Sculpture of the Dublin Martyrs, Mayor Francis Taylor and his grandmother-in-law Mayoress Margaret Ball. It stands outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Dublin. Unveiled in 2001. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Psyberartist. This week, our focus is not on one particular saint but on several – seventeen in fact – Irish men and women, lay and clerical, who were put to death for their Catholic faith between 1579 and 1654. They were beatified by Pope St John Paul II in 1992 and their feast day is celebrated on June 20 each year. Their names were:
Patrick O’Healy OFM; Con O’Rourke OFM; Matthew Lambert; Robert Meyler, Edward Cheevers; Patrick Cavanagh; Bishop Dermot O’ Hurley; Margaret Ball; Fr Maurice Mac Kenraghty; Dominic Collins; Bishop Conor O’ Deavany; Fr Patrick O’ Loughran; Francis Taylor; Fr Peter Higgins; Bishop Terence Albert O’Brien; Fr John Kearney, Fr William Tirry.
Dangerous
Ireland in the 17th century was a difficult and dangerous place to live as a Catholic. It was a time when many innocent people were killed as part of the brutal campaign of Queen Elizabeth of England to impose the Protestant faith on the Irish. For the Crown, you could not be a subject to the Queen and be loyal to the pope at the same time. You must be one or the other. Therefore, to declare yourself as Catholic was to believe there was a higher moral and spiritual authority than the monarchy – something that the monarchy rejected. Total allegiance to the queen was essential.
Is the feast of the Irish martyrs a mere acknowledgement of the heroism of these witnesses at a time that is long gone and in conditions that no longer exist?”
Such arrogant usurping of God as the ultimate authority was behind the violence inflicted on victims, including those who were willing to be loyal to the crown politically but religiously wanted to stay faithful as Catholics. Such was also the case with St Thomas More, who famously described himself before his execution as “the king’s loyal servant but God’s first”.
We have come a long way since then. The representation of the pope by a high-ranking cardinal at the coronation of King Charles in 2023 was a clear sign of how far we have come down the road of peace and reconciliation. So, is the feast of the Irish martyrs a mere acknowledgement of the heroism of these witnesses at a time that is long gone and in conditions that no longer exist?
Issue
Hardly. The core issue remains, namely the one that emerged shortly after we humans were created as recorded in the Book of Genesis – to become stubbornly independent and even violent in order to use our freedom to do what we want and to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, true or false. At the time of persecution and the death of the Irish martyrs, the religious and moral authority of the King or Queen demanded absolute obedience. What has replaced it is the royal and imperial ‘I’ where the self becomes the sole arbiter of morality. In the words of the philosopher Charles Taylor: “I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me rather than being shaped by external influences. Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves. Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of external impositions and decide for myself alone” (The Ethics of Authenticity). In other words, it is not God, but ourselves who are the dispensers of our own saving grace. It is we who decide what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, who lives and who dies. It is a repetition in history of the ancient sin of doing away with God and moral order, leaving us to play God ourselves and to declare morality a social invention or personal choice.
The witness of the Irish martyrs and indeed all martyrs inspires us to be faithful to the true and the good that exist before us. There is a truth and a moral order that we cannot manipulate at will. As we honour the Irish martyrs, they inspire us to defend religious freedom and freedom of conscience today. The objectively good and the true make demands of us in our conscience – what St John Henry Newman once termed “the connecting principle between the creature and the Creator”. The death of the Irish martyrs and the reason they died, remind us that all individuals, governments and States do not have the final authority on matters of morality, life and death. As St Peter put is: “obedience to God becomes before obedience to men” (Acts 5:29).