OUR CHARITY MUST NOT BE SHOWN ONLY IN PRAYERS

While rejoicing with the results of the prayers of the people of Marseilles for England, Bishop Eugene urges them to take a further step and put their prayers into action for the suffering people of Ireland, who had been suffering for a long time under the effects of the Penal Law as a result of their faith

However, our charity must not be shown only in prayers addressed to Heaven; we come to ask you today to add corporal to your spiritual help. Adjacent to England and under the same empire lives a nation which, with its long suffering and unshakeable firmness in the true religion, has become, one can say, a spectacle to the world, “to angels and to men” [ed 1 Corinthians 4: 9]. 

What the Catholic Church was during the first period of her existence when, in the face of Roman power she confessed in torments the faith of Jesus Christ, Ireland has been in latter times during an equal period. She has been destined to show all that a nation can be in terms of generosity, patience and resignation in a most sorrowful situation. But in the designs of God, the Irish people has not only been an admirable example. Her poverty and suffering, which have been the lot of her fidelity, ought to be all the more appreciable inasmuch as it is at this price that she has been a providential instrument for the propagation of the Faith. Her tears, sometimes mingled with her blood, have given birth to truth.

As a result of their persecution, many Irish had emigrated and wherever they went they had sowed the seeds of their Catholic religion and borne fruit.

To the extent that the population of her island increased extraordinarily, like the children of Israel in Egypt, an emigration commanded by necessity has ceaselessly born it to all the places of the immense possessions of Great Britain, as well as to North America, and thus has laid almost everywhere the first foundations of a Catholic Christianity as well as a leaven by which grace is fermenting the surrounding mass of populations foreign to the true Church.

Bishop Eugene’s Circular Letter to the people of Marseilles, 24 February 1847, EO III Circular n 2

REFLECTION

So many of us have received the roots of our faith through the Irish laity, religious and priests who brought it to our countries and ancestors.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” (Tertullian)