Enter Michael Davies...

 My first meeting with Michael Davies was the first time I did the Paris-Chartres walk.  This was in 1995.  I went with the Baden-Württemberg chapter, but I spent time with the British and American chapters too, and did my best to connect with people.  There was no Irish chapter at this stage, but there were a group of Irish people with the British chapter - this was organised by the Brandsma Review.  Michael Davies was walking with the American chapter organised The Remnant newspaper.

So the fact he was going to address the Ecclesia Dei Ireland AGM was something to look forward too.  He gave a talk about the Prayer Book revolt in Cornwall in the reign of Edward VI.  This was an interesting talk in itself but it was the rest of the meeting which exposed the weakness of Ecclesia Dei Ireland.  I am going to do a further post of the issue of Requiem Masses, especially in the Archdiocese of Dublin, but at this point, I will just describe the proceedings of the EDI meeting.  A number of people had received permission in writing to have the traditional Mass for their funerals.  This sparked a lively discussion.  At some point in the deliberations, somebody raised the question of traditional Extreme Unction.

The trouble about all this was first of all, it made a statement about the age and priorities of the group.  I have no idea how Michael Davies reacted to it.  Secondly, a lot of the petitioning was personalised.  There was no place here for developing strategies or tactics to get the traditional Mass to places it was.  The SSPX made its presence felt and I saw a couple more or less monopolise him after Mass the following day.

In the course of the meeting, the AGM voted to affiliate with the FIUV, of which Michael was then the president.  I thought this was curious.  Three years before this was voted down.  Two years before, the vote wasn't put because the society voted not to amend its constitution to exclude clergy from governing positions.  This year, that issue wasn't addressed and remained unaddressed.  But Michael was never very interested in legal niceties.  EDI applied for membership of the FIUV.

Michael Davies came to Ireland with a dual purpose.  EDI only made up one part of this.  The other was the proposal to re-order Carlow Cathedral.  Most older Irish churches, let alone cathedrals, suffered some vandalism in the name of the Second Vatican Council, but this topic would require a blog in its own right to cover the problem.  Carlow Cathedral was one of the few Irish cathedrals which was unscathed and the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, Laurence Ryan, was determined he was not going to allow this distinction continue.  

The resistance group in Carlow were more determined and most of them had petitioned for the traditional Mass shortly before.  Michael certainly encouraged them and they got straight to work.  There would be a few more years of campaigning which ended up in a High Court action.  But that is all ahead of us.

Not in a vacuum: Some background

 I could work on a book about the background to the development of the Latin Mass movement in Ireland.  But at some point background information becomes an obstacle rather than an aid.

However, there was a particular trigger which had a lot of influence on the development of the traditional movement operating within Irish Church structures.  Rather there were two triggers, but both happened in 1992.

The first wall Irish Catholicism hit was the X-Case in February 1992.  In September 1983, the Eighth Amendment was enshrined in the Irish Constitution, guaranteeing the right to life of the unborn child.  Around 1992, a 14-year old rape victim's family approached Gardaí and asked could they take DNA samples from the unborn child, which they intended to have aborted, from Britain to assist in the case for the prosecution of the alleged rapist (who was subsequently convicted).  The Attorney General sought to an injunction to prevent the girl from travelling to Britain for an abortion and the High Court granted this.  Amid many protests, the Supreme Court upheld the girl's appeal as the Constitution gave due regard to the equal right to life of the mother and the girl had threatened suicide.  This brought the issue of the eighth amendment under the radar.

In May 1992, the Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh, Mgr Éamon Casey resigned following revelations he fathered a child with a US divorcee eighteen years previously.  Casey was a high profile prelate in Ireland and very much seen as a progressive, especially due to his activism in regard to US foreign policy in Latin America.  But his resignation came as a shock, however minor it was in comparison to scandals yet to unfold.

The twin crises released a strain of energy across Ireland which could have been channeled into something powerful, but leadership wasn't there.  However, I personally became more focused on the faith and its position in Ireland at the time.  One publication that emerged came from Mullingar and it was entitled The Democrat.  It was a weekly newspaper which was traditionally Catholic and nationalist.  At the time, The Irish Catholic was very weak, with a very soft focus editor Brigid Anne Ryan.  The newspaper felt the competition.  Within months, it adopted the name The Irish Democrat, but it slowly ran out of steam. 

