St. Malachy. Malachy O'Morgair. We have a beautiful account of the life and times of this Saint, written by his friend St. Bernard. St. Malachy was born in 1094, and spent his youth at the famous School of Armagh. Sprung from pious parents, he was from the first a man of prayer and a diligent student. At the age of 25 he was promoted to the priesthood. Soon after, he was entrusted by the Archbishop Celsus with the serious duty of correcting the various abuses that had grown up during years of incessant war. He re-established the public singing of the Canonical Hours, and urged upon all the frequent reception of the Sacraments.
From the See of Connor he was promoted to the Arch-Archbishop of Armagh. He accepted this dignity only under . obedience. when he felt that his mission was accomplished in the Primatial City, he retired to the Bishopric of Down. There he hoped to end his days in peace amongst the monks he had established at Downpatrick. But he was not allowed to remain undisturbed in his beloved retreat. He had to make two journeys to Rome in connection with the organization of the Irish Church. When he reached the Monastery of Clairvaux, on the second journey, the sickness of death was upon him. In the holy atmosphere of this monastery that he loved, and attended in his dying moments by his friend St. Bernard, he passed to his reward on the Feast of All Souls, 1148.
When Dr. Madden, of Waterford, author of The Lives of the United Irishmen, was searching for materials for a projected Life of the Venerable Oliver Plunket, he found in the Archives of the Franciscan Convent of St. Isidore, in Rome, a manuscript relating to Ireland, which contained a prophecy of St. Malachy. This prophecy is supposed to have been made a few weeks before the Saint's death, and to have been written down afterwards for St. Bernard, when he was compiling the The Life if St. Malachy. The existence of the document was known to the Venerable Oliver Plunket, who suffered martyrdom at Tyburn in 1681, and its authenticity is vouched for by the learned Mabillon, who wrote to Dr. Plunkett in defence of it. The substance of the prophecy is : " The Church in Ireland shall never fail. With terrible discipline shall she be purified for a week of centuries, but afterwards far and wide shall her magnificence shine forth in cloudless glory." Whether the prophecy is genuine or not is, of course, an open question. But the gloomy part of it has been verified to the full.
The Church in Ireland lay under a cloud for seven centuries. Her enemies continued to oppress her from the death of St. Malachy till the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. John de Courcy, the Norman adventurer, who put to death Rory Mac Dunlevy, the last King of Uladh, at Downpatrick, in 1200, is styled in the native Annals " the plunderer of Churches and territories." Arch-bishop Healy writes :—" De Courcy, De Burgo, and De Lacy swooped down on the North, and amid the blackness of its desolated schools, they extinguished the lamp of Celtic learning in the blood of the slaughtered scholars of Armagh." Turmoil and confusion were not lessened when the Clannaboy Ó Neills crossed over the Bann in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and annexed what they could of Antrim and North Down. 'Then came the first instalment of the penal laws in the reign of Henry VIII., and during the three centuries that followed the most drastic and cruel measures were passed with the avowed object of clearing every vestige of Catholic Faith and practice out of the British Isles. The stone altar on the hillside and in the glen bears silent testimony to the treatment meted out to those who clung to the religion of their fathers. The State Records keep undying evidence of the barbarity of the penal laws and of the numbers of prelates, priests, religious, and laity who suffered imprisonment, confiscation, exile, and death for the crime of professing the Catholic Faith. " The suppression of the native race," writes Lecky, " was carried on with a ferocity that surpassed that of Alva in the Netherlands, and was hardly exceeded by any page in the blood-stained annals of the Turks." Edmund Burke stigmatised the Penal Code as " a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and for the debasement in them of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of men."