One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Two-thirds and perhaps as many as three-fourths of the Roman Catholic priests in Ireland were educated at the College of Maynooth, which turns out one hundred and fifty or more earnest, zealous, able young clergymen every year, and is the most conspicuous and influential educational institution in Ireland. Comparatively few of the graduates go to the United States. Dr. Hogan, professor of modern languages and literature, explained that nearly all of the Irish priests who emigrated to America were educated at the missionary college of All Hallows, near Dublin, for the United States was until recently counted as a mission field by the holy see and was under the jurisdiction of the prefect of the propaganda of the holy faith at Rome. There are quite a number of Maynooth graduates in America, and during the recent visit of Cardinal Logue they gave a dinner in his honor in New York.

Dr. Hogan took us through the buildings, which are spacious and surround two large quadrangles. They are built of stone, four stories in height, are entirely modern and fitted up with all the conveniences and accessories that belong to an up-to-date institution of learning. The chapel is also modern, built within the present generation and entirely conventional. It is not large enough to accommodate all of the students, and the underclass men attend mass elsewhere.

Beyond the second quadrangle is a campus of seventy acres of lawn and garden and grove, where five hundred young men were engaged in taking their daily supply of fresh air and exercise when we passed through the archway. Almost every kind of game was going on, from croquet to football. There were several cricket contests in progress; others were playing at hockey and basketball; others were on the track running, and the lazy ones were lying stretched out on the velvet grass. There are now five hundred and sixty-two students, nearly all of them theologs, and one hundred and twenty graduated in 1908. They come chiefly from Ireland, a few from Irish families in England, a few more from Australia, but at present there is no representative of the United States. When I asked a group of young men how they got along without any Americans, one of them illustrated the quick wit of his race by replying promptly: “We hope never to have them here, sir; they are altogether too smart for us. If they keep on, the Americans will run the world.”

It costs very little to get an education at Maynooth. The fees are small,—$20 for matriculation, $25 for tuition, $150 a year for board, and other small fees for electric light, rent of furniture, etc., which brings the total up to about $225 a year. There are two hundred and seventy scholarships which have been founded by friends of the institution and societies in the different parishes, and they pay an average of $150 a year. There is a fine library with forty thousand volumes, and a gymnasium and everything else that is needed.

The ancient castle of Maynooth, built by the Earl of Kildare in 1427, stands at the gateway of the college, and occupies the site of the original stronghold of the family, built in 1176 by the first Maurice Fitzgerald, who came over with the Strongbow at the time of the Conquest. It has been a ruin since 1647, and a beautiful ruin it is—one of the largest and most picturesque in the kingdom.

Maynooth College County Kildare

Until 1895, when the centenary of Maynooth College was celebrated, six thousand priests and prelates of Irish birth had been educated within the walls of that “mother of love, and of fear and of knowledge, and of holy hope,” as her alumni call her. And now the number exceeds seventy-five hundred. Most of them have been, and those now living are still, doing pastoral work in Ireland, and nearly two thousand of the alumni have gone abroad into the United States, England, Scotland, Australia, South Africa, and other English-speaking countries. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century and for several hundred years before Catholic education was prohibited in Ireland, but it was not possible for the British authorities to prevent young men from crossing the sea, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of Irish colleges were founded in the Peninsula, in France, and in Flanders, and there most of the Irish priests of that long period received their education. It has been often asserted that the Catholic faith might have disappeared in Ireland but for the ardent piety and ambition of these young students, who found the preparation they needed for parish work from the Irish faculties of divinity schools on the Continent. In 1795, at the time Maynooth College was founded, about four hundred young Irishmen were attending such institutions, and in 1808 a printed report names twelve colleges with four hundred and seventy-eight Irish students.

Most of these institutions were in France, and they were closed and desecrated by the French Revolution, which expelled their inmates, profaned their altars, and confiscated their possessions. The Irish bishops, in consequence, found themselves confronted with an alarming situation. The foreign supply of priests was entirely cut off and the laws of Parliament prohibited their education at home. In this extremity they applied to the government, asking permission to found seminaries for educating young men to discharge the duties of Roman Catholic clergymen in the kingdom. William Pitt, then prime minister, was persuaded that it was safer for England to grant this request than to permit the young priests to imbibe the hatred of England and the democratic and revolutionary principles that pervaded society on the Continent. Edmund Burke and Earl Fitzwilliam acted in behalf of the bishops, and the latter was instructed by the prime minister to supervise the establishment of a new institution. Dr. Hussey, confidential agent of the English government in Dublin, was appointed the first president. He is described as a scholar, statesman, diplomatist, and orator; he had a checkered and eventful career; he undertook many things and excelled in them all. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, a preacher of remarkable power, and the intimate friend of such statesmen as Edmund Burke. He had the confidence of William Pitt and was the trusted agent of princes and statesmen. He was a native of County Meath, was educated at the ancient University of Salamanca of Spain, and originally entered a Trappist monastery, but left it shortly after and became chaplain of the Spanish embassy in London. The British government, recognizing his ability and integrity, sent Dr. Hussey on two confidential missions to the court of Spain, and rewarded his success by granting him a liberal pension for life and appointing him as confidential agent of the government in its negotiations with the bishops, and afterward to be president of the first Catholic theological seminary in Ireland. After two years at the head of the institution he was appointed bishop of Waterford, where he remained until his death in 1803.