THE CONVERTS' CHRISTMAS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 51, 21 December 1905, Page 14

THE CONVERTS' CHRISTMAS

The first Christmas kept by converts to the Catholic Church has always been among the most memorable of their new experiences ; as such they have spoken of it to friends again and again. Yet the record has hardly managed to get into print, probably because Christmas is too busy a season to afford much time for letter-writing, or for notes in diaries. Such glimpses as we can get of Manning, Newman, and Faber on their first Christmas days as Catholics are interesting if only fiom their marvellous variety. Newman, who was received into the Church in October, 1845, remained in his ' monastery ' at Littlemore for his Christmas under the new conditions. For Mass he went to Oxford, by a road through the fields which least exposed him and his fellow neophytes to the eye of a public that was not only curious, but actually censorious. There is a fine church in Oxford now, and it has Jesuits to serve it. But the old St. Clement's had insufficiencies that moved the most serious of neophytes to laughter — as when the announcement was made from the altar : ' Confessions will be heard next Sunday afternoon in the arbor.' Newman did not then divine his future. He -was writing to Cardinal Wiseman: 'Did your Eminence know me you would see that I was one about whom there has been far more talk for good and bad than he deserves, and about whose movements far more expectation than the event will justify.' To others he was writing : 'You may think how lonely I am !' Before two years were over he was ordained a priest at Rome ; and it was on Christmas Eve in 1847 that he first set foot in England in that capacity. Faber, received into the Church in the same year, 1845, spent his first Catholic Christmas in a little house, No. 77 Carolina street, Birmingham. 'A little hovel,' he called it, into which he gathered ' my dear monks,' the young men who had followed him to Rome. The English Christmas is the time for feasting. But Faber, a layman, like the rest, was writing at that time: 'How are we to be sapported I do not know. Mutual love is next door to victuals and drink, and it is some comfort to me that I shall be simply on a level with them, and live like a poor man.' A sketch of that first Christmas season of theirs comes as a rather welcome antidote to the display of fattened beeves in every street. It is supplied by a visitor, Mr Hutchinson, afterwards to be one of Faber's fellow Fathers of the Oratory. ' Preparations for dinner,' he says, ' were going on. Faber was acting as cook, and, though terribly scorched by the fire, was perseveringly stirring a kettle full of pea-soup. I remember well the impression John Strickson (afterward Brother Chad) made on me. He wore a cassock of some very shaggy material, and he looked so gaunt and hungry that I thought him the beau-ideal of a wolf in sheep's clothing. The furniture of the house was very scanty. A benefactor had

given them some pewter spoons with the temperance pledge stamped on them j and as they were too poor and too ascetic to drink anything stronger than tea, the pledge was not likely to be broken.' Manning, a convert six years later, had a unique experience. He was able to say his three Masses, and to say them in Rome, on the first Christmas Day after his conversion. Cardinal Wiseman conferred on him the tonsure a week after his reception, and he wan ordained priest before he had been for three months a Catholic. Father Faber, it is interesting to remember, instructed him in the ceremonies before he said his first Mass, which he did at Farm street, having for his assistant priest the French Jesuit (he always did love French Jesuits, then and thereafter) Father Ravignan. By the Christmas of that year he was settled near the Collegio Romano in Rome with his nephew, afterwards well known as Father Anderson, S.J. — a name that has escaped some of the fame that was its due. ' I sometimes think that we Jesuits are warranted to strike only on our own box,' was one of his own pleasantries at the end of his life. Be that as it may, there ought to be a very general memory and recognition of the conspicuous attainments, services, and personality of a man who, in all these, was remarkable. Nobody, it is true, more consistently avoided any such recognition. He had his own rewards. One of them, we like to think, was that first Catholic Christmas of his in Rome with Manning