Rome Rule
"Rome Rule" was a term used by
Background
The term has been documented as used in the
Most Irish Protestants were deeply afraid of a repetition of the events of 1798 and the years just before. They tended to consider Roman Catholicism and possible rebellion as almost identical terms. To keep things as they were in Church and State seemed the guarantee of safety.[5]
Ensuing out of the anti-Catholic landowner slogan "
I learn by the doctrines, history and practices of the Church of Rome that the lives of Protestants are endangered, the laws of England set at nought, and the crown of England subordinated to the dictates of an Italian bishop.[10]
The 1885 Home Rule Bill
After the collapse of the
Anglicans of the established
From 1882
While southern Ireland was clamouring for repeal of the Union with Britain, Ulster came round to the view that Union with Britain suited her better than any form of self-government for Ireland. For one thing, she saw that the Union was to her economic advantage since she was far more industrialised than the agricultural south, and her future clearly depended on the continuance of friendly trade with Britain.[14] Due to the industrial revolution, Belfast had grown bigger than Dublin. Ulstermen were proud of their achievements and would have seen them as proof of the Weberian theory of the "Protestant work ethic".
Religious faith combined with business acumen to raise in Ulster a fixed opposition to Home Rule, which was later expressed in the popular slogan, Home Rule means Rome Rule.[15] The Ulster unionist subjective sense of separate identity, articulated in religious idiom, dominated Ulster unionist hostility to home rule. That home rule meant Rome Rule was, for the average Ulster Protestant, conclusive condemnation of any tampering with the union. Rome Rule conjured the nightmare of a native rising for a settler community. Economic factors merely reinforced racial pride.[16]
Her Protestant majority became fearful of one day finding herself dominated by a Roman Catholic Parliament in Dublin:
- They saw Catholic priests playing a big role in the pro-Home Rule IPP branches.
- Would Home Rule, they wondered, become Rome Rule, with Catholic bishops telling Catholic MPs how to vote?
- Might Irish Protestants not thereby lose their civil and religious liberty?[12][17]
This was the background against which the English Conservative Party played the Orange Card. Lord Randolph Churchill played it with gusto. In 1886, the year of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill, Churchill crossed to Belfast to make an inflammatory anti-Home Rule speech in the Ulster Hall, and a little later, coined the memorable phrase, "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right".[15]
Parnell's political opponents pointed out that he was the only non-Catholic MP in his party. To avoid further accusations about Rome Rule, he nominated six other non-Catholics for safe seats (out of the IPP's new total of 85 MPs) in the 1886 election.
Other elements
As the Irish nationalist movement recovered in the 1890s from the division caused by Parnell's relationship with
The resurgent Church's dogma on the
Opponents of Rome Rule could also quote from several anti-clerical books by Margaret Cusack, the founder of The Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, who had then converted to Protestantism in 1887.[18] In The Nun of Kenmare: An Autobiography (1889), Cusack complained that she had been vilified by her fellow churchmen behind her back: "The practice of the Inquisition still holds in the Roman church, as I have found again and again, and as this book will show. You are condemned unheard."[19]
The Ne Temere papal decree of 1907 required non-Catholics married to a Catholic to agree to educate their children as Catholics, and often the non-Catholic was required to convert before the marriage. Ne Temere was tolerated by the UK parliament as it had little impact in Britain; Irish Protestants felt that it would have a much greater impact in a future Catholic-dominated Home Rule Ireland. In 1911 debates, both views were considered, and notably, those against Ne Temere were unionists and those tolerating it were not.[20][21]
From 1898 the "Index", or list of books forbidden to Catholics, was modified by Pope Leo XIII. Along with indecent works it still included forbidden authors such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the scientists John Locke and Galileo, that most Europeans would by then have found unobjectionable.
Socialist theorists on Rome Rule
The English socialist organiser Harry Quelch wrote in his 1902 essay, "Home Rule and Rome Rule":[22]
It is not too much to say that from the time that a Pope of Rome formally sold Ireland to an English King, the Church of Rome has been the persistent, unrelenting enemy of Ireland and the Irish people.