In June that year, another publication emerged.  This was The Brandsma Review.  Through the 1980s, there was a small circulation magazine called The Ballintrillick Review which was based in Ballintrillick, Co Sligo and was edited by an New Yorker named Doris Manly who died around 1991.  The Brandsma Review took up where The Ballintrillick Review left off.  But there was one important difference.  The Brandsma's editor Nick Lowry was active in the LMSI/EDI.  The masthead of the Brandsma was Pro Vita, Pro Ecclesia Dei et Pro Hibernia which of course means for life, for the Church of God and for Ireland, but Ecclesia Dei was to refer to Pope John Paul's apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei Adflicta.  This magazine was to be very important to the pro-life and pro-traditional Mass cause which was placed under the patronage of the Dutch Carmelite martyr Blessed Titus Brandsma.  Blessed Titus had a connection with Ireland too, as he studied English in Dublin's Whitefriars St and in Kinsale in the early 1930s.  My association with the magazine began in January 1993 and in 2012, I became editor.  

The principal role of The Brandsma Review was to be a reference point for traditionally minded Catholics in Ireland.  It still is, though perhaps not to the extent it could be. I have to say I was always grateful to have it in the heat of the fight.

Stonewalled petitions - sample

 I don't why I put myself forward for committee membership of Ecclesia Dei Ireland.  I believe it was in the year 1993-94, but it could easily have been the following year.  But I think I am right because I recall being off the committee two years before being re-elected (I didn't stand; and I don't think it would have looked very good for the society to have had its youngest committee member standing down at the AGM Michael Davies addressed in 1995.  My reasons for stepping down was because I believed that I was wasting my time on the committee.  But that is jumping ahead in the narrative.

In the course of the year, I attended monthly meetings which could be long and drawn out with very little substantive business conducted.  I do remember two dioceses discussed.  Cork and Ross had a particular significance as the EDI secretary Nuala Ramsay was a native of Cork.  Bishop Murphy, as I have said, is alleged to have said a traditional Latin Mass would only take place in Cork over his dead body (I'm told then Archbishop Connell's reaction was to say "That can be arranged").  Eventually a compromise was reached in Cork by the SMA priest Father Thomas Higgins saying Mass daily in the SMA house in Blackrock in the early hours of the morning, but it did mean that it was possible to attend Mass in Cork.

The Kildare and Leighlin diocese was a lot more engaged, and at one point a delegation from Carlow joined us at the committee meeting.  There were two petitions advancing in the diocese - one in Carlow and the other in Newbridge.  I saw what was going on in Carlow.  I was aware that the Newbridge petition was driven by a teenager (Thomas Murphy), but I knew little more about it.  Carlow had a group of people who were apparently serious.  There was a certain back and forth with the bishop, who at the time was Laurence Ryan.  

I think there were dynamics in place in the diocese which militated against any entertainment of a petition.  One was the presence of the National Liturgy Centre in St Patrick's College, Carlow.  I am not sure to what degree St Patrick's College was functioning as a seminary at the time (in these few years St Patrick's in Carlow, St Kieran's in Kilkenny, St Peter's in Wexford and St John's in Waterford would all close their doors), but the college was the source of every liturgical, or rather non-liturgical nonsense visited on Ireland's parishes at the time.  I have also heard allegations about the bishop's lack of faith but as I never knew him personally, I can't comment.

The petitioners in Carlow submitted a petition to which the bishop responded that he did not believe he could ask a priest to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass and he asked the petitioners if they could find any.  The petitioners soon found two diocesan priests and two religious willing to say the Mass and gave the bishop the names.  The response was that one of the religious was outside the diocese and the bishop said "I don't know of him" and the other religious was in the diocese "but he may not be always in the diocese".  Of the two diocesan priests, he said that he contacted both of them and that they did not wish to say the Mass, one expressing surprise that he was even nominated.

The petitioners contacted both priests.  The bishop contacted the first priest and upbraided him aggressively for having anything to do with the petitioners and left him in no doubt that no permission would be forthcoming.  That priest contacted his colleague and warned him, so the other priest greeted the bishop with a denial (not a direct lie, but an effort to distance himself from the petition), but the bishop gave out to him anyway.  The petitioners knew where they stood.

The efforts to get a traditional Mass in the diocese took a back seat in Carlow as the issue of re-ordering the cathedral came up the following year.  Newbridge had its own problems.  The bishop would not apply for an auxilliary as he was worried the Pope would impose a conservative on him and was no longer up to doing all the confirmations.  He chose Newbridge as the pilot parish to have the priest confirming the children.  This generated a storm in its own right and the bishop/clergy did not distinguish themselves in their efforts at communication with the flock.

