(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR!'] Sui,—It is rumoured that
a cleft has appeared in the rock of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and that the line of cleavage is between the first two words. The Cork Examiner, the most " live " newspaper in Southern Ireland, ultra- Romanist in many of its notices and advertisements, recently published Republican propagandist articles consigning Southern Protestants to "outer darkness," whilst equally condemning "Unionist Imperialist Catholics" (as the R.C. gentry are designated), complicating things considerably. This paper, in common with almost all other local Irish organs, gave wide publicity to the "bleeding statues of Thurles "in 1920—as heart- less a fraud as was ever perpetrated. It may be remembered that the local priests sat on the fence, refusing either to endorse or to condemn the reports of the phenomenon (which, even had it been "genuine," would have been horrible enough)!
I travelled up to Dublin in a train packed with Southern R.C. devotees, many of them maimed or diseased, all of them seeking Divine healing of body or mind from the " bleeding " marble (or was it plaster?). Is it surprising that young men brought up in an atmosphere so subject to the influences of such poisonous superstitions should be deaf to the belated appeals of their religious pastors on the ground of moral law? Your correspondent "0. H. F." knows that such fine stalwarts as composed the R.I.C. were men, whether Roman Catholic or. Protestant Catholic, who had freed their souls from this corrupting atmosphere, an atmosphere which centuries of priest rule had failed to remove from Ireland, seeing that the hierarchy had never made the least effort to dispel it. He may recollect the treatment meted out to Michael McCarthy for. making such an effort.
The terror which the system of the confessional involves is probably responsible for nine-tenths of Ireland's woes to-day. For if the men are not regular in the performance of these duties their women are! Verb. sap.—I am, Sir, &c., NEMO.
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