CLERICAL " INTIMIDATION " IN IRELAND.
WHETHER the publication of " the Dogma " by the Vatican Council strengthened the Catholic Church or not—a question which will depend almost entirely on the character and abilities of the next Pope—it certainly has had the effect of strengthening " Protestant " feeling, in the ancient sense of that word, to the most inconvenient degree. Every question in which a Catholic is concerned is judged by the public, whether in Britain or Germany, not on its merits, but on its relation to the assumed designs of the Roman hierarchy ; and the commonest Whig truisms, ideas which thirty years ago were perfectly absolute with men as little Catholic, or Paseyite, or Ecclesiastical as Sydney Smith and Lord John Russell, are denounced as argu- ments in favour of Ultramontane despotism. It is becoming nearly impossible for a Protestant Member of Parliament, and quite impossible for a Protestant journal, to plead in favour of the commonest principles of religious liberty, if they happen to affect Catholics beneficially, without being instantly sus- pected of intending to support Archbishop Manning, or Cardinal Cullen, or the Society of Jesus, or some other autho- rity with which he or it has about as much relation as with Buddhism or the Grand Lama. If there is a distinctive mark or stamp, for instance, in the Roman Catholic creed, it is its sacerdotalism,—the assumption that a monopoly of spiritual power has been divinely dele- gated to a separate and limited caste. If • there is, on the other hand, a distinct mark or stamp on the theology of the Spectator, it is its disbelief in Sacerdotalism, and dislike of its pretensions,—a dislike often expressed with a contemptuous vehemence which brings down on us remonstrances from English Churchmen, and even, in one case, Protestant Non- conformists. Yet we cannot say that Judge Keogh has gone out of his way to irritate the clergy of three-fourths of the Irish people without being told we are agents of the Pope, and shall not be able to argue that Mr. Justice Lawson's speech when pronouncing the Galway election null was deficient in religious impartiality without being assailed as traitors in the Liberal camp.
It is too bad, but we must say what we have to say, never- theless, and careless of misapprehension ; and what we have to say is, that Mr. Justice Lawson's judgment as reported, however sound as to the main point, the freedom of the Galway election —a matter on which there is a direct conflict of evidence, and on which we have no opinion—involves this new and, as it seems to us, most unfair doctrine, that Catholic priests alone among Nonconformist clergy must abstain from interfering in elections, except by silent votes,—must, in fact, suppress their own claim as citizens, because they believe in a particular set of doc- trines, or rather in a particular system of ecclesiastical organisation. We do not desire, in the faintest degree, to assail the Judge's decision, which in its secular bearing may be .tight or wrong, for anything we, in our absence of any know- ledge of the comparative credibility of the local witnesses, can tell, and which, being a judge's decision, is presumably correct, but his speech introducing that decision was permeated by this thought :—If a Catholic priest presses a particular vote upon a Catholic voter's conscience, that is intimidation. He may vote silently, but for him to agitate as a Protestant clergyman may is not only "disgraceful," but illegal. We will
elections or M. Thiers, if they will press an abstract right to not quote sentences in proof of the statement, for the reports of the judgment are so bad that any sentence we quoted would instantly be declared a misrepresentation ; but we affirm that it permeates the entire judgment, that it was intended by the Judge to permeate it—he only requiring very full proof of the spiritual influence—and that he allowed this himself in his peroration, when he declared his judgment to be intended to warn priests against leading mobs,—that is, as far as we see, from appearing at the head of noisy columns of electors. Every journal of either side which has noticed the judgment has accepted that as its drift, and if Protestant, has accepted it with a certain approval, damped only in an occasional case by a slight hesitation as to the results such a principle pushed to its logical sequence might yield. Clearly it leads to this, that a Catholic priest, who cannot even now sit in the House of Commons, any more than a clergyman of the Establish- ment, is, unlike his rival, to be disfranchised altogether, except as to his personal vote, to be placed in the position of a Peer who, if he only proposes a candidate, invalidates his election. And we ask, where is the justice, to say nothing of the decency, of such a disfranchisement of one particular set of Nonconformist clergymen ? Take an exactly parallel case. Suppose that, at the next election, the Nonconformist ministers of Leicester were to agree among themselves that Mr. Peter Taylor was a foe to Christianity, that his Bill for opening Museums on Sunday was an injury to their con- sciences, and that consequently they could not vote for him ; and further, suppose that they appealed to their flocks to defend the Sabbath and keep their consciences pure, and agitated strongly for an Evangelical candidate, and marched to the booths at the head of their flocks, would any human being declare that they had exceeded their legal rights ? They might be called silly, .or fanatic, or hot-headed, or anything, but their right would be no more disputed than the right of Liberal journals to support Mr. Fawcett's election for the borough of Hackney. This particular supposition is not very likely to be realised in Leicester, but it might be realised in any Scotch borough, and was notoriously realised in the most recent English elections, in which the necessity of maintaining religious education was pressed by hundreds of clergymen