Reflections and Comments 1865-1895Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
General
Reflections and Comments 1865-1895
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence
Essays
A considerable body of the graduates of the Irish Catholic
University, including members of the legal and medical professions,
presented a long and solemn memorial to Cardinal Cullen and the
other Catholic bishops at the late commencement of that institution,
which throws a good deal of light not only on the vexed question of
Catholic education in Ireland, but on the relations of the Catholic
Church to education everywhere. The memorial examined in detail the
management of the university, which it pronounces so bad as to
endanger the existence of the college. But what it most complains of
is the all but total absence of instruction in science. The
memorialists say that the neglect of science by the university has
afforded a very plausible argument to the enemies of the university,
who never tire of repeating that the Catholic Church is the enemy of
science, and that she will carry out her usual policy in Ireland
with respect to it; that "no one can deny that the Irish Catholics
are miserably deficient in scientific education, and that this
deficiency is extremely galling to them; and, in a commercial sense,
involves a loss to them, while, in an intellectual sense, it
involves a positive degradation." They speak regretfully of the
secession of Professor Sullivan, to take the presidency of the
Queen's College, Cork, and declare that "no Irish-Catholic man of
science can be found to take his place." They then go on to make
several astounding charges. The lecture-list of the university does
not include for the faculty of arts a single professor of the
physical or natural sciences, or the name of a solitary teacher in
descriptive geometry, geology, zoölogy, comparative anatomy,
mineralogy, mining, astronomy, philology, ethnology, mechanics,
electricity, or optics. Of the prizes and exhibitions, the number
offered in classics equals that of those offered in all other
studies put together, while in other universities the classical
prizes do not exceed one-fourth of the whole. They wind up their
melancholy recital by declaring that they are determined that the
scientific inferiority of Irish Catholics shall not last any longer;
and that if they cannot obtain a scientific education in their own
universities, they will seek it at Trinity or the Queen's Colleges,
or study it for themselves in the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley,
Tyndall, and Lyell. They make one other singular complaint, viz.,
that no provision is made for supplying the lay students with
instruction in theology.
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