Mary Mcaleese Column, the Universe March 1994 Mostly It Is Mothers
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Mary McAleese Column, The Universe March 1994 Mostly it is mothers who hand on the faith. Mostly it is an uphill struggle. My kids would rather have teeth pulled without benefit of anesthetic than submit to heartfelt Godtalk. But on the days when their careless cynicism threatens to defeat me I now have a new role model to appeal to for courage and patience. Her name is Blessed Margaret Ball, and the first stained glass window commemorating her martyrdom has just been installed in my local parish church. Margaret Ball died 410 years ago, one of the many thousands who died in Ireland during the bloody years of the Reformation but whereas her co-religionist were killed by religious and political adversaries Margaret Ball was left to die a slow agonising and lonely death in a Dublin prison by her own son Walter, the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Echoes of that hatefilled century when rabid Protestantism combined with colonial zealotry to create the lethal cocktail from Ireland still reels drunkenly, can be heard in sectarian gunfire and political demagoguery in today’s Belfast almost half a millennium later. Margaret Ball would understand our conflict more deeply more comprehensively than most of us struggling to live through its twentieth century episode. Margaret Bermingham was born in County Meath, into a wealthy landowning family which was deeply committed to the Catholic Church and whose faith never wavered even in the face of increasing oppression. In 1540, she married Bartholomew Ball one of Dublin’s leading merchants and settled into a busy, comfortable life as the wife of a prominent businessman and politician. One can only imagine the anguish she suffered when fifteen of her twenty children died. She lavished love on the five who survived into adulthood but Walter broke her heart when he converted to Protestantism. Margaret was a courageous and risktaking Catholic. Young people came to her home in large numbers to be instructed in the Catholic faith at a time when that faith was outlawed and persecuted. The saying of Mass was illegal, priests were hunted down and executed but through it all, Margaret gave them shelter and encouragement. In the late 1570’s she went to prison for allowing priest to say mass in her home but her wealthy connection secured her release fairly promptly. Her experience of prison didn’t mollify her one bit. When Walter became Lord Mayor of Dublin his mother’s overt Catholicism was more than a tiresome embarrassment. It was a perfect opportunity to show how complete and enthusiastic his conversion was. He ordered her to be arrested, dragged through the streets of the city on a hurdle and consigned to a damp, ratfilled dungeon in Dublin Castle. A charming inversion of filial devotion. She was by then well into her seventies, a gentle, motherlywoman used toa privileged lifestyle. The prison broke her health, just as Walter broke her heart but not once did she waver either in her devotion to her church or her unconditional love of her estranged son. When she died in prison three years later, from malnourishment and squalor, the people of Dublin, well used to a daily litany of deaths, marked hers out as something special. Margaret Ball was instantly recognised as a martyr. It took four hundred years for the Vatican to give her formal recognition and it may take another generation to carry her name to sainthood. But around a window in a parish in Rostrevor Co. Down, thanks to a parish priest with a warm and generous understanding of the role of women in the church of the past and the church of the future, a new generation of faithful will see her name and hear her story. Her son was no Augstine. There was no happy ending, just endurance and fidelity and forgiveness to the bitter, bitter end. .