The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Volume 1, October, 1864

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Christian is my name, Catholic my surname , said one of the early Fathers, when he wished to give an adequate description of his religious belief. In the same way, the name and surname of this publication sufficiently indicate its character and scope. First of all, it is Ecclesiastical, by reason of its subject matter, of the class which it addresses, and of the sanction under which it appears. Next, it is Irish, because, to the best of its humble ability, it is intended to serve the Catholic Church of our native country. Father Segneri tells us in one of his sermons, that in his day men used to flock to the religious houses in Italy, eagerly asking: What news from Ireland? Those were the stormy days of the latter half of the seventeenth century. How often, on such occasions, in the cool cloisters of Roman colleges, where he had spent so much of his blameless life, was the name of Archbishop Plunket pronounced by the old friends to whom his worth was so well known! How many a listener went straight out from such conferences to pray for his stricken brethren of the suffering Irish Church! At that time the trials, the wounds, the sorrows, the triumphs, the hopes of Irish Catholics were the subject of many a discourse, the anxious care of many a heart. To-day all this is changed in great part. No foreign preacher now-a-days would allude to his hearers' widespread interest about the Irish Church, as one of the signs of the times. And why? Not because—due allowance made for changes—our country has become less interesting; for surely our Catholicity, in the bloom of its second spring, is not less remarkable than it was when torn and beaten to the ground by persecution. And if fraternal love made our distant brethren look sorrowfully over the sea upon our Church when in ruins, surely the same love would teach them not to turn away their eyes from us now that we are once more setting in fair order the stones that had been displaced. Brothers share each other's joys as well as each other's sorrows. The reason of the change is, that Irish Catholic intelligence does not find its way abroad. There is much to be said about the Church in Ireland, there are many anxious to hear it, but there is no messenger to bear the news. It is not, perhaps, too much to say, that there is less known abroad about the state of the Irish Church in these days of telegraph and railway, than there was when Dr. Plunket had to borrow a name under cover of which to write to the internuncio, and when Irish news was not thought out of place among the Epistolae Indicæ et Japonicæ of the Jesuit Fathers. The Irish Ecclesiastical Record will endeavour to meet this want. It will give some account of the necessities, the progress, the efforts of the Irish Church. Facts of Ecclesiastical administration, Episcopal letters of general interest, various documents that go to make up the history of a Church, shall find their place in its pages. By these means we shall have at hand a ready answer, when we are asked what are we doing in Ireland. Otherwise, our silence is likely to be taken as an admission that we have nothing to show worthy of the Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum .