dimanche 1 février 2015

Bienheureux CONOR O’DEVANY, prêtre franciscain et évêque et PATRICK O’LOUGHRAN, prêtre franciscain, martyrs

This image counterposes O’Devany and O’Loughran (background) with the sufferings of 16th century martyr Archbishop Dermot O’Hurley (foreground).


Bx Conor O’Devany, évêque et Patrick O’Lougham, prêtre, martyrs

Conor O'Devany, né en 1532 en Irlande du Nord, prêtre franciscain, ordonné évêque de Down et Connor le 2 février 1583. Patrick O’Lougham, né vers 1577, prêtre franciscain originaire de l'archidiocèse d'Armagh furent martyrisés et pendus à Dublin le 1er février 1612 sous le roi Jacques Ier, à cause de la foi catholique.

SOURCE : http://www.paroisse-saint-aygulf.fr/index.php/prieres-et-liturgie/saints-par-mois/icalrepeat.detail/2015/02/01/12640/-/bx-conor-o-devany-eveque-et-patrick-o-lougham-pretre-martyrs

Bienheureux Conor O’Devany et Patrick O’Lougham

Martyrs en Irlande (+ 1612)

Conor O'Devany, né en 1532 en Irlande du Nord, prêtre franciscain, ordonné évêque de Down et Connor le 2 février 1583. Patrick O’Lougham, né vers 1577, prêtre franciscain de l'archidiocèse d'Armagh. Martyrisés le 1er février 1612 à Dublin en Irlande et béatifiés le 27 septembre 1992.

À Dublin, en 1612, les bienheureux martyrs Conor O’Devany, évêque de Down et Connor, franciscain, et Patrick O’Lougham, prêtre, qui, sous le roi Jacques Ier, furent condamnés à mort à cause de la foi catholique et subirent le supplice de la pendaison.

Martyrologe romain

SOURCE : http://nominis.cef.fr/contenus/saint/11406/Bienheureux-Conor-O%92Devany-et-Patrick-O%92Lougham.html

Blessed Conor O’Devany

Also known as

Conchubhar Ó Duibheanaigh

Memorial

1 February

20 June as one of the Irish Martyrs

Profile

Franciscan Friars Minor (Observants) priest. Chosen bishop of the diocese of Down and ConnorIreland on 13 May 1582 by Pope Gregory XIIIArrested in 1588 in the antiCatholic panic following the failed invasion by the Spanish Armada. Arrested again in 1611, he is one of the Irish Martyrs.

Born

c.1530 in UlsterArmaghIreland

Died

hanged on 1 February 1611 in DublinIreland

Venerated

6 July 1991 by Pope John Paul II

Beatified

27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II in RomeItaly

Additional Information

books

Book of Saints, by the Monks of Ramsgate

Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints

other sites in english

Catholic Online

sitios en español

Martirologio Romano2001 edición

fonti in italiano

Martirologio Romano2005 edition

Santi e Beati

MLA Citation

“Blessed Conor O’Devany“. CatholicSaints.Info. 31 January 2017. Web. 13 April 2021. <https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-conor-odevany/>

SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-conor-odevany/

Cornelius O'Devany

(Conchobhar O'Duibheannaigh)

Bishop of Down and ConnorIreland, b. about 1532; d. at Dublin, 11 February, 1612 (N. S.). He was a Franciscan of Donegal Convent, and while in Rome in 1582 was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor, and consecrated, 2 February, 1583. In 1588 he was committed to Dublin Castle. Failing to convict him of any crime punishable with death, Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam sought authority from Burghley to "be rid of such an obstinate enemy of God and so rank a traitor to her Majesty as no doubt he is". He lay in prison until November, 1590, being then released ostensibly on his own petition but doubtless through policy. He was protected by O'Neill until 1607, and escaped arrest until the middle of 1611, when, almost eighty years old, he was taken while administering confirmation and again committed to Dublin Castle. On 28 January, 1612, he was tried for high treason, found guilty by the majority of a packed jury, and sentenced to die on 1 February (O.S.). He was drawn on a cart from the Castle to the gallows beyond the river; the whole route was crowded with Catholics lamenting and begging his blessing. Protestant clergymen pestered him with ministrations and urged him to confess he died for treason. "Pray let me be", he answered, "the viceroy's messenger to me here present, could tell that I might have life and revenue for going once to that temple", pointing to a tower opposite. He kissed the gallows before mounting, and then proceeding to exhort the Catholics to constancy, he was thrown off, cut down alive, and quartered. With him suffered Patrick O'Loughran, a priest arrested at Cork. The people, despite the guards, carried off the halter, his clothes, and even fragments of his body and chips of the gallows. They prayed all night by the remains, an infirm man was reported cured by touching them, and Mass after Mass was said there from Midnight until day. Such was the concourse that the viceroy ordered the members to be buried on the spot, but next night the Catholics exhumed them and interred them in St. James's Churchyard. A list of martyrs compiled by Dr. O'Devany was used by Rothe in his "Analecta".

