HUNGARY’S IRISH MADONNA

THIS ST PATRICK’S DAY MARKS 325 YEARS SINCE MASS-GOERS AT THE CATHEDRAL OF GYÖR IN HUNGARY WITNESSED A PAINTING OF THE MADONNA AND CHILD ‘WEEPING’. KNOWN AS THE ‘IRISH MADONNA’ THE PAINTING HAS A MYSTERIOUS BACKSTORY

BY SÉAMUS DEVITT CSsR

On St Patrick’s Day 1697, in the side chapel of St Anne in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Hungarian city of Györ, a painting of Mary and her Child began to shed tears of blood. The 6am Mass had just begun. There was consternation.

Word spread, and crowds of people – Catholic, Protestant, Jews – came running to the cathedral. The weeping continued until around 9am. Priests from the cathedral wiped the painting with pieces of cloth, but the weeping continued. Later, they took the painting off the wall, removed its frame, removed the stretchers holding the canvas and examined it thoroughly. They could find nothing to explain why their ‘Irish Madonna’ was weeping.

Walter Lynch, a Galway man and the exiled bishop of Clonfert, had lived in Györ 40 years earlier. When he died in 1663, this painting of the Madonna and Child was among his most precious possessions. The Irish bishop had travelled into exile from Inishbofin when that island, the last stronghold of the Irish, surrendered to the Cromwellian forces on February 17, 1653. The Irish commander of the island, George Cusack, was allowed to leave by ship together with a thousand of his soldiers. The Bishop of Clonfert was also allowed to leave. It is not known if he had the rolled-up canvas of this painting with him, amongst his few belongings.

Months later, in May 1653, he was in Belgium, reduced to penury and writing to Rome for financial assistance. Roughly two

The Cathedral of the Assumption in the Hungarian city of Györ

bishop of the nearby diocese of Györ (pronounced ‘Jeour’) in Hungary, about 75 miles (125 kilometres) east of Vienna.

In that year (1655), Bishop János Püsky of Györ invited the homeless Irish bishop to his diocese and promised him a livelihood. He appointed Walter Lynch a canon in his cathedral and gave him an income. He also employed him as assistant bishop, and Bishop Walter Lynch lived and worked there for eight years.

Then, just as he was planning to return to his diocese of Clonfert in the West of Ireland, he died, aged 68, on July 14, 1663. It was said of him that ’In his life he was a model of the devout priest,’ that he spent his income on the care of the poor, and that he was greatly liked by the flock of Györ. He was buried in the crypt of the cathedral.

After his death, the people took his beloved painting and hung it in the cathedral. They placed it ’with no particular interest or attention’ on the northern wall of the side chapel near the shrine of St Anne. It was there, 34 years later, that many people witnessed the painting weeping tears of blood, a phenomenon that continued for over three hours. A cloth that wiped the tears on that morning, March 17, 1697, is preserved to this day in the cathedral and is venerated by the public on certain days. However, almost 200 years passed before the story became known in Ireland.

The painting of the ’Irish Madonna’ or the ’Consoler of the Afflicted’ is venerated by the Catholics of Hungary and the people of Györ. Just after the event, the military governor of Györ paid for a beautiful wooden altar to be placed at the shrine. Sixty or more years later, a magnificent marble altar was created, and the painting hangs there to this day. In 1996, during a visit to Hungary, Pope St John Paul II

They took the painting off the wall, removed its frame, removed the stretchers holding the canvas and examined it thoroughly. They could find nothing to explain why their ‘Irish Madonna’ was weeping.

prayed before the painting in this, a national Marian shrine in Hungary. The following year, in March 1997 − the tercentenary of the event − great celebrations were held, covered by Magyar Television, the national television station in Hungary. The cathedral was packed for the three days of celebration.

Bishop John Kirby of Clonfert, and some other priests from that diocese, were invited guests for this celebration.

THE PAINTING

Painted on canvas, its dimensions are 26 inches in height by 20 inches in breadth (66cm by 50cm). There is no agreement among art experts as to what school of painting it came from, or from what country. Some say it is Spanish in style, others Dutch. Nor do we have any idea where or when Walter Lynch came into possession of it.

If it was a life-long treasure, he could have got it when a student in Lisbon, or later while studying in Paris and Caen. Or it could have come into Galway on one of the many trading ships from the Continent, during Lynch’s years as warden of St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church in the city. Or it could have been painted by some artist, local or foreign, in Galway itself. The answer is unknown.

