Saint Oliver Plunkett - lessons from the life of an Irish saint and scholar

I remembered in a hazy sort of way being taught about him in national school by Máistir Ó Currain and when Fr Sean described how he died at the hands of the English it reawakened memories; so I did a bit of scratching about (research) when I got home.

According to records that are not set in stone, he was born on November 1, 1625 in Loughcrew Co Meath.

From 1649 to 53 another ‘Oliver’ Oliver Cromwell had set about getting rid of Catholicism in Ireland, so by practicing your faith you were doing so at your own peril. This was the time when Mass rocks became the norm out in the countryside, people would gather at appointed places (mass rocks) to pray. Most if not all priests caught doing so were immediately disposed of by the sword if Cromwell’s forces were notified that a mass was taking place.

Oliver Plunkett was ordained a priest in 1645 and was appointed by Irish bishops to act as their representative in Rome, which saved him from execution.

The penal laws were relaxed around 1660 to the extent that he was able to return to Ireland and he immediately set about confronting a problem that existed among the priesthood, which was alcohol abuse. He established a Jesuit college in Drogheda in 1670 where a year after opening he had 150 students. Almost a third of them were Protestants, so integrated education is not something that was created in 20th Century Belfast.

The Duke of Ormonde was a Protestant whose parents were Catholics so he tolerated the Catholic hierarchy until the beginning of the 1670s, but because Oliver would not agree to the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, his college was shut down and demolished. (The Test Acts were a set of English laws that served as a test for public office and imposed very restrictive laws on Catholics and nonconformists. It implied that only those able to take Communion in the Church of Ireland were fit for public employment).

Oliver Plunket had to go on the run (there was no Tony Blair to sign a letter for on-the-runs) as he refused an order to go into exile however he was largely left to his own devices for a few years. In 1678 further anti-Catholic feelings were raised by a plot concocted in England (Popish plot) by a clergyman called Titus Oates.

This led to the subsequent arrest of Archbishop Peter Talbot in Dublin, which led Oliver Plunkettto once again to go into hiding.

Arthur Capell had been lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1672-777 and was the figure behind the campaign of persecution in the hope of reinstalling himself as lord lieutenant of Ireland.

Despite the pressure he was under, Plunkett would not abandon his flock even though he had a price on his head, but was arrested in Dublin in December 1679 and imprisoned in Dublin Castle, where he administered absolution to the dying bishop of Dublin Peter Talbot.

Plunkett was accused of trying to bring 20,000 French soldiers into Ireland to start a rebellion and fearing that he would be open to sympathy in Irish courts, he was taken over to England. After being shunted around the courts and through the use of witnesses that would sell their own mothers to the devil, Oliver Plunket, by now an Archbishop, was found guilty of high treason in the month of June 1681 for promoting the Roman faith and got the death sentence.

In passing judgement, the chief justice said: ‘You have done so much as you could to dishonour God in this case, setting up a false religion, then which there is not anything more displeasing to God or more pernicious to mankind in the world’.

In what was a serious miscarriage of justice, (which still takes place hundreds of years later in British courts) the Jury with their minds already made up returned with a guilty verdict in less than fifteen minutes. Despite many pleas for clemency from different quarters, Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, England on July 1, 1681 (garrotting was another commonly used term for such barbarous exterminations of the time). He was only 55 years of age and the last Catholic Martyr in the religious sense to die by order of the court in England. His body parts were never put back together from that day onwards, some remain in Lamspringe in Germany, with most of his body kept in Downside Abby in England. His head remains in Ireland the country of his birth, in St Peter’s Church in Drogheda.

Naomh Oilibhéar Pluincéad was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1975. He was the first Irish saint for close on 700 years, and the first of the Irish Martyrs to be beatified. There are churches, parishes, schools, sports grounds and clubs as well as roads and streets named in his honour throughout the Christian world.

You can express your feelings in whatever way you like, but the ISIS of today who instil fear by cutting heads off people didn’t invent this practice. In saying that, they are like mavericks in comparison to what was done in the name of kings and queens of England in their heyday where Bishops heads were mounted atop the gate entrances to estates as a warning to anyone daring to look towards Rome.

In 1981 Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich held a mass along with 20 Bishops and abbots on London’s Clapham Common for the 300th anniversary of his death. His head was brought across in the same helicopter that Cardinal Ó Fiaich travelled on and was greeted by thousands of pilgrims who took over Clapham Common on that day. As a follow-on to that occasion Oliver Plunkett was made patron saint for much needed “peace and reconciliation in Ireland” in 1997.

James Woods

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