A Roman Catholic writer, Mr. Michael J. F. McCarthy, in a book on "Priests and People in Ireland", makes a vigorous and uncompromising attack on the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland. He ascribes the ills of Ireland mainly to a single cause, that is sacerdotalism. In his opinion it is the priesthood which is keeping Celtic Ireland "poor, miserable, depressed, unprogressive". Mr. Frank Hugh O'Donnell, himself a Roman Catholic and an Irish Nationalist, declares that notwithstanding the appalling poverty of masses of the Irish people, large sums are obtained by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland. He says that: "All over Ireland urgent wants of the lay Catholic community are left unattended. All over Ireland, not even wants, but mere caprices of the clergy are the excuse for costly outlay. All over Ireland, and outside Ireland, the sight of collecting priests on all sorts of mendicant missions is an abiding vision. Sometimes it is to construct a sumptuous cathedral in a hamlet of grog-shops and hovels. Sometimes it is to raise a memorial church of marble at a cost of £80,000 on an uninhabited hillside in Kerry out of respect to the birthplace of Daniel O’Connell. Sometimes it is to defray the mistake of an architect. Sometimes it is to defray the bill of a Jew purveyor of decorative monstrosities. Never is it to endow the most crying needs of a Catholic university."
We hear from time to time that the Irish people are determined to formulate their own politics, and not to take them from Rome; but events constantly demonstrate that not only the religion but the politics of Ireland are those of the Church of Rome, and that the Irish people are still being exploited in the interest of clericalism and for the proselytising of England. The question is: How long will the people of Ireland permit themselves to be used in this way, and to constitute one of the most effectual barriers to Irish independence by the suspicion that Home Rule only means Rome Rule?
The Irish socialist and nationalist James Connolly wrote much about religion and politics, but did not consider the insecurities of Irish loyalists. His optimistic view in 1910 was that the Catholic Church would accommodate itself with an Irish "Workers' Republic", and so Rome Rule could never occur:[23]
North and the South will again clasp hands, again will it be demonstrated, as in ’98, that the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united Social democracy.
1912–1925
The phrase took on a new lease of life from the introduction of the
The Protestants' fears about a Dublin Parliament may seem to have been exaggerated at the time, but the history of Ireland since independence has, on the whole, tended to suggest that they were not. "Home Rule", they declared, "would be Rome Rule, and that was all there was to it". "It may seem strange to you and me,"
Lord Riddell, "but it is a religious question. Those people are . . . . prepared to die for their convictions".[24]
Indeed, occasional speeches by leading Nationalists designed to allay Liberal fears that "Home Rule really would be Rome Rule", were in 1911 clearly making some Catholic churchmen anxious. The end and the reward of Home Rule commanded the sympathy of all of us, but the question is: Are they not as likely, or more likely, to have as their reward secularism in the schools?[25]
The nationalist view was also indicatively divergent:
Our home was a Catholic household; all the children were at Catholic schools and the Catholic university, so all the children’s friends were Catholics, and all my grandmother’s subtle match-making and her ambition’s pre-supposed Catholic dynasties. Home Rule means Rome Rule said the Ulster Protestant slogan. Not at all. ...It was "our people", neither Rome nor the Protestant ascendancy, who should rule in Ireland. "Our people", through an élite, sprung from it, trained for its service, ...The Jesuits were helping to train such an élite.[26]
The envisaged threat from both Home Rule and Rome was expressed in an angry poem by Rudyard Kipling, Ulster 1912, 4th verse:
’We know the war prepared
On every peaceful home,
We know the hells declared
For such as serve not Rome.[27]
It so happened that
Loyalists were unspecific about the likely effect of "Rome Rule", but it became an effective slogan in maintaining the loyalty of the Protestant working class, and contributed to the lack of trust which caused the near-civil war prior to the
During the Irish War of Independence the Irish Republic sought international recognition from other countries, including the Holy See. Its envoy Seán T. O'Kelly wrote to Pope Benedict XV in 1920 in terms suggesting that the war was a part of a long religious struggle, and identifying the Irish Republic with "Catholic Ireland". The letter was not published until recently; it included:[29]
Irish Catholics believe that their devotion to their religion and to the Holy See handicaps their efforts for independence. While this in no way shakes their adherence to the Faith, they naturally resent the audacity of an officially heretical government approaching the Holy See on occasions through Catholic or non-Catholic channels, seeking to procure, on pretexts of faith and morals, the condemnation of Catholic Ireland. It is true that the latter happens to be weak and England strong; hence England tries to turn into an instrument of further oppression a force on which Ireland should obviously have paramount claims and for which Ireland suffered and fought and bled while the oppressor repudiated, blasphemed and persecuted it.
