The sins of the Fathers
Sir: There is an element of truth beyond autobiography in Sean O'Callaghan's arti- cle on the Irish Catholic Church, (`Murder with the Fathers' help', 20 April). Over the past 200 years, a minority of Irish priests have supported violent revolution as a result of their own experience of alien rule, and more of the Irish clergy have shared in the general Irish tendency to canonise dead revolutionaries, a difficult form of rhetoric to avoid in a nation founded on the Easter Rising of 1916.
It is, however, precisely O'Callaghan's type of IRA revolutionary who has consis- tently vilified the Church, including all the bishops and most of the priests, for their opposition to the armed rebellions of 1798, 1848, 1867 and even the Rising of 1916, to which they were only converts after the event, like the great mass of the Irish peo- ple. Certain prelates, like Cardinal Cullen, have enjoyed a particular place in Irish rev- olutionary demonology for upholding peaceful constitutional nationalism of the type of Daniel O'Connell against the revolu- tionary Fenians. The present troubles began in Ulster when clerical authority was failing.
Otherwise, O'Callaghan's article illus- trates the pathetic tendency among some modern Irish Catholics to blame all their own sins and woes upon their priests. Indeed O'Callaghan still sounds as much an extremist as ever but if The Spectator goes to a convicted murderer for its Church his- tory, then it gets what it deserves.
Sheridan Gilley
Department of Theology, University of Durham, Palace Green, Durham
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