Sources

O'Laverty, Diocese of Down and Connor, V (Dublin, 1895); Rothe, Analecta Nova et Mira, ed. Moran (Dublin, 1884); O'Reilly, Memorials of those who suffered for the Catholic Faith (London, 1868); Murphy, Our Martyrs (Dublin, 1896).

Cornelius O'Devany." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 13 Apr. 2021 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11207a.htm>.

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by William D. Neville.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. February 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.

Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

SOURCE : https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11207a.htm

Blessed Patrick O’Loughran

Also known as

Pádraig Ó Lochráin

Patrick O’Lochran

Memorial

1 February

20 June as one of the Irish Martyrs

Profile

Priest in the archdiocese of ArmaghIreland. One of the Irish Martyrs.

Born

c.1577 in UlsterArmaghIreland

Died

1 February 1611 in DublinIreland

Venerated

6 July 1991 by Pope John Paul II

Beatified

27 September 1992 by Pope John Paul II in RomeItaly

Additional Information

books

Book of Saints, by the Monks of Ramsgate

Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints

other sites in english

Hagiography Circle

MLA Citation

“Blessed Patrick O’Loughran“. CatholicSaints.Info. 15 June 2015. Web. 13 April 2021. <https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-patrick-oloughran/>

SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-patrick-oloughran/

The martyrdom of Bishop O’Devaney

30 November, 1999

Henry Peel OP tells the story of the 17th century martyrdom of Bishop Conor O’Devaney and a young priest, Fr Patrick O’Loughran.

George’s Hill on Dublin’s Northside is best known today because it is the site of George’s Hill Presentation Convent. This was the first foundation of the Presentation Sisters in the city. It dates from 1794. The site has also been identified as the place of martyrdom of the Franciscan bishop of Down and Connor, and a priest, Patrick O’Loughran, who had been arrested in Cork on his return from the continent. They were hanged, drawn and quartered on February 1st, 1612.

The bishop was in his eighties and the priest about thirty five. They are included in the seventeen Irish martyrs whose annual memorial is celebrated on June 20. There are ten separate accounts of the martyrdom which agree substantially about the details. Two of these claim to be based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. The third was written by a Franciscan from Dundalk within three months of the event. He would certainly have met people who were present. The fourth was compiled by Franciscans in Louvain from letters received from Ireland a short time after the martyrdom.

Place of execution

In 1612 George’s Hill was simply a hill outside the city. There was then only one bridge over the river Liffey. It gave its name to Bridge Street which it connected with Church Street, named after the Church of St. Michan. It was over that bridge that Conor O’Devany and Patrick O’Loughran were brought by cart from Dublin Castle to George’s Hill on February 1st, 1612. The bishop is reported as saying that he was being carried to his place of execution while Christ had to carry his cross. Crowds gathered to accompany them on their journey and it is estimated that there were several thousand at the place of execution. The Catholic population of Dublin was certainly well represented. Until the last moment the prisoners were offered a pardon and preferment if they would take the Oath of Supremacy.

On arrival at the place of execution the prisoners were released from the cart to which they had been tied lying on their backs faced upwards. Immediately, they knelt to pray. The Sheriff, surrounded by soldiers, ordered them to approach the gallows. The bishop threw off his cloak and appeared in his Franciscan habit. He had told a woman who visited him in prison to make sure that he was buried in his Franciscan habit saying that he esteemed it more than the insignia of a bishop. He requested that the priest should be the first to suffer lest the spectacle of his own suffering should weaken his resolution. The request was refused.

As he mounted the scaffold a great cry arose from the crowd. Even at this last moment he was offered his freedom and preferment if he would confess his treason and take the Oath of Supremacy. He replied that he was being put to death for his faith and not for treason.

Scaffold bathed in red glow

On reaching the top step of the scaffold the bishop prayed aloud for all who were present. He prayed for the Catholics of Dublin and of Ireland, urging them to persevere in their faith. He prayed for all heretics and for their reunion with the Church and he forgave his persecutors. He kissed the hangman’s rope, placed it around his neck, drew the veil over his face and held out his hands to be tied.

It was at this moment that an event occurred which was recorded by almost all the sources and evidently was remembered by all the witnesses. The sky had been dark and overcast all that day. Now as the sun was setting the clouds parted and the scaffold was bathed in the red glow of the setting sun. While the bishop hung on the gallows the clouds closed over again.

