| Irish Catholic Martyrs | |
| Death Date: | between 1535 (Venerable John Travers) – 1 July 1681 (Saint Oliver Plunkett) |
| Martyred By: | Monarchy of England |
| Feast Day: | 20 June, various for individual martyrs |
| Venerated In: | Roman Catholic Church |
| Birth Place: | Ireland |
| Death Place: | Ireland, England, Wales |
| Beatified Date: | 3 were beatified on 15 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI 1 was beatified on 22 November 1987 by Pope John Paul II 18 were beatified on 27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II |
| Canonized Date: | 1 (Oliver Plunkett) was canonized on 12 October 1975 by Pope Paul VI |
Irish Catholic Martyrs were 24 Irish men and women who have been beatified or canonized for both a life of heroic virtue and for dying for their Catholic faith between the reign of King Henry VIII and Catholic Emancipation in 1829.
The more than three century-long religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland came in waves, caused by an overreaction by the State to certain incidents and interspersed with intervals of comparative respite.[1] Even so, during the worst of times, the Irish people, according to Marcus Tanner, clung to the Mass, "crossed themselves when they passed Protestant ministers on the road, had to be dragged into Protestant churches and put cotton wool in their ears rather than listen to Protestant sermons."[2]
According to historian and folklorist Seumas MacManus, "Throughout these dreadful centuries, too, the hunted priest -- who in his youth had been smuggled to the Continent of Europe to receive his training -- tended the flame of faith. He lurked like a thief among the hills. On Sundays and Feast Days he celebrated Mass at a rock, on a remote mountainside, while the congregation knelt on the heather of the hillside, under the open heavens. While he said Mass, faithful sentries watched from all the nearby hilltops, to give timely warning of the approaching priest-hunter and his guard of British soldiers. But sometimes the troops came on them unawares, and the Mass Rock was bespattered with his blood, -- and men, women, and children caught in the crime of worshipping God among the rocks, were frequently slaughtered on the mountainside."[3]
The 1975 canonization of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales raised considerable public interest in other Irishmen and Irishwomen who had similarly died for their Catholic faith in the 16th and 17th centuries. On 22 September 1992 Pope John Paul II beatified an additional 17 martyrs and assigned June 20, the anniversary of the 1584 martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, as their feast day.[4] Many other causes for Roman Catholic Martyrdom and possible Sainthood, however, remain under active investigation.
Religious persecution of Catholics in Ireland began under King Henry VIII (then Lord of Ireland) after his excommunication in 1533. The Irish Parliament adopted the Acts of Supremacy, which declared the Irish Church subservient to the State. In response, Irish bishops, priests, and laity who continued to pray for the pope during Mass were tortured and killed.[5] The Treasons Act 1534 defined even unspoken mental allegiance to the Holy See as high treason. Many were imprisoned on this basis. Alleged traitors who were brought to trial, like all other British subjects tried for the same offence prior to the Treason Act 1695, were forbidden the services of a defence counsel and forced to act as their own attorneys.[6]
According to D.P. Conyngham, "Though the faithful underwent fearful persecutions toward the latter part of the reign of Henry, few publicly suffered martyrdom. Numbers of the monks and religious were killed at their expulsion from their houses, but the King's adhesion to many articles of Catholicity made it too hazardous for his agents in Ireland to resort to the stake or the gibbet. In fact, Henry burned at the same stake Lutherans, for denying the Real Presence, with Catholics, for denying his supremacy."[7]
Meanwhile, the King and Thomas Cromwell continued Cardinal Wolsey's policies of centralizing government power in Dublin Castle and seeking to completely destroy the political and military independence of both the Old English nobility, the Irish clans, and the Gaelic nobility of Ireland. This, in addition to the King's religious policy, ultimately triggered Old English aristocrat Silken Thomas, 10th and last Earl of Kildare, to launch a 1534-1535 military uprising against the rule of the House of Tudor in Ireland.[8]
