Attempt on Viceroy’s life condemned from pulpit
Armagh, 22 December 1919 - Cardinal Logue has been unsparing in his criticism of the attempt on the life of the Irish Lord Lieutenant, John French.
Holy Ireland ‘shall never be regenerated by deeds of blood or raised up by the hand of the midnight assassination’ he stated in a letter that was read out by priests throughout the archdiocese of Armagh.
The perpetrators ‘can lay no claim to the name of a patriot’, he said. He also warned against membership of secret societies – ‘he who joins a secret society may be said, in the words of St Paul, to deliver himself to Satan’.
The cardinal was nevertheless keen to contextual the crime at Ashtown with reference to the government’s policy of repression in the country:
‘It is true we are subjected to a sharp trial, to drastic repression, such repression as has been seldom paralleled in modern times, even by autocratic Russia or overbearing Germany, without any serious effort on the part of our rulers to apply the remedies which would have infallibly obviated the present confusion and secure order and tranquillity. We have been treated like children, our nurses dangling before our eyes empty toys and insincere promises, taxing their ingenuity to keep us quiet by devising some shadowy distractions. But our people should bear these trials in a Christian spirit. They should exercise patience, knowing such an unnatural and violent state of things cannot last.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
