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DR. EOIN MACNEILL
The Chief Living Historian of Ireland
"I strange, said a friend of mine the everyday, that Ireland has no contemporary Catholic writers such as England has. For instance, she has no Belloce or Christopher Dawson or Maurice Baring."
I answered, saying: "How many contemporary Catholic writers in Ireland do you know of? Do you know of half a dozen? I don't want to you to name Yeats or Joyce or Sean O'Casey. For they, of course, aren't Catholic or counterparts of the three English writers you mentioned."
He did not know half a dozen Irish Catholic writers. He did not know that the most promising Catholic poet writing in English was a young Irishman. He did not know that there was a Catholic cultural fermentation in Ireland which is doing, and will do, remarkable things for the Faith and mankind. That it is a leaven working in many gifted men and a woman.
Those of us who take an interest in Catholic literature and its contemporary writers must, more than once, have heard such an assertion as that of my friend, whose blood and name, by the way, are Irish, but who has not the opportunity to keep abreast of what is being done in Ireland to aid the Faith and to create beauty through the written word.
How can one form an opinion on such a matter by reading solely, or almost solely, of Catholic writers in England and of what they have accomplished, however splendid and worthy?
There is no foundation for the forming of an opinion in ignorance, though that inane thing—for empty it is—is an excellent, if unsubstantial, foundation for a prejudice.
A RADICAL POINT.
Another point—and one that is radical—Ireland is a Catholic country. There is no Catholic minority in that literally faith-ful land. It was not necessary for gifted writers there, forming an intellectual Catholic spearhead, to attack such long as in Britain maintained the long dominance of false "history" assertively, if unhistorically and profoundly, Protestant.
There was an atmosphere in England in which Catholics found it difficult to breathe. The foulness of this counterfeit history had to be blown away. Indeed, much that is noisome still remains, though, unfortunately, it does not stink in the nostrils of most of the English people. For instance, so far from Dean Inge's being affected by anything coming between the wind and his gentility, that dignitary regards the mephitic Protestant version of history as being fragrance itself.
There was a cleaner, a more wholesome atmosphere in Ireland. There was, of course, a political and economic domination, cruel and ruthless, to be fought. It was against this that Irish writers directed their vigilance, industry and literary powers.
They were true to the ancient Faith where. There was no people had been for to write books for the conversion of their fellow-countrymen. But there was pressing need, life-or-death need, for them to light, with the brand of burning words, a fire in the hearts of their people against the alien persecution and conversion practised on them—the faith—by those whose forebears were faithless.
GREATNESS TO COME.
But Ireland has ever been a land of scribe and scholar. Learning, for its own sake, was always a tradition with its people. They were, it can be said with little exaggeration, a nation of classicists when the people of some other lands, even if they had a literature, did not know it.
That tradition, and the spirit which springs from it, are an animating impulse in the Ireland of to-day.
With the road cleared, or being cleared, that leads to nationhood untrammelled and untyrannised, there is, as I have said, a cultural fermentation in Ireland to-day which works to the accomplishment of much, the greatness of which can only be guessed at.
To me, watching this development with high interest and, may I say, delight, this is as plain as the pre-election moves now being made at Can-
berra in a Parliament already in the uninviting wordy throes of approaching dissolution.
AN ISSUE JOINED.
My friend, whose acquaintance with Catholic Irish writers of standing of to-day was deficient, mentioned the name of Mr. Christopher Dawson, that able English writer of our day, whose work of scholarly distinction and literary quality has exerted much influence.
In advancing the point I am trying to make I may usefully couple the names of Mr. Dawson and an Irish Catholic writer of importance, Professor Eoin MacNeill, whose Irish historical studies place him at the head and front of Celtologists.
Mr. Christopher Dawson's "Glorification of the Roman Conquests" and his unhistorical representation that non-Roman peoples were "tribal" and, for that reason, inferior, have been successfully controverted by Dr. McNeill.
