Letter from Fr. James O’Mahony

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PROVINCIAL CURIA, St. Bonaventure's, Cork. Ireland. October 13, 1947. Most Reverend and dear Father General, I hasten to acknowledge your letter of Sept. 23rd which has only just arrived here. I can assure you, in advance, of the respectful and obedient reception of the decision of the General Definitory just announced. But before placing your letter before the Provincial Definitors, I feel it is my urgent duty to reply at once. I am not forgetting your assurance that certain paragraphs of your letter are not intended as an accusation or indictment, and, if my reply takes the form of a defence, it is in that spirit of filial frankness which your letter encourages and which, I feel, will not be misunderstood. You are our universal Father in Saint Francis, I am your son, and it is my duty to give you the truth of a situation as I see it, particularly when complaints have reached you about men who are not in a position to defend themselves. I do this or in the more freely that I shall not be accused, either at home or in the Custody, of partiality in favour of conditions in the Custody. One of my first acts as Provincial, four years ago, was to declare publicly that the ideal of a Province was the normal, natural, and necessary development of the Custody. That declaration has been quoted, over and over again, by the Provincial Custos. The fact that this ideal has been sincerely accepted individually and collectively by members of the Custody is sufficient answer to the opinion which says that a permanent establishment of the Order was never seriously contemplated. I have always regarded it as unfortunate that the spirit of missionary enterprise, which the early pioneers worked in lonely and forsaken places, was not sufficiently subordinated to the interests of a Province. But it was not for me to pass judgment on the past so much as to ensure the future. You will forgive me if I remark that it is not without its particular irony that the success of the English Friars (however much I rejoice in it for its own sake) should be contrasted with that of the Irish Friars considering that Mendocino County, forsaken by the English Province, should have become the burden of the Irish, and that the Mission in India, for which Mendocino County was given up, should have had to draw upon the Irish. Time will tell. It is my belief that success, now hidden, will declare itself, with God's help, in no long period of time; and expansion in the West is scarcely to be compared with expansion in the East, particularly where Catholic Boston is concerned. With regard to Father Walter's application, and his many charges, I can only repeat that his testimony has no very serious value. It is nothing short of a gross libel on the Custody to say that its members are out of sympathy with the Americans. So many have already taken out their papers of citizenship, the vast majority are actually doing so, and they listened with much such docility to my advocacy of taking root in th…