I’ve been reading a lot lately about the “Great Hunger” as the Irish call it – that is, the Famine of the 1840s and 1850s that killed a million or more Irish and sent as many emigrating to the United States, Canada and many other places about the world.
It is a pitiful, heart-wrenching story wherein, either out of ignorance, racism or an infamous sense of superiority, the ruling English not only did little to help but actually made matters much, much worse.
Without going into a detailed history lesson, suffice it to say that most of the landowners in Ireland by the 1840s were either English-born or one generation removed. The Penal Laws and other legislation prohibited Irish Catholics from voting or owning land had been repealed years earlier, but what remained was a landowner class of English and Anglo-Irish. The crops grown by the Irish tenant farmers, the butter and honey that they made, the fish and shellfish that they harvested from the sea, the sheep and the cattle, the horses and ponies – they were all exported to England, even, and in spite of, the Famine. While the Irish were starving to death and dying from malnutrition-related diseases and infections, the landowners were sending the food produced on Irish land over to England, and they stationed armed guards at the export harbors. Meanwhile in some villages and country lanes, dead bodies were at times lined up in front yards. Churches that had no more land to bury their dead dug mass graves to accommodate the overwhelming need.
My people came out of that time. From Sligo and Donegal they came. The memory of oppression was passed down, the family anthem being the ever-so-beautiful “Galway Bay,” with an especially pointed lyric:
Oh the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways.
They scorned us just for bein’ what we are.
Well, they might as well go chasin’ after moonbeams
or light a penny candle to a star.
Perhaps one of the reasons the Catholic faith was passed on with such passion is that corporate memory of the cruelty during the time of the Penal Laws, when priests roamed the countryside looking for a lighted window signaling to them that they could gather a few faithful in secret to hear Mass. Perhaps the faith landed with such force because of hunger, from the physical desperation and the witness of death to the deep spiritual longing for transcendence.
In the unfolding years for immigrants and their families, there is the inevitable look back to the homeland with, as some call it, “the delicious misery of the Gael.” Home to an Irish-American Catholic is at least in part made up of the county or counties from whence their forebears came. It recalls in the generational consciousness the bigotry and oppression, the Great Hunger and finally the attempt to tear Holy Mother Church from our collective embrace. But as hard as they tried, they could never do it.
It turns out, however; they didn’t have to. All it took was a few generations of secularism and European “modernity” and voilà – the faith that saved us is gone. The same people whose babies died in their arms from the cruelty of foreign oppressors have now voted to legalize the killing of their own babies by their own choice, in the supposed security and intimacy of the mother’s womb. The hearts of the Irish people have become as black as the potato blight that once forced their starving ancestors from their homeland.
And the same stench of death that has putrefied our own country is coming. The bodies once again will line the ground outside cottages (though they won’t let us see them) but the children of Ireland will not even be afforded a mass grave. With heads raised, we used to speak proudly of the Irish Revolution which brought life to the Republic; now we will drop our heads and speak of the Irish Referendum which planted one of the last faithful holdouts squarely amid the culture of death.
My poor people: ones who struck out on their own for a new world, ones who said their tearful goodbyes knowing they would most likely never see their loved ones again. They yearned not only for food, but for the love of God they found in the sacramental life of the Roman Catholic Church. My poor people: now, in the name of feminism, in the name of freedom, in the name of modernity, in the name of being able to keep up with the godlessness of their former oppressors and of a de-Christianized Europe, they vote to legalize abortion.
My poor people! Now they join the ranks of all those trying to teach us their ways, scorning us just for bein’ what we are. The Famine has returned.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.