Are there too many priests in Ireland? Yes. Is Dublin “black with them”? Yes. Do they appear to be as frequent on the country side as crows? Yes. Are they extorting from the Irish people money which is sorely needed for secular purposes? Yes. Here you have four pertinent questions, which invariably crop up whenever Ireland is discussed, together with the average answers to them. “It is the priests!” cry both well and ill informed. According to the latest critic—who, it seems, once occupied the somewhat superfluous position of “literary editor of the Daily Mail”—“one of the heaviest drags upon the life of Ireland is the religious vocation. The monasteries and nunneries prosper and increase, choking and interfering with the circulation of labor and of industry in the country.” Also, “it is my profound conviction that a large proportion of the present misery of Ireland is not only bound up with, but is actually a result of the country’s religion.” Also, “the houses of the people are so indecently poor and small; the houses of the Church are so indecently rich and large. Out of the dirt and decay they rise, proud and ugly and substantial, as though to inform the world that at least one thing is not dying and despondent, but keeps its loins girded and its lamps trimmed.” This, roughly, is the indictment. Appended are some of the figures upon which it is based. Mr. Michael M’Carthy, himself a Catholic, says, “A cardinal, 3 archbishops, 25 bishops, 2 mitred abbots, and 2,722 secular priests, together with a host of regular priests of all the different Orders, such as Jesuits, Franciscans, Vincentians, Holy Ghost, Carmelites, Passionists, Augustinians, Mary Immaculate, Dominicans, Cistercians, Marists, Redemptorists and so forth, all of whom flourish in Ireland—such is the force which constitutes the formidable clerical army of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and its auxiliary forces are the numerous Orders of nuns, Christian brothers, lay brothers attached to the regular Orders, and so forth; together with the great body of Catholic National teachers, male and female, who are under the control of the priests, and teach catechism in the churches; the parish priests, as managers of the parochial National Schools, having the power of dismissing the teachers.” “May it not be said of this great organization,” adds Mr. M’Carthy, “that ‘it is on a scale such as few nations would be able and willing to afford’?”
To dispose of the indictment first, we may quote a little further from the author of it. He writes: “So far as they are individually concerned, they [the priests] are in many cases the true friends of the people. They help them in their affairs, settle their disputes, claim for them their rights, comfort them in their sorrows, admonish, encourage, cherish and watch over them. This is at the best. At the worst they are hard and cruel, selfish and unjust, over-eating and over-drinking—a grotesque and monstrous company. But these are the minority; and on the whole the priests perform the duties of a dreary life as well as could be expected of a narrow and half-educated class of men.” Now, if this means anything at all it means that the person responsible for it believes that the Catholic priesthood of Ireland is socially useful and necessary. The minority of its members are “hard and cruel, selfish and unjust,” which is true of the minority in other priesthoods besides the Irish. But the majority “are the true friends of the people, helping them in their affairs, settling their disputes, claiming for them their rights, comforting them in their sorrows, admonishing, encouraging, cherishing and watching over them.” How the majority manages to accomplish so much, if it is composed of a “narrow and half-educated class of men,” passes comprehension; but we have the fact that it manages it, which is satisfactory. Further, our friend omits, in the plenitude of his deprecation, to mention that the “religious vocation” in Ireland is by no means the softest, easiest and rosiest of vocations, amounting, indeed, to a species of spiritual and physical servitude of the severest kind; and that the religious Orders, so far as they may be represented in “monasteries and nunneries,” are self-supporting, subsisting austerely on the labor of their own hands, and devoting themselves to the most arduous charitable and educational work without fee or reward. And as to “indecently rich” houses of the Church, such an epithet as applied to the Catholic churches of Ireland is quite preposterous. There is no “indecently rich” Catholic church in all Ireland. That there are Protestant churches with incomes amounting to a comfortable number of hundreds per annum and not half a dozen souls in the way of a bona-fide congregation may be granted; but the Catholic church with as little as £100 a year and no congregation does not exist. Neither can it be maintained that the Irish Catholic churches are “indecently rich” in the matters of architecture or adornment—the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, gorgeous windows, splendid altars and vessels, or other elaborate fitments, being the exception and not the rule. Indeed, our author himself complains that “the ugliness of the churches in Ireland is revolting to the healthy sense,” and that the “decorations” which “enshrine the mysteries of the Mass” are “cheap” and “hideous,” so that on his own showing “indecently rich” somehow fails to fit in.
