o co-operate with them under
the pretext of a "national" movement, is surely a thing equally
intolerable by the Church and dangerous to the cause of Irish autonomy.
This I am glad to say is strongly felt, and has been on more than one
occasion very vigorously stated by one of the most eminent and estimable
of Irish ecclesiastics, the Bishop-Coadjutor of Clonfert, upon whom I
called this morning. Dr. Healy, who is a senator of the Royal University
of Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, presides over that
part of the diocese of Clonfort which includes Portumna and Woodford. He
lives in a handsome and commodious, but simple and unpretentious house,
set in ample grounds well-planted, and commanding a wide view of a most
agreeable country. We were ushered into a well-furnished study, and the
bishop came in at once to greet us with the most cordial courtesy. He is
a frank, dignified, unaffected man, and in his becoming episcopal
purple, with the gold chain and cross, looked every inch a bishop. I was
particularly anxious to see Dr. Healy, as a type of the high-minded and
courageous ecclesiastics who, in Ireland, have resolutely refused to
subordinate their duties and their authority as ecclesiastics to the
convenience and the policy of an organisation absolutely controlled by
Mr. Parnell, who not only is not a Catholic, but who is an open ally and
associate of the bitterest enemies of the Catholic Church in France and
in England. Protestant historians affirm that Pope Innocent was one of
the financial backers of William of Orange when he set sail from Holland
to crush the Catholic faith in Great Britain and Ireland, and drive the
Catholic house of Stuart into exile. But it was reserved for the
nineteenth century to witness the strange spectacle of men, calling
themselves Irishmen and Catholics, deliberately slandering and assailing
in concord with a non-Catholic political leader the consecrated pastors
and masters of the Church in Ireland. When in order to explain what they
themselves concede to be "the absence from the popular ranks of the best
of the priesthood," Nationalist writers find it necessary to denounce
Cardinal Cullen and Cardinal M'Cabe as "anti-Irish "; and to sneer at
men like Dr. Healy as "Castle Bishops," it is impossible not to be
reminded of the three "patriotic" tailors of Tooley Street.

Bishop Healy looks upon the systematic development of a substantial
peasant proprietary throughout Ireland