On c.30 July 1535, Venerable Fr. John Travers, a graduate of Oxford University and the Chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, was executed in Dublin for writing a volume denouncing the Act of Supremacy. As this had not yet been made into a crime in Ireland, Fr. Travers was instead tried at the summer assizes for high treason and involvement in the recent rebellion of Silken Thomas. According to historian R. Dudley Edwards, Fr. Travers had acted only in non-combatant roles as a peace negotiator and had even offered himself as a hostage to the King's forces. Fr. Travers also had no political or financial dependency, familial links, or nationalist feelings of loyalty towards the Earls of Kildare and his involvement in the uprising was motivated only by a desire to defend the independence of the Catholic Church in Ireland from being lost to control by the State. Following his inevitable conviction, Fr. Travers was burned at the stake in the Common then known as, "Oxmantown Green", part of which has since become Smithfield Market on the city's Northside.[9] [8]
According to Philip O'Sullivan Beare, "[John Travers] wrote something against the English heresy, in which he maintained the jurisdiction and authority of the Pope. Being arraigned for this before the King's court, and questioned by the judge on the matter, he fearlessly replied - 'With these fingers', said he, holding out the thumb, index, and middle fingers, of his right hand, 'those were written by me, and for this deed in so good and holy a cause I neither am nor will be sorry.' There upon being condemned to death, amongst other punishments inflicted, that glorious hand was cut off by the executioner and thrown into the fire and burnt, except the three sacred fingers by which he had effected those writings, and which the flames, however piled on and stirred up, could not consume."[10]
In 1536, Venerable Fr. Charles Reynolds (Irish: Cathal Mac Raghnaill), the Hiberno-Norse Archdeacon of Kells, was posthumously attained for high treason in the Attainder of the Earl of Kildare Act 1536 for successfully urging Pope Paul III to excommunicate King Henry VIII over his divorce, his uncanonical remarriage, and the Caesaropapism of his religious policy.[9]
When the Suppression of the Monasteries was extended to Ireland as well, the Annals of the Four Masters reports for the year 1540, "The English in every place throughout Ireland where they established their power, persecuted and banished the nine religious orders, and particularly they destroyed the monastery of Monaghan, and beheaded the guardian and a number of friars."[11] A 1935 article by historian L.P. Murray identifies the martyred erenagh of Monaghan Monastery as Fr. Patrick Brady and adds that he was beheaded alongside 16 fellow Franciscan Friars.[12]
Even though she continued the plantation of Ireland with English settlers, the persecution of Catholics ceased after the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary, but after Mary's death in November 1558, her sister Queen Elizabeth I arranged for Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy of 1559, which re-established the control by the State over the Church within her dominions and criminalized religious dissent as high treason. While reviving Thomas Cranmer's prayerbook, the Queen ordered the Elizabethan religious settlement to favour High Church Anglicanism, which preserved many traditionally Catholic ceremonies. Meanwhile, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559), the Prayer Book of 1559, and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) mixed the doctrines of Protestantism and Caesaropapism.[13]
From the early years of her reign, pressure was put on all her subjects to conform to the "Established Church" of the realm or be considered guilty of high treason. Prosecutions for Recusancy and refusals to take the Oath of Supremacy, the issuing of torture warrants, and the use of priest hunters escalated rapidly.
In 1563 the Earl of Essex issued a proclamation, by which all Roman Catholic priests, secular and regular, were forbidden to officiate, or even to reside in Dublin or in The Pale. Fines and penalties were strictly enforced for Recusancy from the Anglican Sunday service; before long. Priests and religious were, as might be expected, the first victims. They were hunted into the Mass rocks in mountains and caves; and the parish churches and few monastic chapels which had escaped the rapacity of King Henry VIII were also destroyed.[14] It ultimately resulted in Pope Pius V's 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which, "released [Elizabeth I's] subjects from their allegiance to her".[1]
In Ireland the First Desmond Rebellion, led by James FitzMaurice FitzGerald and which sought to replace Queen Elizabeth I with Don John of Austria as High King of Ireland, was launched in 1569, at almost the same time as the Northern Rebellion in England. The Wexford Martyrs were found guilty of high treason for aiding in the escape of James Eustace, 3rd Viscount Baltinglass and refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy and declare Elizabeth I of England to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland.
