On August 3rd 1916, the last of the leaders to be executed for leading the Easter Rising was brought before the hangman’s noose.
Sir Roger Casement had no need to take part in the Rising. He had a comfortable life, he was aged 51 and had had a very distinguished and successful career as a British diplomat. In 1904, he had published the Casement Report of human rights abuses in the Congo that detailed ‘the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on the rubber plantations’.
Casement also travelled to South America, where he saw further abuses of native by Capitalists first hand:
Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned – fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.
Casement was awarded a knighthood for his contribution in 1911.
Despite this, he left the British establishment in 1913, having joined Sinn Fein in 1905.
It was alleged that Casement had been secretly baptised by his Catholic mother, but the reality was the Casement had been raised in the Church of Ireland.
One Catholic priest, Fr. Thomas Crotty OP, was particularly impressed with Casement after meeting him and thought that he exhibited a particularly Catholic outlook on the world.
When Casement was imprisoned after the Easter Rising, he spent his last days thinking of life and of its meaning. A number of the leaders of the Rising, particularly Padraig Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett, were particularly devout Catholics and saw the cause of Irish freedom and faith as intrinsically connected. Casement’s journey eventually brought him to the Catholic faith.
At 7am on 3rd August 1916, Roger Casement received his first Holy Communion. He spent his last hours praying after Mass before the British regime hanged him for this efforts to free Ireland.
A priest recorded that:
Casement died with all the faith and piety of an Irish peasant with contrition and resignation to God’s will.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Casement was apparently asked to sign a document apologising for scandal that he may have caused in his life prior to being Catholic, by British Cardinal Bourne. However, given that British intelligence had constructed many damaging lies about him, Casement refused to sign it unless it give them posthumous credence. Cardinal Bourne was later rebuked by De Lai for this heavy handed approach. GK Chesterton signed a letter seeking to keep Casement alive, but it was to no avail.
Casement’s time in prison was spent reading The Imitation of Christ and biographies of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Columbanus. He prayed the Rosary, he wore a scapular. Whatever had occurred within him, slowly as he saw the abuses of colonialism towards others and then towards himself, he died as one fully immersed in the Catholic faith.
Two priests, Fr. Timothy Ring and Fr. James Carey, attended to him in his final moments.
Fr. Carey said:
He was a saint. We should be praying to Casement instead of for him.
The British establishment held on to Casement’s body for almost 50 years, thanks in no small part to the pettiness of Winston Churchill, before returning it to Ireland in 1965, where he was reburied at Arbour Hill alongside the other leaders of the Rising.
When the plans to import German ammunitions at Banna Strand went awry in April 1916, Casement could scarce have imagined that there was any victory to be gained from proceeding with the Rising, in this life or the next. But as his compatriot Padraig Pearse wrote, ‘to fight is to win’ and ‘God fights with the small battalions’.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.