An Irishwoman’s Diary on Pearse, Newman and Mount Argus

John Henry Newman’s journey to Dublin and the founding of the Catholic university started on the evening of October 8th , 1845, in Littlemore outside Oxford when he began his confession to the Italian Passionist priest Dominic Barberi. On the following morning he concluded his confession and was received into the Catholic Church.

Library

A few years later Barberi visited Dublin to preach a retreat and a few years after that, when rector of the Catholic University, Newman gave a gift of books to the Passionist community at Mount Argus.

In the library there is a large book, one of a series of 10, called De Legibus (On the Laws) by Franciscus Suarez Ganatesi, Spanish Jesuit, philosopher and theologian. It is the gift of Newman to Mount Argus.

’Sooner than you think’

Newman’s books would have been in the library on Good Friday before the Easter Rising in 1916 when Pearse, Ceannt and Plunkett went to Confession in Mount Argus. Walking along a passage on their way to confession they met Fr Kieran Farrelly, one of the small number of ardent nationalists in Mount Argus. He is said to have asked them when did they intend to replace their wooden guns with real guns. To which question, Pearse is said to have replied, “it may be sooner than you think”.

When the leaders of the Rising were executed, members of the community at Mount Argus climbed high into the belfry to see the black flag being raised over Kilmainham Gaol.

Pearse’s connection with Mount Argus went back to his father. The monastery at Mount Argus was founded in 1856 and the great church there was completed in 1873. James Pearse carved the pulpit with St Paul of the Cross in white marble relief. It is likely that the large Celtic Cross in the Mount Argus graveyard is also by James Pearse. It bears the inscription “Neill and Co. Stonemasons”.

In a seven-page letter which he wrote to Archdeacon Kinane, parish priest of Fethard, on January 13th,1883, James Pearse described himself as “the working partner of the late Mr Neill”.

‘Young upstart’

The purpose of the letter was to defend himself and his new partner Mr Sharp from “misrepresentation and slander” which were injurious to their business as ecclesiastical and architectural sculptors. The “misrepresentations and slander” had been made by Neill’s son, who was described by Pearse as a “young upstart”.

The basis for the alleged slander of Pearse and Sharp was that they were Englishmen. Pearse pointed out that “God in His wisdom” had brought them both into existence “on the other side of the water”. Furthermore he had been 25 years in Ireland and most of his employees were Irish. In fact he employed fewer Englishmen than his business rival and neighbour, who he described as a “Sham Nationalist”.

Letter

Further in his defence he enclosed a letter from Fr Pius Devine from the Holy Cross monastery in Belfast in which Devine promised him preference in any suitable work that might come to his attention. Devine had received Pearse and his first wife and children into the Catholic Church while at Mount Argus some years earlier.

Patrick Pearse might have understood the disparagement of Englishmen. In a note to his translation of Ceathramhna Gríosuighthe (Some Rebel Quatrains), he says "Just as in early Irish manuscripts, Irish love of nature or of nature's God so frequently bursts out in fugitive quatrains of great beauty, so in the seventeenth and eighteenth century manuscripts we find Irish hate of the English (a scarcely less holy passion) expressing itself suddenly and splendidly in many a stray stanza . . ."

‘Holy passion’

Evidently this “holy passion” did not equate with hatred of all Englishmen. Pearse admired at least one Englishman. In his address entitled “The Intellectual Future of the Gael”, delivered when a young man in October 1897 to the New Ireland Literary Society which he and his friend Eamon O’Neill had founded, he spoke of “the great English cardinal”.

Near the end of his address Pearse quotes Newman, saying that his words about Ireland may yet come true: “I am turning my eyes towards a hundred years to come, and I dimly see the island I am gazing on become the road of passage between two hemispheres, and the centre of the world”.