Extracts from a letter from Joseph P. Walshe to Seán MacBride (Dublin)
(Secret and Personal)

My dear Minister,
I was very glad and greatly relieved to receive your letter of the 28th inst.¹ It contained information badly needed, and it gives me the opportunity of writing you a letter completely extra formam.²

I am a little bit worried about the home front. In other words, I am afraid of the possibility of surrender on this most vital issue for our whole future relations with the Holy See and with our fellow Irish Catholics throughout the world. Your colleagues in the Government may not have read the lives of St. Columbanus and St. Catherine of Siena; and they may not know that most Catholic movements, even most religious orders and institutions come into being only after a prolonged, and frequently bitter struggle with the Holy See. A very distinguished Prelate said to me last year that, but for the struggle of the western clergy against Roman regulations and ordinances, the purity of our Catholic doctrine would have become obscured under a cloud of Italian superstitions, and our clergy would have been modelled so closely on the Italian system that, in less than fifty years, the western Church, including Ireland would have been reduced to the appalling level of Italian Catholicism.

The splendid Irish prelate, who answered Leo XIII's reminder that he could be suspended from office, by saying that the suspension would, at least, be inexpedient, has had thousands of imitators.

Many of us were brought up in the atmosphere that everything that came out of Rome was ipso facto sacrosanct. We cannot deal with them on that basis, without sacrificing the last remnant of our prestige vis à vis our own clergy at home, and the clergy of the entire English speaking world. And we must never forget that they have to admit (most of them with the greatest reluctance) that we are ... wherever we find ourselves, the best, and the most numerous body of practising Catholics in the whole world. Sans peur et sans reproche we can and must fight this battle to the very last ditch. They know that every member of the Government is a fervent Catholic. I have never ceased to emphasize that fact since the Government came into office, and the newspaper (leftist) reaction gave me the first chance of doing so. I may have over-canonized the Government, and may have contributed to the clearly existing belief, in the Secretariat, that our piety is of the naif order that will accept anything. So far as I myself am concerned, I think they have nothing against me. I observe their very slightest wishes ... give money to their charities ... use all my substance, to my last farthing, entertaining their friends ... abstain from all contacts with the other Diplomatic Corps, almost to the point of making enemies amongst them. I follow my country's traditions with regard to the practice of my religion.

But the crisis was inevitable. I saw it coming from the beginning and, now that it has come, it is enormously to our advantage that we are going into it with absolutely clean hands.

[matter omitted]

You will have noticed in my letter to Montini that I never describe the undesired as Italian. It is better not. We can attain our objective more easily by not doing so. It is the most sensitive point of all. I have always emphasized my own esteem and affection for Italians and their quite extraordinary resemblance (with the exception of the priests) to our own people. And moreover in actual fact, some of the foreign ecclesiastical dignitaries available in Rome have become such sycophants of the Vatican, in its worst aspects, as to be quite as objectionable as an Italian candidate: so we must exclude all foreigners i.e. all who are not of Irish blood.

We should continue to assume that no appointment has been made. That will help them also, in their retreat.

In point 8 of your minute you say that you had told the A.B.s. that, if the Holy See were adamant it would be difficult for the Govt to refuse the Holy Father's nominee. As this letter is extra formam, I feel I should advise you not to give the Bishops the slightest impression that the Government would yield. Moreover it is not the H.F. who is in question. The Secretariat of State is responsible, and the H.F. will, most certainly, tell them to find the right man the moment he becomes convinced that our objection is fundamental and unchangeable. Otherwise the Secretariat would always use the H.F. as an arm in our relations with them.

[matter omitted]