get the red hat was allegedly because of his role in drafting the 'plan of campaign' in Maynooth. Also, Benedict XV advised Cardinal Logue against excommunicating the Treaty opponents during the Civil War. This could make an impact on those making the original claims.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 5, 2013 22:05:14 GMT
I would add that while the "Church never did anything for Ireland" slogan is just a means of not thinking about the subject (it seems, for example, to equate Church and Papacy) that does not mean that the Church or the Papacy has always been perfect in its dealings with Ireland. The Vatican tends to favour diplomatic dealings with existing governments in order to allow the free administration of the sacraments/operation of church governance, education, etc. This has often at times led to compromises with the powers that be at the expense of the faithful. Throughout its existence the German Catholic Centre Party regularly complained that the Vatican was willing to sacrifice its interests in order to have better relations with German governments even when these actively persecuted the Church (Konrad Adenauer shared this view, which is one reason why he was careful to make the CDU an interdenominational conservative party rather than being specifically Catholic); Pope Gregory XVI was so attached to the principle of deference to legitimate sovereigns that he denounced the Poles for rebelling against the Russian Tsar (who was actually engaging in religious persecution as well as temporal oppression etc!) Leo XIII's condemnation of the Plan of Campaign, despite the efforts of Cardinal Manning and Archbishops Croke and Walsh, falls into this category. Leo was partly moved by belief in the divinely-conferred right to property (with insufficient appreciation for the peculiarities of the Irish situation) and partly by hope of better diplomatic relations with the British Government which he saw as necessary to advance the wider interests of the church. Monsignor Ambrose Macaulay has a book on the Vatican and the Plan of Campaign which provides an useful account. It is indeed generally believed that the clash over the Plan of Campaign explains why Walsh was never made a Cardinal as the two previous archbishops had been, and why the more biddable Michael Logue became the first Armagh Cardinal. To be fair, the Plan of Campaign did have certain limitations and the few Irish bishops (such as Edward O'Dwyer of Limerick) who opposed it were partly motivated by belief that the tenants were being led to disaster by reckless leaders (and some of them were indeed ruined as a result). Similarly, the way many/most bishops and priests behaved towards such groups as the Fenians and the Parnellites was indeed excessive and an abuse of power- opposing them straightforwardly was one thing, treating them all as apostates when many were genuinely devout Catholics who believed they were exercising a legitimate political judgement was quite another.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 6, 2013 9:04:02 GMT
This is true. And Adenauer's CDU never took root in Bavaria, where the CSU can be very different. These parties are allied to FG in Strasbourg, which means nothing. The CSU is very similar socially to FF and Bavarian patriotism/separate identity is a key plank in their platform. The CDU is a lot like old style FG (not totally - there are plenty of social liberals in the CDU. I could see similarities between Helmut Kohl and Garrett FitzGerald in both their Catholicism and respective patriotisms; though Kohl was strong on the fact that Silesia and Pomerania, claimed as German by the Grundgesetz until the mid 1990s, were German. As an aside, Bunreacht na hÉireann was a model used by Adenauer in drafting the Grundgesetz in the first place, and the territorial claim of East Germany and the provinces annexed by Poland in 1946 seems to reflect de Valera's Articles 2 & 3). Anyway, I digress. I knew one of the German Ambassadors to Ireland who was an old style CDU member and he clearly had a marked preference for Haughey's FF.
Anyway, I would think there could be international frustration with the papacy. There is a current of thought in the US and Mexico which believes Benedict XV and Pius XI sold out the Mexican Christeros. There is a current in Eastern Europe with no affection for the Ostpolitik of John XXIII and Paul VI. (When I mention Adenauer and his concern about East Germany and ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe as well as Catholics of other nationalities there - Adenauer protested to John's face about his lenience to communists and prevented his attendence at the 1962 Eucharistic Congress in Munich - this was the first proposed papal trip abroad of the modern period and would have been a huge diplomatic coup for West Germany only 17 years after the fall of the Third Reich, but the Bundeskanzler had other ideas).
Anyway, this is all to emphasis Hibernicus' point: the Church does not equal the Papacy; the Papacy's policies on temporal matters are not always perfect. And many times, the papacy gets political judgements badly wrong.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 6, 2013 22:01:28 GMT
Agreed, Alaisdir. We ought to correct misrepresentations of church history, but we ought not to be drawn into the trap of assuming every Pope, priest or lay Catholic has always been wise, good and perfect and that every criticism ever made of temporal policy or pastoral strategy was illegitimate.
