Are there too many priests in Ireland? Yes. Is Dublin “black with them”? Yes. Do they appear to be as frequent on the country side as crows? Yes. Are they extorting from the Irish people money which is sorely needed for secular purposes? Yes. Here you have four pertinent questions, which invariably crop up whenever Ireland is discussed, together with the average answers to them. “It is the priests!” cry both well and ill informed. According to the latest critic—who, it seems, once occupied the somewhat superfluous position of “literary editor of the Daily Mail”—“one of the heaviest drags upon the life of Ireland is the religious vocation. The monasteries and nunneries prosper and increase, choking and interfering with[61] the circulation of labor and of industry in the country.” Also, “it is my profound conviction that a large proportion of the present misery of Ireland is not only bound up with, but is actually a result of the country’s religion.” Also, “the houses of the people are so indecently poor and small; the houses of the Church are so indecently rich and large. Out of the dirt and decay they rise, proud and ugly and substantial, as though to inform the world that at least one thing is not dying and despondent, but keeps its loins girded and its lamps trimmed.” This, roughly, is the indictment. Appended are some of the figures upon which it is based. Mr. Michael M’Carthy, himself a Catholic, says, “A cardinal, 3 archbishops, 25 bishops, 2 mitred abbots, and 2,722 secular priests, together with a host of regular priests of all the different Orders, such as Jesuits, Franciscans, Vincentians, Holy Ghost, Carmelites, Passionists, Augustinians, Mary Immaculate, Dominicans, Cistercians, Marists, Redemptorists[62] and so forth, all of whom flourish in Ireland—such is the force which constitutes the formidable clerical army of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and its auxiliary forces are the numerous Orders of nuns, Christian brothers, lay brothers attached to the regular Orders, and so forth; together with the great body of Catholic National teachers, male and female, who are under the control of the priests, and teach catechism in the churches; the parish priests, as managers of the parochial National Schools, having the power of dismissing the teachers.” “May it not be said of this great organization,” adds Mr. M’Carthy, “that ‘it is on a scale such as few nations would be able and willing to afford’?”

To dispose of the indictment first, we may quote a little further from the author of it. He writes: “So far as they are individually concerned, they [the priests] are in many cases the true friends of the people. They help them in their affairs, settle their disputes,[63] claim for them their rights, comfort them in their sorrows, admonish, encourage, cherish and watch over them. This is at the best. At the worst they are hard and cruel, selfish and unjust, over-eating and over-drinking—a grotesque and monstrous company. But these are the minority; and on the whole the priests perform the duties of a dreary life as well as could be expected of a narrow and half-educated class of men.” Now, if this means anything at all it means that the person responsible for it believes that the Catholic priesthood of Ireland is socially useful and necessary. The minority of its members are “hard and cruel, selfish and unjust,” which is true of the minority in other priesthoods besides the Irish. But the majority “are the true friends of the people, helping them in their affairs, settling their disputes, claiming for them their rights, comforting them in their sorrows, admonishing, encouraging, cherishing and watching over them.” How the majority manages to accomplish so[64] much, if it is composed of a “narrow and half-educated class of men,” passes comprehension; but we have the fact that it manages it, which is satisfactory. Further, our friend omits, in the plenitude of his deprecation, to mention that the “religious vocation” in Ireland is by no means the softest, easiest and rosiest of vocations, amounting, indeed, to a species of spiritual and physical servitude of the severest kind; and that the religious Orders, so far as they may be represented in “monasteries and nunneries,” are self-supporting, subsisting austerely on the labor of their own hands, and devoting themselves to the most arduous charitable and educational work without fee or reward. And as to “indecently rich” houses of the Church, such an epithet as applied to the Catholic churches of Ireland is quite preposterous. There is no “indecently rich” Catholic church in all Ireland. That there are Protestant churches with incomes amounting to a comfortable number of hundreds per annum[65] and not half a dozen souls in the way of a bona-fide congregation may be granted; but the Catholic church with as little as ￡100 a year and no congregation does not exist. Neither can it be maintained that the Irish Catholic churches are “indecently rich” in the matters of architecture or adornment—the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, gorgeous windows, splendid altars and vessel............