Exactly half a century has gone by since Daniel O'Connell died at Genoa on the 15th May, 1847. The dead are soon forgotten, and nations have short memories, but O'Connell is not forgotten, and Ireland loves him still. A Jubilee is usually held in commemoration of joyful events, such as births are supposed to be; yet in the Christian martyrology the natalis of a martyr is the day of his death, the day of his birth into true life. Thanks be to God, we are justified in hoping and believing that the holy death of our great Catholic Liberator was but his passage into everlasting life. The circumstances of it were thus referred to in the Cathedral of Armagh by Father Keane, O.P., during the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary:
In Genoa the Superb, this very week fifty years ago, when the midnight chime was tolling, there went through the streets a procession of surpliced clerks with lights and tinkling bells, and prayerful groups of the faithful. They who met it on its way perceived with surprise that it was not one of the ordinary parochial Clergy who bore the Adorable Sacrament, it was the Cardinal Archbishop himself, and pomp was there such as they had not seen before in the carrying of the Holy Viaticum. They soon learned that the greatest man in the world, the famed Irish Chief, was dying in their historic city. There and then he expired, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul! He took his last look at his native land, when, supported on the steamer's deck by the arms of his chaplain and his medical adviser, his tearful eyes saw the beautiful Emerald Isle with the sad cloud of the Famine louring over her. When he shall see her again not her verdant fields, her lakes and dells, her mountains bold, for all these shall pass away; but her people the Irish race for whom he toiled and died.
It was not, however, in the north of Ireland but in the south that the memorial, words were spoken which we desire to preserve in our pages, so often enriched by the orator's skilful pen, and now by the echoes of his eloquent voice. In the fine Cathedral that towers high over the harbour of Queenstown, its spire the last object seen through tears by many an exile departing from the Irish shore a solemn celebration was held in honour of the Golden Jubilee of O'Connell's death; and to the Very Rev. Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the pastor of Doneraile, was entrusted the high and arduous duty of interpreting the lesson of what may be called the festive Requiem of Ireland's greatest son.
Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel? Not as cowards are wont to die, hath Abner died. Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet loaden with fetters; but as men fall before the children of iniquity, so didst thou fall. And all the people repeating it, wept over him (II Kings III, 33, 38.)
These were the words in which David the king announced to his people the death of a prince in Israel; and these might aptly have been the words, which, wafted from Genoa to Ireland, would have told a mourning people how the greatest of their leaders, and the most eloquent of their tribunes, had passed from labour unto rest. And after the lapse of half a century, in which this people has passed through many vicissitudes, that have not lessened nor dimmed their grateful memory of him who was their deliverer, might we not say to-day, Know ye not that a prince and a great man has fallen in Israel? And if we do not lift up our voices like the king, and weep, at least we must renew our grateful remembrance for priceless favours, that were won for us by the indomitable courage and the transcendent gifts of our great Catholic leader.
But here let me change the application of the text, and, instead of apostrophising the dead Tribune for a personal prerogative of liberty, let me say to the Irish people, Your hands are not bound, nor your feet loaden with fetters; for it was the hands of the dead that struck the shackles from your limbs, and gave you, the Irish people, that highest and noblest privilege of conscience the right to serve your God according to those principles which you deem more precious than your life.
There is put before us, therefore, to-day, this great luminous figure, that, rising out of the darkness and dismal abysses of Irish history, has not made the darkness more profound, but dissipated it; for it is the privilege of small minds to accentuate their importance by comparisons, but of great minds to be lost in the brilliancy and magnitude of their work. To those who knew O'Connell, he is the memory of a grand personality, whose transcendent greatness has not grown less in the perspective of time; to us, who never saw him, he is a vision of heroism and power, passing victorious over the frauds and violence of malignant enemies; to future generations, he will still be the embodiment of great power, used for rightful principle, and his name will be invoked by generations yet unborn, as a watchword for civil and religious liberty.
It would be presumptuous to investigate the motives which influenced the Vicar of Christ in suggesting to Irish Catholics the propriety of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of O'Connell's death. Perhaps they will be indicated as we proceed. But it is a consoling reflection that the arms of Pius IX. were extended to welcome to the capital of Christendom the champion of religious liberty; and that his great successor, whose finger appears to be on the pulse of nations, has thought right, amidst the threatening of great revolutions and the trembling expectation of nations, who ask one another, What's next? to signalise the closing years of a great Pontificate by prayer for the soul, and praise for the memory of him who was a great lay-pontiff, and who understood, best of all men, how to reconcile the principles which the world is always placing in antagonism loyalty to God's Church and fidelity to our country.