straight home to their hearers' con- sciences, without in any one case vitiating the return. Where is the fairness of the distinction drawn between the two cases, or what is the reason for the disfranchisement of one class of Christian teachers only ? We could easily conceive a state of opinion in a country in which it might be necessary to dis- franchise all teachers of religion altogether—for instance, if women voted in France, that despotic measure could scarcely be avoided, if Parliamentary government was to continue—but why draw a distinction against one single class of them I Because they are spiritually subject to a foreign power ? So are the laity of their own creed, and the argument, therefore, if good for anything—which it is not, for it would disfranchise every elector in every Catholic country outside the minute territory reserved to the Pope—is good for the total disfran- chisement of all Catholic electors whatsoever. Is it because the Catholic clergy advance claims which render advice from them equivalent to an effective order from an acknowledged superior ? That is the real belief, we know, which all Protest- ants just now entertain, and there probably never was one more opposed to actual and patent facts. If there is one thing certain about Ireland, it is that the priests when opposed to popular feeling have no influence at all, that they are always obliged to go on political subjects with their people, and that this obligation is felt and obeyed even by men who were not originally peasants, and therefore naturally in sym- pathy with the popular view. If there is one political cause in Ireland which the Church dreads and has reason to dread, it is Home-rule, which, as the Bishops thoroughly understand, would lead directly to a conflict between laity and clergy, which they fear ; and indirectly to Republicanisrd of the Fenian—that is, the Red—type, which they abhor ; and yet they are compelled to support Home-rulers, as they were com- pelled years since to support Tenant-right Protestants, lest they should lose the confidence of their flocks. Let them try to put down agrarian passion in Ireland, and how will they succeed ? Just as much and just as little as they would succeed if they declared whisky fatal to the soul. They cannot even keep out men they specially dislike. Just as we write, the following story, apparently quite true, is going the round of all the papers :—The Catholics in Mayo are inclined to favour Mr. Power, but Mr. Moran, priest of Castlebar, is supposed to be against him. On Sunday, Mr. Moran, instead of a sermon, offered an address on the election ; but his people, fancying he was about to preach against Mr. Power, shouted out till they drowned his voice, and finally rushed out, leaving him to "intimidate " his chapel-walls. That is Ireland all over ; the people submissive as children while the priest is on their side, and quite ready to make him the popular leader if he chooses to lead, but the moment he goes his own way, as sudden and choleric in defiance as if they were all Voltairians, or as if, like so many Neapolitans, they thought it a saint's first duty to make things comfortable for his worshippers. Is there a fact more notorious in Ireland than this, that without the ballot the priest could not beat the landlord, that any earthly hope always prevailed over any spiritual fear ? That the priest is powerful as a popular leader we admit, but where is the legal objection to that, any more than to the power of a trades union leader like Mr. Burt, or a trusted champion of secular education like Mr. Chamberlain ? It is simply the result of history, or rather of English folly, in supporting a system which leaves the people no other leaders in whom they can place implicit confidence. When- ever they think they can, they follow them, without the smallest care about their creed, till, at this moment, their avowed leader in the preposterous Home-rule movement is a Protestant, and their choice for Galway a man whom, till now, the priests have resolutely denounced.
We see no fairness, no common civil justice, in this notion that a man without a penny or an acre, who can inflict no penalties of any sort or kind on his opponents, who, in fact, is of WI clergymen in the world most lay-ridden in politics, who is blankly defied and called traitor whenever the people disagree with him, is, whenever he expresses his opinion on politics, or lectures for it, or organises voters on its behalf, an intimidator ; and we see a great deal of political imprudence. What is and must be the consequence of disfranchising Catholic clergymen for preaching politics ? Just this, that their flocks, who are more than half inclined to mutiny—as witness the number of Catholics who voted for Mr. Joyce—and to tell the priests, as the Fenians do, that their place is the church, and not the hustings, feel mutiny discreditable, and fall back into rank from a sense not of religious faith, but of religious honour. That has been the history of Ireland from the first, and is the result which attends anywhere any attempt specially to discredit the Roman Catholic priesthood. As long as the priests are let alone, the electors, whether as in Italy an educated minority, or as in France a mass of peasants, push them aside, not without roughness, but the moment they are specialised, marked out, however slightly, for State hostility, their flocks suddenly rally to their sides, and as in Germany, a body of indifferentist members are replaced by a body of active Ultra- montanes. The State, in fact, produces the very result it dreads, and the " Catholic" seat passes at once into possession of an Ultramontane. What, even in the eyes of an Orange- man, can be the value of that electoral policy under which " Vote for Joyce and Keogh "—that is, for a Catholic can- didate and a Catholic Judge—becomes a war-cry in favour of a stronger Catholic than either ?
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