CARDINAL CULLEN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 179, 1 September 1876, Page 13

CARDINAL CULLEN.

+-• Cardinal Cullen is a native of Kildare county, and was born on the 27th of April, 1803. He commenced his career as an ecclesiastical student in Carlow College, where his talent and industry soon attracted the attention of Dr. Doyle. In 1820 he set out for Borne, entered the College of the Propaganda, and prosecuted his studies ■with, brilliant success. He was not the first son of Erin who asserted the supremacy of Irish genius in the College of the Propaganda. Francis Patrick Kenrick, the future Primate of the United States, was just setting out for the New World, after having for seven years delighted and astonished by his learning and great intellectual power, the professors in the Propaganda. Cardinal Cullen maintained as a student the honor and emulated the fame of young Kenrick. His public disputation, on the 3rd September, 1828, won the applause of Leo XII. and the assembled College of .Cardinals. At the early age of twenty-four he was raised to the **first chair in the celebrated College with which his name will be ever inseparably associated. He was ordained priest in 1829, and became successively President of the Irish College in Eome, Bector of the Propaganda, and corrector of the press for political, ecclesiastical, and theological publications. While discharging his various and onerous duties, he found time to act as agent to the Irish Bishops in their relations with the Holy See. He thus became particularly acquainted with the progress of religion in Ireland, and thoroughly conversant with the peculiar duties and responsibilities of an Irish Prelate. He was high in the esteem of Gregory XVI., who bestowed upon Ireland the Church and Convent of St. Agatha as the future secular college for the education of the Irish secular clergy in Borne. It is unnecessary to inform Catholics at home or abroad that he has been and is still a personal favorite of our present saintly and venerable Pontiff, who appointed him Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland, and Apostolic Delegate in 1850. During his brief connection with the ancient See of St. Patrick, he presided at the Synod of Thurles— a Synod which has conferred incalculable blessings upon the Irish people. Then, for the first time after centuries of persecution, the Church of Ireland emerged as it were from the Catacombs — f ull of life and joy and hope — beautiful as in those halycon days when the Christian bards of Europe sang her praises and celebrated her glories. In this National Council, Archbishop Cullen and his brother Prelates, solemnly condemned a system of education fraught with grievous and intrinsic danger to faith and morals, and resolved to found a Catholic University, which should be a pillar to Catholicity, and an intellectual centre for the Catholics of the Irish race. He was translated to the Archdiocese of Dublin, May 3, 1852. He thus became the immediate successor of Aichbishop Murray in the See of St. Lawrence O'Toole.