FR. SEAN’S 50 -YEAR AMERICAN STRUGGLE FOR UNITY, JUSTICE, AND PEACE IN IRELAND –

Posted By: September 30, 2022

He thought he was coming to America for three years on October 2, 1972, 50 years ago. At least, that is what his Religious Superior told him. But it also conformed to his own estimate, and that of many others, that “The Troubles’’ in Northern Ireland would be over by then—and that “Ireland would be free,” and that he would be free to go back England where he was stationed as a Redemptorist priest. … But, as they say, man proposes, God disposes …

Fr. Sean Mc Manus —President/Founder of the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus and Chief Judge of the World Peace Prize—is originally from the parish of Kinawley, County Fermanagh. As he says himself: “England not only partitioned my country and the Province of Ulster, but the damn Border partitioned my historic parish of Kinawley, which goes back to the Sixth Century. Since the Partition Act, December 23, 1920, part of the parish is “over the Border” in the Swanlinbar area of County Cavan in what later became the 26-County Irish Republic.”

In May 1971, Fr. Mc Manus, while stationed in Liverpool, publicly refused to comply with the National Census taking place in Britain and Northern Ireland/The North—as a public protest against England’s oppression in The North. He was the only person, and especially the only priest in Britain to do so, and it created quite a commotion at the time. He was ordered by his Religious Superior to immediately go to the Redemptorist Monastery in Perth, Scotland.

In August 1971, Fr. Mc Manus was arrested while nonviolently protesting in an anti-Interment (jail without charge or trial) in Enniskillen and held in the police barracks for most of the night. On September 6, he was brought before the court in Enniskillen, where he “refused to recognize the court”—in other words rejected England’s moral or legal right to dominate or rule any part of Ireland and condemned British institutionalized, state and military violence as the root cause of violence in Ireland. … and that caused not only a commotion, but a storm.

Fr. McManus continued to speak out, but never from the pulpit.

In April 1972, Fr. McManus was ordered by his Religious Superior to quit Scotland and go to Hampshire, England, to a Redemptorist center with no parish attached. Fr. Mc Manus would refer to that location as “his ecclesiastical Long Kesh,” after the Concentration Camp in The North.

The Redemptorist Superior (under Church and State pressure) told Fr. Mc Manus that he would be kept in Hampshire, with no public ministry, until he gave “an absolute promise —without equivocation or reservation—never to speak out again on Northern Ireland.”

Fr. Mc Manus explains: “You see —in my conscience and knowledge—my Religious Superior, in effect, was demanding me to be silent about injustice while Biblical faith of the Old and New Testament—especially the teaching of Jesus Christ, Himself, and the official teaching of the Catholic Church was insisting that I speak out.

For example—and very timely—in 1971,  the World Synod of Catholic Bishops, meeting in Rome, issued with the authorization and endorsement of the Pope, the magnificent, prophetic document, Justice in the World declaring: “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.” (Number 6).

And, Rev. Walter Brueggemann, the eminent Protestant American scholar of the Old Testament, clinches all this by stating simply and strikingly: “In Biblical faith, the doing of justice is the primary expectation of God.”

And no Catholic (least of all, no priest) is exempt from that teaching.

So, I had to go with my conscience, and not with the false “British Empire Gospel.” … And so, I was bound for America on October 2, 1972, … and the rest is pretty well documented in many places, especially in my Memoirs: My American Struggle for justice in Northern Ireland. (US Edition 2019).” And my American struggle continues for unity, justice, and peace in a new Ireland. And now 50 years later, I am grateful to God that I’ve been able to do far more in America for justice in Ireland than I would have if I not been exiled by Church and State from England … So, God bless America and God save Ireland.”

IF YOU WANT TO JOIN IN HONORING FR. SEAN’S UNIQUE AND UNSURPASSED 50 YEARS OF WORK TO KEEP THE U.S. CONGRESS STANDING UP FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE IN IRELAND, PLEASE CONSIDER A SPECIAL DONATION TO THE IRISH NATIONAL CAUCUS/ IRISH PEACE FOUNDATION.

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