The ongoing religious persecution also became highly significant as the primary cause of the Nine Years War, which similarly sought to replace Queen Elizabeth with a High King from the House of Habsburg. The war formally began when Red Hugh O'Donnell expelled English High Sheriff of Donegal Humphrey Willis, but not before Red Hugh listed his reasons for taking up arms against the House of Tudor and alluded in particular to the recent torture and executions of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley and Bishop Patrick O'Hely. According to Philip O'Sullivan Beare, "Being surrounded there [Willis] surrendered to Roe by whom he was dismissed in safety with an injunction to remember his words, that the Queen and her officers were dealing unjustly with the Irish; that the Catholic religion was contaminated by impiety; that holy bishops and priests were inhumanely and barbarously tortured; that Catholic noblemen were cruelly imprisoned and ruined; that wrong was deemed right; that he himself had been treacherously and perfidiously kidnapped; and that for these reasons he would neither give tribute or allegiance to the English."[15]
Beatified Martyrs include:
Servants of God include:
According to D.P. Conyngham, "It was fondly hoped by the Catholics of Ireland that the accession of James would bring peace and repose to the Church in that distracted and oppressed country. A general feeling of relief and joy pervaded all classes. Many of those who had been forced into exile returned to their native country: churches were rebuilt - monasteries repaired - the sacred duties of the sanctuary were resumed, and the offices of the Church were performed with undisturbed safety throughout the Kingdom. This state of comparative tranquility was not, however, suffered to continue..."[18]
A Royal edict issued on 4 July 1605 announced that Elizabethan era Recusancy laws were to be rigorously enforced and added, "It hath seemed proper to us to proclaim, and we hereby make it known to our subjects in Ireland, that no toleration shall ever be granted by us. This we do for the purpose of cutting off all hope that any other religion shall be allowed - save that which is consonant to the laws and statutes of this realm."[19]
Beatified Martyrs include:
Servants of God include:
According to historian D.P. Conyngham, "Ireland was torn by contending factions, and was oppressed by two belligerents during the reign of Charles. The Catholics took up arms in defense of themselves, their religion, and their King. Charles, with the proverbial fickleness of the Stuarts, when pressed by the Puritans, persecuted the Irish, while he encouraged them when he hoped their loyalty and devotion would be the means of establishing his royal prerogative. It is ever thus with Ireland... For eight years Ireland was the theatre of the most desolating war and implacable persecution."[20]
Beatified Martyrs of the era include:
Servants of God include:
On 24 October 1644, the Puritan-controlled Rump Parliament in London, seeking to retaliate for acts of sectarian violence like the Portadown massacre during the recent 1641 uprising, resolved, "that no quarter shall be given to any Irishman, or to any papist born in Ireland." Upon landing with the New Model Army at Dublin, Oliver Cromwell issued orders that no mercy was to be shown to the Irish, whom he said were to be treated like the Canaanites during the time of the Old Testament prophet Joshua.[24]
According to historian D.P. Conyngham, "It is impossible to estimate the number of Catholics slain the ten years from 1642 to 1652. Three Bishops and more than 300 priests were put to death for their faith. Thousands of men, women, and children were sold as slaves for the West Indies; Sir W. Petty mentions that 6,000 boys and women were thus sold. A letter written in 1656, quoted by Lingard, puts the number at 60,000; as late as 1666 there were 12,000 Irish slaves scattered among the West Indian islands. Forty thousand Irish fled to the Continent, and 20,000 took shelter in the Hebrides or other Scottish islands. In 1641, the population of Ireland was 1,466,000, of whom 1,240,000 were Catholics. In 1659 the population was reduced to 500,091, so that very nearly 1,000,000 must have perished or been driven into exile in the space of eighteen years. In comparison with the population of both periods, this was even worse than the famine extermination of our own days."[24]
After taking the island in 1653, the New Model Army turned Inishbofin, County Galway, into a prison camps for Roman Catholic priests arrested while exercising their religious ministry covertly in other parts of Ireland. Inishmore, in the Aran Islands, was used for exactly the same purpose. The last priests held on both islands were finally released following the Stuart Restoration in 1662.[25]
Officially Beatified Martyrs of the era include:
Servants of God include:
Martyred by the Protestant and Parliamentarian soldiers under the command of the Lord President of Munster, Murchadh na dTóiteán, during the Sack of Cashel
During the Stuart Restoration, the Crown's treatment of Catholics was more lenient than usual, owing to the sympathy of the king. For this reason, Catholic worship generally moved from the Mass rocks to thatched "Mass houses" (Irish: Cábán an Aifrinn, lit. ‘Mass Cabin’). Writing in 1668, Janvin de Rochefort commented, "Even in Dublin more than twenty houses where Mass is secretly said, and in about a thousand places, subterranean vaults and retired spots in the woods".
