27.04.2012
Archbishop Launches ‘The Friars in Ireland 1224–1540’
Archbishop Michael Jackson performed the official launch of ‘The Friars in Ireland 1224–1540’ by Brother Colman O Clabaigh OSB in St Teresa’s Priory on Clarendon Street, Dublin. The launch was attended by a large number of guests from various Christian denominations, religious orders and organisations.
The Archbishop’s speech is reproduced below:
The Friars in Ireland 1224–1540
Colman O Clabaigh OSB 2012 Four Courts Press
ISBN 9781846822247.
It is usually interesting to start reading a book at the beginning. It is often even more interesting to start reading it from the middle. This is what I decided to do with The Friars for a very particular reason. And it is this: the book comes in the middle of my friendship with its author Brother Colman. We have known one another in Glenstal and in Oxford and most recently we set eyes on one another in Dawson Street, here in Dublin, while I was unselfconsciously raising money for charitable purposes through the Black Santa Appeal just before Christmas 2011. Colman greeted me in his usual cheerful manner. Oxford, in a very real sense, was the ideal place for Colman and me to come to know one another. As a city, Oxford holds in tandem and in tension the secular university and the religious houses. My own association was with Christ Church, itself a peculiarity in that the diocesan cathedral of the Church of England Diocese of Oxford is also the College Chapel. The Chapel in St Benet’s was designed by Martin Stancliffe who was then also the cathedral architect for Christ Church. He designed both the Chapel in St Benet’s and also the St Frideswide Chapel in the cathedral and I had the genuine privilege of being the first person to celebrate Holy Communion in that chapel. Any time I worshipped in St Benet’s, I felt understandably at home. Colman was strategic in the relationship which built up between us and to this day I consider him one of my closest friends. Since returning to Ireland, the bishops of the Church of Ireland have often availed of the hospitality of Glenstal and Colman has characteristically been to the fore there too.
It gives me, therefore, great personal pleasure to launch The Friars here in a monastic house in the heart of contemporary Dublin, in the Edith Stein Room in the Carmelite Priory of St Teresa, Clarendon Street. The monastic house witnesses to the continuing incarnation of God’s love for the people of this fascinating city where, once again, the lives of places of learning and houses of hospitality combine to enable us to ask the questions which inform and enrich human community. Together as people of God we seek to bring about the flourishing of others and as to embrace with understanding and with compassion those for whom flourishing is not an option.
What, you may ask, did I find in the middle of Colman’s book? I suggest, as with all Colman’s work, that if you open this book on any page you will find first and foremost: consistency. The material is marshalled in such a way as to be detailed in its analysis, broad–ranging in its geographical reach and contributing at all times to the development of the argument. It is also full of humour. While recognizing the need for the Liturgy of the Hours for Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians alike, Colman with passionate understatement questions the efficacy of sun dials in the vagaries of the Irish climate. This cannot be done by everyone with such assurance and integrity. In Colman’s case, it flows from his lived monasticism, unsentimental but joyful, vigorous and humorous. I shrivelled at the directness of the reference to the pastoral impact of the friars in my home diocese of Clogher on page 293 in the description of Friar Bernard McGrath’s sermon preached in Clogher: ‘While denouncing the vices, the preacher was contradicted by an abbot in the congregation whose imminent death he then correctly foretold.’
A number of significant themes emerge from this painstaking and exemplary research. The first is the description and the analysis of the networks which the mendicant friars created and ‘worked’ relentlessly across Ireland. This ‘mendicant machine,’ if I may call it that, meant that communications were strong. It greatly facilitated the dissemination and the embedding of devotional practices and liturgies across the Orders and throughout the church. Colman makes the interesting and insightful point: ‘Mendicant sanctity was essentially centrifugal.’ There also was a very easy relationship between the mendicants and the dioceses with the friars supplying much of the pastoral and educational work country–wide. This is a lasting and a noble heritage to this day.
