Greg Daly
The statues of Blessed Margaret Ball and Francis Taylor outside St Mary’s Pro Cathedral in Dublin. 
The Irish martyrs deserve to be household names, writes Greg Daly
Last week The Irish Catholic revealed that the sainthood causes of 42 Catholics martyred in Ireland between 1572 and 1655 are at an advanced stage of preparation for being submitted to Rome for consideration by the Holy See. If all goes well, this should lead to second tranche of Irish martyrs being beatified by the Church, joining St Oliver Plunkett and the 17 martyrs beatified in 1992 as having attained sainthood and being suitable models of Faith for the Irish Catholics of today.
That we should only now be talking about ‘a second tranche’ of martyrs might seem startling, given how many Catholics were killed for their Faith in Ireland in the century and a half after Henry VIII broke from Rome. The Irish Dominicans alone, after all, can lay claim to 94 martyrs, with 53 friars having been slaughtered in massacres in Derry and Coleraine during the Nine Years’ War, and two priests and seven student friars drowned in 1602, yet only Blessed Peter O’Higgins and Blessed Terence Albert O’Brien OP, respectively Prior of Naas and Bishop of Emly, have been formally recognised as having attained the martyr’s crown.
The contrast to the English situation, where 42 martyrs have been canonised and 242 beatified, could hardly be more stark; it is hardly the case, after all, that Irish Catholics, with their history of dispossession and massacre and their survival strategies around Mass rocks and holy wells, gave less and suffered less for their Faith than did their English cousins.
Causes
Delays in the Irish causes have been in large part due to a shortage of resources for necessary historical research, and the challenge of distinguishing between political and religious deaths in the complicated contexts of 16th- and 17th-Centuries Ireland, but it is worth reflecting too on why it took so long for the causes to formally begin.
As the Catholic Encyclopedia put it over a century ago, “practically nothing was done” about the martyrs for about 200 years after the publication in 1669 of a vast catalogue of Irish martyrs by the Clare Franciscan Antony Bruodin.
“A proposal to take up the cause of Primate Oliver Plunkett within a few years of his martyrdom was discountenanced by the Holy See, lest at that critical juncture such action should become an occasion of political trouble in England,” the encyclopedia notes. “After the English Revolution and the commencement of the new era of oppression that succeeded the capitulation of Limerick, it was manifest that any movement towards canonisation of the victims of laws still in force would result in merciless reprisals on the part of the ascendancy.”
Indeed, formal interest in the Irish martyrs really only began to take off several decades after Catholic Emancipation, at a time when the Victorian Catholic Church was beginning to be seen – despite Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum – as a respectable institution for respectable people.
Building on work from the 1860s onwards, in 1896 the Jesuit Fr Denis Murphy published Our Martyrs: a record of those who suffered for the Catholic faith under the penal laws in Ireland. Fr Murphy’s book detailed 264 individual martyrdoms, along with massacres of groups of martyrs, between 1535 and 1691, and provided a foundation for work over the following years.
It seems unlikely that there is one person in 100 in Ireland today who could name more than – at best – one or two of the blessed 17”
In 1917 the Vatican gave formal approval for work to begin on the causes of 260 Irish martyrs, but unfortunately the gathering of evidence proved excessively complicated. “In retrospect,” Fr Patrick Corish would write decades later, “it was a mistake to have attempted to proceed with all these causes simultaneously: the task was simply too big.”
In 1936 Rome insisted that a more limited number of causes be presented, but even then progress remained slow until 1975 – the year of St Oliver Plunkett’s canonisation – when Dublin’s Archbishop Dermot Ryan established a Diocesan Commission for Causes led by the aforementioned Fr Corish and by Fr Benignus Millett OFM.
Following advice from Rome, the commission set to work selecting a geographically and socially representative sample of 12 causes, including 17 individuals. In 1988 they submitted their work – including a file of 800 pages – and three years later the causes was approved, with the 17 martyrs being beatified by St John Paul II on September 27, 1992.
In subsequent years churches were dedicated to the Irish Martyrs in Aughaninshin, Co. Donegal, and Ballycane, Co. Kildare, but these aside, it is fair to say that the cult of the Irish Martyrs has not exactly flourished since the beatifications of 1992. It seems unlikely that there is one person in 100 in Ireland today who could name more than – at best – one or two of the blessed 17.
In an ironic sense, it seems the cult of the Irish Martyrs has been a victim of the scandals that came to light the Church in the late 1990s, as though revelations of monstrous treachery within the Irish Church somehow obscured the inspirational example of some of our Church’s greatest heroes, ordinary Irish Catholics who preferred to die rather than turn their backs on the Faith they had inherited.
