of the Synod of that Diocese, last September, showed that both the principal churches and the endowments now held by the Church of Ireland have been claimed repeatedly by prominent representatives of the Church of Rome.  It is stated that the Church sites and buildings belong to the Roman Communion in Ireland because, on Roman Catholic principles, that communion truly represents the ancient Irish Church, and no lapse of time can invalidate the Church’s title; and that the endowments belong to the same communion because they “represent moneys derived from pre-Disestablishment days, which were, in their turn, the alienated possessions of the Roman Church” (see Bishop of Ossory’s Synod Address, p. 7).  As regards this last statement, it must be noted that the only sense in which it can be truly said that the endowments represent moneys derived from pre-Disestablishment days is that the foundation of the new financial system was laid by the generosity of the clergy in office at the time.  They entrusted to the Representative Body of the Church the capitalised value of the life-interests secured to them by the Act.  The money was their private property, and their action one which involved great self-denial, for they gave up the security offered by the State.  The money was so calculated that the whole should be exhausted when all payments were made.  By good management, however, it yielded considerable profit, and meanwhile formed a foundation on which to build.  It was, however, in no sense an endowment given by the State, nor was it a fund on which any but the legal owners (i.e. the clergy of the time) had a justifiable claim.

The Bishop of Ossory’s statement excited much discussion, but, though many Roman Catholic apologists endeavoured to laugh away his fears as groundless, not one denied the validity of his argument.  The fact that, as he showed, the Church of Ireland holds her churches by exactly the same title as that by which the English Church holds Westminster Abbey, and that, for the Irish Church, there is the additional security of the Act of 1869, count for nothing in the eye of Roman Canon Law.

In an Ireland ruled by a Parliament of which the vast majority would be Roman Catholics, devout and sincere, representing constituencies peopled by devout and sincere persons who believe that the laws of the Vatican are the laws of God, with a clergy lifted above the civil law by the operation of the recent Motu Proprio Decree, an Ireland in which even the school catechisms (see the “Christian Brothers’ Catechism,” quoted by the Bishop of Ossory, op. cit. p. 8) teach that an alien Church unlawfully excludes “the Catholics” from their own churches, how long would it be before a movement, burning with holy zeal and pious indignation, against the usurpers, would sweep away every barrier and drive out “the heretics” from the ancient shrines?

Irish Churchmen who know their country are aware that even the most stringent guarantees would be worthless in such a case, as they proved worthless in the Act of Union, and at the time of Catholic emancipation.