The second theme which flows from this is the international reach of the mendicant friars. Not only do we hear of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1323 of the Anglo–Irish Franciscans Simon Semeonis and Hugh the Illuminator but the person in whose honour a particular tomb had been built in the Dominican Priory, Strade, County Mayo had clearly been in Cologne, Canterbury and Rome, to judge from the representations of the Magi, Thomas a Becket and Peter and Paul intricately carved on the front of the tomb. Incidentally, Simon was intrigued when in Cairo by the game of polo, the three elephants and the giraffe owned by the Sultan and a special unit which incubated large numbers of chicks. For polo we could have told him he needed to go no further than the Phoenix Park; the same Park could provide elephants and a giraffe; and the countryside is awash with special egg–units. But, hindsight is a great thing! Higher Studies were carried out abroad and included the establishment of a quota of free places for Irish mendicant friars, owing to the absence of any studium generale in Ireland. Destinations included Oxford, Cambridge, London, Paris, Milan and Strasbourg. This is not to say that sophisticated earlier studies were not carried out in Ireland. The earliest was in Athenry where Florence MacFlainn, archbishop of Tuam 1250–1256, founded a scholars’ house and bequeathed a set of canon law books to the community. There was a Cork studium by 1267 and an Armagh studium by 1303 as well as examples in Dublin, Coleraine, Limerick, Sligo, Waterford, Clonmel, Galway and Drogheda to name but a few. With utter ease we read that Friar Matthew MacEgan was in 1441 appointed lector in Askeaton, on his return from studies in Bologna. The first provincial of the Franciscans in Ireland, Richard of Ingworth, was one of the founding members of the friary in Oxford and had been the first custos of the custody in Cambridge. The range of talent and experience, even from the meagre records extant, which Colman has brought to the surface is magisterial.
Thirdly, I find myself fascinated by the way in which Colman traces the development of the notion of the cloister as a metaphor of the religious life. This, surely, is something which, with a degree of adaptation, could become a potent feature in domestic religion which, in some shape or form, will have to return to Irish religious observance generally among lay people and clergy alike, if we are to reclaim and redeem something of what has been lost to everyone in the tawdry era of advanced consumerism and institutional greed. The catalogue of the library of the Franciscan Friary in Youghal is important for us in this as in much else as the only mendicant library catalogue to survive. The most influential work in this area was the de claustro animae of the Augustinian Canon regular Hugh of Fouilloy (died 1172). He makes the connection between each architectural feature of the monastery and some specific spiritual or moral value. This enables the religious to sacralise every aspect of his life, dress and environment. With great tenderness, the guest house represented the compassion a religious ought to extend to a delinquent brother and the dormitory the tranquil soul asleep on a bed of conscience. The allegorisation of the cloister takes another form in the Lives of the Brethren, tales of the early Dominicans, as compiled by Friar Gerard of Frachet. The account given is of a tour of the Friary in Bologna offered late at night to St Dominic by the devil himself. On reaching the chapterhouse, the devil finally admits defeat: ‘This place is my hell, because whatever I gain in a week I lose here in an hour, because here the brothers often accuse themselves, confess and are absolved; whence I hate this building above all.’
I could go on and on. Anyone will be fascinated by the forty suits of vestments which the Donegal Franciscans had in 1600, silk, cloth–of–gold and cloth–of–silver; by the impact of the tertiary movement; by the Red Book of Kilkenny which contains hymns and songs set to popular tunes in order to counter the lewdness of the songs of the Kilkenny clergy and laity; by the insight and pithiness of the Dominican Hugh of St Cher, commenting on Genesis 9.13: ‘First the bow is bent in study, then the arrow is released in preaching.’ I conclude, however, with a small number of good–humoured Anglican ironies. Marsh’s Library, Dublin holds the single surviving copy of a short seventeenth–century treatise for the instruction of Franciscan lay brothers, printed in Louvain1610–1614; it is in Lambeth Palace Library that the only surviving Irish manuscript with Dominican liturgical material is found, a thirteenth–century copy of the Bible that the Dominican community at Arklow acquired in the fifteenth century. Many of the friars survived the spiritual tsunami of the Reformation by already being embedded in Irish society and by withdrawing to the territories across the Shannon. Perhaps the greatest Anglican irony of the Reformation is that George Brown, former prior provincial of the Augustinians in England, was the first archbishop of Dublin in 1536. He, in turn, consecrated on June 13th 1537 Richard Nangle, Augustinian Observant friar and first reformed bishop of Clonfert. ‘The papally appointed incumbent’ – as Colman deftly expresses it – of Clonfert, Roland de Burgh, was too influential, as a kinsman of the earl of Clanrickard, for Nangle to get even his toe inside the diocesan door, so Nangle never in fact took up his position, becoming effectively a suffragan of Dublin. But, irony of ironies, Nangle also continued to function as vicar provincial of the Augustinians in Ireland and was prior of the Dublin community when it was dispersed in 1539.
I thank, on behalf of all of us who are guests, Fr Mairtin O’Conaire ODC for being our gracious and generous host this evening. I express my appreciation to Brother Colman for affording me the honour of launching The Friars in Ireland 1224–1540 and only wish I could do this outstanding publication more justice than I have.
Michael Jackson, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and Bishop of Glendalough 17 April 2012