Every boy in a Jesuit school is required to put the letters A.M.D.G. over every
written piece of work submitted to his teachers.
They stand for “Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam” (To the Greater Glory
of God) following the injunction of St Paul that when we eat, drink or
otherwise act, we should dedicate our action to increasing God’s already
Infinite Glory. For two thousand years good Christians of every denomination
have tried to live up to that exacting standard.
It’s hard to believe that the Jesuit-educated William Joyce “Lord Haw
Haw,” was doing that in 1920, if he was, as suggested by Conor Cruise
O’Brien, an accessory to the murder by Royal Irish Constabulary personnel of
Father Michael Griffin, whose body was found in a bog in Galway, or to
his career as a British Empire Loyalist in the 1930s or as a Nazi propagandist
in the 1940s. No charge of homicide was ever brought against him. But a year
after the end of the Second World War he was cold-bloodedly and vengefully
tried and hanged in London. If all propagandists for bad causes were to meet
similar fates there would be a shortage of ropes. But William Joyce had,
perhaps, one saving grace.He faced the hangman bravely, fortified by the rites
of the Church of England.
I wonder how many Jesuit- educated political
commentators offer up their work to the
Greater Glory of God, or if they no longer believe in a deity, to the better
service of humanity?
The Annals of the Four Masters, ( whose work , completed a few years
before Cromwell’s visit, was intended to counteract the distortions
of Ireland’s ENGLISH enemies. It was dedicated-
“Do chum Gloire De agus Onora na hEireann” (To the Glory
of God and the Honour of Ireland). A Church in Dublin, in Phibsborough, I
believe, has a memorial to the Four Masters, erected in the first decade of the
twentieth century, at the instigation and expense of the then owner of The
Irish Independent, a paper perhaps better associated then, as now, with FIBS’
BORO. The then owner was William Martin Murphy, hammer of the working class,
whose paper called for the shooting of James Connolly, then lying wounded after
the Rising.
William Martin Murphy was a Jesuit boy, educated at Belvedere College in
Dublin. He was offered a knighthood by King George V on his visit to Dublin in
1911 and publicly refused it. After all, Irish news magnates in those days had
SOME standards.
I should stress that Cathal Brugha, Kevin Barry, Thomas Francis Meagher and a
great many patriots and other fine
characters were educated by the Jesuits and that the Great O’Neill, or to the
English, “Earl of Tyrone” had an English Jesuit advisor, in his long
resistance to the first Queen Elizabeth. When a historian centuries hence
writes of the anti- Irish propaganda spewing from Irish media, academia
and politicians these past fifty years, he or she might well name his work –
ELIZABETH’S IRISH WHORES.
And devote at least a chapter to Jesuit boys, and even the odd ordained
Jesuit, among them.
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