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The Preacher and the Prelate. Patricia Byrne
Читать онлайн.Название The Preacher and the Prelate
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isbn 9781785371707
Автор произведения Patricia Byrne
Издательство Ingram
But some of Edward’s associates were unconvinced, warning him that it was a risky and foolhardy venture, a wild speculation originating in a romantic imagination, a project that would be abandoned as soon as it ran into opposition. Moreover, was it wise to sacrifice the interests of his family and career for such an undertaking? ‘What wild goose chase is this that you are going upon to that Island of Achill?’ asked one evangelical-minister colleague.16
Edward was unwavering. He would move to Achill with his wife and children and bring about the moral regeneration of the minds and hearts of the Achill peasantry. His undertaking would face the classic missionary dilemma: to bring the Bible and a ministry of service in education, literacy, medical services and economic development to a wretched people, without trampling on the rituals and way of life which bonded a people together. Despite the obstacles, Edward Nangle was convinced that his island colony could become a model Christian development and a template to demonstrate to the world how to lift a people out of poverty, ignorance and idolatry through an evangelising crusade.
CHAPTER THREE
Bonfires in the West
It was Friday night, on the first day of August 1834, when a heavily laden sailing boat – a traditional hooker – with four passengers on board cast anchor in Dugort Bay in north Achill, where the ghostly figures of a welcome party waited on the strand next to shooting bonfire flames.1 Edward Nangle, his sister-in-law Grace Warner, the Newport rector William Stoney and a female servant stepped ashore and helping hands unloaded the Nangle family’s possessions. This was to be their new home and Eliza would shortly travel from Newport with their three small daughters: Frances, Henie and baby Tilly. Edward and his family had earlier travelled from Ballina, County Mayo, where they had lived in recent years on Home Mission Society work.
In the enveloping Dugort darkness, they could just about make out the vague outline of the work already carried out on the ‘infant settlement’, work that became clear in the morning light. It was a most pleasing vista for Edward: a couple of two-storey slated houses on the western end of the site next to reclaimed and cultivated fields; two more houses emerging from foundations further east; and in between, hillocks of peat marking out an area where yet more buildings would rise. His vision was already taking practical shape in a spectacular mountainside development, the like of which had never before been seen in Achill.
Edward was not the first resident at the Achill Mission colony, for a steward, a schoolmaster and a scripture reader already occupied one of the houses, and the Nangle family would share the second with Joseph Duncan, the assistant missionary. The ground-floor room served as a parlour, drawing room and study during the day, and Joseph Duncan’s bedchamber at night, a situation amusingly described by Edward: ‘Mr Duncan could not retire to rest until we vacated the apartment for the night, nor could we come down in the morning until he had arisen and completed his toilet.’2
The passengers appreciated the warmth of bonfire flames and welcoming hands after their two-day journey from Newport, through Clew Bay, then northward along the eastern edges of Achill and through the treacherous straight at Bullsmouth. Edward was now the full-time permanent head of the Achill Mission, with a growing physical infrastructure and an emerging organisation to drive forward his evangelical mission. He retired to bed in his new home on the flanks of Slievemore with the sounds of the ocean ringing in his ears.
Grace Warner, Eliza Nangle’s sister, is an intermittent and shadowy presence in this story. She landed at Dugort with her brother-in-law before Eliza and her daughters had yet set foot on Achill soil. A young unmarried woman, it appears that she may have divided her time between the home of her widowed mother, Patience, at Marvelstown House, Kilbeg, County Meath, and that of her sister, Eliza, with her growing family. She was in Achill from the start of the Achill Mission, and she would be there at the end of her own life, long after Edward, Eliza and their children had departed the island. In the summer of 1834, Grace made a mountainside house ready for her sister and children.
Edward plunged into his work. Slates arrived by hooker from Westport for the new colony buildings. Prayers and worship took place each morning and evening in both the Irish and English languages. Labourers worked on reclaiming the soil and planting crops, and each Sunday the congregation worshipped in the parlour of the Nangle home. Edward took to the mountain slopes to shoot rabbit for dinner and, all the while, storm clouds were gathering.
***
In the same month that Edward alighted on Dugort strand, the Catholic pontiff, Pope Gregory XVI, then three years into his papacy, made an important announcement in Rome when he confirmed the appointment of John MacHale as Catholic archbishop of Tuam, which included Achill Island in its jurisdiction. There was consternation in Britain that John MacHale would now be among the four most powerful Catholic clerics in Ireland. ‘Anybody but him’, the British prime minister had implored the pontiff, for the political establishment viewed John MacHale as an agitating prelate who inflamed passions at a time when sectarian tensions in Ireland were intense.3 Perhaps nervous of John MacHale’s impetuosity, the Pope warned his new archbishop to maintain ‘in every transaction of your rule singular prudence, moderation of spirit, and the greatest care for peace and beneficial quiet’.4 The archbishop’s tenure in Tuam could not have been more different in action and in tone from that recommended by his pontiff.
John MacHale was a tall, lean, athletic man fired with a colossal energy. Born a decade before Edward Nangle in the shadows of Nephin Mountain, County Mayo, he shared Edward’s experience of having lost his mother as a child. He was a prominent, assertive, Irish-educated Catholic cleric, who had already made his mark as a scholar, teacher and vigorous public speaker and writer. He and Edward had crossed swords before Edward’s arrival in Achill in truculent public exchanges that set the tone for their vigorous and uncompromising sparring throughout their long lives.
A year earlier, while both men were based in Ballina, County Mayo, newspapers published an open letter from John MacHale carrying a tirade against Protestantism in Ireland, contrasting its wealth and patronage with the lamentable condition of the people. The established church, he thundered, was ‘the prolific womb from which all the misfortunes of Ireland teemed in fearful succession’.
Edward could not leave John MacHale’s letter unchallenged and he set to work. Each week, throughout the months of August and September, he wrote a long letter of reply, defending the established church and venting a full-blooded condemnation of the evils of Irish Catholicism. The language bristled with frenzy and hysteria, conveying the sense of one teetering on the brink, such was the fierceness of emotion and hostility in the letters.
In a breathless diatribe, Edward condemned the practices of Roman Catholicism, its ‘masses, and purgatory, and penances, and pilgrimages, and priestly pardons, and crucifixes, and holy ashes, clay, candles, bones, teeth, hair, nails, rings, cords, scapulars, and all other thrash and filth, which has become encrusted on it from the muddy stream of a corrupt and sinful world’.
All the religious and folk practices of the people were derided and demeaned in a vitriolic rant.
His most vehement condemnation was aimed at the most central and revered of Catholic beliefs: the mass and the Eucharist. How, he asked, could a mere wafer, ‘a bit of senseless, motionless paste’, be worshipped in a most odious practice? Provocatively, he queried if such a belief indicated that Catholicism condoned cannibalism.
Edward was furious that John MacHale did not take the bait by replying publicly to the letters. Is it ‘beneath your dignity to reply to my statements?’ he asked petulantly in his final letter in September. ‘But who is Doctor MacHale? What entitles him to assume such a lofty position of self-exaltation?’5
The tone of the relationship between John MacHale and Edward Nangle was already set. The colony on the slopes of Slievemore would be the dramatic stage on which their raging antagonism would play out as the pair jousted, their words polished and honed with precision in support of each man’s version of the truth. The pair symbolised, in a spectacular way, the social and religious fault lines