Pope Aware of 'Boycotting'

zoom

Pope Leo Xlll

Pope Leo X111 sent a delegate, Archbishop Ignazio Persico, who spend six months in Ireland and reported unfavourably on the Plan of Campaign and on boycotting. The Duke of Norfolk and his zealous friend, Captain John Ross of Bladensburg, aided and abetted by Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, and Arthur Balfour, the chief secretary, also brought damning accounts of the National League and on the role played by bishops and clergy in furthering the Plan of Campaign to the attention of the Vatican.

The Pope ordered that a decree should be made to enable the Irish people to defend and assert their rights without prejudice to justice or public tranquillity. The decree read as follows

“Fearing lest right notions of justice and charity should be perverted amongst that people in consequence of that mode of warfare called the Plan of Campaign-which has been employed in that country in disputes between letters and holders of lands or farms, as also in consequence of a form of proscription in connection with the same contests known as Boycotting”: commissioned the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition to make the matter the subject of grave and careful examination

Accordingly the following question was submitted to the Most Eminent Fathers… In disputes between letters and holders of farms in Ireland, is it lawful to have recourse to those means known as the Plan of Campaign and Boycotting… and their Eminences, having long and maturely weighed the matter, unanimously replied: “In the negative.”

(This is a translation of the Latin Decree and the words letters and holders of lands and farms was meant to refer to landlords and tenants)

Source:

Extracted from: http://www.victorianweb.org/history/famine2.html