Now for the figures. The population of Ireland at the last census was, roughly, 4,500,000, and the population of England and Wales 32,500,000. In Ireland there are 3 archbishops and 25 bishops, without reckoning Episcopalians. In England and Wales there are 2 archbishops, 33 bishops, 8 assistant bishops, and 27 bishops suffragan, without reckoning 1 Roman Catholic archbishop and 15 bishops, and the chiefs of the Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist New Connexion, Primitive Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Free Church, Salvation Army, Church Army, Calvinistic, Unitarian, Catholic Apostolic, and a host of other bodies. In the matter of hierarchy, therefore, Ireland is not exactly overburdened, even if it be admitted that she should take her pattern from England. Then, as against Ireland’s 2,722 secular priests, England boasts the amazing total of 23,000 beneficed and unbeneficed clergy, plus from 7,000 to 10,000 Nonconformist ministers and 20,000 Salvation Army “Officers.” So that, at a moderate computation, while there is one priest or minister of religion to every 500 of the population in England, there is only one priest to every 800 of the population of Ireland. The ratios indicated may not be exact, but they are based on Whitaker and pretty near the mark. Taken another way the position amounts to this. In an English townlet of from 3,000 to 4,000 population you will find, as a rule, a couple of vicars, three or four curates, a Wesleyan minister, a Baptist minister, a Congregational minister, a Catholic priest and a couple of Salvationists. In an Irish townlet of the same size you have possibly six Catholic priests and a solitary Episcopalian. Dreadful, is it not? Being mainly of one sort, as it were, the priests of Ireland appear to be much thicker on the ground than the clergy and ministers of England. But it is nothing more nor less than an optical illusion—one of those many illusions upon which judgments about Ireland are usually formed. As to places of worship, it has been charged against the Irish Church that she builds too much. “The traveler walking or driving across the wastes of that empty land,” says the author previously quoted, “will nearly always find that the first thing to break the monotony of the horizon is a spire or tower; and when he arrives at the desolate little huddle of cabins or cottages that makes a town he will find, dominating and shadowing it, the Catholic chapel. Sometimes, indeed, the buildings are poor and rough: but these are becoming fewer and fewer, and are now gradually, even in the poorest districts, being replaced by structures strangely out of keeping with the ruinous poverty around them. The last few years have seen in Ireland a great activity in the building of these chapels; the very slight increase which has taken place in the standard of living has made the movement possible.” Assuming this to be a just statement of the case, is it not equally true of our own England? Has not the building of churches, chapels and general places of worship proceeded as merrily in the poorer districts of the larger English towns during the past decade as ever it did in Ireland? Where can you turn in England without seeing a spire? Where is the townlet, or suburb, or slum that has not got its brand new red-brick Anglican church, or its ruddy, stone-fronted Bethesda, or its castellated, prison-like Salvation Barracks? Furthermore, the English temples are seldom half full. You have to provide a sort of religious variety entertainment, with services of song, magic-lantern sermons, brass bands and the like to get the people in at all; whereas the churches of Ireland are full to overflowing, and the congregations do not require the lure of a steady succession of novelties, or, indeed, any departure from the prescribed offices.
