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 IRISH

164

IRISH

ensued the persecution which tlie Four Masters likened to that of the early Church under the pagan emperors, declaring that it was exceeded by no other, and could be described only by eyewitnesses. The extirpation was so thorough that even remembrance of the vic- tims was effaced. In the published catalogue of Irish martyrs submitted recently to the Congrega- tion of Rites, there are but two cases belonging to Henry's reign. The absence of records for this period is easily explained. The destruction of all kinds of ecclesiastical property, and documents especially, accounts for much, since few but church- men could make such records; but it is perhaps a more probable explanation that scarcely any were made, as it was neither safe nor practic;ible to have or transmit what reflected upon government under Tudor despotism. Few memorials could be com- mitted to paper before places of refuge had been secured in foreign countries. Then they were taken down from the lips of aged refugees, and as might be expected they exhibit the vagueness and confusion of dates and incidents to which personal reminiscences are subject when spread over long and unsettled periods.

For the time of the suppression there is a par- tial narrative in the recital of an old Trinitarian friar, written down by one of his brethren. Father Richard Goldie or Cioold (Goldseus), an Irish pro- fessor at the University of Alcala. According to this account, on the first announcement of the king's design, Theobald (Burke?), provincial of the order, came to Dublin with eight other doctors to maintain the pope's supremacy. They were cast into prison; Theobald's heart was torn from his living body; Philip, a writer, was scourged, put into boots filled with oil and salt, roasted till the flesh came away from the bone, and then beheaded; the rest were hanged or beheaded; Cornelius, Bishop of Limerick, was beheaded there; Cormac was shot and stoned to death at Gal way; Maurice and Thomas, brothers- german, hanged on their way to Dublin; Stephen, stabbed near Wexford; Peter of Limerick and Geof- frey, beheaded; John Macabrigus, lay brother, drowned ; Raymond, ex-superior, dragged at a horse's tail in Dublin; Tadhg O'Brien of Thomond, torn to pieces in the viceroy's presence at Bomljriste bridge between Limerick and Kilmallock; the Dublin com- munity, about fifty, put to various deaths; those of Adare, cut down, stabbed, or hanged; those of Galway, twenty, burned to death in their convent or, by another account, six were tlirown into a lime- kiln, the rest weighted with stones and cast into the sea; tho.se of Drogheda, forty, slain, hanged, or thrown into a pit; at Limerick, over fifty butchered in choir or thrown with weights into the Shannon; at Cork and Kilmallock, over ninety slain by the sword or dismembered, including William Burke, John O'Hogan, Michael, Richard, and Giollal righde. This is the earliest narrative as regards period. It deals only with the Trinitarians. It had the misfortune to be worked up by Lopez, a fanciful Spanish writer, and consequently has incurred perhaps more discredit than it deserves. The promoters of the cause of the Irish martyrs have not extracted any names from it. Nevertheless, the version given by O'SuUevan Bearr in his " Patriciana Decas", despite many apparent inaccuracies and exaggerations, con- tains in its main statements a not improbable pict- ure of the experienc<'s of this single order when the agents of rapine and malignity were let loose \ipon the members. It is as a cry from the torture cham- ber, expressing the agony of a victim who loses the power to detail accurately the extent of his suffer- mgs or the manner of their infliction.

The first general catalogue is that of Father John Ilouliiig, S.,I., comjiiled in Portugal l)etween 1588 and 1!>'M. It is styled a very brief abstract of certain cases

and is directed towards canonization of the eleven bish- ops, eleven priests, and forty-four lay persons whom it commemorates as sufferers for the Faith by death, chains, or exile under Elizabeth. Cornelius O'Devany, the martyred Bishop of Down and Connor, took up the record about the point where Houling broke off, and he continued it until his own imprisonment in 1611. Shortly before that time he forwarded a copy to Father Holywood, S.J., desiring him to take steps to have the lives of those noted therein illustrated at length and preserved from oblivion. O'Devany's catalogue was in David Rothe's hands while he was preparing the "Processus Martyrialis", published, in 1619, as the third part of his "Analecta", which still remains a most important contribution to the subject. During the next forty years Copinger (1620), O'Sul- levan Bearr (1621 and 1629), MoLanus (1629), Mori- son (1659), and others sent forth from the press works devoted either wholly or in part to advancing the claims of Irish martyrs to recognition and venera- tion. In 1669 Antony Bruodin, O.S.F., published at Prague a thick octavo volume of about 800 pages, entitled " Propugnaculum Catholics! Veritatis ", a catalogue of Irish martyrs under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth, and James, containing notices of about 200 martyrs, with an index of 164 persons whose Christian names come first as in a martyr- ology. Bruodin based his work on Rothe's "Ana- lecta ", but he made large additions from other writers, as Good, Bourchier, Gonzaga, Baressus, Sanders, Wadding, Alegambe, and Nadasi, and in particular from a manuscript ascribed to Matthew Creagh, Vioar-General of Killaloe, which had been brouglit to the Irish Franciscans of Prague in 1660.

Practically nothing was done for about two centu- ries after Bruodin's publication. A proposal to take up the cause of Primate Oliver Plunket within a few years of his martyrdom was discountenanced by the Holy See, lest at that critical juncture such action should become an occasion of political trouble in Eng- land. After the English Revolution and the com- mencement of the new era of oppression that suc- ceeded the capitulation of Limerick, it was manifest that any movement towards canonization of the vic- tims of laws still in force would result in merciless re- prisals on the part of the ascendancy. At length, in 1S29, the last political hindrances were removed by Catholic Emancipation, but over thirty years were al- lowed to pass immarked by any action, either because more immediate demands pressed upon the energies of the Catholic community or because, during the long period for which the matter had been laid aside, the sources of trustworthy information had become so in- accessible or forgotten that the task of accumulating evidence seemed too formidaljle to undertake. In 1861 Dr. Moran, then Vice-Rector of the Irish College, Rome, and subsequently in succession Bishop oi Os- sory and Cardinal -Archbishop of Sydney, reopened the question by his life of Oliver Plunket, the first of a series of important historical publicaticms, in which he covered the whole period of Irish per.secutions from Henry VIII to Charles II. All the.se publications were effectively, if not professedly, directed towards hastening the C^hurch's solemn recognition of the mar- tyrs. The first of these writings (1861) expressed the hope that the day was not far distant when the long afflicted Church of Ireland woidd be consoled by the canonization of Oliver Phuiket. In 1S84, when the last of them, a reissue of Hothe's ".Analecta", was published, the intermediate ailvance had been so great that the t>ditor, then Rothe's succes.sor in Ossory, noted the expression of a wish both in Ireland and abroad "that, although our whole people might justly be regarded as a nation of martyrs, yet some few names, at least, among the most remarkable for con- stancy and heroism would be laid before the Sacred Congregation of Rites and, if found worthy, be en-