CARDINAL CULLEN AND FENIANSM

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3115, 11 February 1879, Page 1

CARDINAL CULLEN AND FENIANSM

Cardinal Cullen's opposition to the Fenian conspiracy,. which, was.the moat creditable of his public acts, may, probably be attributed to , mixed motives. He perhaps deprecated a rebellion -which was unlikely to prove successful; and he distrusted, with reason, the Character and policy of ringleaders who were intimately allied with American Republicans: The Fenian agitators, though they courted the alliaiioe'~of nth'&'~lris|r^'e'i^ooid7%ellW'*df' >' the same class with the deadliest Enemies of Borne in Germany,, Italy/ arid France. Communists and followers of Garibaldi would, if they had succeeded in their plans, have been more difficult to deal with than English Ministers or Lord-Leititen-ants. Cardinal Cullen's frequent detiunciationa of the Fenian plot were useful;, and yet they were framed so as to avos& any expression of loyalty, or even of regard for public tranquility. The oomminations of the Church were carefully confined to the accidental circumstance that Fenian* ism was constituted as a secret society. Cardinal Cullen formally censured, not the design of robbery, of muider,; aiß of anarchial revolution, but the comparatively harmless obligation'; of secret oaths. We invariably reminded the faithful that the Holy Father had excommunicated the Freemasons; and that.the Fenians had, by their secret organization, brought themselves within the compass of the official curse,. The Manchester and; Clerkenwell murderers were therefore Js culpable as the late Earl of Zetland, or as tk| Snnct of Wales. There was a kind of feminine or monkish spite in the affectation of identifying the Fenians with a body which, as Cardinal Cullen must have* known; is ia England, a convivial, charitable, and' wholly innocuous club. His' Irish adherents perhaps obeyed his injunctions- to abstain from Fenianism the more readily . because his warnings seemed also to apply to an unoffending body of English gentlemen and tradesmen.—Saturday .Review.