Mass rock in County Mayo

FOR three centuries, the Irish refused to give up their Catholic altars on pain of heavy fines, imprisonment and death. The practice of their religion was strictly prohibited by the British crown and their churches, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, which was dedicated in 1191, were all taken over by the new clergy.

It is one of the great mysteries and miracles of history that the Irish persisted for so long, establishing secret altars in homes, on rocks, in caves, in ditches and even in holes in the ground. Those who could not find their way to these hidden places often turned toward the direction of those sacred altars and prayed their Spiritual Communions as the unseen Host was lifted.

“From the golden hour in which St. Patrick as bishop said his first Mass on Irish soil down to the coming of the Normans, love of the Blessed Eucharist was one of the dominant characteristics of the Irish race,” Fr. Augustine Hayden wrote in 1933.

This devotion was never diminished by oppression. On April 14, 1655, to cite one example of that oppression from Hayden’s book Ireland’s Loyalty to the Mass, three priests were brought before a Protestant jury in Wexford. The jury concluded that no crime had been committed, to which the judge replied, “No crime could be more heinous than to be a priest,” and the three priests were hung.

Priests and bishops were constantly on the run after England broke with Rome. Some of the laity lost all their wealth for the crime of harboring a priest or assisting at a Mass.

From the penal times to engineered mass starvation in the 19th century, there was a continuous, unrelenting effort to break the faith of the Irish, and it failed.

It is also one of the great mysteries of history that the very thing the Irish resolutely refused to accept — a “Mass” in English instead of Latin that was stripped of many of its prayers and redefined as, or at the very least strongly confused with, a commemoration of the Last Supper rather than a propitiatory sacrifice — they later willingly embraced during the 1960s. [For more on the similarities between the reforms of Thomas Cranmer and those of Vatican II, see Hugh Ross Williamson’s The Modern Mass: a Reversion to the Reforms of Cranmer (1969).]

The key to instituting the reforms in England was their gradual institution. And so it was with the Novus Ordo Mass in the 20th century. And this time it appeared to come from the papacy itself. What Thomas Cranmer and Oliver Cromwell could not impose, “Pope” Paul VI did. It was not the papacy that betrayed the Irish, but a supremely clever imposter, speaking a double-tongued social gospel of the “dignity of man,” his successors traveling the world like rock stars always approving more enthusiastically the wonders of man than God, and promoting the changes the Irish had so long and so heroically opposed.

Most of the Irish have fallen away from the new thing. It’s inconceivable and truly absurd to think that they would in large numbers face death, imprisonment or impoverishment to preserve it. It would be ridiculous to die for it now that everyone is saved and everyone has a right to God’s good pleasure, even the unrepentant sinner (if one may be so bold as to mention the phenomenon of sin.) The “loving God with one’s whole heart and mind and soul” was for a backward time when God was mistakenly considered superior to man and everything in an Irishman’s life was enchanted by and suffused with the supernatural. God will get a stern rebuke from many an Irishman today if he is turned away from the gates of heaven. Church attendance was about 90 percent in the 1950s and is below 30 percent today. The attack of the Modernists was, firstly, on worship and, secondly, on the Catholic family. And so we also see their great success in the collapse of the Irish birthrate — and now even abortion and sodomy. It’s very hard for man to support a family in Ireland today.

From Insula Sanctorum to land of apostasy — many simply deceived and unknowing, some still greatly devoted and with the right intentions. We cannot judge or see inner realities and that is for God alone to know.

In 1725, Jonathan Swift, then Anglican dean of St. Patrick’s of Dublin, wrote that while the Irish were “absolutely starving by the means of every oppression that can be inflicted on mankind,” the Protestant clergy of that country were “gorged with wealth and sunk in indolence.”

The Irish may not be “gorged with wealth” today; with junk food and drink, they are engorged as Ireland is now shockingly obese, another outward sign of its fall from the transcendent. The Irish now fit in with the world in ways they long ago refused. Are they happier? The question would be irrelevant to their ancestors.  For the Irish were not born for this world alone. Irish poet Fearghal Og Mac-a-Ward wrote when he visited Reformation Scotland:

…”in this bright-flowered land of shining fields I receive not the Lord’s Body. By my art, I swear, I was deceived, and though I owned all Alba … better were one Mass.”

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