Cullen’s Discourse on Catholic Education delivered at a Meeting of the Secular and Regular Clergy of Dublin, 1867

Cullen was very concerned that the Catholic Hierarchy should have a firm hold over the curricula in primary and secondary schools and in any Universities which he would allow his flock attend. His belief that the Queen’s Colleges neglected the peculiar needs of Irish Catholics marked the course of the Synod of Thurles. In this extract from a lecture Cullen gave many years later, we can see the consistency of his views on the education of Irish Catholics. It shows the religious concept of history that many thinkers had in the nineteenth-century Ireland, that is, the extent to which Irish Catholics saw their history in terms of the successes and sufferings of their church. It also shows that liberalism (with its stress on secular education) was identified as the enemy of Catholic Ireland. Cullen’s concern to defeat the attempts of Westminster to get control over Irish school and Colleges was very much a nineteenth-century one. As the Synod began its work in 1850, the debate about the powers of the British State was only beginning.

You are all aware of the events which brought on our present difficulties and struggles. In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth, having assumed the headship of the Church, and wishing to imbue their subjects with their own doctrines, and to make them imitators of their own unholy works, determined to introduce a new system of instruction for the rising generations, and to despoil the Church of the authority given to her by Christ, to instruct all nations, to teach the truths of Revelation, and to prevent the spread of error. With this view, notwithstanding the protestations, petitions, and complaints of the people, all monasteries, convents, colleges, and other places of education were seized on, and their properties confiscated, thus leaving our Catholic ancestors without means of bringing up their children in the true faith. To perpetuate this state of affairs, a most cruel code of penal laws was enacted against Catholic schools and schoolmasters at home, and against parents sending their children to foreign countries to be instructed in their own creed. Things remained in this deplorable condition for a long period, during which the boasted promoters of reformation and enlightenment left nothing undone to reduce the country to the lowest state of ignorance and degradation. If a spark of knowledge was preserved, that blessing is due to Rome, France, Spain, and Belgium, which opened the halls of their colleges and universities to the exile from Erin suffering for his faith, and to the courage of Irish youths, who, in their thirst for learning, did not hesitate to seek it beyond the seas, though they knew that on their return home they would be exposed to the operation of the most cruel laws for having done so.

Whilst all Catholic education was banished by confiscation and penal enactments front our shores, everything possible was done to encourage Protestantism, and to provide means for propagating its doctrines. Parochial schools, Erasmus Smith’s schools, royal colleges, charter schools, and other institutions were gradually established, at the public expense, or from confiscated property, for the purpose of rooting out Catholicity, and establishing the church of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. To strengthen the operation of these minor establishments, and to bind them together, a great university was founded at the end of the sixteenth century, and gradually enriched with State endowments, or with property confiscated from Catholics. To say nothing of other sources of income, this university, destined by its founder, Elizabeth, to be the bulwark of Protestantism and the bane of Catholicity in Ireland, possesses at present 199,000 acres of land, and has under its control thirty-one rich benefices of the Establishment.

In later times, those purely Protestant establishments have been supplanted by other schools, and principally by the Queen’s Colleges, established on principles which exclude all Catholic teaching, and so favourable to differentism and infidelity, that Christ’s Vicar on earth has declared them dangerous to faith and morals, and the faithful people of Ireland have always looked on them as a gigantic scheme of godless education.