No Pope in Politics? Britain, the Vatican, and the "Irish Lacordaire" at the Creation of Edward Cardinal McCabe, 1882

Abstract

No Pope in Politics?Britain, the Vatican, and the "Irish Lacordaire" at the Creation of Edward Cardinal McCabe, 1882 Mary McCain (bio) On May 28, 1882, Ireland's most famous Catholic preacher ascended the pulpit in the procathedral in Dublin, hoping to redirect the minds and hearts of his auditors toward Rome. Before a large congregation gathered for the first time with their newly elevated cardinal, Edward McCabe, the famous Dominican priest Thomas N. Burke delivered an address full of his characteristic eloquence, but also carrying two very pointed messages: first, that Pope Leo XIII had elevated McCabe to the College of Cardinals without any secular motive or hope for political gain; and second, that the future happiness of the Irish people depended on their continuing practice of the kind of Catholicism they had been encouraged in and directed to adopt by McCabe's predecessor, Paul Cardinal Cullen.1 That either of these points needed to be asserted, let alone roundly defended, on such an occasion suggests that the four years since Cullen's death in 1878 had wrought significant change in his Church. The change came not in terms of Catholic religious practice but in the sphere of secular politics, as increasing numbers of the laity became much more directly engaged in insisting that the British provide and implement a satisfactory answer to the land question. As this article will demonstrate, Burke was not fully in sympathy with this new approach of activism and agitation, and the analysis of why this was so will illustrate that, though Cullen's reforms in Irish religious practice would long outlast his death, the de facto settlement he had achieved in terms of the secular, political questions of the nineteenth century would be altered. This analysis will support the argument that after Cullen, the institutional Church recognized and responded to a need, in Emmet Larkin's apt phrase, to "change its focus."2 Two sermons that [End Page 122] Burke composed for McCabe's elevation, the one he delivered and the one he prepared but chose not to make public, will shed light on the discussion.3 Burke, a member of the Dominican order of priests, had been one of the most important heralds of the devotional revolution for more than two decades and was often Cullen's choice for key ecclesiastical celebrations. It should quickly be added, however, that the relationship flourished because the two men were largely in sympathy on both religious and secular matters; Cullen did not direct or supervise either Burke's calendar or the content of his sermons. Called "the Irish Lacordaire" earlier in his career, after the famous French Dominican of the previous generation known throughout the Catholic world for his eloquence, Burke likely watched the Land War unfold with increasing unease. Like Cullen, Burke had witnessed the effects of highly assertive nationalism while living in Italy. And, like Cullen, Burke feared the results of any similar movement taking hold in Ireland. When the time came to welcome the new Cardinal McCabe home, a strange coincidence of timing served to exacerbate Burke's fears. Because the cardinal archbishop had stayed in Rome for several weeks after his March elevation, the celebration of his new office was complicated by, and temporarily paired—in Burke's mind, if not also in the public's—with the Phoenix Park murders on May 6, 1882. The assassinations of Lord Frederick Cavendish on the day he arrived to take up his duties as chief secretary and of the longtime civil servant Thomas H. Burke were shocking, totally unexpected, highly unusual in the Irish context, and repellent to all quarters of public opinion.4 The coincidence forced Burke to confront the immediate problem of gross political violence alongside his increasing concern that his fellow Catholics' adherence to Rome was weakening. Burke himself was deeply shaken by the murders from the moment they were reported. The sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Burke (who was not a direct relation of the murder victim or of the preacher) had coincidentally returned to Dublin from convent school in England on the day of the assassinations. The next day, a Sunday, the teenager, who would soon marry the Earl...