Given this, the news that a second tranche of Irish martyrs’ causes is at an advanced stage of preparation could hardly be more timely. They’re inspirational figures, and their stories are ones we should all know.
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Edmund Daniel SJ, for example, was a member of the community that founded Ireland’s first Jesuit school in 1565. Shortly after its opening, the Pope’s envoy Fr David Wolfe SJ was declared a traitor to the crown, and the school was sacked and looted. It reopened in Kilmallock in south Co. Limerick the following year, and returned to Limerick soon afterwards.
With the country in turmoil, as Irish Catholic lords in Ulster and Munster rejected English Protestant rule and proclaimed their rebellions crusades, the Jesuits in Rome decided to withdraw their mission in Ireland. Fr Daniel remained in Ireland for some time, nonetheless, before travelling to Spain in an attempt to raise money to pay a ransom for Fr Wolfe, who had been imprisoned in Dublin Castle.
On returning to Ireland he was arrested in Limerick, charged with carrying apostolic letters addressed to the rebel leader James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, as well as a copy of Pope Pius V’s 1570 papal bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth. He was taken to Cork where he was hanged, drawn and quartered on October 25, 1572, Europe’s first Jesuit martyr.
The Franciscan brother Tadhg O’Daly was martyred in Limerick in March 1578, according to a list of live causes supplied to The Irish Catholic by the Archdiocese of Dublin. He had been arrested at Askeaton Friary, according to Fr Murphy’s Our Martyrs, for wearing his habit and making an open profession of the Faith, and was eventually condemned to death after refusing to say that Queen Elizabeth was head of the Church.
A cause is also being readied for five of those killed in the sack of Drogheda in 1649”
Another Franciscan, Fr Donal O’Neylon, was martyred in Youghal in March 1580 on returning from Spain to Ireland to preach the Faith. Tortured by the authorities there, he was reportedly hanged upside-down from a windmill’s vane, there “to be shot at till his whole body was pierced through with balls”, as Fr Murphy relates it.
November of 1580 saw the Roscommon-based Cistercian and Premonstratensian abbots Gelasius O’Cullenan and Eoin O’Mulkern arrested in Dublin. Abbot Gelasius was offered a choice of bishoprics if we would renounce the authority of the Pope, and then tortured when he refused to do so. Both men were hanged, but rather than being quartered, Abbot Gelasius’ body was mounted intact on top of Dublin Castle, to be used for target practice by English troops.
Nine laymen martyred in Dublin between November 1581 and June 1583 in connection with the religiously-motivated Baltinglass Revolt are also under consideration: the brothers David and John Sutton of Castletown; Maurice Eustace of Castlemartin; Thomas Eustace of Cardistown and his son Christopher; Walter Eustace, the brother of the rebellion’s leader; William Wogan of Rathcoffy; Robert Scurlock of Scurlockstown; and Robert Fitzgerald of Osbertstown. Curiously, the then Chief Justice Nicholas Nugent is not included in this cause, despite the prominence of his show trial and despite Fr Murphy having focused especially upon him in his 1896 book.
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In 1582, Bro. Felim O’Hara, an elderly Franciscan laybrother, was killed by English soldiers in front of the high altar at Moyne Friary south of Killala Bay. Although local patronage had enabled the friars to remain at the friary in the decades after Henry VIII’s formal dissolution, they were still vulnerable to attacks, with one friar seemingly having been tortured to death in 1579 after refusing to reveal details learned under the Seal of Confession of a planned plot against the Queen.
The Limerick-born Archbishop of Armagh Richard Creagh died in prison in London in late 1586 or early 1587 according to the diocesan statement. First arrested on his way to take up his post as archbishop in late 1564, he would spend roughly 13 years in prison before his death, despite his conviction that he could serve both the Church and the crown in Ireland.
Interrogation
On several occasions under interrogation he professed his steadfast loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, claiming that he was “from youth brought up to serve the crown of England as of nature and duty I was bound, knowing and also declaring in diverse places the joyful life that Irishmen have under England”.
Fr Brian O’Carolan, a secular priest who had exercised his ministry in the Diocese of Meath, was hanged and quartered in Trim in 1606, having been accused of “having administered the sacraments according to the Roman rite”. According to a letter written by a Jesuit priest later that year, Fr O’Carolan had been offered “his life and liberty and a good living if he would turn Protestant”.
Sir John Burke of Brittas in Co. Limerick was martyred in Limerick in December 1606, after having been arrested early in the reign of James I for promoting Catholicism. In his trial he reportedly claimed that he would acknowledge no king or queen who did not believe in Christ and his mother, and who would try to turn him from the service of both.
