The Pastor of Morne Rouge.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 41, 9 October 1902, Page 4

The Pastor of Morne Rouge.

A correspondent of the New York Evening Post thus describes a visit which he recently paid Pere Marye, the priest who defied Mount Pelee at itsiworst and stayed with his people at Morne Rouee half-way up the mountain side. Says he :

Crucfixes with great iron out-stretched Christ* upon them mark the boundaries of each parish in Martinique. Between parishes there are small roadside shrines that ever have fresh flowers in them. Much damage has been done about the church of fond St. Denis, but there it stood, with doors open this Sunday afternoon, undismayed, the dust of the volcano on its high al&ar This was Morne Rouge, the stronghold of Pere Marye' of whom you have heard. Out of the catastrophe, through so far live great eruptions and explosions, has come this interesting cure a man as sweet in heart aB any Daudet wrote about, Btout in spirit* true to duty, human and jovial and devoted. ' My friend, the geographer, seeing the Corpus Christi prooes sion coming up the street, unslung hip oamera— muoh to my fear that the people would be scandalised. There was Pelee's bald glowering cone, with smoke, towering in the background ■ there were the streets filled with the asheß it had vomited ; there were the deserted homes ; there were the buried hillsides, the smitten land toward St. Pierre ; there was the submerged flower garden ; there were the denuded palms ; there were the pathetic islanders, wholly destitute, half afraid, half trusting in the faith of Pere Maryf marching in his van— of course there was a lot to appeal to the taker of photographs. He Hnapped the shutter, then said to the black guide :"I am not a Catholic, but may Igoin ? " And he went in, following the procession, and— shades of his Methodist ancestors !— knelt down in a pew by an altar of the Madonna. He knelt and stayed kneeling throughout the Office— Litany and Vespers—and a few minutes before I write this (many days after) I hear him tell a man : " I knelt there, and I don't often pray." ' Up to now six oth r men besides ourselves (two ran away in panic) have sat and talked and dined with Pere Marye and marveiled. They will know whether the effect he made on the geographer was or was not made also on themselves. He was the one beautiful episode in their curiously American descent for the sake of study and report, upon two islands that have greatly suffered. '■ I was there," recounted Mr Jacacei afterward, " when the mountain was mumbling. 1 went into his church and heard him say the litany- cay the lovely things they do say, you know, of woman— 'star of the sea,' 'hope of the soul,' 'gate of pearl,' 'tower of ivory,' ' mother of sorrows— pray for us ! ' And I was indeed touched. The priest's voice grew vast. Pelee rumbled, and he recited the litany for his people on the altar to the Virgin. For 16 years his Church of the Madonna has been everything to him. Nothing short of death can divorce them. I tell you it is beautiful." '