Yonder Lie the Yesteryears

...Therein lay its deadliness...

...The Roman persecutions by comparison look like the work of imperial thugs, crude Caesars who beside the cunning Cromwells seem the veriest amateurs...

...Numerically, Ireland is, of course, a foremost Catholic nation...

...Ireland has been beaten for centuries with the result that the flowers of her national and Catholic genius have well-nigh faded away...

...Witness the drastic clauses of the current censorship bill now before the Dail, which, however, Ireland needs not only for morality's sake but for that of her nationality as well, and which the hierarchy supports though the government seems to be interested in it only from the point of political expediency...

...May 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 41 Of what ultimate avail are any societies if they do not foster a desire for a finer spiritual culture I I might make myself clearer by urging similar criticism against certain American clubs whose ideal actually lies in a sociability that receives much of its character from the poolrooms...

...Indeed, in every land live Catholics who seem to suffer from delusions of persecution...

...There are wounds a nation may not heal in the short span of a century, when those wounds have been opened for hundreds of years...

...The persecution of Ireland was more than brutal...

...The piety of many seems to be of an unprotected kind, and not unalloyed with an unintelligent deference to the higher culture of the Catholic Church, which, vulgarly speaking, is a hangover of the penal days...

...She walks yet in the lowlands of that faith, and only now is she beginning to thirst for the white streams of the mountains and the endless horizons of that vast kingdom called the Catholic Church...

...Churches dot the land, there are priests aplenty, and every convenience exists to foster the inner spiritual life...

...But he was a great man, and perhaps his victory was sufficient in that he united the nation and gave new life and leadership to a prostrate people...

...With Henry VIII, the arts of persecution had advanced appreciably since the days when they threw martyrs to the lions for a Roman holiday...

...Ireland is awakening...

...Happily they belong to an era which is passing, and which was all too amusing to that class of people who used the term "Roman Catholic" in the disparaging sense it once connoted...

...She saved her faith, no more— and what a miracle for angels and men...

...But she had lost meanwhile her old sense of it, she had lost the broad sweep and the vision splendid of a faith never dimmed nor made common by sordid circumstances...

...And some of our youth have turned away with hunger in their hearts...

...Perhaps she has succeeded here a little too well...

...Ah yes, Holy Ireland...

...For there has been no martyrdom like Ireland's...

...Would that the rest of the world were as holy, but it is a holiness of the heart without that inspiration of the intellect which comes from closer acquaintance with the finer phases and higher tenets of the Faith, and which makes for a nation's full contribution to the content of Catholic thought and culture...

...and she is not bred of mortal things...

...She has been the cockpit of Catholicism arrayed against every force of oppression, the proving-ground where that faith received the supreme test...

...and all the more tragic among a people so uniquely gifted...

...In a country 92 percent Catholic, there are fully five times as many non-Catholics as Catholics as officers in banking, insurance, civil service, government offices, shipping, railroads, etc., and fully three times as many in the professions...

...she is so organized...

...The writer remembers it as one of the first popular proverbs he learned, unhappily at a time when he had very little curiosity about major premises...

...One wonders how history will write of him who recognized the ascendancy, though this shortcoming may be traced to his toady worship of the crown...

...and if the marks of the penal laws are struck from the statutes, they will remain to sear the soul...

...To us, her children, Ireland means today not only what her dear dead have died for, but also what her living must labor for...

...On the other hand, bank porters, for example, are preponderantly Catholic, according to the old law that Catholics are the hewers of wood and drawers of water...

...and the vulgar form of defending one's faith with one's fist, supplemented with much rowdy rhetoric, is today outmoded...

...O'Connell may justly be called the Father of Emancipation...

...What a dangerous conclusion, how false, how evasive, and in its full connotation how destructive of right thinking...

...Emancipation was long overdue, and had it not been for the infamous Veto proposals, which had for their object the chaining of the Church to the civil power and which arrayed the Irish against the English Catholics, it would have come at least fifteen years sooner...

...The stand of the Irish Catholic lay body was here superb, and for this among other things English Catholics are coming now to be more grateful to their Irish coreligionists...

...Ireland had been so persecuted that Catholicism and suffering had come in the people's minds, if not synonymous, at least to be very closely related—a servile state best summed up in what seemed to have been a generally accepted adage to the effect that "persecution is good for the Church," and doubtless first circulated by some kind but simple Samaritan as a sop of consolation and a partial explanation of the crimes and follies of men...

...And certainly in the accustomed, wellworn rounds one may look too often in vain for that inspiration to go forth into the highways and the byways of the Faith, moved by the spirit which seems to be the charm of the true Catholic gentleman and the fount of all the graces...