Fr Donough MacCready was, according to the Dublin statement, a secular priest from Derry who was martyred in Coleraine before August 5, 1608.
It should surprise nobody that serious historical detective work is needed around many of these martyrdoms”
With the Irish-born John Carey and Fr Charles Mahoney long numbered among the Martyrs of England and Wales, it seems fitting that an Englishman should be among the current ‘Irish Martyrs’ under consideration. George Halley – later Bro. Angelus Halley – was born in Herefordshire but moved to Ireland when aged 18 to become a Carmelite friar, and was arrested in 1642. Seemingly offered the chance of saving his life if he would become a Protestant, he, as Fr Murphy puts it, “calmly and boldly replied that he had not left his country in order to desert the orthodox Faith, which he had imbibed with his mother’s milk”. He was executed at Siddan Castle, Co. Meath, that August.
Of the hundreds massacred in September 1647’s Sack of Cashel, nine have been singled out for consideration as martyrs: two different Frs Theobald Stapleton, one of whom was chancellor of the cathedral and the other the author of a catechism; the elderly and bed-ridden Fr Thomas Morrissey; the Dominican Prior of Cashel, Fr Richard Barry OP; the Franciscan Fr Richard Butler and the Jesuit Fr William Boynton, respectively struck down by the high altar of the cathedral and by the cathedral’s altar of the Virgin; Kearney, mother of Blessed John Kearney, and Mary Barry, as well as the Franciscan Bro. James Saul.
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A cause is also being readied for five of those killed in the sack of Drogheda in 1649. The Jesuit Fr John Bathe and his brother Thomas, a secular priest, were seized by a Protestant mob, taken to the market-place where the Jesuits, the Pope, and the Faith were mocked, and the two were beaten and shot.
Fr Dominic Dillon OP, who had been directed by the papal nuncio Archbishop Giovanni Battista Rinuccini to serve as a preacher to the Catholic Confederate troops, was beheaded along with his fellow Dominican, Fr Richard Oveton, the Prior of Athy, in the Cromwellian camp outside the town.
Cromwell himself mentioned the fifth of the Drogheda candidates for beatification in his September 17, 1649 letter to Parliament, relating how nearly 1,000 Catholics who had fled towards St Peter’s Church for safety were “put to the sword”, and that all bar two friars were “knocked on the head promiscuously”. One of those two, he says, was the Augustinian prior, Fr Peter Taaffe, “whom the soldiers took, the next day, and made an end of”.
Two related friars, Frs Bernard and Laurence O’Ferrall OP, were seized while at morning prayer in Longford’s Dominican priory in Spring 1652, Fr Bernard being killed in the priory and Fr Laurence being arrested and hanged shortly afterwards.
Fr Conor McCarthy, a secular priest and onetime student at the Irish College of Seville, was martyred in Killarney in June 1653.
1653 also saw the killing of Ireland’s Franciscan Provincial Fr Francis O’Sullivan on Scariff Island off Kerry’s coast near Derrynane, the future home of Daniel O’Connell; his skull is preserved at Killarney’s Franciscan friary.
The Dominican Prior of Tralee, Fr Tadhg Moriarty OP, was a third Kerry martyr that year: captured while celebrating Mass at ‘Poll an Aifreann’, the Mass rock in Kilclohane Wood, he was taken to Killarney, condemned to death, and executed.
Final cause
The final cause in this tranche of martyrs is that of the Wexford martyrs. Fr Donal Breen – known locally as ‘Daniel the Spaniard’ owing to his habit of dressing like a Spanish priest since his time studying in Santiago de Compostela, Fr James Murphy and the Cistercian Abbot Luke Bergin were all executed together in April 1655.
Given Ireland’s tumultuous history, it should surprise nobody that serious historical detective work is needed around many of these martyrdoms, and in some cases people might legitimately wonder whether these martyrs necessarily and invariably died through hatred of the Faith.
Perhaps so, but anyone so wary should reflect for a while on some of the highest profile beatifications and canonisations of martyrs in recent years. How much certainty is there around the identities of the 800 Martyrs of Otranto whose canonisations were approved by the then Pope Benedict XVI on the same day that he announced his own resignation? And might it not be said that saints like St Maximilian Kolbe and St Oscar Romero are better said to have been killed through odium amoris – ‘hatred of love’ – than hatred of Catholicism as such?
It’s time, surely, for Ireland’s martyrs to be raised to the altars to inspire their successors in the Faith.
