THE LATE CARDINAL MORAN

New Zealand Tablet, 12 September 1912, Page 26

THE LATE CARDINAL MORAN

The Right Rev. Dr. Chine, Bishop of Perth, in the unavoidable absence of his Grace Archbishop Kelly, presided at the annual breakfast of the Hibernian Society in Sydney on Sunday, August 25. After referring to the great grief felt in all parts of Australia at the death of Cardinal Moran, his Lordship Dr. Cluue went on to say: I would put before you this morning Cardinal Moran, as an ideal Hibernian. He worked all through his life for the twin objectives of your society—faith and fatherland. In my opinion, I can do nothing more practical than to present him as the ideal we all should look up to and should try to copy in our lives. He felt, as you and I feel, that faith is everything, even in this material age—that it is God's best gift, that it is morethan brain power or good health, or the amassing of - riches. Hence, he may be called the man of faith preeminently like the patriarchs of old, the man who always walked before God. He was born, as you know, the year after Catholic Emancipation was granted, at what may be called the second birth of the faith in the old land, and under God’s Providence he was destined, not exactly to plant that faith here, but to be its successful propagator and its fearless protagonist and champion— Defensor Fidei , the Defender of the Faith, in these southern lands. Why, to have seen the Cardinal, to have lived for ever so short a time in his presence, to have watched him in his aloofness from material things, and in his absorption for spiritual ones, was like getting A Glimpse of the Old Church in Her Glory and in her fame, when she was illumined by successive lines of light— by the lives of Augustine, of Gregory, and of the other great saints and prelates who have gone before, men wno lived by the light of faith. And if ever a man lived by the light of faith, look at that long span of life, which terminated in August last year, X in his Palace at Manly, so full of incident, so full of work, so full of strenuous labor'. There was not a moment of that eighty years that was not given to the advancement and to the triumph of our Holy Faith. Take that great personality, that brain, that intellect— ... is it not true to say that there was not a beat of that heart or a throb of that brain that was not motived by the desire to uphold and defend God’s Kingdom on earth All his time was a fitting consummation to a life devoted to the furthering of the teaching of Christ —it was the death of. which we read in the Sacred _ Scriptures, the death of the just that is pleasing in the eyes of the Lord. There is not a more beautiful passage in the Scriptures than that in which our Lord Himself describes the death of the just man. He does not call it by the name of death, but by a sweeter name that ought to appeal to every one of us who believes in a future life. He calls it a going to the Father, a leaving of this vale of tears, a leaving of the misunderstandings and the hard work incidental to our pilgrimage here, a simple going to the eternal home, a sinking into the Father’s arms. That surely is a description of the death of the illustrious Cardinal, whose memory we hold dear to-day. Not only did he work for the faith, not only did he spend his grand K energies in advancing and defending it, but he was ■ also true to that other objective every genuine Hibernian should have before him—fatherland.. "I pass by the splendid efforts of ' The Cardinal in the Cause of Federation, his splendid efforts in trying to quench the provincial rivalry of constituent States, his grand efforts in trying

to fuse together and consolidate those elements in order ■ to bring about what we see to-day, and which we rejoice —the Commonwealth of Australia. T pass by this,because the Roman cassock, no matter how elevated or pure the ideals of its wearer may be, no matter how high his aim, is exposed to that ungenerous and absurd criticism that seeks to see lurking somewhere in its folds "the ardent desire, the latent ambition, to. reconstruct spiritual despotism even on liberty’s shrine in a new land. The Cardinal had to meet and suffer from this, and we all know that not the youngest Australian amongst us, not the most impassioned lover of this fair country, loved it more ardently, and was more desirous of its temporary advancement than his Eminence. I sometimes think that many of us who have grown old have an incurable propensity to canonise the past, and are always contrasting the experiences of childhood with the present. We are prone to look regretfully and wistfully on the years that have flown by, and, perhaps, some of us look to the future to relieve us from a world of care and incurable sickness. Cardinal Moran was none of that sort. He Was a Man of the Age. The buoyancy of spirit within bounded like the buoyancy of his step to advance with the times. He loved the age, he loved the land, with a love that seemed to increase in warmth as life left the decaying framework; it never waned, it never weakened. Hence, I hold P him before you as the embodiment of everything a true ' Hibernian should be—animated by the quenchless love for God and Holy Faith, and; for the land in which his lot was cast. There was another characteristic of the dead Cardinal that has sometimes'struck roe, and it , is this: We sometimes meet men whom God has gifted ■ intellectually,, but whose intellect seems to dry up the

region of the heart, which seems to be a frozen zone. On the other hand, there are others whose hearts are so expansive that they seem to run away with the head, and to leave little brain-power at all. But in the Cardinal there was such a delicate adjustment of parts, there was such a balance of powers, that one hesitates to say whether his directive force came from his luminous mind or from the mellow warmth of his great old heart. , Everyone of us has a great deal to learn from the life of the illustrious dead. Though dead he still speaks to each of us ; his life is there luminous as a light before the Australian public, . and his words and his personality are there to inspire us towards higher , and nobler ideals, to spur us on to be better and truer Hibernians. His addresses at these annual Communion breakfasts were powerful stimulants, great levers, that strength-, ened the Hibernian spirit all through Australasia, and I cannot do better than ask you to cherish the maxims that fell from his saintly lips, the advice he gave you to try, according to your powers, to develop the material resources of Australia, and to uphold the faith : of your fathers. Much as he loved this rich and beautiful' land, he loved Ireland, which he felt so many years : ago, with a strong, unswerving affection. We know that his eloquent advocacy and the moral and material aid he gave were, indeed, powerful factors in helping on the cause of Home Rule. Perhaps, one of the keenest regrets of the Irish element all over the globe will be that when the old Parliament House in College Green is re-opened it will not be. graced by the stately presence of the prelate who ever inculcated, together with love for the- land of one's birth, love for the country that struggled so long in serfdom, and which is now on the eve of political emancipation.