...Who is not moved at the thought of what she has suffered for a faith never forsworn, or not inspired with the lesson of a loyalty never lost...

...he roared the magic phrase for those whose words were whispers, until George IV was forced in tears to sign the act, and even then only at the reluctant instigation of another Irishman, Wellington...

...it was adroit...

...now Ireland faces the future...

...and what in the ways of 1,500 years men had come to know were the best weapons to crush a people's faith were employed against her...

...The legal is but one form of emancipation...

...Sunt lacrimae rerum: the least criticism conjures up frightful things, and they are the ones who must go forth to fight the sinister shadows unarmed save for a chip on the shoulder and in all the base attitude of belligerency...

...Indeed, priests and people proffered it everywhere...

...In the joyous scenes in June, blind is he who does not see the return of that vision so long dimmed under persecution by another power...

...The English people in general are more grateful ; and I would not accuse him of excessive reflection who would rush to qualify the remark of a young Protestant English schoolboy, when in a competitive essay recently on the topic of emancipation he wrote, "If they had not made a stand, I can tell you frankly we would not be as free as we are now...

...It has happened in Ireland...

...Moreover, there were no London holidays...

...Who has not heard the phrase...

...With ten of their bishops giving ground under duress in 1798 to this new impertinence, credit must be given to the Irish laymen in that they stood fast and held no illusions about this subject...

...I do not mean to be offensive in recalling a cynic's recent remark to the effect that even if a Major O'Neal Segrave had not captured for Ireland the world's motor-car record, the country would still have the consolation of retaining the world's champion sodality at Limerick...

...Bowed down amid the dust and the tears, she held jealously to her heart the faith that had now, one might say, become a part of her very nationality...

...Ah, to hear again on a Munster hillside the peasant telling the Hail Mary in the pure words of his native Gaelic: "Shae dhu vaha, a Muire" —what an inspiration...

...people have caught at that phrase as a drowning man clutches a straw, and some have grasped at it ever since...

...And it is our wish that she should be left alone, to hold counsel with her own heart and take the time to rebuild herself anew, no easy task in the light of what she has endured...

...Yet this is not the only measure of a nation's faith or its service to humanity...

...40 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 YONDER LIE THE YESTERYEARS By THOMAS HEALY WHILE the coming centenary of Cathlic emancipation points to a future full of promise for Ireland, it is only in retrospect that the significance of such a spectacle can be fully realized...

...Only too easily do we subscribe to the outward forms of going to church, attending meetings, promoting parish rivalries, paying funds, all in a rote ruinous to that inward grace coming from the sense of deep faith, and for whose lack all the preposterous profusion of spiritual verse in our club and sodality magazines may not atone...

...it is their natural state of equilibrium...

...Emancipation is a process still evolving, and there is much yet to be redeemed...

...Thank heaven, you cannot fool a people with a false phrase all the timel Ireland needs a new judgment...

...Some doubt whether religiously, intellectually or ethically she is yet fully equipped and conditioned to the times we live in...

...Their victory came when Pius VII, to the disgrace of those who had advised him, revoked his own rescript which had approved the Veto for the Irish people, and by his redecision forever destroyed the possibility of Catholic submission to Protestant civil authority in religious matters...

...When we think of what her constancy cost her, our hearts go out to her with love and sympathy...

...but while many Irish people praise him for what he did, many are more apt to denounce him for what he left undone, and the fruits of his omission are still felt in the triumph of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland today, a most incongruous phenomenon...

...Catholic Emancipation is still a majestic movement...

...Now a phrase may sum up a state of mind, even a national state of mind, and a phrase may become embedded in the consciousness of a people until it becomes the final refuge for lazy minds and lazy souls...

...Another and sadder reminder of the penal days is seen in the recent census figures which all too eloquently reveal the proscription still practised against Catholics by the privileged heritors of a social and economic supremacy...

...Her ancient and proud nationhood did not spring from its mystical origins thus to die...

...May God grant her peace, that the world may again be heartened with her laughing courage as she goes forth to meet the new challenge of her destiny 1 Yonder lie her yesteryears...

...She must in this day and age be prepared to defend her faith against forces perhaps far more perilous than persecution, or at least than those old forms of it that still remain to trouble her not too tender memory...

...It can be considered an accomplished fact only if we exclude those disabilities, or the effects of them if you will, which are still strangely foisted on the Catholic body in the educational, civil and business realms...

...Ireland is very dear to the world...

...There is a clue here to the trouble with many Irish Catholics, at home and abroad, if one may be allowed to make such an observation about his own people...