Archbishop Croke of Cashel - and Páirc an Chrócaigh - died 100 years ago today.
In 1884, as first patron of the GAA, he threw his support behind the revival of Gaelic games. Indeed, seeing the prevailing fashion for English sports as part of a general betrayal of the national heritage, he set the tone for the infant association: "If we continue travelling for the next score years in the same direction that we have been going in for some time past, condemning the sports that were practised by our forefathers and putting on England's masher habits, we had better abjure our nationality . . ."
Croke was regarded in many quarters - not least in Rome - as the most militantly nationalistic of the Irish bishops. Known as the "Land League archbishop", he was a direct link between the tenant rights movement of the 1850s and the land war of 1879-82. As a young curate in Charleville, he was influenced by the agrarian doctrine of James Fintan Lalor.
Proposing the formation of tenant societies, he enunciated the principle that was to be applied with success by the Land League 30 years later: tenant farmers exposed to the chronic threat of eviction had it in their power to eliminate the evil, and with it the "land-grabber", by collective action among themselves.
Mother a Protestant
Thomas William Croke was born in Castlecor, Co Cork, in 1823. His father was a Catholic but his mother, Isabella Plummer, belonged to a Protestant family. He was educated in Charleville and at the Irish Colleges in Paris and Rome. Caught up in the romantic nationalism of 1848, Croke and another young priest offered to take over the editorship of the Nation after the arrest of Charles Gavan Duffy.
He preached at the dedication of Newman's University Church, St Stephen's Green, in 1856.
As newly-appointed bishop of Auckland, Croke attended the closing sessions of Vatican I in 1870. He resigned precipitately four years later - having completed the work he had been sent to do in the New Zealand diocese - mainly because of ill health and a desire to return to Ireland. On the way home, he visited San Francisco and New York, where he met the Fenian John Devoy.
The two men argued about Irish nationalism. Croke told Devoy he had no objection to physical force in principle, but opposed it "because he never believed they had a ghost of a chance of success".
He praised Charles Kickham in 1878, when contributing £10 to a fund for the impoverished but unrepentant Fenian: "apart altogether from and independent of his attractions as an Irish poet, scholar and patriot, I take him to be of all men that I have ever met about the gentlest, the most amiable, the most truthful, and the most sorely and searchingly tried." He allowed Kickham, who was deaf and nearly blind, to be readmitted to the sacraments.
Friendship with Cullen
Croke was translated to the archdiocese of Cashel and Emly in 1875. He was considered an outsider, not being on close terms with his fellow bishops in Munster. He had a long-standing friendship with Cardinal Paul Cullen, however, which tells us something about both men.
During the Cullen era, the number of Irish priests rose from 2,500 in 1850 to 3,500 in 1878. There was now one priest for every 1,200 people, compared with a ratio of one to 2,100 in 1850. Meanwhile, emigration continued to ravage the countryside. The population of Cashel archdiocese fell from 160,232 in 1871 to 115,364 in 1901.
As the country seemed about to suffer another famine in the winter of 1879, Croke placed his immense moral authority behind the Land League. His public statements about rural distress attracted unfavourable attention in Rome. On acknowledging "the chivalrous dash, devotedness and determination of Parnell", Croke was asked "to explain his political alignment with a person known to be a violent man preaching socialistic doctrine".
Croke feared the intervention of Pope Leo XIII, imprisoned in the Vatican, could turn the mass of the Irish people against the church. He asserted that Parnell's parliamentary policy was approved by 99 per cent of the Catholic priesthood and people.
He said in an open letter to a meeting at Emly in 1880: "We have borne so much, and borne it so meekly, that now that we are beginning to fret a little under our punishment and cast ourselves on a small scale into the attitude of self-defence, persons are found to call us ugly names". Ominous words, such as socialistic and communistic - "borrowed from the vicious vocabulary of the Continent - are used to designate the efforts being made by well-meaning men throughout the country to prevent the Irish people from perishing at home or being drafted like cattle to climes beyond the sea. There can be no sin in striving to live and die in Ireland."
The following year he visited Michael Davitt in Portland Prison. When Parnell and the leaders imprisoned in Kilmainham issued their no-rent manifesto, however, Croke condemned it.
Prompted by political and agrarian unrest - and intense diplomatic activity by an English mission to Rome - Leo XIII dispatched an envoy to report on the Irish situation at first hand.
Monsignor Ignazio Persico found that Croke possessed "the finest qualities of the heart but he is one of the most ardent nationalists and a bitter enemy of the English government . . . A lover of popularity, he is always on the go to make his voice heard." His mania for political affairs was unbecoming for an ecclesiastical dignitary and "destroys all of his good qualities".
The Parnell split
After the divorce court revelations, Croke thought Parnell should resign as leader of the parliamentary party. With emotions already running high, he declared: "I have flung him away from me for ever. His bust, which for some time has held a prominent place in my hall, I kicked out."
As the Parnell tragedy shattered the dream of Home Rule, Croke looked to the GAA to rekindle local pride and national feeling. He considered himself to be engaged in a "struggle for national independence". But he disclaimed violence in favour of a revolution accomplished by the force of public opinion.
His biographer, Dom Mark Tierney of Glenstal Abbey, writes: "Thanks to his great gift of oratory and his strong personality, Croke won for himself the lasting devotion and veneration of his flock. One could almost call him a superb showman". An impulsive, generous man, he used to say: "This is a splendid world."