Writing on the old Celtic religion in pre-Christian Ireland, Dr. MacNeill "demolished the idea of the druids as a priesthood that presided over human sacrifice, a Western medicine-man," and showed that they were, in truth, a guild, or other of philosophic scholars. The druids were the shapers of a culture opposed to that of Imperial Rome, and hated by the Casars as an obstacle to their aim, debellare superbos. That culture is hard to reconstruct, but it, like the Graeco-Roman culture on the Continent, left its mark on later Christian development.
As Mr. Aodh de Blacam points out in an article from which I take that extract, Dr. MacNeill's judgment has been developed powerfully by Rev. Fr. J. Ryan, S.J., in his "Irish Monasticism," wherein it is argued that the close union of study with devotion in the Irish monasteries came from the racial tradition of learning, to which I have referred.
NEEDS "DE-BUNKING."
This contrast between the Imperial world and the Irish Christian long engrooted in Celtic culture, has long engaged the attention and unsurpassed historical aptitude of Dr. MacNeill. The superior features of Celtic institutions, as unanswerably presented in his writings, have not only deeply impressed scholars, but thrown new and true light upon much formerly obscure and grossly misrepresented. It is those who oppose the designedly fostered false notion of the ineffectuality and impractical dreaminess of the Celt.
Moreover, "it must be noted . . . that MacNeill's incidental writings on Celtic
Britain and Gaul have set these lands in a new light, not less than Ireland."
That Graeco-Roman culture was an enormous influence in history and civilisation is above the din and debate of controversy. However, it is not to take from that culture to claim that it was exaggerated classical enthusiasm has magnified its true influence. It has unduly and unhistorically been exalted and glorified. After all, it was not the source of every historical phase of Western culture. It needs "de-bunking"—not the less to assure its own merit.
DEVOTION TO ROMAN LEARNING.
Writing directly against "certain statements in Mr. Dawson's writings, Dr. MacNeill says, in "Early Irish Laws and Institutions":
The worship of success, the worship of bigness, the worship of the State—we may say, in short, the worship of the Beast and his image—it is in the spirit of this absesent that the history of the Roman power has been written, and no historian has yet faced the other side of the picture, the amount of steam-rolling of humanity that went to make up the "Pax Romana."
With all that can be said in its favour, the "Pax Romana" would have been an immense calomity for civilisation and for mankind if God in his providence had not made the Roman power a medium for the propagation of Christianity.
Though Ireland was never brought under the Roman power—never

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Capuchin
Annual
THE CAPUCHIN ANNUAL, 1949.
Edited by Father Senan,
O.F.M.Cap. One Guinea.
THE 1949 Capuchin Annual
(published to-day) is bigger, better and brighter than ever. To give even a list of its various features and a detailed account of its many magnificent illustrations would put a severe tax on an overcrowded Christmas Book Page. One has, therefore, to be selective.
A personal choice of articles would include the following: "My Earliest Irish Friends," by Mrs. William O'Brien (still happily able to wield an active pen), in which figures like Canon Sheehan, Michael Davitt and Archbishop Croke live again; "The Jacobite War in Ireland," by Sir Charles Petrie; "Pastor Angelicus," by the Editor, which is a revealing study of Pope Pius XII, accompanied by as fine a gallery of pictures as have ever appeared in an Irish magazine; "James Clarence Mangan," by Aodh de Blacam; "Melleray Afternoon," a charming sketch by J. F. Reynolds; "Seumas O'Kelly," by Aidan O'Hanlon, in which justice is done to the memory of one of our best modern writers, and a survey of the last fifty years of Irish painting by Thomas McGreivy.
The pièce de resistance of the art section is the collection of 48 full-page photographs by Adolf Morath. They include His Grace the Archbishop of Armagh, the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste, the Ceann Comhairle, the Minister for External Affairs, Mr. de Valera, Senator Margaret Pearse, Madame Gonne MacBride, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Jack Yeats, Rev. Dr. Patrick Browne, Mr. Daniel Corkery, Mr. D. L. Kelleher, Mr. Joseph McGrath, Gen. Aodh MacNeill, Robert and Mrs. Montieth, and many other notabilities. They are all superb examples of the modern photographic art.
J. M. B.