Chapter XXIV: The Triumph of Irish Faith

The secret society onslaught on the attachment of the people of Ireland to their spiritual guides and to their ancient faith was treacherous, deadly, and long-continued. But, thank heaven! the Church in Ireland, has survived the shock, terrible though it was. My own Archbishop—at present, happily for Australia, placed by the Holy Father over that extensive portion of the vineyard—a Prelate who knows the Ireland of history better, I would say, than any living man, and the Ireland of the present day, as well, certainly, assured me that never since the days of St. Patrick was the Faith stronger in the country than at the present moment. The frequentation of the sacraments was at no past period more general—if ever as general. Pious Confraternities spread their blessed influence everywhere. Temperance is progressing. The clergy, numerous and well supported by the people, enlighten all by the purity, self-denial, and laboriousness of their lives. They visit their people in every home, no matter how poor, in every cabin, in every garret. They are, as ever, of and with the people. Their little means are freely given to every want of education and religion, and, as far as these means can go, to the poor. This is a condition of things that must continue to bind the priests to the people, and the whole Church of Ireland to God. These holy pastors, whom every tie of nature, affection, and duty, bind to the Irish people, are the guides who have been with them for ages. Numerous, intelligent, learned, patriotic in the highest degree, sons of the saints, they alone can lead God’s people aright. They have done so, and sad must be the hour when miserable adventurers, seeking their own gains, can so delude a nation as to seduce them from the side of God’s anointed, to what did prove, and must ever prove, if pursued by the Irish people against the loving and intelligent advice of the Irish priests, “a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.” The time is come, however, when using their own intelligence Irishmen will everywhere be able to resist the wiles and temptations of the secret society seducer, and think for themselves. The leaders, the fathers who have never deceived them, whose advices are always given for their best advantage, who suffered and died for them in the past, and are ready to do so in the present and in the future, are the clergy of Ireland, led by the Bishops of Ireland, and all following the infallible teachings of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. God grant that this guidance may never fail; that the day may never dawn when it will not be heeded; and that the race of wretched men who have so often in the past ensnared generous-hearted, Catholic Irishmen in Ireland, in Great Britain, in America, and elsewhere, may end for ever. From such false agents and from the machinations of all enemies to Irish Faith, we well may pray, GOD SAVE IRELAND!

I have no doubt whatever, but this our prayer will be heard. We only want a knowledge of the evil to avoid it. Even from what I have said this evening—and I have only stated plain, unvarnished facts—it must be evident that all secret societies and societies aiming at bad and irreligious ends are no other than deadly Illuminated Freemasonry. Let them be called by whatever name, they are a part of the system of secret revolutionary fraud, invented and cast upon the earth by Satan to compass the ruin of souls, and the destruction of the reign of Jesus Christ. They are of the same kind as the Black Hand in Spain, as the Commune of Paris, as the Nihilism that now dominates in Russia. With such associations the children of God have only one duty to discharge. It is: so far from giving them any countenance or support, to oppose them by every means possible. I believe their strength has spent its force in Ireland. It only remains that the Irish abroad, who have crossed the seas to find a home, an honest living, and an honourable fortune if they can in this and in other lands, should, as I have just advised, stand on their guard against emissaries who, under pretexts as seductive as those used by the Fenian leaders to lead our countrymen to ruin, or by that degraded seducer of brave, but heedless and passionate young men, Carey, to drag his victims to murder and the gallows, may come to whisper words of conspiracy and lead far astray. The Catholic who hears the invitation from any quarter, were it from an angel from heaven, were it from a priest of God—fallen as that angel or priest should be to be able to give it—let him beware. It is a devil that speaks to him as sure as it was a devil that spoke to his mother Eve in the Garden of Eden. Let him renounce that devil and his tools and his works. Let him ask aid from on High—Good Counsel from God through the prayers of God’s Virgin Mother, and he will triumph. He will stand firm on the side of God, and one day be rewarded at His Right Hand with the most glorious triumph that can be given to man to witness—the triumph of Christ coming in His Majesty to judge the living and the dead.

