The Bishops Against Him

Everybody assumes the Catholic Church ran Irish temperance. A friar in the front of the story, a pledge that looks like a sacrament, medals with saints on them, the Pioneer pin on a lapel at Mass.

It is not what happened.

Most of the Irish bishops were against Theobald Mathew, some of them actively, and they beat him. What the Church ran was the movement that came fifty years later, and it was a different animal built for a different purpose.

1838. Who was actually with him

Take the count first, because it is more balanced than the argument that follows.

Perhaps a third of the priests of Ireland took the pledge themselves. That is a great many men, and at parish level the movement had real clerical weight behind it.

Among the bishops the picture changes. At least ten of the twenty seven supported him actively, including Bishop John Ryan of Limerick and Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin, the man who had ordained him. Archbishop Michael Slattery of Cashel was in favour, in a lukewarm sort of way. [1]

Ten of twenty seven is not nothing. It is also not a majority, and the other seventeen ranged from indifferent to hostile.

The Archbishop of Tuam

His fiercest opponent was John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, the most formidable churchman in Ireland and the one with the largest following in the west.

MacHale shut Mathew out of his diocese.

The immediate cause was a dispute about money. Underneath it were disagreements about education and about politics, which were the two subjects MacHale cared about most and on which Mathew had declined to take a side.

The effect was geographic and it is worth stating plainly. The province where drink did the most damage, and where the poverty was deepest, was closed to the temperance crusade by its own archbishop.

1843. The letter to Rome

Opposition was not only Irish and not only spoken.

In 1843 an English Catholic named Thomas Chisholm Anstey sent Rome a forty three page affidavit condemning the movement.

The objections in circulation at the time are worth setting out, because they were not all bad faith.

The pledge looked like a vow, and a vow is a serious matter in canon law to be taken with counsel, not sworn by ten thousand people in a field in an afternoon.

The medals worried people more. Ordinary people had begun attributing healing power to them, which Mathew discouraged and could not stop. To a bishop that is superstition attaching itself to a devotional object, and to a Protestant polemicist it was proof of everything ever said about Rome.

And the scale of the thing frightened them. One friar could summon crowds no bishop could summon, and he was not answerable to any of them.

1842. Three refusals

The opposition was not rhetorical. It acted three times, and each time it cost him something he needed.

When Rome asked the Irish archbishops for an assessment, with a papal endorsement in prospect, they sent back lukewarm appraisals. No endorsement followed.

In 1842 a public fund was raised in his name, the Mathew Testimonial, at the moment his finances were failing. The bishops would not support it. Two years later he was in a debtors cell.

And in 1847 the diocese of Cork fell vacant. The parish priests of Cork voted, and gave Mathew more votes than any other candidate. The bishops passed him over. [2]

A historian who has gone through this sequence concludes that the bench had decided to sacrifice the temperance movement on the altar of unity. [3]

Why unity beat temperance

That phrase deserves unpacking, because the bishops were not villains and their reasoning was not stupid.

The Irish Catholic Church of the 1840s was rebuilding itself after two centuries in which it had been illegal. It was fighting for control of education, negotiating with a Protestant state, and holding together a hierarchy that disagreed violently about politics.

Into that walked a friar with millions of followers, no institutional position, a Quaker at his elbow, a tendency to attract crowds that looked like a political force, and an absolute refusal to declare himself on Repeal.

From the bench he did not look like an asset. He looked like a risk they had not authorised.

So they let him fall. And the movement, having no structure but him, fell with him.

1898. Doing it properly

Fifty years later the Church took temperance up again, and the contrast tells you exactly what the bishops had objected to.

The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association was founded in 1898 by a Jesuit. It ran as a Jesuit apostolate for about a hundred and twenty years. It had a probationary period, a devotional structure, a pin and a clear line of authority.

It was inside the institution, and it lasted a century.

Mathew's crusade was outside the institution, and it lasted six years.

That is the lesson the Irish Church drew, and on its own terms it was correct. What it cost was the thing Mathew had that the Pioneers never came close to. In three years he halved the drinking of a nation. The Pioneers, for all their hundred years and their half million members, never moved a national figure at all.