Bosco – Irish Sentinel Contributor – 25/09/21
When the Irish left these shores in the 1800s, burdened by genocidal famine, persecution and poverty they weren’t met with open arms and welfare benefits. They were invariably placed in ghettos in cities like New York and Boston. They were met with hostility and suspicion. Previous waves of emigre from these shores during the 1700s had not confronted such antagonism so what was the difference between those left in the 1700s and the flight in the 1800s? It is a simple demarcation; religion. Those who were hitherto embraced were Ulster scots; protestant dissenters. The rejected and scorned were Irish Catholics. Despite what pampered woke academics argue today, locked away in their well heated rooms as they prepare to indoctrinate the next generation with self-loathing and before the intelligentsia return to their comfortable homes and lives, the narrative they weave is almost fantastical. These self-labelled men of learning perpetuate a false equivalence aiming to equate the experiences of extremely poor Irish Catholics who were soon marginalised upon entry by anti Catholic sentiments amongst the natives with modern migrants who are given priority to exercise their self interest over the host nation they intend to usurp. The Catholic Irish, in their tens of thousands, fought and died in the US civil war in an act of selfless duty to their new home, while modern migrants to Ireland are active in their selfish denigration of all things Irish, manipulated by middle class white liberals. What’s worse is the weaponised mantra of “white privilege”, levelled by race baiting agitator migrants and traitor Irish, at not only the present day natives but also their ancestors, ancestors who were anything but “privileged”.
In the US the Klu Klux klan, a virulently anti Catholic organisation published anti papist literature which chronicled the delight that nuns took in whipping young girls. It claimed that members of the Knights of Columbus vowed to “burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive [non-Catholic] heretics; rip open the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.” lecturers like Helen Jackson, a popular orator in klan circles and an “escaped nun,” regaled listeners with tales of carnal relationships between priests and nuns and forced abortions within convent walls.
Prominent historian and commentator Kenneth Davis remarked that when one discerns the true concealed history of the united states, a special brand of anti Catholicism was “very powerful”.
“People, he says “wanted their own religious freedom, not freedom for others. There was a very, very deep hatred of Catholics.”
We don’t have to go to the united states to witness anti Catholicism. Our Island, was a bastion of anti Catholic persecution. The puritan protestant Oliver Cromwell was a self avowed hater of Catholicism stating
“Catholicism is more than a religion, it is a political power. Therefore I’m led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed.”
Barbarous wretches, the term Cromwell had for the Catholic Irish, spared little remorse for those he massacred when he justified his tyranny on the basis of a divine chastisement stating “ providence, in His righteous justice, brought a just judgement upon them”.
The response of the native Irish to the invading despot was to remain steadfast in the faith of their fathers such that Oliver Cromwell in a dispatch to his superiors commented
, “All is not well with Ireland yet. You gave us the money, you gave us the guns. But let me tell you that every house in Ireland is a house of prayer, and when I bring these fanatical Irish before the muzzles of my guns, they hold up in their hands a string of beads, and they never surrender.”
Historian Chris Fogarty who berates the complicity of the Catholic hierarchy in his analysis of the Irish tragedy, that was framed as a famine but concluded it more an act of genocide, concedes
“ It was also mass martyrdom; as the victims could have saved their lives by renouncing their Faith. Food crops that civil law had forced them to tithe (before soldiers took the rest) to the local English State Church parson was on offer to whoever would renounce Catholicism and become Anglican. But they died for Faith and Freedom, and their mass graves are Ireland‘s holiest places (excepting, perhaps, the graves of those who died resisting)”.
There is no denying that those Irishmen and Irishwomen who abandoned the faith of their fathers would be given assistance.
One such episode involved protestant pastor Edward Nangle who established a reformist mission on Achill Island in 1842. Nangle was considered a difficult and intolerant man with a deep hatred of Catholicism. The anti papist pastor declared that no children were admitted to the colony schools unless they were willing to receive protestant religious instruction
While the Achill Mission almost certainly saved many from famine death – a place of refuge in difficult times, its brand of anti-Catholic missionary intervention was wholly conditioned upon the starving rejecting the Catholic faith. As conditions improved, many who had left the Catholic faith to avail of the soup soon returned to the fold.
One contemporaneous observer of earlier missions, writing in 1828 explained the defeasible efforts of protestant evangelisers of the native Catholic Irish who recognised the futile efforts where Catholic apostates would soon return to the faith of their fathers once the peril had evaporated.
“The converts are like birds, which visit milder climates at intervals – but their coming is a proof of a great severity in their native country, and they return when the iron days are passed, and the sun cheers them from home.”
The penal laws similarly focused on the Irish but the Catholic Irish. The penal laws was a name given to the code of laws passed by the Protestant Parliament of Ireland which regulated the status of Roman Catholics through most of the eighteenth century.
The Penal Laws were aimed not at a particular race or ethnic group, but at the adherents of a particular religion. The objective was to entice the colonised Irish into wholesale conversion to Protestantism. A Catholic could avoid the oppressive effects of these laws by conversion, although the statutes went to great lengths to ferret out insincere conversions and defaulters. The laws operated in such a way as to demarcate the prosperous from the impoverished, the politically effective and the oppressed, on the basis of religious affiliation. These statutes had a profound effect, not only on the eighteenth century but in the present where the residue of such oppression culminated in the troubles in northern Ireland.
