I go further still. If I do homage to the many virtues and gifts of the Irish people, and am zealous for their full development, it is not simply for the sake of themselves, but because the name of Ireland ever has been, and, I believe, ever will be, associated with the Catholic Faith, and because, in doing any service, however poor it may be, to Ireland, a man is ministering, in his own place and measure, to the cause of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church.
Gentlemen, I should consider it an impertinence in me thus to be speaking to you of myself, were it not that, in recounting to you the feelings with which I have witnessed the establishment of these Evening Classes, I am in fact addressing to you at the same time words of encouragement and advice, such words as it becomes a Rector to use in speaking to those who are submitted to his care.
I say, then, that, had I been younger than I was when the high office which I at present hold was first offered to me, had I not had prior duties upon me of affection and devotion to the Oratory of St. Philip, and to my own dear country, no position whatever, in the whole range of administrations which are open to the ambition of those who wish to serve God in their generation, and [pg 483] to do some great work before they die, would have had more attractions for me than that of being at the head of a University like this. When I became a Catholic, one of my first questions was, “Why have not our Catholics a University?” and Ireland, and the metropolis of Ireland, was obviously the proper seat of such an institution.
Ireland is the proper seat of a Catholic University, on account of its ancient hereditary Catholicity, and again of the future which is in store for it. It is impossible, Gentlemen, to doubt that a future is in store for Ireland, for more reasons than can here be enumerated. First, there is the circumstance, so highly suggestive, even if there was nothing else to be said, viz., that the Irish have been so miserably ill-treated and misused hitherto; for, in the times now opening upon us, nationalities are waking into life, and the remotest people can make themselves heard into all the quarters of the earth. The lately invented methods of travel and of intelligence have destroyed geographical obstacles; and the wrongs of the oppressed, in spite of oceans or of mountains, are brought under the public opinion of Europe,—not before kings and governments alone, but before the tribunal of the European populations, who are becoming ever more powerful in the determination of political questions. And thus retribution is demanded and exacted for past crimes in proportion to their heinousness and their duration.
And in the next place, it is plain that, according as intercommunion grows between Europe and America, it is Ireland that must grow with it in social and political importance. For Ireland is the high road by which that intercourse is carried on; and the traffic between hemispheres must be to her a source of material as well as social benefit,—as of old time, though on the minute geographical scale of Greece, Corinth, as being the [pg 484] thoroughfare of commerce by sea and land, became and was called “the rich.”
And then, again, we must consider the material resources of Ireland, so insufficiently explored, so poorly developed,—of which it belongs to them rather to speak, who by profession and attainments are masters of the subject.
That this momentous future, thus foreshadowed, will be as glorious for Catholicity as for Ireland we cannot doubt from the experience of the past; but, as Providence works by means of human agencies, that natural anticipation has no tendency to diminish the anxiety and earnestness of all zealous Catholics to do their part in securing its fulfilment. And the wise and diligent cultivation of the intellect is one principal means, under the Divine blessing, of the desired result.
3.
Gentlemen, the seat of this intellectual progress must necessarily be the great towns of Ireland; and those great towns have a remarkable and happy characteristic, as contrasted with the cities of Catholic Europe. Abroad, even in Catholic countries, if there be in any part of their territory scepticism and insubordination in religion, cities are the seat of the mischief. Even Rome itself has its insubordinate population, and its concealed free-thinkers; even Belgium, that nobly Catholic country, cannot boast of the religious loyalty of its great towns. Such a calamity is unknown to the Catholicism of Dublin, Cork, Belfast, and the other cities of Ireland; for, to say nothing of higher and more religious causes of the difference, the very presence of a rival religion is a perpetual incentive to faith and devotion in men who, from the circumstances of the case, would be in danger of [pg 485] becoming worse than lax Catholics, unless they resolved on being zealous ones.