This changed radically, however, due to the Popish Plot, a conspiracy theory concocted by Titus Oates and Lord Shaftesbury, who claimed that a plot existed to assassinate the King and massacre all the Protestants of the British Isles. Between 1678 and 1681, the attention of the public was riveted upon a series of anti-Catholic show trials that resulted in 22 executions at Tyburn.
As persecution of Catholics heated up in reaction to the Titus Oates plot, a priest with the Hiberno-Norse surname of Father Mac Aidghalle was murdered while saying the Tridentine Mass at Cloch na hAltorach; a Mass rock that still stands atop Slieve Gullion. The perpetrators were a band of redcoats under the command of a priest hunter named Turner. Local Rapparee leader Count Redmond O'Hanlon is said in local oral tradition to have avenged the murdered priest and in so doing to have sealed his own fate.[28]
Irish victims of the Titus Oates witch hunt included:
Despite their exposure and public disgrace in 1681, the anti-Catholic witch hunt masterminded by Titus Oates and Lord Shaftesbury laid the foundation for the second overthrow of the House of Stuart in 1688, the creation of the anti-Catholic Whig political party, and, despite the best efforts of those who fought in the Jacobite risings, to decades of the British Empire being governed as a Whig single party state.
As the Whig-controlled Parliament of Ireland passed the Penal Laws, which progressively criminalized Roman Catholicism and stripped away from its adherents all rights under the law,[29] a miracle connected to the ongoing religious persecution in Ireland took place, according to Diocesan and municipal records, at Győr in the Kingdom of Hungary.
During the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, a painting of Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted had been removed by Bishop Walter Lynch from Clonfert Cathedral to protect the image from desecration by the New Model Army. Bishop Lynch had kept the image hidden while held in the prison camp at Inishbofin, and, before his death in Hungarian exile, had willed the image to the Cathedral (Hungarian: Mennyekbe Fölvett Boldogságos Szűz Mária székesegyház) of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Győr. On St Patrick's Day 1697, the "Irish Madonna" (Hungarian: Ír Madonna), as she had come to be called, was seen many witnesses to weep tears of blood. The wall and even the canvas behind the image were closely examined and found to be dry. Signed statements remain and bear the signatures of many non-Catholic eyewitnesses, including local Lutheran and Calvinist ministers, the Orthodox Jewish Chief Rabbi of Győr, and Count Siegebert Heister, the Captain General of the town's military garrison.[30] A copy of the image was presented in 2003 to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert by Bishop Pápai Janos of Győr and now hangs inside St Brendan's Cathedral in Loughrea, County Galway.[31]
A 1709 Penal Act demanded that Catholic priests take the Oath of Abjuration, and recognise the Protestant Queen Anne as Supreme Head of the Church within all her dominions and declare that Catholic doctrine regarding Transubstantiation to be "base and idolatrous".[32]
Priests who refused to take the oath abjuring the Catholic faith were arrested and executed. This activity, along with the compulsory deportation of other priests who did not conform, was a documented attempt to cause the Catholic clergy to die out in Ireland within a generation. Priests had to register with the local magistrates to be allowed to preach, and most did so. Bishops were not permitted to register.[33]
In 1713, the Irish House of Commons declared that "prosecution and informing against Papists was an honourable service", which revived the Elizabethan era profession of the priest hunter,[34] the most infamous of whom remains John O'Mullowny, nicknamed (Irish: Seán na Sagart), of the Partry Mountains in County Mayo.[35] The reward rates for capture varied from £50–100 for a bishop, to £10–20 for the capture of an unregistered priest: substantial amounts of money at the time.[33]
Irish nationalist John Mitchel, a Presbyterian from County Londonderry, later wrote, "I know the spots, within my own part of Ireland, where venerable archbishops hid themselves, as it were, in a hole of the rock... Imagine a priest ordained at Seville or Salamanca, a gentleman of a high old name, a man of eloquence and genius, who has sustained disputations in the college halls on a question of literature or theology, and carried off prizes and crowns -- see him on the quays of Brest, bargaining with some skipper to work his passage... And he knows, too, that the end of it all, for him, may be a row of sugar canes to hoe under the blazing sun of Barbados. Yet he pushes eagerly to meet his fate; for he carries in his hands a sacred deposit, bears in his heart a holy message, and he must tell it or die. See him, at last, springing ashore, and hurrying on to seek his Bishop in some cave, or under some hedge -- but going with caution by reason of the priest catcher and the blood-hounds."[36]
