27

Archbishop Thomas Croke

1823–1902

 

Every year the finals of the All Ireland Gaelic games of hurling and football are held in Croke Park in Dublin.  The most important dates in the sports calendar of Ireland, they draw crowds not only from Ireland but from abroad, especially from the United States.

      The stadium, now one of the most up-to-date in the country, belongs to the Gaelic Athletic Association, and is named after Archbishop Thomas Croke, the great nineteenth-century archbishop of Cashel, who promoted Gaelic games as a patriotic movement, and so helped to create in a large way the popular national identity of modern Ireland.

      Thomas William Croke was born in Castlecor, in County Cork, in January 1823.  His father William was a Catholic, but his mother, formerly Isabelle Plummer, was a Protestant, though she converted to her husband's religion four years before she died.  Such mixed marriages were by no means uncommon in nineteenth-century Ireland, especially in the southern counties where intolerance was less than in Ulster.  But most Protestants in the south were Anglicans, and hence closer to their Catholic neighbours than the Calvinistic Presbyterians of the north in many aspects of their beliefs.

      Croke studied for the priesthood at the Irish College in Paris between 1840 and 1844.  He spent a final year, 1847, in Rome before being ordained.  He taught for a time at the diocesan college in Carlow, and then again in Paris until 1849.  Being abroad, he was away from the devastation caused by the famine, especially in parts of Cork.  Yet no-one of any sensitivity could be unaware of its effect on the Irish character.  During the post-famine years of 1849 to 1858 he did mission work in the Diocese of Cloyne, in the south of Cork.  He was made the first president of St Colman's College in Fermoy, where one of his pupils for a brief time was the father-to-be of JAMES JOYCE [25].  He was then parish priest of Doneraile in County Cork from 1865 to 1870.

      Croke attended the Vatican Council as theologian to Bishop William Keane of Cloyne.  This was one of the defining events for Catholics in the nineteenth century, leading as it did to the definition of papal infallibility.  But for Croke it had a surprising outcome.  From there he was sent, as so many priests of the day were, from Ireland to New Zealand.  The Irish community in New Zealand was an active one, but not as significant as that in Australia.  His stay lasted only five years, as on a visit to Ireland in 1875 he was elevated to the archdiocese of Cashel and Emly, one of the most important in the country, covering as it did not only the fertile areas of Munster, but also the impoverished hill country in the Galtee Mountains.

      Croke, conscious of these contrasts in Irish life, was a keen advocate of education, and everywhere he went he promoted the building of churches and schools.  Like most Irish clergy he supported the temperance movement, which had begun in Cork in the 1830s, but he was also an enthusiast for the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language.

      These activities as a pastor were as nothing compared to his national work.  In his younger days he had been a follower of DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] in his campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union.  After O'Connell's death he supported the Young Ireland movement, that had ended in the abortive uprising of 1848, which took place in Munster.  That unhappy failure did not prevent him from being a supporter of the Irish Tenant League in the 1850s at a time when there was no real Irish party, merely a group of Irish MPs with nationalist interests.

      However, when Croke became archbishop in 1875, a distinctive political movement was emerging under Isaac Butt, and he also became an advocate of home rule.  Butt was followed by the more aggressive CHARLES PARNELL [5], and the Land League.  Though these were looked upon with dismay by more conservative figures like CARDINAL PAUL CULLEN [44], Croke happily embraced them.

      Croke was a nationalist to the core.  This inevitably got him into trouble with the government.  The British, through influential English Catholics, attempted to poison Rome's opinion of him.  In 1887 he wrote an unwise letter to the main nationalist paper the Freeman's Journal, criticizing the government's use of Irish taxes to fund the repression by the police of those who paid them.  This seemed to have overstepped the mark, and to be encouraging Catholics to not pay legal taxes, so he was denounced in Rome.  However, his friends Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin (himself a nationalist) and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning of Westminster, smoothed the troubled waters.

      Croke was as dismayed, as many other followers of the Irish party were, by the shocking revelations of the private life of Parnell and Mrs O'Shea, during the divorce action naming Parnell, brought against her by her husband, Captain O'Shea, between 1890 and 1891.  The Irish party split when the Irish bishops announced that they could no longer support such a public sinner.  Disillusioned by party politics, he slowly withdrew from that arena.

      But his enthusiasm for the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) remained.  Started in the early 1880s by Michael Cusack and some other enthusiasts at a time when both rugby and soccer were being organized on a more professional basis, the aim was to bring the benefits of healthy sport and competition to the parishes of Ireland.  Rugby and soccer were denounced as 'foreign' games, played only, it was claimed, by the garrison and 'Castle Catholics'.  Gaelic football and hurling, which had been played since time immemorial, were provided with new rules and a league.  The GAA was organized everywhere, and soon had a large following.

      Many of its members shared Croke's disillusionment with the Irish Party and the older politics.  In time, of course, it formed a parish-by-parish ready-made organization for Irish republicans to infiltrate in order to promote a new wave of revolution in the early twentieth century.  Croke remained a great heroic figure to the movement, which now has world-wide links.  The promotion of sport has been one of the great social movements of modern Ireland; its influence has been for the most part wonderfully beneficial, and is indissolubly linked with the name of Archbishop Croke.

      However, Croke died at Thurles on 22nd July 1902, and did not live to see the emergence of the new nation exactly a century after he was born.