The monks remained in possession of the abbey for several years, and for the first time since its suppression in 1536 an abbot of Holy Cross was chosen. The succession was kept up till the beginning of the eighteenth century, and expired in the first dark years of the Penal Code with Thomas Cogan, the last of the abbots of Holy Cross, who died on the 10th of August, 1700, and was buried in the choir of the old church, in the tomb where the bones of his predecessors are awaiting the day of resurrection.
O gray walls, sacred ruins of Holy Cross! ye have a spirit’s feeling, and work upon the soul till it forgets all glad and pleasant scenes to blend with the gloom and desolation that have come to abide with you. The gentle river still flows by, but where is the great strong life-current of faith and love that here was fed from God’s eternal fount? Cold are the burning lips of love that wore the pavement smooth; cold the great warm hearts that beat with highest impulse of divine charity. No more from their chalices mysterious monks
drink deep love of God and men; no more at early morn is heard their matin song; no more to heaven ascends their evening hymn. Gone is the dim religious light that shone through mystic windows. The tapers are quenched, the belfries mute. No more floats on the breeze
“The heavenliest of all sounds
That hill or vale prolongs or multiplies.”
The dead only are here, and around them the silence they so loved and broken walls, which, if they mourn not, make others grieve.
“Once ye were holy: ye are holy still;
Your spirit let me freely drink and live.”
As a monastic ruin the Abbey of Holy Cross is, in the estimation of the people, second to no other in Ireland; and it owes this celebrity less to the beauty of its architecture than to the possession of the holy Rood.
The marble shrine in which this famous relic was preserved may still be seen in the southern transept of the church. The relic itself, at the time of the suppression of the abbey, passed into the hands of the Earl of Ormond, in whose family it remained for nearly a century, when Earl Walter gave it for safe-keeping to Dr. Fennell, who left it to James, second Duke of Ormond. It was finally deposited, in the early part of the present century, in a shrine in the chapel of the Ursuline Nuns at Blackrock, near Cork, where it is to remain “until such time as the church of the Holy Cross, with the monastery of Cistercian monks attached thereto, shall be rebuilt.”