Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 38, 17 September 1903, Page 18

Notes

Father O'Mahony True charity ' bearetli all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things '— • Tempering her gifts, that seem so free, By time and place, Till not a woe the bleak world see, But finds her grace.' When the burrowing microbe of smallpox sent liquid fire through the veins of hapless sufferers over in Tasmania recently, Father O'Mahony, the gifted editor of the 1 Monitor, 7 bore all things and endured all things for sweet charity's sake. He almost forced his way into the stricken ones, and remains in quarantine among the sufferers until the pestilent microbe has locally ceased from troubling, and the plague has died away. Father O'Mahony, so to speak, carried the position by storm. Permission to enter the gaa-td-id enclosure was at first peremptorily denied. Then there ensued some emphatic correspondence with the Chief Secretary, Dr. McCall. In the course of these communications our esteemed friend of the ' Monitor ' pushed his right to the post of danger in uncompromising fashion. He even accused Dr. McCall of cruelty in preventing a dying Catholic patient receiving the consolations of religion and the last rites of the Church. Father O'Mahony's charitable violence carried the day and he is now in happy spiritual charge of those of his faith who are temporarily segregated with him from contact and communication with the outside world.

His case reminds one of an incident in the life of the late Cardinal Vaughan. When touring in America in search of funds for the foundation of his Foreign Missionary College of Mill Hill, he arrived on a sweltering day in Panama. The population was being decimated by smallpox. They were dying in hundreds. The atmosphere was fetid, the bodily attendance on the sufferers of the most casual and slipshod kind, their spiritual needs wholly unattended. For the autocratic Freemason President of the swampy and malarious little republic had banished all the priests, and the administration of the Sacraments was treated as a criminal offence. But Dr. Vaughan set the President's iniquitous decree at calm defiance. He ministered to the sick and dying all over the place. He was at last placed under arrest and was only released from durance vile on heavy bail. The long history of smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and other deadly epidemics, whether at Liverpool, Dublin, Hamburg, Naples, Bombay, New Orleans, or elsewhere, shows, after all, the wisdom of the Church's discipline of celibacy, which enables her priests to dare and do, as a sheer matter of course, for the souls of sufferers what is out of the question for a married clergy to attempt.