The Tragedy of James Connolly

   Father Denis Fahey’s pamphlet, The Tragedy of James Connolly, which is now, I am glad to observe, going the rounds among those who study the social problem seriously, is pre-eminently a popular, if scholarly work. Connolly can be and is being gravely misused. The fact that he died within the bosom of the church makes his social heresies all the more a dangerous weapon in the hands of subversivists. Young and earnest trade unionists speak of him in awe, as if, from the Catholic standpoint, he were the complement of Pearse. Father Fahey’s pamphlet will disabuse them of this idea . . .. For all that Connolly was, excepting that he was a social subversivist, we honor him—for his self-sacrifice, his courage, his patriotism.
- Pat Murphy (In The Standard, Jan. 23, 1948)

Editor’s Notes

   James Connolly (1868–1916) was an Irish Patriot and a Socialist labor leader. As a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood he was appointed to be the Commandant of the Dublin Division of the Army of the Irish Republic and was the officer in charge of the occupation of the GPO (General Post Office) in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916.
  

    Connnolly was one of the seven signers of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and one of the sixteen leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising who were executed by the British in Kilmainham Jail. He was the last to be executed there, as he had been seriously wounded in the fighting and had to be brought to the execution on a stretcher and strapped to a chair so that the firing squad would not have to shoot a man lying on the ground in order to execute him.
  

    James Connolly was also a Catholic. The contradiction between his socialist beliefs and his Catholic faith was a problem that he apparently did not understand fully during his active years. As he approached his death he asked for and received the sacraments but his ‘socialist’ legacy has been a problem for Irish patriots ever since. Father Fahey sheds some light on this problem in this treatise that he describes as The Tragedy of James Connolly.