After the bishop had been hanged the executioner cut off his head and held it up with the customary cry: ‘Look on the head of a traitor’. The work of dismembering the body was completed and the crowd surged forward, seeking some relics of the martyr.

The execution of the priest followed in similar fashion. The remains were buried on George’s Hill but disinterred the following night and given honourable burial. One source which claims the testimony of an eyewitness records simply that they were buried ‘with other martyrs’. This may mean St. Kevin’s churchyard where the memory of the martyred Archbishop of Cashel, Dermot O’Hurley was still green.

Member of the Franciscan Order

Conor O’Devany had entered the Observant branch of the Franciscan Order in the friary of Donegal sometime around 1550 when he was a very young man. This friary had been founded by the ruling O’Donnell family in 1474. It had not yet been confiscated since the royal writ did not run in the Gaelic North until after the surrender of Hugh O’Neill in 1603. Conor O’Devany was appointed bishop of Down and Connor by Pope Gregory XIII in May 1582. He was one of three bishops consecrated on May 13th, 1582 in the Church of Santa Maria dell’ Anima in Rome. He returned to Ireland shortly afterwards.

Conor O’Devany was one of six bishops and a gathering of the clergy who attended a synod in Clogher in 1587 which promulgated the decrees of the Council of Trent. He was captured and imprisoned in Dublin Castle in the nervous aftermath of the failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588 but managed to obtain his release and returned to continue his pastoral care of his diocese. In the early summer of 1611 he was again taken prisoner and lodged in Dublin Castle.

The Elizabethan conquest was completed with the surrender of Hugh O’Neill in 1603. What is known as the ‘flight of the Earls’followed in 1607. There was no longer any political or military focus of resistance to English rule.

Accused of treason

In 1612 O’Devany was accused of assisting Hugh O’Neill and Brian MacArt O’Neill in their treasons. The bishop admitted that he had lived in the war zone during the nine years war. He had done so because it was his duty to discharge his pastoral care and he had confined himself to doing his duty. He protested that he was being charged because of his religion and not because of any treason which he denied having committed. The bishop also denied the competence of a secular court to try him. The Chief Justice commented that Christ had submitted to being tried by Pilate to which the bishop replied that he was content to play the role that Christ played before Pilate.

Lord Deputy Chichester had thought that by making an example of a bishop and a priest he would cow the Catholics, particularly those of the Pale into religious conformity. The attempt had the opposite effect and provoked a demonstration of religious fervour in the heart of the Pale. Martyrdom was forging a link between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish. Five days after the execution Chichester reported to London ‘how a titular Bishop and a priest being lately executed for treason merely are notwithstanding thought martyrs and adored for saints’.

This article first appeared in The St Martin Magazine (February 2001), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.

SOURCE : https://www.catholicireland.net/the-martyrdom-of-bishop-odevaney/

1612: Bishop Conor O’Devany and Father Patrick O’Loughran

February 1st, 2015 Headsman

On this date in 1612,* Bishop Conor O’Devan(e)y and Father Patrick O’Loughran were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors at George’s Hill outside of Dublin.

In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, Ireland’s Catholics found things increasingly uncomfortable under King James.

In 1607, reacting to a squeeze on their incomes and prerogatives, two native noblemen fled to the continent hoping to make arrangements with the Spanish for a reconquest that would never come. This Flight of the Earls spelled the end of Ireland’s homegrown Gaelic aristocracy and set the stage for the Plantation of Ulster, the settler statelet that formed the germ of present-day Northern Ireland.

O’Loughran’s crime was very simple: already on the continent himself, he had administered the sacraments to those attainted fugitives, later having the boldness to return to Ireland.

There, the charge of collaborating with Bishop O’Devany was also laid to his shoulders.

While O’Loughran was in the summer of his natural life, O’Devany was around eighty years old. Consecrated a bishop in Rome in 1582, he had returned to the north of Ireland and been briefly detained in the post-Spanish Armada security scare.

In the 1600s, O’Devany’s protector had been Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyronne, and unfortunately this man was one of the earls in the aforementioned Flight.

He wasn’t a difficult man to target, but the somewhat gratuitous decision by England’s viceroy to do so was not widely supported even by the English and Protestant factions. O’Loughran’s conduct could perhaps be stretched to resemble treason; O’Devany was just an old man being persecuted for his faith. Going to his glory, the bishop did not fail to play that angle up under the eyes of a sympathetic Gaelic crowd.

