THE DUBLIN REVIEW. JULY, 1869. ART. I.-THE EARLY IRISH CHURCH. Essays on the Origin, Doctrines, and Discipline of the Early Irish Church. By the Rev. Dr. MORAN, Vice-Rector of the Irish College, Rome. 1864. THE Duffy, HE British Parliament is not always a safe school of history. A statement in Hume apt for present debate is used without inquiry; whether since confirmed or confuted, it passes current in the House, and though its inaccuracy be afterwards proved, the misstatement has meanwhile travelled far and wide on the wings of the daily press to the newspaper readers of the kingdom, and truth in a pamphlet labours in vain to overtake it. The error floats in the superficial recollection of the many, whilst the authentic correction is stored but in the libraries and the memory of the few. More than twenty years ago Lord John Manners, in a debate on "the Irish Arms Bill," stated "that the Roman Catholic Church was not the Church of the Irish people originally; that Church was for hundreds of years independent of Rome, and it was not till an English king conquered Ireland that the supremacy of the Pope was acknowledged by it." Lord John Manners added, "This is no curious opinion, tortured out of obscure records, but is a received fact, stated in strong terms, among other historians, by Mr. O'Driscoll, a Roman Catholic himself." Dr. Rock, in his then letter to Lord John Manners, acknowledged that he did not know what might be the religious belief of Mr. O'Driscoll. It is a pity that Dr. Rock did not refer to Mr. O'Driscoll's "Views of Ireland," because he would at once have ascertained that Mr. O'Driscoll was an avowed and strong Protestant ! Yet Lord John Manners, upon the strength of Mr. O'Driscoll's Irish name (for nothing else in him or his book savours of Catholicity), quoted him as a Catholic authority, adequate to transmute a "curious opinion" into a "received fact." And such is the VOL. XIII.-NO. xxv. [New Series.] B parentage of many received facts in the British Parliament and in English society! Last year this curious opinion was re-announced by the Archbishop of Armagh in his charge, and by the Bishop of Oxford in the House of Lords; its echo was heard on many hustings at the last election, and it has doubtless been received as a fact by most of the clergy and half the people of England. Even if true it would be useless as an argument, since the length of ecclesiastical possession by Catholics in Ireland previous to the Reformation is admitted to have been at least equal to that of Protestants since; and whether, therefore, the Catholic Church had existed in Ireland for four hundred or for fourteen hundred years before the Reformation, its right by possession was then, even according to the Protestant view, more venerable than that of the Irish Established Church is now. But the statement, though argumentatively useless if true, is positively untrue, nay, the very opposite to the fact; for, as Dr. Rock had proved before, Dr. Moran proves again, and more completely from the further evidence which has during the last twenty years come to light, and chiefly from Protestant sources, that S. Patrick was a Catholic, and a Roman Catholic, and that the Irish, his spiritual children, were and ever continued to be Catholics, in communion with the See of Rome, professing the distinctive doctrines and habituated to the distinctive practices of the Catholic Church, and that not a single Protestant doctrine or Protestant practice prevailed amongst them. The Bishop of Oxford at the same time mentioned that S. Patrick himself informs us that his father and grandfather were, the one a priest, and the other a deacon; this and the extract from an old Irish canon, to which we shall next refer, form the most plausible grounds of inference on the Protestant side we have yet seen, though these relate to discipline only-and even these grounds disappear when they come to be examined. S. Patrick does mention the fact alluded to, but that it was the custom of priests and deacons then to marry by no means follows, any more than it would follow that, because the late Cardinal Weld had a daughter well known in English society, therefore it is the present custom for cardinals to marry. It is no very unfrequent circumstance for a layman left a widower with a child to become a priest; the only thing extraordinary is if it happened to have occurred with both father and son, and perhaps it was just because it was extraordinary that his father and grandfather should have been, the one a priest and the other a deacon, that S. Patrick mentioned it. Dr. Todd writes thus :-"The following canon, the sixth of this synod, seems to have been enacted before the celibacy of the clergy was enforced in Ireland: What cleric soever or if his wife does not walk with her head veiled, let them (i. e., the clerk and his wife) be despised by the laity, and also separated from the Church.' That Dr. Todd has been misled by an erroneous copy of the language of the canon would appear from the following remarks of Dr. Moran: Dr. Todd supposes that the second part of the sixth canon above cited has relation to the clerk's wife; the original words, as quoted by him, of the text seem, indeed, to leave no doubt on this head: since, after speaking of quicunque clericus, it adds et uxor ejus. However, to say the least of it, Dr. Todd does not display his usual candour in this argument. When citing the original Latin text he refers to Martene's edition, and yet he forgets to mention that the word ejus (on which his own argument entirely rests) is omitted in Martene's text. If this word were supposed to form part of the original text it would supply an additional argument for the antiquity of these canons, as we should suppose these canons to have been enacted at a time when very many were assumed from the marriage state to the sacerdotal dignity, and when, consequently, a special enactment was required regarding the wives from whom the clergy should separate themselves, according to the disciplinary law of celibacy rigorously observed in our early Church. However this formula, uxor ejus, occurs only in the text of Spelman, from whose edition it was copied by Ware and some others. The MS. from which Spelman took this text seems to have been of the eleventh century; and he himself assures us that it was corrupt in many places, pluries malesanum, and standing in absolute need of critical correction, et in locis quibusdam criticorum implorsus sagacitatem. On the other hand, we have an accurate text of this ancient decree, viz., as it is recorded in the "Collectio Hibernensis Canonum," one of the most authentic of our ecclesiastical monuments, and dating from the year 700. Now, in this valuable record the canon of our apostle is thus quoted : "Patricius: quicunque clericus ab ostiario usque ad sacerdotem, si non tunica usus fuerit, quæ turpitudinem ventris tegat et nuditatem, et si non more Romano capilli ejus tonsi sint: et uxor si non velato capite ambulaverit, pariter a laicis contemnentur et ab ecclesia separentur." "Patrick decreed : Whatsoever cleric, from an ostiarius to a priest, who shall not wear a tunic to cover his nakedness, and whose hair is not shorn according to the custom of Rome; and a wife appearing in public with an unveiled head, shall be alike despised by the laity, and separated from the Church." Thus, then, there is nothing in the ancient canon of S. Patrick about the "clerk and his wife," but whilst the first part of the canon presents an enactment regarding the clergy, the second part prescribes that married women, too, should adopt the law of Rome, and that only when veiled should they appear in public. In the Roman Church, as we learn from S. Jerome, the veil was worn by virgins consecrated to God, as a sign of their being espoused to Christ, and by married females, in signum obedien |