Those were the days of the penal laws, when they who clung to the old religion suffered much.  But nothing could shake their faith; neither the proclamations of Elizabeth and James, the massacres of Cromwell, nor the ferocious proscriptions of the eighteenth century.  The priest said Mass, though his crime was punishable by death, and the people heard Mass, though theirs also was a criminal offence; and the schoolmaster, driven from the school, taught under a sheltering hedge.  The clerical student, denied education at home, crossed the sea, to be educated at Louvain or Salamanca or Seville, and then, perhaps loaded with academic honors, he returned home to face poverty and persecution and even death.  The Catholic masses, socially ostracised, degraded, and impoverished, shut out from every avenue to ambition or enterprise, deprived of every civil right, knowing nothing of law except when it oppressed them and nothing of government except when it struck them down, yet clung to the religion in which they were born.  And when, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tide turned and the first dawn of toleration appeared on the horizon, it was found that the vast majority of the people were unchanged, and that, after two centuries of the most relentless persecution since the days of Diocletian, Ireland was, in faith and practice, a strongly Catholic nation still.

On a soil constantly wet with the blood and tears of its children, it would be vain to expect that scholarship could flourish.  And yet the period had its distinguished Irish scholars both at home and abroad.  At Louvain, in the sixteenth century, were Lombard and Creagh, who both became Archbishops of Armagh, and O’Hurley who became Archbishop of Cashel.  An even greater scholar than these was Luke Wadding, the eminent Franciscan who founded the convent of St. Isidore at Rome.  At Louvain was John Colgan, a Franciscan like Wadding, a man who did much for Irish ecclesiastical history.  And at home in Ireland, as parish priest of Tybrid in Tipperary, was the celebrated Dr. Geoffrey Keating the historian, once a student at Salamanca.  John Lynch, the renowned opponent of Gerald Barry the Welshman, was Archdeacon of Tuam.  And in the ruined Franciscan monastery of Donegal, the Four Masters, aided and encouraged by the Friars, labored long and patiently, and finally completed the work which we all know as the Annals of the Four Masters.  This work, originally written in Irish, remained in manuscript in Louvain till the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was edited and translated into English by John O’Donovan, one of Ireland’s greatest Irish scholars, with an ability and completeness quite worthy of the original.