“Dublin, Feast of the Angel Guardians, 1864.
“Very Reverend Brethren,—My attention has been called by some respectable gentlemen to a report now widely circulated, that this city, or its vicinity, is to be made the theatre of a signal combat between two foreign pugilists, who are about to expose their lives to imminent danger for a certain sum of money. This report must be the subject of great regret to every one who is imbued with the spirit of Christian charity, and who recognises in his fellow-man the image of his Creator. It is not necessary for me to call on you to use all your influence to preserve this Christian country from an exhibition so disgraceful, and so well calculated to degrade human nature. I shall merely request of you to publish, as soon as possible, from your altars, that such combats, in which human life is exposed to danger, are prohibited under the severest penalties by the Holy Catholic Church. Passing over the decrees of the Council of Trent, it will be sufficient to state that the learned Pontiff Benedict XIV. excommunicates the principal actors in such fights, their seconds, and all who encourage them, and all who designedly become spectators of such unworthy scenes. If you denounce these penalties from the altar I am confident that the faithful of this diocese, who are so devotedly attached to Holy Catholic Church, and so obedient to its laws, will listen with contempt to the invitation of those who would implicate them in the misdeeds of foreign gladiators, and will abstain from countenancing or encouraging anything condemned by our holy religion, and contrary to the dictates of the Gospel.
“PAUL CULLEN.”
The absurdity of the date of this “pastoral,” and the satirical retort on Lord Lyndhurst’s celebrated speech, in which he characterised the Irish as “aliens in blood, in language, and religion,” by describing Mace and Coburn as “foreign gladiators,” might have aroused suspicion. But no; with the godly, when they attack the wicked, on fait flêche de tout bois; so the Puritan and Methodist prints actually praised the anti-combatant zeal of the Cardinal, and the “pastoral” was reproduced with approbation in a paper containing two savage assaults—in one of which a man’s nose was bitten off—and four other outrages of the “foinest pisanthry” with weapons, in two of which the victims were left senseless and apparently dead!
That the English newspapers took the hoax au sérieux is hardly to be wondered at, but the two following specimens, one ridiculing, the other approving, the ingeniously fabricated “pastoral,” are really worth preserving as curiosities of newspaper literature.
(From the Manchester Guardian, October 5, 1864.)
“THE ARCHBISHOP AND THE PUGILISTS.
“To the Editor of the ‘Examiner’ and ‘Times.’
“Sir,—I perceive from your journal of to-day that Archbishop Paul Cullen has issued a pastoral to his clergy against the great fight that was to have come off in Ireland, in which country it is well known that fighting is the very last thing the inhabitants ever resort to for the settlement of differences. As the men are not going to fight, there will be little difficulty in obeying the injunction of Cardinal Paul. Had it been otherwise, I am afraid a few of ‘the faithful’ would have been congregated in the outer ring, and perhaps some few (who of course could not read or had not read the Pastoral) might have got up some little independent shindies of their own, even as young buds surrounding the inner red roses, or noses. But are we quite sure the Archbishop really alludes to the same thing as we do? He describes the projected fight as between ‘two foreign pugilists.’ Now I understand Mr. Coburn is not an American, but an Irishman. Mr. Mace is undoubtedly from Norwich; and although, in a certain sense, that Quaker, crape-weaving city may be described as in partibus infidelium, yet letters from Limerick to Norwich are not yet forwarded viâ Ostend. I fancy what the Archbishop means is this, that in the case of real native Irishmen—take the Belfast Catholics and Protestants, for example—fighting could not possibly occur, and that he wishes to show that only individuals ‘not to the manner born’ could import so dangerous a custom or practice into that peaceful land. A ‘foreigner’ from London or from Oldham might possibly come to fisticuffs in the county of Wicklow, but they would receive no countenance or encouragement from the peace-loving natives, who, refusing to hold their hats or coats, or to mop off any casual claret, would avert their eyes, and, like the soldier in the song, ‘wipe away a tear.’ I have no interest in the two persons called ‘foreigners’ by the Archbishop, but I think in so designating them his Eminence has administered a severer punishment than the occasion required. I should not like to retort upon the Archbishop or call my Irish fellow-citizens ‘foreigners’—writing a paragraph for your journal, for instance, to the following effect—‘Two foreigners, named Dennis Blake and Patrick O’Rafferty, were brought before Mr. Fowler for fighting in Deansgate. O’Rafferty, who spoke with a strong foreign accent, said “Blake tould me, plaze yer hannar, he’d jist bate the soul out o’ me in a brace of shakes, an’ Oi——” Mr. Fowler, “I’ve evidence enough. You are ’aliens in blood, in language, and in religion”—I am quoting an eminent jurist—and you must pay a fine of —, or go to prison.’
“It must, however, be a great consolation and relief to the minds of Mr. Mace and Mr. Bos Tyler that the Archbishop ‘passes over the decrees of the Council of Trent,’ and merely throws the ‘learned Pope Benedict XIV.’ at their heretic heads. It seems to me that one of the Pope ‘Bonifaces’ would be more appropriate in a case of ‘pubs,’ and prize-fighters, for a ‘stinger over the left.’