After 1922 Rome Rule was occasionally used as a disparaging term by anti-clerical socialists in Ireland who opposed the Church's views on social policy.
In 2009 Professor Ronan Fanning of UCD considered that: "...in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland, the old Unionist taunt that Home Rule would mean Rome Rule had no force because Rome Rule had become more a cause for pride than for shame."[32]
Outburst in 1988
The slogan continued to be used for decades in unionist politics in Northern Ireland, and explains the visceral outburst by Ian Paisley in the European Parliament against the presence of Pope John Paul II on 12 October 1988.[33] Paisley referred to the Pope as "The Antichrist".[34]
Culmination 2009
It is all too often forgotten that immediately before
a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state”, it was preceded by his asking Northern Ireland's critics "to remember that in the south they boasted of a Catholic state". But, in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland, the old Unionist taunt that 'Home Rule would mean Rome Rule' had no force because Rome Rule had become more a cause for pride than for shame. ...In Pat Rabbitte's words, the Vatican seems "to misunderstand the earthquake they have set off in [Irish] society. Whatever happens, it is the end of the age of deference."
Prof. Ronan Fanning, Professor Emeritus of Modern History (UCD)[35]
See also
- Roman Catholicism in Ireland
Notes
- ^ Kee, Robert: The Green Flag Vol.II: The Bold Fenian Men, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p.64
- ^ Searle, G. R.: A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 142.
- ^ a b c The Times; Parliamentary Intelligence. House of Commons, Wednesday, 12 July; 13 July 1871; pg6 col F
- ^ "LOCAL AND PERSONAL ACTS (IRELAND) BILL.— [BILL 26.]—SECOND READING. (Hansard, 12 July 1871)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ISBN 0-370-01340-9
- ^ Gray, Tony: pp.50–52
- ISBN 1-85285-570-3
- ^ Gray, Tony: p.103
- ^ Gray, Tony: p.105
- ^ Gray, Tony: p.150
- ^ Online notes about O'Connell's visit in 1841
- ^ ISBN 0-86167-305-0
- ISBN 0-571-08066-9
- ISBN 0856404985.
- ^ a b Holt, Edgar Protest in Arms Ch. III Orange Drums, pp.32–33, Putnam London (1960)
- ISBN 978-0-7171-4421-1
- ISBN 1-84536-003-6
- ^ Cusack, A. What Rome Teaches (1892); The Black Pope: History of the Jesuits(1896); Revolution and War, the secret conspiracy of the Jesuits in Great Britain (published posthumously, 1910).
- ^ "The Nun of Kenmare". Catholic Digest. 1 November 2010. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ "MIXED MARRIAGES IN IRELAND. (Hansard, 7 February 1911)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ "MARRIAGE LAW—THE "NE TEMERE" DECREE. (Hansard, 28 February 1911)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ "Home Rule and Rome Rule by Harry Quelch 1902". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ "James Connolly: Labour in Irish History - Chapter 16". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.44
- ISBN 0-7171-0645-4
- ISBN 0-09-113100-6
- ^ Stewart, A. T. Q.: p.56
- ^ "RELIGIOUS EQUALITY. (Hansard, 11 April 1912)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ "DIFP - Documents on IRISH FOREIGN POLICY". www.difp.ie. Archived from the original on 18 November 2017. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ Fourthwrite article
- ^ Irish Times, 30 March 1971, page 13.
- ^ "The age of our craven deference is finally over". independent. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ Paisley's intervention can be found on YouTube.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 11 April 2020.
- ^ The age of our craven deference is finally over, the Sunday Independent, Dublin, 6 December 2009.