THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND COMMUNISM

THE LIMERICK SOVIET

A soviet supported by the Catholic Church that was the singular spectacle I found when I broke through the military cordon about the proclaimed city of Limerick.

The city had been proclaimed for this reason: Robert Byrne, son of a Limerick business man, had been imprisoned for political reasons. He fell ill from the effects of a hunger strike, and was sent to the hospital in the Limerick workhouse. A “rescue party” was formed. In the melee that followed, Robert Byrne and a constable were killed. Then according to a military order, Limerick was proclaimed because of “the attack by armed men on police constables and the brutal murder of one of them.”

At Limerick Junction we were locked in our compartments. There were few on the train. Two or three school boys with their initialed school caps. Two or three women drinking tea from the wicker train baskets supplied at the junction. In the yards of the Limerick station, the train came to a dead stop. Then the conductor unlocked compartments, while a kilted Scotch officer, with three bayonet-carrying soldiers behind him, asked for permits. At last we were pulled into the station filled with empty freight trucks and its guard of soldiers. Through the dusk beyond the rain was slithering.

“Sorry. No cab, miss,” said a constable. “The whole city’s on strike.”

That explained my inability to get Limerick on the wire. From Kildare I had been trying all morning to reach Limerick on the telephone. All the Limerick shops I passed were blinded or shuttered. In the gray light, black lines of people moved desolately up and down, not allowed to congregate and apparently not wanting to remain in homes they were weary of. A few candles flickered in windows. After leaving my suitcase at a hotel, I left for the strike headquarters. On my way I neared Sarsfield bridge. Between it and me, there loomed a great black mass. Close to it, I found it was a tank, stenciled with the name of Scotch-and-Soda, and surrounded by massed barbed wire inside a wooden fence. On the bridge, the guards paraded up and down and called to the people:

“Step to the road!”

At the door of a river street house, I mounted gritty stone steps. A red-badged man opened the door part way. As soon as I told him I was an American journalist, the suspicious look on his face vanished. With much cordiality he invited me to come upstairs. While he knocked on a consultation door, he bade me wait. In the wavering hall light, the knots in the worn wooden floor threw blots of shadow. On an invitation to come in, I entered a badly lit room where workingmen sat at a long black scratched table. In the empty chair at the end of the table opposite the chairman, I was invited to sit down. As I asked my questions, every head was turned down towards me as if the strike committee was having its picture taken and everybody wanted to get in it.

“Yes, this is a soviet,” said John Cronin, the carpenter who was father of the baby soviet. “Why did we form it? Why do we pit people’s rule against military rule? Of course, as workers, we are against all military. But our particular grievance against the British military is this: when the town was unjustly proclaimed, the cordon was drawn to leave out a factory part of town that lies beyond the bridges. We had to ask the soldiers for permits to earn our daily bread.

“You have seen how we have thrown the crank into production. But some activities are permitted to continue. Bakers are working under our orders. The kept press is killed, but we have substituted our own paper.” He held up a small sheet which said in large letters: The Workers’ Bulletin Issued by the Limerick Proletariat.

“We’ve distributed food and slashed prices. The farmers send us their produce. The food committee has been able to cut down prices: eggs, for instance, are down from a dollar to sixty-six cents a dozen and milk from fourteen to six cents a quart.

“In a few days we will engrave our own money. Beside there will be an influx of money from England. About half the workers are affiliated to English unions and entitled to strike pay. We have, by the way, felt the sympathy of the union men in the army sent to guard us. A whole Scotch regiment had to be sent home because it was letting workers go back and forth without passes.

“And we have told no one else the national executive council of the Irish Labor party and Trade Union congress will change its headquarters from Dublin to Limerick. Then if military rule isn’t abrogated, a general strike of the entire country will be called.”

Just here a boy with imaginative brown eyes, who was, I discovered later, the editor of the Workers’ Bulletin, said suddenly:

“There! Isn’t that enough to tell the young lady? How do we know that she is not from Scotland Yard?”

In order to send my wire on the all-Ireland strike, I stumbled along dark streets till I came to the postoffice. Lantern light was streaming from a hatchway open in the big iron door in the rear. “Who comes?” challenged the guards. While I was giving a most conversational reply, a dashing officer ran up and told me the password to the night telegraph room. Streets were deserted when I attempted to find my way back to the hotel. At last I saw a cloaked figure separate itself from the column post box against which it was standing. I asked my way and discovered I was talking to a member of the Black Watch. Limerick is the only town in the British Isles that retains the ancient custom of a civilian night guard. While the strike was on, there were, during the day, 600 special Royal Irish constables on duty in Limerick. But, at night, in spite of unlit streets, the 600 constables gave place to the sixty men of the Black Watch.

“Priests preached sermons Sunday urging the people to withstand the enemy with the same spirit they did in the time of Sarsfield,” said young Alphonsus O’Mara, the mayor of Limerick, whom I met at breakfast. His Sinn Fein beliefs had imprisoned him in his hotel, for his home was beyond the town and he would not ask the British military for a pass. Opposite the breakfast room we could see the drawn blue shades of Limerick’s dry goods store. A woman staggered by with a burlap bag of coal on her shoulders. A donkey cart with a movie poster reading: “Working Under Order of the Strike Committee: God and man,” rolled past. A child hugging a pot of Easter lilies shuffled by. “There’s no idea that the people want communism. There can’t be. The people here are Catholics.”

