There used to be over 3,000 seminarians in Ireland (before the heresy of Vatican II). There were 20+diosecean seminaries, and double that number of novitiates for male religious Orders in Ireland. Maynooth College was famous as being the premier seminary of Ireland, and before 1962 boasted 500 seminarians. Thousands of Irish priests were across the world as missionaries, and here in the USA, until …More
There used to be over 3,000 seminarians in Ireland (before the heresy of Vatican II). There were 20+diosecean seminaries, and double that number of novitiates for male religious Orders in Ireland. Maynooth College was famous as being the premier seminary of Ireland, and before 1962 boasted 500 seminarians. Thousands of Irish priests were across the world as missionaries, and here in the USA, until the end of the 19th century , between 1787-1880's- 75% of priests, and a good percentage of our bishops came from Ireland. One of the last great prelates of the USA Church who was born in Ireland and came to the USA was the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, John Murphy Farley (1842-1918) who was born in Newtownhamilton, County Armagh, Ireland and came to the USA as a young boy yet was ordained from the North American College seminary in Rome, and was present there during the whole Vatican Council I (which unlike Vatican II, was Catholic). He served as private secretary to Cardinal John McCloskey of New York, and succeeded Archbishop Corrigan in 1902, cardinal in 1911, and died in 1918 at 76.
The Irish, and Irish Catholicism has a magnificent history here in the USA. The Sisters of Mercy, founded by Ven. Mother Catherine McAuley in Ireland, were among the first Orders of teaching sisters in the USA, after the Sisters of Charity founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. With the Sisters of Charity, many Sisters of Mercy served on the battlefields of the Civil War, and in hospitals as nurses. They went from a few hundred at the time of the Civil War (many of their vocations coming by the boatload from Ireland), to nearly 20,000 in the USA alone in 1962. UNfortunatly, they because extremenly liberal, and even feminist dissidents after Vatican II, discarded their traditions, the habit, and created new "ministries" (campaigning for women-priests, married priests, LGBTQ rights, homo marriage, etc.) and today have barely 2,000 in the USA at a median age of 81+ (like most liberal Orders of USA nuns). Traditional and devout Irish CAtholics were the bulk of the waves of immigrants to the USA between 1848-1920, and the devotion of these good people largely built most dioceses and Archdioceses in the USA. The Italian people, Poles, Germans and others during that period came at much smaller numbers.
Today, Ireland only has 2 functioning diosecean seminarians, and in the whole of Ireland, there are only about 24 seminarians. I may be mistaken, but I belive that last year, only 1 new priest was ordained in Ireland. This is the fruit of 50+ years of Vatican II, 8+ years of Pope Francis. Any more "changes" as stated by this radical Francis appointed bishop of Dublin will wipe out the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland completely. Francis should be extremely proud. He is, at least here, achieving his goal. Hopefully in the end he will be stopped.