The fact is that the Irish Church and the Irish priesthood have been cruelly and brutally maligned by pretty well every sand-blind writer and carpet-bagging politician who has visited the country. We have blamed upon the Church poverty and distress and ignorance and squalor which are the direct outcome of bad government and not of priestly cupidity. We have said in effect to our Irish brethren, “You are too indigent to have a religion, or churches, or spiritual guidance. Every penny you pay for these things is sheer waste of money, particularly as it keeps our rents down. And inasmuch as you are of one Church and one mind—which is a thing unthinkable in this free and enlightened England—you are slaves and soulless.” But the Church of Ireland goes on its way, and in the words of Archbishop Croke, which by the way Mr. M’Carthy, Irish Catholic, quotes with a sneer, “[The Irish priesthood] holds possession of the people’s hearts to a degree unknown to any other priesthood in the world.”
CHAPTER IX
MORALS
For all practical purposes, and in spite of everything that can be brought against her, Ireland may be justly described as a moral country, even as Scotland is essentially an immoral country and England a middling one. It is true that we live in a time when morality has ceased to matter and virtue is become a reproach. The world has divided itself into two camps—the one scientific, the other artistic. Neither of them professes the smallest concern with morals. We have invented new and most blessedly euphonious names for the old wickednesses. Robbery is called competition; lying, smartness; effrontery, pluck; cowardice, courtesy; avarice, thrift; cunning, wisdom, and so forth. And when it pleases us we can e’en find hard names for the Christian graces. The faith of Ireland, for example, has been discovered to be fanaticism, bigotry, paganism, materialism, idolatry, and I know not what besides; her charity is credited to her for pusillanimity; her patience and long-suffering for indolence and apathy. What wonder, therefore, that the very chastity upon which her national morals are based should at length have been assailed. Hearken to the inspired ex-literary editor of the Daily Mail:
“The crowning achievement of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the thing which is unparalleled elsewhere in the world, is the complete and awful (sic) chastity of the people. There is many a country district where that incident which in England and Scotland is regarded merely as a slight misfortune is unknown and unimagined by the people. I have seen a man, the father of a grown-up family, blanch and hold up his hands at the very name of it, as though even to breath it were a blasphemy. And this, in itself a good thing, has reached such a point that it has become a dreadful evil. It is no longer a virtue, it is a blight.”
And the dear young gentleman goes on to assert that it is the chastity of the Irish people which fills Irish lunatic asylums, and exclaims dithyrambically: “There may be no bastards in Ireland, but a hundred bastards would, in Ireland’s peculiar circumstances, be a more gracious and healthy sign than one lunatic.” Here surely is wisdom of the highest and most delightful type. We have already seen that the increase of lunacy in Ireland has been pronounced, by the committee which sat on the question in Dublin, to be mainly due to excessive drinking and the assimilation of adulterated spirits. The committee may not have been right; for my own part I believe it was decidedly wrong. But it delivered itself of no pronouncement which warrants either the scientific or the ribald to associate Irish lunacy with chastity, rather than with drink or other predispositions. If chastity fills the lunatic asylums how come the Irish priesthood to be at large, or for that matter the women of the English middle classes, and honest women all the world over? And if bastardy be a preventative of lunacy, how comes it that in Scotland you have as many lunatics as you have in Ireland, and about ten times as many bastards? Can it be that of two evils Caledonia, with her customary shrewdness, has chosen both? The suggestion is as ridiculous as it is abominable, and as scandalous as it is malicious. Even in the sense which our Daily Mail young person may be presumed to have in mind, it is the direct opposite of chastity that helps to people lunatic asylums, and never chastity itself, “blight” or no blight. I mention this wholly unprecedented incursion into sophistry only by way of showing what the astute censors of Ireland really can do when they set themselves to the work; and although I have no proof on the subject I should like to wager that the author of it is an Orangeman and of Scotch extraction. It is no compliment to Ireland to say that, in theory at any rate, her morals are entirely sound. In other words, Ireland believes in virtue and goodness, even though she may not always succeed in living up to her tenet, and though, for reasons which need not be discussed, she may be possessed of primal dispositions to the sorriest evil.