Father Michael Flanagan: I Speak to Catholics

This leaflet, issued by the San Francisco-based Irish-American Educational League around 1938, reprinted excerpts from a speech given by the Irish Roman Catholic priest Fr Michael O’Flanagan in New York City in the summer of that year. The lecture, titled ‘American Catholics and the War in Spain’, was organised under the auspices of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. The Irish American Section of the Committee took an active role in organising O’Flanagan’s visit. 

In his speech, O’Flanagan spoke in support of the Spanish Republic from the perspective of an Irish Catholic. The organisation of O’Flanagan’s visit reflected an awareness among American supporters of the Spanish Republic that the large Irish American community required arguments tailored to specific national and religious contexts.  

Born in Co. Roscommon, Ireland, in 1876, Fr. Michael O’Flanagan was a onetime vice-president of the Irish nationalist organisation Sinn Féin, whose executive committee he first joined in 1911. Throughout his career, he regularly toured the US to raise funds for various causes, including promotion of the Irish language, Irish independence and, in the late 1930s, Republican Spain. His frequently maverick stances resulted in multiple formal suspensions being placed on O’Flanagan from his higher-ups in the Irish Catholic Church. 

In his July 1938 address at Madison Square Garden, O’Flanagan appealed for Catholics in the audience to recognise that, contrary to what other priests and bishops of the Catholic Church told them, the doctrines of ‘our own Catholic church’ obliged them to support the ‘cause of liberty in Spain.’ O’Flanagan also acknowledged the communist attendees, offering that their ‘big-hearted Stalin’ reminded him ‘of our own James Connolly’, the revered Irish socialist executed following his participation in the Easter Rising of 1916.