Free Against the Tide by Noël Browne Page B

regularly played games with
Eton College, as we did with many other schools in the area.
    It was intended at Beaumont that the sons of English Catholics could receive instruction in their own religion in order to develop informed grounding in the purpose and objectives of their
faith. It was the practice for the older students to be sent out to London at week-ends with the Catholic Evidence Guild which held public meetings and discussed the general subject of Catholic
apologetics. (I was never to be sent on these sorties.) The majority of our teachers in Beaumont were either professed Jesuits or students of the Order. We were educated to believe that we were
quite rightly a privileged class, the generally accepted belief of the English public school system. Because of my education in Ballinrobe, where I was taught another version of the British
historical mission, I found myself in some trouble concerning this question. As with so many schools, we held debates on subjects of public interest. There was discussion about the unquestioned
‘right’ of the British armies to ‘civilise’ the Irish just as they had civilised the Indians, the Africans, and a host of other nations in the world. As with the Christian
Brother’s defence of his heroes, so did the British teacher preach his own special version of the just war’. We had been taught in Ballinrobe that we might with justice kill violently
our British fellow-man so that we could free Ireland. But in Beaumont the Jesuits of the same faith taught me that it was ‘just’ that the Irish had been murdered in the process of the
subjugation. It made me question the casuistry of all the great religions, especially my own.
    In the course of the acquisition of their Irish colony the British had also, according to my Christian Brother, continued to suppress and destroy Roman Catholicism in many demonstrably cruel
ways. It occurred to me that this fact created a serious dilemma for the English Catholic. I set out to make this point at a subsequent debate, and so disturb their complacency. My simple case was
that we Irish were the sole defenders of the one true Roman Catholic faith and that the British Catholic was both a renegade and a coward. The consequences of my use of this debating point were
both absurd and serious for me, and for my sister Eileen.
    I was called to the Rector’s room. There was a double door, green baize outside, to be negotiated before gaining entrance for the interview. This proved to be an intimidating experience:
on one hand the aristocratic headmaster of a leading English Catholic public school and on the other an unlearned child who was in that same school on sufferance. There was the added fear of the
consequences of some misdemeanour of which I was quite unaware. The Rector, a Wellesley, was as always courteous. Sorrowfully he intoned that he had been approached by a young boy named Clifford,
now Lord Clifford, a member of the distinguished aristocratic recusant Clifford family which had governed England under Charles II. They had a long and honourable history in British politics and in
the defence of Roman Catholic values. It appeared that Hugh, who was, and still is a good friend of mine, had complained to the Rector that during a debate I had been particularly hurtful to him
and his family. My case was that they had failed to sacrifice their land, their home, their property, and everything they had, for their faith, as we Irish had done. ‘We Brownes had owned
great estates in County Meath before Cromwell came to rob us’.
    Father Weld gently chided me, explaining that the Cliffords had been a source of powerful support to the Catholic Church in British history. I had also questioned such issues as the
indissolubility of marriage and the right to divorce, unusual for that time. I appeared to question religious practice generally; it had been noticed that I had declined to join the society known
as the Apostleship of Prayer,