For example, in the Slieve Beagh mountains of County Monaghan, a large Celtic cross now tops a Mass rock known as Leacht a 'tSagairt ("The Priest's Flagstone"). The cross is said in the local oral tradition to mark where a priest hunter shot a Fr. McKenna while he was saying Mass there on Christmas Day, c. 1754. The priest hunter was assassinated soon afterwards in nearby Emyvale by local rapparee leader and folk hero Shane Bernagh.[37]
While being interviewed by Tadhg Ó Murchú of the Irish Folklore Commission, Peig Minihane-O'Driscoll of Ardgroom, in the Beara Peninsula of County Cork, revealed that the local Mass rock, known in Munster Irish as Clochán a' tSagairt was located at a cairn to the south. Peig Minihane-O'Driscoll also revealed that her husband had been born before Catholic Emancipation and that her in-laws had twice carried their baby son up into the mountains, seeking to secretly make contact and request his baptism from one of the two outlawed priest known to be in hiding locally, one near Ballycrovane Wood and another near Castletownbere. Minihane-O'Driscoll concluded, "I don't know... there was some strength in them (the old people), with the grace of God. Oh, may God not blame us for complaining now, dear, there is a good life in it compared to that time."[38]
The Irish Martyrs suffered over several reigns and even at the hands of both sides during regime change wars. There was a long delay by the Holy See in opening an Apostolic Process into the Sainthood Causes of the Irish Catholic Martyrs for fear of escalating the ongoing religious persecution. Further complicating the investigation is that the records of these martyrs could not be safely investigated or publicized except by the Irish diaspora in Catholic Europe, due to the danger of being caught possessing such evidence at home. Details of their endurance in most cases have been lost.[39] The first general catalog, that of Father John Houling, S.J., was compiled in Portugal between 1588 and 1599. It is styled a very brief abstract of certain persons whom it commemorates as sufferers for the Faith under Elizabeth.[5]
Detailed accounts were also written and published by Philip O'Sullivan Beare, David Rothe, Luke Wadding, Richard Stanihurst, Anthony Bruodin, John Lynch, John Coppinger, and John Mullin.
After the successful fight that was eventually spearheaded by Daniel O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation between 1780 and 1829, interest revived as the Catholic Church in Ireland was rebuilding after three hundred years of being strictly illegal and underground. As a result, a series of re-publications of primary sources relating to the period of the persecutions and meticulous comparisons against archival Government documents in London and Dublin from the same period were made by Daniel F. Moran and other historians.
The first Apostolic Process under Canon Law began in Dublin in 1904, after which a positio was submitted to the Holy See.
In the 12 February 1915 Apostolic decree In Hibernia, heroum nutrice, Pope Benedict XV formally authorized the formal introduction of additional Causes for Roman Catholic Sainthood.[40]
During a further Apostolic Process held at Dublin between 1917 and 1930 and against the backdrop of the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, the evidence surrounding 260 alleged cases of Roman Catholic martyrdom were further investigated, after which the findings were again submitted to the Holy See.
Thus far, the only Martyr to complete the process was Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was Canonized as a Saint in 1975 by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.[39] Plunkett was certainly targeted during the anti-Catholic witch hunt connected to Titus Oates and was executed following a show trial motivated solely in odium fidei ("out of hatred of the Faith"), instead of being in any way guilty of than any real crime against the state.
Other causes have also been formally recognized.
12 October 1975 by Pope Paul VI.
15 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI.
22 November 1987 by Pope John Paul II.
27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II.