THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE CRIMES OF SINN FEIN.
THE evil tolerance of what we are old-fashioned enough to call and to believe to be the sin of murder among the official Liberal Home Rulers may be ex- plained in part by the infatuation of party politics. But what are we to say of similar action, or inaction, by the Roman Church in Ireland and, unfortunately, by a portion of the Roman clergy even in England ? The Roman Church in theory, and of cours3 also in practice amongst its best adherents—devotees who, thank heaven, can be counted by the million--holds as strongly as L3rd Hugh Cecil that them is a real difference between right and wrong, between what is sinful and what is un- sinful. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that, theoreti- cally, the whole theology of the Roman Church is based upon this distinction. The Pope, speaking ex cathedra— that is, in his capacity as Pope and not merely personally— is the judge and exponent of what is sinful and what is not. !For the moment we need not enter into the question of the General Councils of the Church and of their powers to vary or to override the ex cathedra statements of the Holy See.] But though nothing in the abstract sounds so immutable as the Roman doctrine in regard to right and wrong, we find a very different story when we come to the region of the conmete. Take, for example, the events of last week. Anyone who knows anything about the doctrine of the Roman Church knows that it takes, in the abstract, the very severest view of suicide. It has amplified rather than restricted the teachings of the old dispensation on the sin of self-murder. Yet, because it suited a certain part of the Roman Church in Ireland, and apparently also a section of Roman Ecclesiastics in England, to " boom " the suicide of the Lord Mayor of Cork as a martyrdom suffered at the hands of the British Government, we have seen the suicide's funeral converted into what we might almost call a festival of the Church.
We are glad to think that the London crowd was so tolerant and so respectful. We do not war with the dead, and we fully admit that, even though Mr. MacSwiney was a member of a murder organization—the Irish Republican Army—and acted as one of its chiefs, he was, at any rate, a than of courage. There is, however, a world of difference between the silent good-breeding shown in the attitude of the London crowd, and the Requiem Mass, the procession of priests and high ecclesiastics, and the organized glorification of the man who, by delibe- rately refusing food, killed and intended to kill him- self. Of course, we shall be told that it is very doubtful whether, in the ecclesiastical sense, the Lord Mayor's refusal to take food was an act of suicide. Here we come to the essential difference between the Church of Rome and that section of the Anglican Communion of which Lord Hugh Cecil is so devoted and so brilliant an adherent. It may seem Roman in its views, but, thank God, it has never sacrificed truth on the altar of casuistry. The Roman Church is prompt to proclaim that there is a great difference between right and wrong, between what is sinful and what is unsinful ; but, unfortunately, while the Church has said this with one voice, with another voice it has in effect denied this fundamental principle. The Papacy
may proclaim suicide a crime, but the casuists and the doctors have managed, as Pascal pointed out so well, to make this of little or no effect with their "Doctrine of Probability," with their " distinguo," with their frittering away of general propositions little by little, and finally by their use of a particular proposition which Pascal notes with scorn and horror in the Provincial Letters. That proposition is that the world has in recent times become so corrupt that for the time, at any rate, it is impossible to apply the complete code of Christianity on moral issues. Men and women have become so demoralized that the wind, even of the law of God, must be tempered to the shorn lamb. We have seen this watering down of doctrine to suit policy in the funeral of the Lord Mayor of Cork. Shakespeare envisaged it in Hamlet—though in Hamlet the letting of Doctrine bow its head to Power was not so clearly, nay slavishly, thorough as when Ultramon- tanism did homage to self-murder and Sinn Fein in the streets of London, Cork, and Dublin.
FIRST PRIEST.—Hor obsequies have been as far enlargxl
As we have warranty ; liar death was doubtful ; And, but that groat oommand o'eniways the order, She should in ground unnanctilled have lodged Till the last trumpet ; for charitable prayers, Shards, flints, and pebbles should be I brown on her.
LAERTES.—Must there no more be clone?
FIRST PRIEST.—No inore be done ;
We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem and such rest to her As to peace-parted souls.
But this willingness to find obliquity, even in a right line, is not confined to the point of suicide. Even on such a plain point as murder the Roman Church in Ireland has not found it convenient to speak out in any way that would compel men's attention. No doubt most of the Irish bishops and priests have officially condemned murder,' and some quite strongly, but as a rule the thing has been done in a timid and perfunctory way. It has been made quite obvious to the murderers that no man need feel par- ticularly perturbed over the matter. Killing No Murder— Irish version—has become one of the standard works of the Roman Church in Ireland. It may be remembered that even in England a Roman Catholic editor published in his newspaper an article under that title—an article which was explained away with a good deal of difficulty. Mean- while we can only hope and pray that the whole British people will soon be made to realize fully that murder is the most awful of crimes. If it does not, woe betide us and ours ! A State in which the opposite view is taught and practised and prevails is doomed, and deserves its doom.
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