It is the teaching of all history that every race, and principally the chosen ones, has had to pass through alternations of slavery and deliverance; and it has passed into a proverb, that it is only in the very extremity of their distress that a Deliverer has been sent. When the tale of bricks was doubled for the captive Israelites, Moses appeared. And surely if ever a saviour was needed by a nation, it was when, in the dawn of this century, Ireland lay bound hand and foot at the feet of her mistress and conqueror. It is difficult for us, who enjoy comparative freedom, to understand the despair and the smothered anger of our people, when after the disbanding of the Volunteers, the Insurrection of '98, and the passing of the Act of Union, all the disabilities of Irish Catholics,
It was just at this crisis that a young Dublin barrister who had been educated in a French Seminary, and had studied law at Lincoln's Inn, London, saw two careers opening before him. The one had every promise of success ; the other every sign and omen of failure. The one beckoned to wealth, honour, dignity. The other to poverty, disgrace, possibly a prison. There was every reason to hope that the name of the young barrister might be enrolled with such immortalities as the names of Flood, Grattan, Yelverton. There was every reason to fear that it might go down to posterity with only the dim aureole that hangs around the memories of our patriot dead. It was a question of law or liberty the law of the land or the liberty of the people; a selfish career culminating in perishable glory; or a self-sacrificing career ending in defeat and the immortality of honour. It was a critical moment for Ireland that in which the young barrister balanced these alternatives. Thank God, like the prophet of old, he heard the voices of eternity, and, disdaining all lower and lesser ambitions, he flung in his lot with the destiny of the conquered and martyred race. It is true, that choice spirits had walked the rough way before him. It is true, that all the consecrated and canonised spirits of the earth have
And, if ever a soul might have been daunted by the difficulties of the task it had undertaken, it might have been O'Connell's. He undertook the task, which only the angels in Scripture performed, of rolling back the stone from the sepulchre of a martyred people, and summoning the dead to life. And to do so, he had to cancel the history of three centuries, and to face a most inexorable despotism that was pitiless in its barbarity, and unscrupulous in its ministers and instruments. The very names of O'Connell's worst opponents, even history, which loves evil things, has willingly blotted out. On the other hand, was a nation not sick unto death, but already clothed in the cerements of the grave. It needed all the faith of the prophet of old to believe that these dead bones could live again. Had he a strong, virile people behind him, O'Connell would have still appeared to have been desperate in undertaking the task of wresting their rights from the Government; but, with a bloodless and famished race behind him, nothing surely, but an inspiration from heaven, could have justified him in undertaking the work of their emancipation. He succeeded ; and we measure the greatness of his success by the difficulties he had to surmount. He succeeded ; and we calculate his prowess by the magnitude of the obstacles he overcame. He succeeded; in spite of the awful malignity of his opponents, who had recourse to every vile subterfuge to discredit him and supplant him. He succeeded, in spite of the almost incurable indifference of the prostrate people. And his success was absolute and perfect. The dead bones did clothe themselves with flesh, and became a disciplined and irresistible army. His voice rang through the land like the trumpet of the archangel, and faces were uplifted to him, radiant with hope; a new light dawned in eyes that had only seen the blackness of despair ; fettered hands were lifted up to him; and the voice of the nation grew from a wail of despair to a shout of defiance and triumph. But you who remember, and we who imagine, his triumphal marches through the land, the majesty of his figure, the ring of his voice, the inspiration of his words, the magnetism of his great personality, as he swayed the vast multitudes
Twenty-five years of such labour and sacrifice rolled by, and the year 1828 found O'Connell as buoyant and hopeful as when in 1803 he began his glorious Crusade. Nay, more so. For surely it was a hopeful spirit that contested Clare in that year, and a dauntless spirit that won it. And when, armed with the mandate of the electors, he strode into the very citadel of the enemy and defied them, it was felt that half the cause for which he struggled was won.
There have been two great historical, because revolutionary, scenes witnessed in the House of Commons the one was dramatic, but valueless; the other was dramatic, but it entailed vast consequences. The one was, when Cromwell strode into the House with an armed mob, and bade his soldiers Take away that bauble, meaning the Speaker's mace; the other was, when O'Connell took up the Oath of Apostasy, read it, tore it in shreds, and declared that one part of it he knew to be false, the other he believed not to be true. The House was startled from its staid respectability, ministers stormed, the press thundered, there were threats of treason and the Tower. O'Connell went back to his constituents, returned armed again with their mandate ; and in the following year he saw the whole edifice of British intolerance crumbling before him, and a reluctant minister demanding and obtaining from a still more reluctant king the Charter of Catholic Emancipation.