Catholics in the north were disproportionately represented in lower economic and social categories and were rarely to be found in senior managerial positions. Gerrymandering of political districts ensured protestant dominance in the corridors of power. To be a Catholic in Northern Ireland was effectively a proscription into the lowest caste in the province. Civil rights, largely gleaned from the burgeoning civil rights movement in the USA, was harnessed as a means of seeking equal recognition. The response were loyalist inspired pogroms and the burning of Catholic neighbourhoods leading many Catholics into exile in the safety of the Republic. As violence erupted in the six counties the British army arrived as peace makers but they soon became collaborators with the staunchly protestant regime.
On the 24th of April 1934 in Parliament of Northern Ireland a fractious debate ensued concerning on the rights of the minority nationalist and mostly Catholic community to which Lord Craigavon, first prime minister of the fledgling political entity exclaimed;
“All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more.”
Firebrand Reverend, Ian paisley, famously referred to Catholics in this way, “they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”.
Anyone old enough to recall the 1970s and 1980’s would be well acquainted with Paisley’s anti catholic vitriol.
Moving into the later parts of the 20th century, clergy scandals and revisionism, promoted by elements of the media and academia manufactured a new wave of anti Catholicism. This variety was not emanating from protestant agitators from north of the border but within what was once the hearth of Catholic Ireland.
The progressives and communists within academia and the media successfully manipulated the gullible public, many of whom held onto personal vendettas due to personal experiences, into accepting a false equivalence whereby a paedophile posing as a priest and contrary to the teachings of the church was considered no different to saint who did. Not constrained by this fallacious activity the same influential quaters engineered acceptance too of a fallacy of composition; to infer that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. IN essence the conclusion that what was true of the Church was adduced from what was true of one homosexual pederast. One may as well conclude that mathematics was faulty on the basis that of a bad mathematics teacher.
Once the Rubicon had been crossed with regard to ignoring the past and the Church dethroned from a pedestal, erected to that position by the public themselves by the way, the media harnessed a growing fabricated discontent to perpetuate their cultural revolution. Any social issue the Faith promoted e.g sanctity of life, met immediate opposition without question. The emotional reaction was reflexive as it was vindictive as much of the vitriol was singularly irrational leading to absurd claims such as “masturbation is the same as an abortion”.
The magdalyne laundries were likened to concentration camps despite the fact these institutions operated fully under colour of law AND the approval of the public. The political classes jumped on board the anti catholic train with ease with globalist Enda Kenny rebuking the Vatican despite the fact that the very party he led were as complicit as anyone.
It wasn’t just the main stream parties either . Sinn Fein had rebranded themselves into a Marxist internationalist movement where they miraculously were able to campaign against islamophobia and LGBT rights at the same time and do so without sniggering.
The party that once represented the downtrodden in the North now embraced an anti-Catholic sentiment that made loyalists sound like the legion of Mary. Mary Mao McDonald, who was reared in a privileged middle-class environment in a leafy Dublin suburb, attended a private school, and once considered Fianna fail her political home, suddenly became the new voice for the working class. It seemed legitimate to conclude that sinn fein had a monopoly on the absurd. Not yet finished, Sinn Fein embraced feminism and islam mania to add to their penchant for the ridiculous, and their new opprobrium became nationalism alongside Catholicism to round off their slide into the ludicrous.
It now appeared that the entire political spectrum, the mass media and academia had embarked on a regime of anti-Catholic hysteria such that one could be forgiven into thinking that the British establishment had returned to the land and armed with more venom.
The English Catholic convert, G K Chesteron, famously warned against the folly presently plaguing Irish discourse when he wrote,
“I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where the fictions discredited it”.
The great Archbishop Fulton Sheen, an American of Irish ancestry said similarly about the animus against the Church in sections of America, declaring
“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”
It used to be the case that one attempts to destroy something from without but knowledge and experience created an apparent novel means that would prove more successful but it wasn’t new a method at all; the trojan horse. To attack the Church from outside resulted in the production of martyrs and saints, emboldening the resolve of the faithful and ensuring not only the survival of the Church but its thrift. Therefore, and there is plenty of evidence to support the claim if one cares to seek it, that the Church was infiltrated from within in order to destroy it. The Church, once infiltrated could be distorted in substance and in personnel such that the people who once defended it with their lives, would learn to hate it.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen had asked those Americans who believed calumnies and lies about the Church to look more carefully and “Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live it but by those closest to it” he said. But what if the personnel inside the Church appeared to act exactly as the Church seemed to project? A Corrupt institution filled with corrupt individuals?
All one has to do is look at the evidence with a modicum of discernment to realise that a nation that would rather starve, prefer torture and death than renounce the faith, now wholly abuses it. How could this happen? For me it is clear. The Church was an impediment to the destruction of the West. Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose grave was recently visited by far leftist President Michael D. Higgins, a man himself praised by a far leftist Peronist Pope wrote the following in 1915
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
The fact that so many distrust the media, and academia yet pay lip service to it to reinforce their own manipulated prejudices demonstrates a profound ignorance and naivete stored in the Irish psyche. Are we that malleable that within a generation we as a nation can sound worse than Ian Paisley in his anti-Catholic pomp of the 1960s?
Chesterton was well aware of ignorance writing “ I noticed that those who were most ready to blame priests for relying on rigid formulas seldom took the trouble to find out what the formulas were.” And yet, despite all our so called progress, social entries, enhanced third level access, and apparent sophistication, the nation was so easily duped, reminiscent of a sale of a bogus elixir by the some sleazy snake oil salesman, to believe a lie so readily?
Our martyrs, our persecuted ancestors our sacred dead deserve more.
The truth shall make you free. John 8:32
Bosco (Saints & Scholars)
