An Empty Threat

New Zealand Tablet, 24 September 1908, Page 22

An Empty Threat

Colonel Fitzpatnck,' says a last week., cable message states that a party of Orangemen had decided .that the Host should never be returned to Westminster Cathedral' if there had rT,oX °mr n ' a - r P rOCession of the Blessed Sacrament at the recen Congress in London. We had been expecting thi, sort of thing. But we really never thought 'that a merparty! o the 'loyal ' brethren wou.d have undertaken the "on! tract, , n the teeth of eight hundred London police and of a guard of honor of over twenty thousand resolute Catholic men. The Poet Laureate of the lodges (Robert Young, better known to the

brethren as « Old True Blue '), in one of his flights of fancy, took down his lyre and sang in doggrd numbers of the fateful day '•When William's eighteen thousand men Crushed James's five-and-twenty.' - . ' But here we have a ' party ' of possibly ' five-and-twenfy ' yellow men valorously prepared to ' crush '—nay, paralyse— more than eighteen thousand men.' It beats Balaclava-nay, it bangs Banagher.' In all the circumstances, it does seem a little singular _that the ' party of Orangemen • have done nothing to interfere, with the Eucharistic procession that (as our columns elsewhere show) has been going on in England ever since i8 4S . * The rather belated announcement of this projected deed of loyal ' derring-do may possibly. have made some impression upo-i the minds of simple folk east of "the Irish" Sea.' West of tho Irish Sea people can easily sec 'where the lafture" comes in ' Por the Irish people happen to have been listening to this sort of braggart ' loyalist ' nonsense "for over a century past.' The loyal ' brethren, for instance, threatened to upset the Croxyn and Constitution when it was proposed to emancipate Catholics Catholics were emancipated, but the brethren did not bring abou' the threatened upsetting. -They threatened that if Father Mathcw, the great temperance reformer, 'invaded' Ulster he would never get back in one piece. (How Uke the recent threat about the Eucharistic procession!) But Father Mathcw 'invaded Ulster-he came, he saw, he conquered tens of thousands of hearts, including, those of many Orangemcn-and got back safe and sound. In , 868-9, the watchword 6f the ' loyal > Orange brethren-coined by the Rev. 'Flaming' Flanagan at Newbhss-was this : that, if the Protestant Church in Ireland wore d.se.tabhshed, they would • luck the Queen's crown into the Boyne But that Church was disestablished in ,869, and the Queen s crown remained on the royal head till a peaceable and natural d.ath removed it threc-and-thirty years later. And hen we have the customary 'loyalist' braggadocio about 'a hundred thousand armed men ' • lining the ditches ' north of he boyne and fighting the whole British Empire; and the threatened bloodshed and revolution that was to follow if the Nat.onal.st Party 'invaded Ulster '-which they did with very con, picuous s f w . nn . ng sca(s .n. n the fQrmc - y holds of iyrone, Deny, and even sacrosanct Belfast. We coutj Rive numerous examples of this harmless and empty gasconading, to wh.ch the 'loyal' Orange brethren nrc so 'prone It pleases tnem, it p.obably does no particular harm to anybody and .t adds to the gaiety of life. The extent to which the brethren mean all this fine fury was sufficiently tested during he Cnmean and the South African wars. The Irish Nat ona organs challenged the braggart brethren to equip and IT not a hundred thousand mc-n '-but a regiment, nay even a company or an awkward squad, to do for the Empire the valiant battle wh.ch (during every movement for the extension o popular nghts) they were threatening to do against i Bu they never sent so much as a corporal's secretory