It was a victory greater than that of Blenheim or Waterloo. And it was a victory won unaided. But I am wrong. O'Connell had two invisible allies besides the powers that were working with him from above. The great ones of the earth had heard, in the dawn of the century, two voices that could neither be despised nor ignored. The one was the voice of the American, the other the voice of the French, Revolution. The one uttered its solemn protest against injustice, and its solemn demand for liberty, with all the reverence and decorum that the great crusade for freedom demanded; and, even amidst the thunder of cannon and the fury of fight, the patriotism of America enforced, but bounded its claims,
Yes, and for the world. For I do not think it is generally understood how far-reaching in its consequences was this measure of Catholic Emancipation. You can generally limit such charters of freedom to a race or a particular period of history. The liberation of the negroes from slavery, the removal of Jewish disabilities, have hardly affected the general interests of the human race. But this measure of Catholic Emancipation was the initial step towards the broad toleration, which the world enjoys to-day. For fifty years the ideas of the world have been deepening and broadening towards the freedom of thought, which has now become the characteristic of our dying century. It is quite true that irreligious governments in Catholic countries have shown a tendency towards retrograding to persecution. France has warred against the religious communities, and is carrying on a petty guerrilla struggle against nuns and children. Italy has marked its secession from the paternal authority of the Holy Father by imprisoning him, and confiscating Church property. Germany, a Protestant nation, has tried to smother the free speech of Catholic bishops, and has been shamefully worsted in the conflict. But all this is recognised as being in direct defiance of all modern principle, and those politicians know that these petty persecutions are not only futile in themselves, but an insult to the progressive spirit of our century.
Under the English flag, let it be said, we have little cause to complain in this respect. Whatever reforms are still needed in
But furthermore, Catholic Emancipation was the setting free of a race destined to mighty conquests. It was the equipment of an army that was destined to overrun the earth. For it gave at least a few years of preparation to that race that was destined, under Providence, to evangelise the infant nations of the world. Its Pentecost had not yet come that awful Pentecost of death and famine and fiery tongues, which scattered the apostles of Ireland over the earth, just at the' time when the surplus populations of the older nations were pouring out to found new empires under unfamiliar skies. In those twenty years of emancipation the population leaped up to eight millions, and the excitement of political agitation and the newly developed systems of education were sharpening the faculties and elevating the ideas of the people for that exodus that was the prelude to the spiritual conquest of the globe.
Did O'Connell see the vast results of his labour? Did he calculate the stupendous issues that were to flow from his work? No! We who are but puppets in the hands of Omniscience can never measure the vast consequences that issue from our acts. The heresy of Arius poisoned six centuries of the Church's life, and the souls of millions. The quarrels of the Crusaders have left the tomb of Christ even to-day in Moslem hands. The apostasy of Luther has torn whole empires for three centuries from the sacred unity of the Church. Thank God, the principle holds for good as for evil, and we cannot forecast the immensity and importance of work done for God, however trivial it may appear. Did the world know that those half-starved emigrants that left your shores in the coffin ships of '48 and '49 were the evangelists going forth
One would have supposed that such a victory would have sufficed for a lifetime. But there are souls that cannot tire. Some are carried on by the lust of fresh conquests; some by the desire of perfecting their work; some by the revelation, that dawns upon us all at one time or other in our lives, that the activity of evil powers is always more effective and vigorous than the most strenuous efforts after the things that are pure and good. O'Connell found that when the glitter and the tumult of his great victory had passed, and men had ceased to speak of the king who broke and trampled the pen that signed Catholic Emancipation, and the sword fell from the statue of Walker in Derry, that still the people were galled by all the petty tyrannies that will last even through great revolutionary changes. The tenantry were crushed with rackrents; were ruined by that tax that was an insult to their religion and an injury to themselves the tax of tithes, wrung from unwilling hands by the ministers of an alien religion. He saw then that single measures were of but little avail to sweep away the vast mass of injustice that still burthened the people, and that it were better to concentrate the energies of the nation in effecting a complete and radical change of Government, than in attacking the myriad injustices that had their origin in the system, and not in individual acts of legislation. Then he raised the war-cry Repeal of the Union. And then he organised what was perhaps the most perfect system of agitation the mind of man ever evolved. Every parish had its branch, every branch its offices; there were wardens and stewards, all obeying implicitly the great central mind; and the people, flushed with victory, and animated with new hopes, rose up and corresponded bravely with the splendid efforts that were being made for their freedom, until from Mullaghmast to Mallow, and from the wilds of Galway to the Hill of Tara, multitudes, numbering from 100,000 to 350,000, gathered together, and by their enthusiasm and devotion gave O'Connell not only some of the prerogatives of royalty, but also a higher and loftier commission than even his ambitious mind contemplated. A vast meeting was summoned to the plain of Clontarf. Four hundred thousand men would be there. The last word would be said for Ireland. Alas! the last word was never said. The meeting was proclaimed a few hours before the time appointed. O'Connell had to face the alternative
Two years later, one dismal summer, the odour of death hung over the land the Angel of Death was there. The verdict of the last great Assize will tell who was to blame for the awful holocausts of '47 and '48. The country threw the blame on the Government, and verdicts of wilful murder were brought in by coroner's juries against the Prime Minister. In the midst of the horrors, a grey-haired broken-hearted man passed out over the Irish seas, like the Irish chieftains of old, to see Rome and die. But, before he reached it, in the very sight of its minarets and domes, and whilst the Eternal City was en fète for his arrival, he died. He never received the welcome, he never passed under the triumphal arch. So much the better. It is well to find the laurels of eternity on the Cross. O'Connell died a broken-hearted exile, and his wrongs, silently endured, demand our compassion, whilst we give him our reverence and gratitude; and from that day until now his figure stands forth in all its beauty and grandeur. The people of his own day gave him their love and admiration, and that love and admiration are transfigured into worship with us, who have inherited with his memory the fruits of his labour and sacrifice.
