Irish Catholic Martyrs

Irish Catholic Martyrs
Irish Catholic Martyrs formally recognized
Born	Ireland
Died	between 1535 (Venerable John Travers) – 1 July 1681 (Saint Oliver Plunkett), Ireland, England, Wales
Martyred by	Monarchy of England Commonwealth of England, Protectorate of England, First French Republic
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Beatified	3 were beatified on 15 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI 1 was beatified on 22 November 1987 by Pope John Paul II 18 were beatified on 27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II
Canonized	1 (Oliver Plunkett) was canonized on 12 October 1975 by Pope Paul VI
Feast	20 June, various for individual martyrs

Irish Catholic Martyrs (Irish: Mairtírigh Chaitliceacha na hÉireann) were 24 Irish men and women who have been beatified or canonized for both a life of heroic virtue and for dying for their Catholic faith between the reign of King Henry VIII and Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

The more than three century-long religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland came in waves, caused by an overreaction by the State to certain incidents and interspersed with intervals of comparative respite.^[1] Even so, during the worst of times, the Irish people, according to Marcus Tanner, clung to the Mass, "crossed themselves when they passed Protestant ministers on the road, had to be dragged into Protestant churches and put cotton wool in their ears rather than listen to Protestant sermons."^[2]

According to historian and folklorist Seumas MacManus, "Throughout these dreadful centuries, too, the hunted priest -- who in his youth had been smuggled to the Continent of Europe to receive his training -- tended the flame of faith. He lurked like a thief among the hills. On Sundays and Feast Days he celebrated Mass at a rock, on a remote mountainside, while the congregation knelt on the heather of the hillside, under the open heavens. While he said Mass, faithful sentries watched from all the nearby hilltops, to give timely warning of the approaching priest-hunter and his guard of British soldiers. But sometimes the troops came on them unawares, and the Mass Rock was bespattered with his blood, -- and men, women, and children caught in the crime of worshipping God among the rocks, were frequently slaughtered on the mountainside."^[3]

Writing in 1914, Rev. William Burke laid the blame for the lingering colonial mentality among the Irish people, less upon the seven hundred years of colonialism beginning in 1172, than upon the almost three hundred-years of religious persecution. In particular, Burke wrote, "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most Irishmen are still haunted by a sub-conscious feeling of inferiority social or even intellectual." Burke then enumerated, the "habits of slavery induced by the Penal code", as a lack of, "personal dignity, mental independence, and self-restraint". He also accused the legacy of religious persecution of having deprived the Irish people, "of that sturdy individualism which respects oneself and respects others and which is as widely removed from insolence as it is from servility."^[4]

Even so, Rev. Burke continued, "While the code in so far as it was meant to pauperise and degrade was completely successful, it was a signal failure in its main purpose of Protestantising the people. Nay even, it had the very opposite effect; for whilst in the sixteenth century they, clergy as well as laity, gave evidence of the wavering convictions of the period, in the nineteenth century they had become the most staunch Catholics in northern Europe."^[5]

The 1975 canonization of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales raised considerable public interest in other Irishmen and Irishwomen who had similarly died for their Catholic faith in the 16th and 17th centuries. On 22 September 1992 Pope John Paul II beatified an additional 17 martyrs and assigned June 20, the anniversary of the 1584 martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, as their feast day.^[6] Many other causes for Roman Catholic Martyrdom and possible Sainthood, however, remain under active investigation.