Bishop’s homily: Archduke’s murder, Edermine monks and precious peace

IN THE SECOND PART OF OUR FOCUS ON WEXFORD AND WORLD WAR I, WE REMEMEBER MORE OF THOSE MEN WHO FOUGHT AND DIED IN THAT HORRIFIC CONFLICT, AND AT SOME OF THE RECENT EVENTS TO MARK THE CENTENARY

This is the text of the homily delivered by Bishop of Ferns Denis Brennan on Remembrance Sunday at St Iberius Church, Wexford

On Sunday June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie visited Sarajevo. As they drove through the streets a grenade was thrown at their car, an open touring car, it missed its target explodingbehind the vehicle and injuring the occupants of the following car. The motorcade continued on to the Governor’s Residence. At the conclusion of the visit it was decided to visit those injured in the explosion at the local hospital.

However, no one told the drivers of the change of plan so when the error was discovered the drivers had to turn around on the street.

During this manoeuvre the convoy came to a halt. Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian nationalist was sitting in a nearby cafe. He seized his opportunity, ran across the street and shot the royal couple. This assassination in Sarajevo is seen by many as the spark which lit the fuse which led to the carnage that was World War I.

On November 11, 1918, a few minutes before 11 a.m., Private George Price, a Canadian soldier, was killed on the Western Front, the last fallen soldier of the Great War.

Between those two events it is estimated that 17 million people lost their lives, countless millions more were injured, many horribly, a generation was traumatised, empires were overturned, and the political order of the world was changed forever.

The Great War was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. It is sometimes called a family feud because the heads of state of Britain, Germany, and Russia were first cousins.

Thousands of Irish soldiers fought in the Great War. It is estimated that 49,000 were killed or died from their injuries, more than 800 were from Wexford.

One of the books written about the Irish involvement in the Great War is called ‘ The Glorious Madness’ by the historian Turtle Bunbury. In the book he mentions an Irish Convent in Ypres, Belgium founded in 1665.

One of its past pupils was Nano Nagle, who founded the Presentation Sisters in 1775. We celebrated the bi-centenary of Wexford Presentation School and Convent a few weeks ago.

The convent in Ypres had survived the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars but its luck ran out when the town became one of the most violently contested battlegrounds on the Western Front.

As the battles raged around them the nuns had no choice but to flee. Seven of the 15 sisters were Irish, some from Wexford with names like Rossiter and Fletcher.

In 1904 Dora Howard, a niece of John Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, joined the convent. John’s brother Major Willie Redmond was killed in action on the Western Front on June 6, 1917.

Last year on the anniversary of his death the Irish Times ran an article on him entitled ‘An Irish Patriot and a British Soldier’, highlighting in a sentence the complex nature of Irish history.

The Sisters from Ypres came to Ireland and settled in Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, where they still reside. Nearer to home a group of monks fled Brussels in 1915 and settled just up the road in Edermine. Their best known member was Dom Marmion, a widely read spiritual writer who was beatified in 2000 by Pope John Paul II. The monks returned to Belgium in 1919.

Those who returned to Ireland after the war came back to a different country. The events of 1916 had changed everything. As Bunbury puts it in ‘ The Glorious Madness’ – ‘for those who returned to Ireland after the war, the horror of their experience was magnified by the realisation that everything they had fought for amounted to nought and that anyone that thought otherwise was no longer welcome.’

In recent years public sentiment has softened and there is now a greater understanding and appreciation of the motives of the Irish who fought in the Great War.

Tom Kettle, poet, soldier and Home Rule politician, who was killed on the Western Front on September 9, 1916, wrote a moving poem to his young daughter from the trenches.

The poem is called ‘ To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God’ and it captures the poet’s insight into what Bunbury calls ‘ the Glorious Madness’:

In wiser days my darling rosebud blown to beauty proud as was your mother’s prime.

In that desired, delayed, incredible time,

You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own

And the dear heart that was your baby throne,

To dice with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme

And reason; some will call the thing sublime,

And some decry it in a knowing tone. So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, died not for flag, nor

King, nor Emperor,—

But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret scripture of the poor.

On this centenary of the ending of the Great War let us be mindful of the precious gift of peace that we enjoy today, and remember pray for those who were not as blessed as we are.

May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in eternal peace. ABOVE: A newspaper from 1914.