People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 15 August 1912, Page 41

People We Hear About

It is announced that Mr. Hilaire Belloc has re-, signed the editorship of the Eye-Witness. Out of the fifty-seven priests ordained at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, on Sunday, June 23, fiftyfour were University graduates who had taken the B.A. degree at the National University. T. P. O’Connor, M. P., has now entered upon his 30th consecutive- year as president of the Irish Organisation in Great Britain. Probably this constitutes a record for one man as the elected and honored leader of so important a body. The vast majority of present-day active members were children when T.P. was first chosen as president, many of them were unborn. Mr. Thomas F. Purcell, who, as foreman of the construction of the Washington monument, in Washington, D.C., from 1880 until its completion, laid every stone of the great shaft, died at his home in Washington recently, at the age of eighty-eight years. Mr. Purcell was a native of Limerick, and went to the' United States when a young man. He was considered the foremost stone setter in the United States. Rev. William J. Bodkin, the distinguished Rector of Stonyhurst, is one of the once well-known family of Kilclooney, his grandfather being John Bodkin, in the good old days M.P. for the county. Father Bodkin’s father was Mr. Dominick Bodkin, R.M., and Father Bodkin was born in Galway in 1867. He entered the Jesuit Order, took his divinity course at St. Beuno’s, went abroad for a year, and then returned -to Stonyhurst to teach. His brilliant gifts were soon recognised, and in 1907 he was appointed Rector. He had previously established a Catholic Grammar School at Leeds. His Eminence Cardinal Farley has the courage of his convictions on the subject of clubs, and the following story is told by, a paper of his Eminence’s visit to the Old Manhattan club house when he was still Mgr. Farley. When all had been passed in review and the party returned to the reception room, one of the members of the club asked tire prelate what he thought of it. ‘Well,’ answered Mgr. Farley, ‘as we passed through all the rooms I could not help thinking how much better for themselves and everybody else it would be if all these men were quietly at home at their own family firesides, instead of spending their evenings in the club-room.’ * * Mr. Shane Leslie has found time from his bridal visit to the United States (no pun intended) to send an article to the Irish Independent , discussing: Taft versus Roosevelt.’ Taft he describes as ‘an old-fashioned and cultured gentleman’ who ‘ seems to incarnate the wise and just style of American statesman ’ —a ■ man ‘who might have signed the Declaration of Independence.’ Roosevelt, he sardonically adds, could hardly have done that —unless he had been allowed to compile it as well. On the hustings or on the platform, Taft is out of his element, whereas" Roosevelt ‘ can forge thunderbolts and fling metaphors that hit home.’ It was he who described the Trust magnates as ‘ men with hard faces and soft bodies.’ Mr. Gladstone visited Dublin in 1877, and received the Freedom of the City. But, as the Irish Catholic has pointed out, there is no analogy between the circumstances connected with the visit of Mr. Asquith and those connected with the visit of Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone arrived on October 17, 1877, on a private visit to the Earl of Meath, at Kilruddy. He was out of office at the time, a Conservative Ministry being in power, and the Duke of Marlborough Lord Lieutenant. The ex-Premier visited the Lord Lieutenant, and also his Eminence Cardinal Cullen. The freedom of the city was voted to him not so much as a politician, but as a tribute to his scholarship and general eminence.