Maynooth

...Not all the candidates for the Irish priesthood go through Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth: there are older foundations -the Irish College in Rome, the Irish College in Paris, the College of the Irish Nobles in Salamanca and the Dublin diocesan college of Clonliffe...

...The corridors have stone flags, the stairways are of stone, and are worn by generations of students' feet...

...One might expect to find equipment of every kind created out of a spirit of allegiance to the College...

...Public benevolence in Catholic Ireland is very much wanting...

...Recently a sum has come to the College from a private source, and it is to be expended on an extension of the library...

...And these bright and dark greens are in great plenty, making a garden which an Irish autumn can do itself proud in...

...Dreary" is the word that this historian Lecky used of the Irish bishops' pastorals of fifty years ago, and "dreary" is the word that still describes them...

...They are licenses that had to be taken out by students who came to Maynooth after its foundation...

...The type with the long upper lip, the craggy forehead, the long, penetrating gaze, is not as frequently to be met with now as it was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, judging from the portraits of the period...

...I think how hardy these young men must be to go up and down these stairways and through these corridors on December or January mornings...

...if I judge rightly, when they leave the lecture hall each goes to his own room and takes up his own particular private interest...

...But one has only to think of the pastorals issued by the bishops who hold their synods here to know that this style in Scholasticism is not Maynooth's-not yet, at least...

...Maynooth is popular and Maynooth is practical...

...At present, what appeals to the most of them are the factory products of Munich...

...They came from a people whose cultural life had been brutally broken, and who had among them few men of liberal education...

...One is copying a passage out of the Summa...

...A magnanimous philosophy is certainly not their inspiration...

...I am not surprised to see professors on good mounts going riding, and other professors going to shoot in the coverts near by...

...Their first thought is discipline...

...And yet an Irish Catholic cannot stand within the halls of Saint Patrick's College and fail to be stirred by what has been accomplished in them...

...They have produced no prelate with a philosophical temper or equipment, no one whose utterance has had a ring of universality, but perhaps they have prepared the way for the advent of such men...

...And so these fine grey buildings on the plain of Kildare have something about them that is like a barrack as well as a college...

...As I walk down a gallery I look at portraits of bishops whom this College gave to the country-among them men who have taken great parts in public affairs...

...They show on what suffrance Maynooth existed in the beginning : magistrates declare that the young men who have come before them are well disposed toward the government and may be permitted to enter a Roman Catholic seminary...

...Maynooth is popular-that is the first thing to realize about it-what is most general in Irish life is represented in Saint Patrick's College...

...Here is a life, I think, that goes back to Scholastic days, and I wonder what possibility there is of these students becoming inspired by the great statements of Saint Thomas, so that they go forth from these halls to bring to their countrymen "that magnanimous philosophy," which, in the words of Louis Gillet, the French historian and critic, has a generosity, a noble confidence in human nature, a manner of giving credit to it, and of counting for the rest on Divine goodness which is the tradition of humanism...

...But while these colleges prepare students in dozens, Maynooth prepares them in hundreds...

...I wish someone would endow a foundation that would help Irish priests toward an appreciation of pictures, statues, architecture...

...In the quadrangle that the grey buildings form there is a garden of the kind that I like to see In Ireland-few varieties of flowers are in it, but there are many varieties of evergreens- myrtles and dark yews, and green Portugal laurels, and laurels with yellowing leaves...

...I look on a folio of Peter Lombard's lectures, and see the pages as magnificent printing...

...All of them are men of the country...

...And then I look on documents that come like projectiles out of the past...

...Its heads are giving attention not to philosophies but to conditions...

...This is the training ground for Ireland's priesthood: 500 students are here, young men mainly from the farmers and shopkeepers of the country...

...There is striking color in the picture-the gold of the Magdalen's hair, the blue of garments, the white of the Body of Christ...

...For four years after they have taken their Arts degree they study theology...

...In cubicles formed by the projecting bookcases a few sit at tables, and, in their soutanes, they look like mediaeval clerks...

...I look at the successors of these licensed learners...

...But they do not go to Dublin for lectures...

...I could never understand the matter or even the language of most of these books...

...There are no halls, no learned foundations, that have come out of any such benevolence...

...I look on the manuscript known as the Black Book of Limerick, and see it as remarkable scrivenery...

...A little over a hundred years ago students began to come here...

...I liked best its stalls of carved oak in which the choir of students sit and chant vespers...

...In this garden is a tree the like of which I have never seen before- a weeping beech...

...But because of the decency of the lives of the men who came out of Maynooth, their helpfulness to their congregations, their understanding of and sympathy with the people, Catholicism in Ireland today is a great living force...

...Lord Russell of Killowen, in Sargent's portrait, is of this distinctive type...

...And now the library...

...When they left Maynooth, these men had to be organizers, administrators, church-builders, leaders in political and social movements...

...And something about them like a great country house...

...The windows are white and their tops are blue and starred with gold...

...For three years they take the National University Arts course...

...One portrait in particular holds me: it is the portrait of Archbishop MacHale...

...Maynooth has a church by Pugin that is a fine one, if one can call a church fine that has nothing of the locality in it...

...When one remembers that this has been done for over a century, and that there were and there are multitudes of ecclesiastics, not only in Ireland, but in America and Australia, who look to Maynooth as their alma mater, one is surprised to note how very little has been returned to the place...

...they are curious enough and abstract enough to permit me to think of them as colors that harmonize with the notes of blue and gold that make this library removed from the usual exchanges of learning...

...the professors, it seems to me, do not think of themselves as being part of any corporate life...

...I suppose that the pictures and statues one sees in Irish churches are the worst that can be found in any quarter of the world...

...A monastic table is in the centre of the room...

...At the end is an altar with a painting of the Descent from the Cross above it...

...Only the Irish race produces the type that is delineated here -the long upper lip, the wide, mobile mouth, the face that is at once powerful and sensitive, wise, humorous and austere...

...Projecting to the table are high bookcases-twenty feet high, I think- with folios with their broods and litters of little books beside them: books with stained ivory, and blue, and brown bindings...

...Maynooth, with so little endowment from the multitude who have passed through her halls, is an example written large of this attitude...

...For seven years the candidates for the priesthood live lives that, except for holiday visits to their own people, are isolated...

...None of the Irish priests whom I know seem to think of Maynooth as a place where an intellectual life has been shared with others...

...Maynooth exists on what was an annual grant made by the British government a century ago, and which has been compounded for 400,000 pounds, and on pensions paid by the students...

...And so what is here is fine and well kept, but sparse...

...Stress was laid on the practical rather than on the intellectual side of the priesthood...

...their degrees are conferred upon them here...

...But I think there has been only one other such endowment in the whole course of its history...

...They went into a world that was different from the continental Catholic world in as much as there was neither a traditional philosophy nor a traditional art that they could come in contact with...

...they came with licenses which stated that, although Roman Catholics were, strictly speaking, outcasts, a tolerant government would permit their being educated for their own peculiar priesthood...