Irish Catholic Martyrs

Irish Catholic Martyrs (Irish: Mairtírigh Chaitliceacha na hÉireann) were 24 Irish men and women who have been beatified or canonized for both a life of heroic virtue and for dying for their Catholic faith between the reign of King Henry VIII and Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

The more than three century-long religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland came in waves, caused by an overreaction by the State to certain incidents and interspersed with intervals of comparative respite.^{[need quotation to verify]}

The 1975 canonization of Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales raised considerable public interest in other Irishmen and Irishwomen who had similarly died for their Catholic faith in the 16th and 17th centuries.^{[citation needed]} On 22 September 1992 Pope John Paul II beatified an additional 17 martyrs and assigned June 20, the anniversary of the 1584 martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, as their feast day.

Religious persecution of Catholics in Ireland began under King Henry VIII (then Lord of Ireland) after his excommunication in 1533. The Irish Parliament adopted the Acts of Supremacy, which declared the Irish Church subservient to the State. In response, Irish bishops, priests, and laity who continued to pray for the pope during Mass were tortured and killed. The Treasons Act 1534 defined even unspoken mental allegiance to the Holy See as high treason. Many were imprisoned on this basis. Alleged traitors who were brought to trial. King Henry and Thomas Cromwell continued Cardinal Wolsey's policies of centralizing government power in Dublin Castle and sought to destroy the political and military independence of both the Old English nobility, the Irish clans, and the Gaelic nobility of Ireland.^{[citation needed]} This, in addition to the King's religious policy, ultimately triggered Old English aristocrat Silken Thomas, 10th and last Earl of Kildare, to launch a 1534-1535 military uprising against the rule of the House of Tudor in Ireland.

On c.30 July 1535 John Travers, a graduate of Oxford University and the Chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, was executed in Dublin for writing a volume denouncing the Act of Supremacy. He was burned at the stake in the Common then known as, "Oxmantown Green", part of which has since become Smithfield Market on the city's Northside.

The focus of religious persecution turned from Catholics to Protestants after the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary, but after Mary's death in November 1558, her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I arranged for Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy of 1559, which re-established the control by the State over the Church within her dominions and criminalized religious dissent as high treason.^{[citation needed]} While reviving Thomas Cranmer's prayerbook, the Queen ordered the Elizabethan religious settlement to favor High Church Anglicanism, which preserved many traditionally Catholic ceremonies. Meanwhile, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559), the Prayer Book of 1559, and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) mixed the doctrines of Protestantism and Caesaropapism. From the early years of her reign, pressure was put on all her subjects to conform to the "Established Church" of the realm or be considered guilty of high treason. Prosecutions for Recusancy and refusals to take the Oath of Supremacy, the issuing of torture warrants, and the use of priest hunters escalated rapidly.^{[citation needed]}

In 1563 the Earl of Essex issued a proclamation, by which all Catholic priests, secular and regular, were forbidden to officiate, or even to reside in Dublin or in The Pale. Fines and penalties were strictly enforced for Recusancy from the Anglican Sunday service; before long. Catholic priests and others were hunted into the Mass rocks in mountains and caves; and the parish churches and few monastic chapels which had escaped earlier destruction were also destroyed. It ultimately resulted in Pope Pius V's 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which, "released [Elizabeth I's] subjects from their allegiance to her".

In Ireland the First Desmond Rebellion, led by James FitzMaurice FitzGerald and which sought to replace Queen Elizabeth I with Don John of Austria as High King of Ireland, was launched in 1569, at almost the same time as the Northern Rebellion in England. The Wexford Martyrs were found guilty of high treason for aiding in the escape of James Eustace, 3rd Viscount Baltinglass and refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy and declare Elizabeth I of England to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland.^{[citation needed]}