The first item on the agenda..

 I think it was Brendan Behan who said the first item on the agenda of any Irish organisation was the split.  Traditional Catholics are notoriously fractious the world over.  I know there was controversy on the LMSI/EDI committee at a very early stage, but the first major problem to arise was around the character of Father Pádraig Ó Fithchill.

Even before any question was raised, the fact that the society was headed by a priest caused an immediate problem.  The international federation of lay Catholics seeking the traditional Mass and sacraments, Federatio Internationalis Una Voce was precisely that, a lay organisation.  I suspect no one in Ireland was aware of how much of a problem this was.  In the late 1980s, the most active organisation in the federation was Una Voce Canada.  UV Canada was eventually expelled from the Federation, when its president, Jim Scheer was ordained to the permanent diaconate.  However, Fr Pádraig Ó Fithchill was a priest.  Most people suggested he was an Augustinian (he told me he was an Augustinian tertiary, associated with the Order's Canadian province and also that he did novitiate in Clare Priory in England.  Clare Priory was only used as a novitiate for two years, but it was plausible that he was there given his age.) 

However, he was a priest of the Birmingham Archdiocese.  It's interesting that many people suspended the normal question about a priest using the Irish version of his name: what's his name in English?  I have to say I only guessed when someone put the question to me in a very loaded manner.  His name was Patrick Fell.  You can read about his conviction and time in prison in the link.  I have to say I have strong reasons to believe that this was another miscarriage of justice and I don't believe he was O.C. of a Provisional IRA active service unit.  That's beside the point.  Much later I was faced with a situation I was desperately looking for priests to offer the EF Mass and I knew Father Ó Fithchill was happy to do so, but I also knew to use him would cause me more trouble.  The matter of the organisation's affiliation with the FIUV did not hinge on Father Ó Fithchill's priesthood alone: the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales were well aware of Father Ó Fithchill's background.  For that reason, they were very wary of having any connexion with the new Irish body.  

But at the AGM of Ecclesia Dei Ireland in 1994, a proposal was made to change the constitution to enable the body affiliate with the FIUV.  Though this was not personalised, the motion was voted down.  For some attendants, the matter was simple.  In many parts of Ireland at that stage, priests played an active role in community life even outside pastoral life.  For example, it was not unusual to find a parish priest chairing the local Gaelic Athletic Association club in many rural parishes.  So many people found it perplexing that a priest could or should be excluded from an executive role in a specifically religious body like the LMSI/EDI.  One speaker said very clearly that if the FIUV had a problem with EDI being chaired by a priest, then the problem lay with them.  So the motion was defeated.

In the event, Father Ó Fithchill resigned as Honorary President of the society, a role he was given when he resigned as chairman two years earlier.

Kerry: First stumbling block

 The Irish bishops attended an Ad Limina meeting in 1992 where the late Pope St John Paul II principally instructed them on their duty regarding abortion as there was some perception of weakness in the wake of the X Case.  In the course of the meeting, the bishops called on several dicasteries, including the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.  The President of the Commission was Antonio Cardinal Innocenti.  Bishop Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin of Kerry called on the Commission and came away of the opinion, rightly or wrongly, that the Commission would leave arrangements in his diocese up to him without intervention.  In 1993, he received petitions for a regular traditional Mass from Cahirciveen, Killarney and Tralee.  He answered negatively, citing the conversation he had with Cardinal Innocenti.  I am sure the cardinal was delighted with that, especially as the letter addressed to one of the lead petitioners, Mrs Hannah McCarthy in Cahirciveen was featured in the US Latin Mass Magazine, with a commentary by Roger McCaffrey.  

One result of the refusal was the coming of the Society of St Pius X into the Kerry diocese, where they have had Masses at various locations since then.  Renewed petitions to Mgr Ó Súilleabháin, who died in 1994, and his successor Dr William Murphy, got nowhere until after Summorum Pontificum, but that was still a decade and a half away.

I can't say with any certainty that Bishop Ó Súilleabháin's relation of his conversation with the cardinal had any influence over subsequent events.  But what I can say is that after this Kerry petition failed, nothing positive emerged in Ireland between Bishop Ó Súilleabháin's refusal of the Kerry petitions in 1993 and the granting of permission for Mass in Bruckless in Co Donegal in 1999.  There is a strong temptation to conclude post hoc, ergo propter hoc.