It is needless to say that there are a Catholic and a Protestant school—the latter of comparatively recent origin. The Anglican Church in Ireland, studying what it had long despised, now seeks to hold forth to the world that it is the real successor and representative of the early Irish Church; while the Catholic Church in Ireland is simply a papal continuation of the foreign church, forced on Ireland by Henry II. and Pope Adrian IV., and their respective successors. Unfortunately, however, the memory of man records not the fact that, in the sixteenth century and later, the Thirty-nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer were presented to the Irish as being the creed and liturgy of its early saints. Those who burnt the crosier of Patrick broke with the early Irish Church as effectually as they did with the romanized Irish Church of later days.
At the beginning of this century, Ledwich, following in the wake of the wild theories of Conyers Middleton, denied entirely the existence of St. Patrick, and his theory met with no little favor among those opposed to the church. Now his existence is admitted, his life studied and written, and efforts made, with no little skill, industry, and learning, to show that the Roman Catholic Church has no claim to St. Patrick or the church which he founded; a church so full of life, that its missionaries spread to other lands, and went forth with papal sanction to plant catholicity or revive fervor on the continent. It is to this curious phase of controversy that we are indebted for the volume of Essays which are here contributed by Doctor Moran, and which evince his learning and research, as well as his fitness for close historical argument.
That there should be much material for a discussion as to so early a period as the fifth century may surprise many, especially those who have always been taught to clear with a bound some ten or more centuries prior to the sixteenth. And it must be admitted that it is indeed surprising, when we consider the wholesale destruction of Irish manuscripts by the English in Ireland from the time of Henry down to the present century. From the period of the invasion to the Reformation, though invaders and invaded were alike Catholic, the English treated the Irish with such contempt that only five families or bloods were recognized as human, and even monasteries were closed to men of Irish race. The literature of the proscribed was of course slighted and despised.
From the Reformation the literary remains of earlier days were proscribed and destroyed, not only as Irish but as popish.
In this almost universal destruction, the ecclesiastical books, missals, sacramentaries, breviaries, penitentials, the canons of councils, doctrinal books, many historical and biographical treatises perished. The Irish people and their church hold by tradition to their predecessors, and claim to be direct successors of the church and converts of St. Patrick. Nor can the Anglican party which destroyed so much of Irish literature now base any argument on the silence of manuscript authority or draw any inference in their favor from the absence of proofs, for whose disappearance they are themselves accountable.
The uninterrupted adherence of the Irish nation to the Roman Church gives it the force of prescription, and it will hold good against all but the most direct and positive evidence.
No mere inferences can invalidate her claim.
The documents regarding the early Irish Church begin with the confession of Saint Patrick and his letter to Coroticus, a piratical British chief, published by Ware in 1656, from four manuscripts, and by the Bollandists from a manuscript in the Abbey of Saint Vaast.
The canons ascribed to the saint were published by the same, as well as by Spelman and Usher.