But a little incident of the strike impressed me with the fact that there were communists among these fervent Catholics. In order to pictorialize the predicament of the Limerick workers to the world through the journalists who were gathered in Limerick waiting the hoped-for arrival of the first transatlantic plane, the national executive council devised this plan. One bright spring afternoon, the amusement committee placed poster announcements of a hurling match that was to be held just outside of Limerick at Caherdavin. About one thousand people, mostly Irish boys and girls, left town. At sunset, two by two, girls with yellow primroses at their waists, and boys with their hurling sticks in their hands, marched down the white-walled Caherdavin road towards the bridge. The bridge guard hooped his arm towards the boat house occupied by the military. Soldiers, strapping on cartridge belts, double-quicked to his aid. A machine gun sniffed the air from the upper story of the boat house. Scotch-and-Soda veered heavily bridgewards. A squad of fifty helmeted constables marched to the bridge, and marked time. But the boys and girls merely asked if they might go home, and when they were refused, turned about again and kept up a circling tramp, requesting admission. Down near the Broken Treaty Stone, in St. Munchin’s Temperance hall, in a room half-filled with potatoes and eggs and milk, women who were to care for the exiles during their temporary banishment, were working. A few of the workers’ red-badged guards came to herald the approach of the workers, and then sat down on a settle outside the hall.

St. Munchin’s chapel bell struck the Angelus.

The red-badged guards rose and blessed themselves.

THE BISHOP ON COMMUNISM

Possibly, I thought, the clergymen of Limerick were hurried into support of red labor. What was the attitude of those who had a perspective on the situation towards communism?

Just outside Limerick, in the town of Ennis in the county of Clare Clare as well as Kerry has the reputation of shooting down informers at sight there dwells the most loved bishop in Ireland. The Lenten pastoral of the Right Reverend Michael Fogarty, bishop of Killaloe, was so fervently national that when it was twice mailed to the Friends of Irish Freedom in America it was twice refused carriage by the British government. There was no doubt that he was for Sinn Fein. But how did he stand towards labor?

Past an ancient Norman castle on which was whitewashed the legend “Up De Valera!” into the low-built little town of Ennis, I drove up to the modest colonial home that is called the “episcopal palace,” Bishop Fogarty invited me to take off my “wet, cold, ugly coat,” and to sit at a linen-covered spot at the long plush-hung library table. As he rang a bell, he told me I must be hungry after my drive. Then a maid brought in a piping-hot dinner of delicious Irish stew. I sat down quite frankly hungry, but from a rather resentful glance which the maid gave me, I have since suspicioned that I ate the bishop’s dinner.

First I told the bishop that I am a Catholic. Then I said I was informed that there was a reaction against the Church in Ireland, against being what American Protestants call “priest-ridden.” The first reason of the reaction, I was told, was the fact that the people felt that the hierarchy was not in favor of a republic. Indeed I had it from an Irish-American priest in Dublin that many of the Irish bishops were in a bad way, because neither the English government nor the people trusted them.

“Priest-ridden?” The bishop smiled. “Priest-ridden? England would like us to control these people for her today. We couldn’t if we would. Priest-ridden? Perhaps the other way about.”

The second reason, it was said, is due to the fact that the workers feel that the Church is standing with the capitalists. A Dublin Catholic, wife of an American correspondent stationed in that city, told me that socialism is so strong in the very poor parish of St. Mary’s pro-cathedral in Dublin that out of 40,000 members, there were 16,000 who were not practising their religion.

“A lie!” exclaimed the bishop as his jaw shot out and his great muscular frame straightened as if to meet physical combat on the score. “It is simply not true. The loyalty of the Irish to the Catholic Church is unquestionable.”

And anyway, he indicated, if the people desired a communistic government there is no essential opposition in the Catholic Church.

In the past, said the bishop, the Church in Ireland had thrived under common ownership. When in the fifth century Patrick evangelized Ireland, the ancient Irish were practising a kind of socialism. There was a common ownership of land. Each freeman had a right to use a certain acreage. But the land of every man, from the king down, might be taken away by the state. There was an elected king, and assemblies of nobles and freemen. There were arbitration courts where the lawgivers decided on penalties, and whose decisions were enforced by the assemblies. One of the reasons, the bishop said, that England had found it difficult to rule the Irish, was that she attempted to force a feudal government on a socialistic people.

Recently to illustrate that the Irish still retain their instinct for common ownership there had been, as the bishop mentioned, a successful socialistic experiment in Clare. On looking up this fact at a later time, I discovered that the experiment had points of resemblance to the ancient state. In 1823 the English socialist, Robert Owen, visited Ireland. His outline of the possibilities of co-operation on socialistic lines inspired the foundation of the Hibernian Philanthropic Society. It was in 1831 that Arthur Vandeleur, one of the members of the society, decided he would establish a socialist colony on his estate in Ralahine, Clare county. A large tract of land was to be possessed and developed by a group of tenants. This property was not, incidentally, a gift, but was to be held by Mr. Vandeleur until the tenants were able to pay for it. An elected committee of nine, and a general assembly of all men and women members of the society, were the government. The committee’s decision against an offending member of society could be enforced or not by the members. The success of the society is acknowledged. Through it was introduced the first reaping machine into Ireland. By it the condition of the toiler was much raised, and might have been more greatly elevated but for the fact that the community had to pay a very heavy annual rental in kind to Mr. Vandeleur. The experiment came to a premature end, however, because of the passing of the estate out of the hands of Mr. Vandeleur, and the non-recognition of the right of such a community to hold a lease or to act as tenants under the land laws of Great Britain.

“Why should there not be a modernized form of the ancient Gaelic state?” asked the bishop.

When I spoke of the Russian soviet, and stated that I heard that the Roman Catholic church had spread in eight diocèses under the new government, the bishop nodded his head. The Church, he said, had nothing to fear from the soviet.

“Certainly not from the Limerick soviet,” I suggested. “It was there that I saw a red-badged guard rise to say the Angelus.”

“Isn’t it well,” smiled the bishop, “that communism is to be Christianized?”