Search results for ""Author Thomas J. Morrissey""

Edward Cahill SJ was a well-known and influential figure in Ireland during the early decades of the new Irish state. As Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Sociology at the Jesuit House of Studies in Dublin, his research led him to view liberalism as the great enemy of the faith and spiritual values of the majority of the Irish people. He identified with liberalism the exclusion of God from public life and a strong emphasis on secularism, and also the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. He sought to counter this by teaching a Christian sociology based on the papal social encyclicals. Cahill gathered around him a lay organisation of men and women drawn from all walks of life, known as An Ríoghacht, which became influential in the 1930s. Mr and Mrs de Valera were good friends of Cahill and shared many of his views. His magnum opus, widely read at the time, was entitled The Framework of a Christian State.

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Daniel Murray was undoubtedly the outstanding Irish Catholic archbishop of the nineteenth century. He was a man of elegance and charm, ready to listen to others and to find good in them. To the redoubtable Bishop Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, the archbishop was `an angel of a man’.His concern for the education of the poor led to the founding of the Irish Sisters of Charity and the invitation to Dublin of the Sisters of Mercy and the Irish Christian Brothers. His interest in the education of the middle class was manifested in the foundation of the Sisters of Loreto and in his support for the schools of the Jesuits and the Vincentians. A man of great pastoral energy, he built numerous churches and readily encouraged lay involvement in the work of the diocese. He was actively involved in assisting the Holy See in the appointment of priests and bishops around the world and his efforts to provide aid to the needy during the Great Famine, and the veneration and respect he inspired in his clergy, further contributed to the high esteem in which he was held. And yet, he is a virtually forgotten figure in Irish history.This neglect is related to the stance he took on some issues of the day – his support for certain government initiatives, his opposition to his clergy’s involvement in politics, and his caution about openly supporting Repeal.

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Born in Newry, educated at a Jesuit school in Dublin, John O’Hagan studied Law and Arts at Dublin University. There he became friendly with Thomas Davis, Gavan Duffy, and other Young Irelanders. He wrote for the Nation newspaper and was the author of some of its best known ballads. He toured Munster with Duffy and the poet Denis Florence McCarthy, and Ulster with Duffy and John Mitchel, and published accounts of both adventures, which cast light on the country side and people during the 1840s. After the 1848 revolution, O’Hagan worked as a lawyer on the Munster Circuit. Subsequently, he became friendly with John Henry Newman and lectured in Law, Literature and the Arts in Newman’s Catholic University. He stayed in touch with Newman after the latter had returned to England. In the 1860s, O’Hagan was appointed a Commissioner for National Education, a post and subject of great interest to him up to his death. In that decade also he married Frances O’Hagan, who was much younger than him. They had a happy marriage and their house on the hill of Howth was a welcome centre for poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Aubrey de Vere, and a range of friends, writers, educationists, lawyers, and clergy. John O’Hagan prospered in a career in equity law, and he was appointed in turn chairman of the court of quarter sessions in Leitrim and in Clare. While in Clare, the title was raised to that of Judge. In 1880 he was appointed to take charge of the land commission arising from Mr Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881. He died in 1890 widely mourned and praised as a man of integrity who, in the words of The Spectator magazine, was ‘known to all not only as a most learned and experienced lawyer with a serene temper and a judgement of rare balance, but as a scholar of wide and liberal culture, a man beloved and respected by all who knew him’.

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In 16th and 17th century Ireland religion and nationality fused together in a people’s struggle to survive. In that struggle the country’s links with Europe provided a life line. Members of religious orders, with their international roots, played an important role. Among them were the Irish Jesuits, who adapted to a variety of situations – from quiet work in Irish towns to serving as an emissary for Hugh O’Neill in the south of Ireland and in the courts of Rome and Spain, and then founding seminary colleges in Spain and Portugal from which young Irishmen returned to keep faith and hope alive. In the seventeenth century persecution was more haphazard. There were opportunities for preaching and teaching and, at time, especially during the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640s, for the open celebration of one’s religion. This freedom gave way to the savage persecution under Cromwell, which resulted in the killing of some Jesuits and others being forced to find shelter in caves, sepulchres, and bogs, the Jesuit superior dying alone in a shepherd’s hut on an island off Galway. There followed a time of more relaxed laws during which Irish Jesuits publicly ran schools in New Ross and, for Oliver Plunkett, in Drogheda, but persecution soon resumed and Oliver Plunkett was arrested and martyred. At the end of the century, as the forces of King James II were finally defeated, some Jesuits lived and worked through the sieges of Limerick and then nerved themselves to face the Penal Laws in the new century.

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