Far from being cowed by the bishop’s butchery, those onlookers swarmed the gallows, touching the spilled blood and the quartered flesh as holy relics. “Some cut away all the hair from the head, which they preserved for a relic; some others gave practice to steal the head away … the body being dissevered into four quarters, they neither left finger or toe, but they cut them off and carried them away … with their knives they shaed off chips from the hallowed gallows; neither could they omit the halter with which he was hanged, but it was rescued for holy uses.” (Barnabe Rich)

Days after the executions, that aforementioned aggressive viceroy, Lord Chichester, reported to London how “a titular Bishop and a priest being lately executed for treason merely are notwithstanding thought martyrs and adored for saints.”

Thanks to the counterproductive outcome, the British laid off the policy of martyring Catholic priests thereafter (at least until Cromwell, but that’s another story).

Both men were beatified in 1992 among the Irish Catholic Martyrs.

* The date was February 1 according to the Julian calendar still in use by England at the time; it was February 12 according to the Gregorian calendar. England occupied Ireland through the period of the new Gregorian calendar’s initial 16th century adoption by Europe’s Catholic countries, so the official date in Ireland was February 1 … even though the padres’ boss in Rome would have considered it February 12.

Possibly Related Executions:

1679: St. John Kemble, 80-year-old priest

1608: St. Thomas Garnet, protomartyr of Stonyhurst

1581: Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant

1582: John Payne, snitched out

1679: St. David Lewis, the last Welsh martyr

1588: Nicholas Garlick, Robert Ludlam, and Richard Simpson

1578: Blessed John Nelson, martyr

SOURCE : http://www.executedtoday.com/2015/02/01/1612-bishop-conor-odevany-and-father-patrick-oloughran/

Beati Conor O' Devany e Patrizio O' Lougham Martiri

1 febbraio

>>> Visualizza la Scheda del Gruppo cui appartiene

† Dublino, Irlanda, 1 febbraio 1611

Conor O' Devany e Patrizio O' Lougham, rispettivamente vescovo di Down e Connor e sacerdote dell’arcidiocesi di Armagh, entrambi nativi di Ulster nell’Irlanda del Nord furono impiccati sotto il regno di Giacomo I per la loro fede cattolica. Papa Giovanni Paolo II li ha beatificati il 27 settembre 1992.

Martirologio Romano: A Dublino in Irlanda, beati martiri Conor O’Devany, vescovo di Down e di Connor, dell’Ordine dei Frati Minori, e Patrizio O’Lougham, sacerdote, che, sotto il re Giacomo I, condannati per la loro fede cattolica, subirono il supplizio dell’impiccagione.

Il martirio di questi due intrepidi testimoni della fede si colloca nel contesto delle persecuzione perpetrate in Gran Bretagna ed Irlanda verso quei cattolici che rifiutarono di firmare l’Atto di Supremazia, cioè il riconoscimento del sovrano inglese quale capo della Chiesa Anglicana in opposizione al Romano Pontefice.

Conor O' Devany [Conchubhar O Duibheanaigh] nacque a Raphoe, nella contea irlandese di Donegal. In giovane età divenne frate francescano nel 1550. Il 13 maggio 1582 il pontefice Gregorio XIII lo consacrò vescovo di Down e Connor nella chiesa di Santa Maria dell’Anima in Roma. Nel 1588, anno dell’Armada, fu arrestato ed imprigionato per alcuni anni. Una volta rilasciato continuò ad esercitare il suo ministero, ignorando le difficoltà che si moltiplicavano e rifiutando di essere coinvolto nella guerra dei Nove Anni con il grande Hugh O’Neill.

Patrick O’Loughran [Padraig Ó Lochrain] nacque a Donaghmore, nella contea irlandese di Tyrone, nel 1577. Divenuto presbitero, fu nominato cappellano di O’Neill. Nel 1607, dopo la fuga dei Conti, fu cappellano della contessa O’Neill presso Flanders. Tornato poi in Irlanda, venne immediatamente arrestato a Cork, insieme al vescovo Conor O' Devany.

Per i due compagni di prigionia fu celebrato un comune processo all’inizio del 1612. Da Londra era giunto alle autorità protestanti di Dublino l’ordine di giustiziare un vescovo e come compagno di quest’ultimo fu designato il cappellano di O’Neill. L’accusa nei loro confronti fu di tradimento ed il verdetto naturalemente di colpevolezza. Vennero dunque impiccati insieme a Dublino il 1° febbraio 1612. Papa Giovanni Paolo II li ha beatificati il 27 settembre 1992 insieme ad altre quindici vittime della medesima persecuzione.

Autore: Fabio Arduino

SOURCE : http://santiebeati.it/dettaglio/39310