While still in Ireland, Walter Lynch hosted a gathering of the Irish bishops at the Carmelite Abbey in Loughrea on December 7, 1650. The Cromwellian army was moving towards Connacht in the late 1650s; the noose was tightening, and there was great fear. In the Carmelite Abbey, the bishops consecrated Ireland – now in direst need – to the Mother of God, in perpetuity.

William St Leger, a Jesuit, wrote: “On the 7th of this December 1650, in an Assembly of the whole kingdom – a union of all Catholics − contrary to and against all hope, it was accepted and declared: That, because it happened on the vigil of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, it was accepted and publicly decreed by the unanimous vote of all, that the God-bearer Virgin under the title of the Immaculate Conception, should be Patroness of the kingdom, and that this day, both solemn and

All Catholic bishops, all senior clergy and all male religious were to be out of the island of Ireland by May 1 of the following year, under penalty for treason if they remained or returned.

festive, should from now on be forever celebrated by the whole kingdom as a perpetual memorial of this.” There is no evidence that Bishop Lynch made use of the painting of the Madonna and Child at this event.

THE BACKGROUND

When the Irish Madonna, the Consolatrix Afflictorum, wept tears of blood in 1697, Hungary was at war. The Austrian, Hungarian and other armies were still fighting the Ottoman Empire Turks, who had been driven from the gates of Vienna in 1683. The Hungarian people were suffering greatly.

And there were dark clouds gathering in Ireland. On February 6, 1697, William III appointed Henri de Massue, 2nd Marquis deRuvigny, a Frenchman and a Huguenot or Calvinist, as Lord Justice of Ireland. He was known as Lord Galway and was a hero from the Battle of Aughrim. He became, in practice, the Chief Justice. William asked him to reintroduce the Act of Banishment into the Irish Parliament – a bill that the king had blocked for two years.

William badly needed money to pay his army. He needed the Irish landowners (now mostly Protestant) on his side. DeRuvigny, now ‘Earl of Galway’, was William’s weapon to bring the divided Irish Parliament into line. He was a man to be feared. William was aware that ‘neither the sword nor the great seal could be trusted in Irish hands,’ so he entrusted them to the hands of his fellow-Calvinist, deRuvigny.

A letter in Vatican archives states: “Lord Galway…a powerful enemy of the Catholics, will have to be reckoned with, as he seeks nothing but the destruction of the catholic religion and the persecution of all who profess it; by doing so, he hopes to take vengeance for the expulsion of the French Huguenots, and to gratify his followers by handing over to them the spoils of the Catholics, without which it would be impossible for his supporters to continue to reside in Ireland.”

The Frenchman arrived in Dublin on May 31. His officials prepared the bills within three weeks, ready for sending to the Privy Council in London, as the law required: the bills were being prepared in great haste. News of the proposed bill, The Act of Banishment, caused consternation among the ‘Papists’, who quickly sent delegations to London and to Europe, to no avail.

The Dublin Parliament met on July 27. The bill, or Act of Banishment, was placed before the houses. It had its final reading in Dublin in the House of Lords on August 30, and in the House of Commons on September 10. William signed it into law on September 25, 1697.

The whole process happened with unseemly speed. All Catholic bishops, all senior clergy and all male religious were to be out of the island of Ireland by May 1 of the following year, under penalty for treason if they remained or returned.

“I have to fall in with the wishes of the Irish parliament which is well aware of the turbulent spirit of the regular clergy and has to take measures for the preservation of peace,” said the king. This, and the bills that followed, were intended ‘to prevent the further increase of popery’ in Ireland: with no more bishops, there would be no more ordinations, and eventually no more priests.

Without priests, the Irish would then become contented members of ‘the church by law established’; there would be no more Catholics in the kingdom. Such was the hope.

Was that the reason why the painting of ‘The Irish Madonna’, the Consoler of the Afflicted, wept for those hours, on St Patrick’s Day, in the year of 1697?

Historians can tell us the what. They can only speculate as to the why.

This St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2022, marks 325 years since the weeping, that morning in Györ.

A copy of the ‘Irish Madonna’ in the Cathedral of Loughrea, presented by Bishop Lajos Pápai of Győr in 2003

This frame, preserved in the Cathedral of Györ, contains one of the cloths that wiped the tears of blood from the picture on the morning of March 17, 1697. The linen is now dark and discoloured as by faded blood stains. A certificate on the back states: “This is the very cloth, which dried the devotional picture at the Cathedral when it exuded blood on March 17 1697... Raab, (the German name for Györ) 20th May 1701.”

Séamus Devitt CSsR is curate in Assumption Parish in Ballyfermot, Dublin. A fuller study of this event, and of the life and times of Walter Lynch, Warden of Galway and later Bishop of Clonfert, is being prepared for publication.