All that secret organization of which we have been speaking so much, is being framed by Satan and his emissaries for one end long foreseen—that is, to form, and that before very many years, the vast kingdom of Antichrist, which already spreads its ramifications over the whole earth. It is, you see, determined to leave no people, or nation, or tribe, or tongue, unsubjected to its influence. It seeks now the semi-civilized empires of Asia by means of Masonic France, and other European Masonic influences. It plants in Africa the germs of a European domination, which must speedily subject to its authority the dark sons of Ham. I believe, so far as I can judge, it will soon send its telegraphs and its railways careering through that ancient Continent. Placing itself “above all that is worshipped or called God,” it will in its pride and hate obliterate the polytheism of these countries to make room for its own Atheism; and that which Christianity has been hitherto unable to effect in destroying the false gods of the heathen, it will effect, in order to plant its own dark _non credo_ instead. It will thus one day be able to call to the standard of whoever is to be its last, long-foretold leader, countless millions to battle with the elect of God. It may be—I believe it will be—checked, if but for a few years, to afford time for the Church of Christ to manifest her glory once more, and to gather in her strength for the final combat. But that it will advance to that combat is revealed to us. Children of Ireland what a glorious place is reserved for you when that struggle does come! From the beginning you have been its opponents. When it cried—away with Christ—away with Christ’s Vicar—let him be crucified—let his temporal and spiritual power be obliterated—and when, in the nations of Catholic Europe, and of the world, it raised its cries of secularism, of infidel education, of ruin to the Christian family and every Catholic institution, who of all the people of God most withstood it? Who best, from slender resources, in all the lands where English is spoken, supported the Vicar of Christ and every Catholic principle? In their island home, during these very saddest days, from the period of the great famine till this hour, the Irish people, scattered in their millions over this country and England; over all the rising nations of great America; and the infant empires growing daily to maturity in Australia and New Zealand, and other islands of the Southern, the Indian, and the Pacific Oceans; by the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel; in the Colonies of Southern Africa; in the islands of the Caribbean Sea; amidst the decaying Christianity of Buenos Ayres; in Canada; and all the other lands of the earth which give the best promise to Atheistic machinations, the Irish people lifted up the Cross of Christ, and sustained, by the sweat of their brow, the strong, vigorous reality of the Catholic religion. They gave their daughters to the cloister, their sons to the sanctuary, their all to the cause of God. Freemasons thundered and intrigued in the legislatures round about them. Emissaries from the secret sects assailed them in the press, on the platform, everywhere. Fidelity to their religious principles was often visited with political, commercial, and even social ostracism. Ridicule and abuse rained in turn for their fidelity upon them. But the Faith of St. Patrick and the hope of God’s bright kingdom, the smile and the prayer of Mary in Heaven, were able to defeat and baffle all. In serried ranks with the pastors they had themselves brought forth, and nourished, and educated, and kept, they stood amidst the deluge of deception, allurement, and intrigue about them, firm as their own loved, distant land amidst the billows of the ocean, and went on advancing the mighty work of building up the Church which other nations were pulling down, until their very enemies paused, and wondered, and admired. And often too when these enemies saw in the lands which the Irish had evangelized, the Cross of the Catholic Church arise and pierce the heavens, where it had never been seen before, or had been proscribed for generations, they cried out that Catholicity was immortal—was divine! It comes, for instance, by the Irish into this land, just as it was before the storm banished it, the same as their fathers once saw it. And they say rightly, “so that Church is now and so will it be for ever.” Masonic Anti-Christianity will advance and do more damage than ever heresy effected. It will one day sweep the sects of heresy and the temples of idols utterly away; but it too will have its defeat, and in time must yield to Christ and to His cause the greatest triumph. Its union of all men in one vast republic; its bringing together of every people and nation; its destruction of every form of religion to make way for its sect; its advance in science, in education, in national progress, all will serve one day to place the Son of Mary supreme—to realize the prophecy made to His Mother: “And he shall be great, and be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give him the throne of David His father, and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall never be an end.”

I say that when this consummation comes, as come it surely must, few nations shall have a more glorious record than the people of what is called “poor Ireland.” Few nations shall have done more to prepare for the final combat, or shall have manifested to a greater extent in Christian heroism the last and most terrible trial. No nation whatever shall show a grander roll call of martyrs, confessors, virgins, and souls saved, than the land and the race evangelized by St. Patrick, whose sacred name already adorns the most glorious and promising churches now existing in the world.