WOMAN'S WORK IN THE CHURCH.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 41, 18 February 1898, Page 17

WOMAN'S WORK IN THE CHURCH.

fHE recent discussion on female parochial franchise at the Anglican Synod in Christchurch brings up the whole question of woman's place and function in the working of the Church. Elsewhere, in to-day's issue, we have lightly touched upon the way in which the Reformers, in effect, cut off Avomen from many fields of active Church work for which they are admirably fitted. Lecky, the Protestant historian, in his History of European Morals, admits that the suppression of the conventual system by the Reformers was " very far from being a benefit to women or to the world." Woman exercises a high and holy function in her quiet domestic sphere as wife and mother. But ecclesiastical history has abundantly proved that the Creator has adapted many of the sex for still move intimate relations with the life of the Church. Witness, for instance, the conspicuous part which holy widows and consecrated virgins filled in apostolic and sub-apostolic days, in the convers on of the mighty Roman Empire. The highest types of the womanhood of the Empire were, as Lecky says, " essentially male " — such as the Amazons, or a Portia, or an Arria, or the mother of the Gracchi, who beheld, with dry eyes, the sacrifice of her children. Christianity, without unsexing woman, has transfigured her by cultivating to the highest point the virtues proper to her nature. In the Catholic Church — and mainly through the veneration of Mary — woman, for the first time, ceased to be a mere chattel of man. She found her true place and meaning in the plan of creation. She dropped quietly and naturally into her work in the Church. Her role was not that of a priestess or preacher. She was the martyr, like Felicitas and Aoxkk ; the converter of her sons, like the mothers of SS. Augustine, Chrykostom, and Basil ; and, above all, the eager soldier in the great army of charity, like the Empress Flacilla, like Fahiola and her companions, and the endless company of widows and consecrated virgins, who founded and carried on hospitals and other works of benevolence such as the pagan had never dreamed of.

It would carry us far beyond the scope of the present article to do more than hint at the noble work done by Catholic Sisterhoods in the cause of education. Their spiritual and corporal works of mercy alone form an ample theme for voice and pen. "No achievements of the Christian Church," says Lecky in his Jlinlori/ of European Morals, "are more truly great than those which it has effected in the sphere of charity." It was one of the most striking external differences between the Church and the old paganism. It is still one of the broad lines of demarcation which separate the Church from the sects. Our Protestant brethren may well glory in many of the individual heroes of charity which they have produced, such as Elizabeth Fry, Dr. Fotheroill, and Susanna Necker ; but in the multitude, brilliancy, variety, eager intensity, and organisation of her charitable activities, the Catholic Church stands, and has ever stood, alone. Her charity is one of the evidences of her divine origin, wbich, we fear, has never — with, perhaps, the exception of Cardinal Baluffi's book — been adequately urged upon those who arc outside her pale.

The distinguished Protestant author Leiiixitz, in his S//sInn of Tliooloi))j, called Catholic religious generally "Heaven's army on earth." This mighty army acts quietly, like God's other silent but mighty forces that grind the valleys out and round the hills. It is ever ready to smooth every human ill, whether arising from poverty, sickness, loss of patents, war, famine, or pestilence. The great women's

army of charity is composed of hundreds of regiments, as various in name and uniform as in activities. Some provide homes for foundlings, or orphans, or deformed children, or widows, or deaf mutes, or the blind or aged. Others, like the Sisters Guardians and the Sisters of the Trinity, nurse the sick gratuitously by night and day in their own homes. The infant children of poor women workers are tenderly caml for in numberless Crecliea. Scores of religious Orders, like the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of St. John of God, provide hospitals for every form of human ill — some devoting their lives to the care of incurables. One crowning advantage of the Church's celibate Orders of charity is this : that the funds subscribed for the poor reach their destination with practically no deduction beyond the cost of the simplest fare and the poorest raiment for those whose lives are cons( crated, without the hope or desire of earthly reward, to the care of the afflicted.

The mere name-list of Catholic female congregations of charity would form a lengthy bead-roll, that might well be written in letters of gold. As becomes a universal Church, they are of every colour, from the white Caucasian Sisters of Charity— French, Irish, and Italian — to the Red Indian Sisters of St. Benedict, the yellow Chinese Virgins of Purgatory, and the Black Sisters of the Southern States. Their histories abound in deeds of heroism that have yet to find an adequate historian. A volume has yet to be written to tell of the noble work done by the Tertiaries of St. Francis during the fearful scourge of the Black Death. There is an inspiration in the story of what the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Mercy did in the Crimean, American, and Franco-German wars ; of what Catholic Sisterhoods did when the cholera devastated Dublin, Liverpool, Palermo, France in 1884, Spain in the following year, and Hamburg at a later date ; when the bubonic plague swept down upon China and India ; when earthquakes broke out in the Baeilicata, in the island of Ischia, and in Sicily ; when the yellow fever seized New Orleans and Memphis in 1873, 1878, and 1879, and the fearless religious "went down before the reaper Death like ripened grain." Mr. Charles Warrhn Stoddakd has told us the story of the lepers of that island of death, Molokai. Perhaps only the last day will toll what our heroic nuns are doing among the foetid brethren in Burmah, Trinidad, Guiana, the Seychelles Islands, and elsewhere:. The story of Catholic charity furnishes a glorious theme for the historian and the philosopher. It is the very Gospel living and moving, so to speak, before our bodily eyes. It is Christ projected into the Church's life and still going about the world doing good

(Acts, x., o7).