Shall we close here with barren admiration for O'Connell's genius and courage; or shall we say that his life has a lesson? Certainly the latter. And our first thought shall be surprise that for fifty years O'Connell has had no successor. No great Catholic layman has arisen in Ireland, strong and firm in his faith, strong and firm in his determination that the twain interests of faith and fatherland shall not be sundered. And yet it is only what we have a right to expect. A great Catholic nation has a right to a great Catholic leader. For remember we are a Catholic nation. Catholicity is the dominant note in our history. Catholicity is the first characteristic of our race. Take away our fidelity to our Church, which was fidelity to our country, and the history of our nation is a squalid record of internal struggle, and impotent efforts to shake off foreign domination. But our history is glorified by that one principle; nay, it is rendered unique in the history of the world.
Now, if the history of our race has been a history of supernatural patience and tenacity of principle, the destiny of our race is also a supernatural one. I am quite well aware that this position may be controverted. We have become so imbued with the materialistic spirit of the age, that finds its expression in books and pamphlets, in the entire literature of the country, that many are dreaming of the time when Ireland shall become a great mercantile nation, competing for success with half the globe. God grant that her children may flourish on her soil in the full numbers that her natural resources fit her to support; but I hardly think or hope that Ireland will ever rank amongst the great Powers, that her armies will be invincible, or that her navies will sweep the seas. Neither would I desire it. I had rather see her mountains crested with monasteries, from which God's praises ascended by night and by day, than see her valleys blackened with the smoke, and her rivers polluted with the slime of great factories. And, surely, there is no true Irishman who would not rather see your harbour ploughed by the emigrant ship, carrying your evangelists over the world to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, than to see its waters blackened with the hulls of warships crammed with deadly instruments of destruction for the annihilation of the weaker nations of the earth. No! Ireland has one great mission that of Christian teacher and apostle; and Irish Catholics should have one great ambition that of liberty enough to preserve the traditions of the motherland, and to strengthen and consolidate the mighty race to which they belong in a word, to make Ireland once more what she was from the fifth to the tenth centuries, the home of religion, the sanctuary of learning, the Pharos of the Western seas.
I do not know whether there may not be in Ireland some chosen soul to whom God is speaking now, as He spoke to His Prophets, as He spoke to O'Connell, and revealing the future of the race. I wonder whether in the classroom of some Irish seminary, in the hall of some great college, in some lonely Dublin attic, or walking the streets of our cities in the dust of our towns, or dreaming on the purple mountains I wonder whether there may not be even one, who, gifted with fine genius and instincts, is looking into the future, and beholding possible conquests greater than those of Alexander and Napoleon, more stupendous and epoch-making than even their victories? If so, he has a vast
But, perhaps, you will say: We want no more leaders; we want no watchers on the mountain heights, but workers in the valleys. Well, be it so. Nevertheless, there is need of some power to bind up your strength and direct it. We want a voice to embody your feelings and declare them. We want a soul to touch your souls as with a flood of light, to be reflected back in an illumination of words and works. Meanwhile, we give you the inspiration you seek, the model you require, the counsel you need, in the life and works of him whom we commemorate to-day, and we tell you in a word, the secret of his success in life, his immortality in death, when we say that O'Connell loved his country with all the warmth of his great Celtic heart, but, above and beyond his country, he loved his God.