Weigel's book on JPII's last years is actually quite good on Vatican Ostpolitik and its drawbacks; the similarities with Pius XII's concordat with Hitler are disturbing. (I am not saying either policy was dishonest - legitimate arguments could be made for both, for example Ostpolitik was founded on the assumption that communism was likely to last for the indefinite future which was not an unreasonable assumption - just that their actual working revealed severe drawbacks.) There is actually quite a reasonable case for the view that Pius XI sold out the Cristeros in Mexico - the government violated many ceasefire commitments and carried out severe reprisals. I might add that there are many members of the underground Church within and outside China who believe Benedict XVI went too far in trying to conciliate the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and its government sponsors. Again, there were legitimate pastoral reasons for the attempt but it has had significant setbacks and may well prove to have been a colossal mistake - we can't tell yet. In relation to Ireland, I might add that that there used to be and might still be a view among some English and conservative Irish Catholics (not to mention non-Catholics) which was the exact opposite of the "church never did anything for Ireland" view. This was that the Church authorities in Ireland, and to some extent outside it, in order to retain the support of the Irish populace went much too far in turning a blind eye to such features of nationalist agitations as savage violence and intimidation, corrupt machine politics, opportunistic alliances with enemies of Catholicism elsewhere etc. Of course a great deal of this criticism was selfish, snobbish and short-sighted, but there was a certain amount of truth in it.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 7, 2013 8:56:04 GMT
I can recall the major deal made of Pope John Paul II sending his envoy (the then Mgr John Magee, still his secretary at the time) to visit Bobby Sands in the Maze Prison in 1981 when he was on hunger strike. Whether this was a good, bad or indifferent strategy is an open question, but the objections to it came from the sources you mention.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 7, 2013 23:31:24 GMT
It goes back a good way further than that. Quite a few prominent English Catholics criticised Daniel O'Connell as engaging in incitement to violence in the 1830s and 1840s (that was when he said "I repent that I ever emancipated them") and similar criticisms by similar people were made about Church attitudes to land agitation and the Home Rule movement in the 1880s (quite a few Home Rulers used to complain that English Tory Catholics denounced them as a bunch of criminals but expected them to defend English Catholic schools in Parliament) and to the Irish bishops' failure to condemn the IRA in 1916-21. As I said, not all the criticisms were invalid, but the quarters they came from provoked much grinding of Irish teeth.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 8, 2013 9:00:52 GMT
I think you can go back to Lanfranc of Canterbury, if not even further (the tension between Ss Boniface and Fergal on the continent in the eighth century, for example, if not the very opposition St Patrick encountered from the British Church during his mission).
However, since the Reformation, or at least since Jacobitism ceased to be a viable politics, Irish and English Catholicism have had parallel focuses. One sought majority status in an independent state; the other wished to be seen as loyal to the state in which they found themselves, in spite of religious differences with the established. Each lamented lack of sympathy from the other side.
The Northern Ireland problem brought this out. English Tory Catholics could rightly condemn both the actions of the Provisional IRA and their rivals (INLA mainly, but also Saor Éire, IPLO and of course Official IRA/Group B, something Eamonn Gilmore and Pat Rabitte want everybody to forget, but some of us still remember) and the political and philosophic direction that (Provisional) Sinn Féin have taken. But they never showed much empathy for the position the Catholic community in Northern Ireland found themselves in or the role of the British government in creating the Stormount Regime in the 1920s and supporting it right up until the early 1970s and even then, it was only gradually dismantled. Irish Catholic opinion in the Republic either washed their hands of the northern problem ("nothing to do with us") or excessively sympathised with the Provos. True, a huge amount of Irish nationalists supported the SDLP alternative. Now, Hibernicus might answer or clarify this, but am I right in saying any sympathy the SDLP received from Britain was from the Labour side of politics (which has a lot of support from Catholics across Britain)?
I might add that many people in the twenty-six counties tend to direct any ire about the situation in the north at the Tories, but one of the greatest Orange sympathisers among Northern Ireland secretaries was Labour's Roy Mason and the architects of the Prevention of Terrorism legislation under which the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were held were Labour ministers.
I should say, I can recall the late Cardinal Hume making statements about support for Sinn Féin among northern Catholics, but he was also active in relation to cases of miscarriages of justice against the Irish in Britain. I do think that the sort of English Catholic opinion under discussion was cold and indifferent on that point.
BTW, we are straying from the topic, but I would like to ask Muirchertach if he finds the thread informative?
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