OUR ROMAN LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 1 November 1917, Page 34

OUR ROMAN LETTER

By “Scottus.”

The world is not going well with the Freemason body these days. The latest is quite a furious row arising out of a sort of international meeting held by a number of head Freemasons, among the rest our old friend Ernest Nathan, once Mayor of Rome, of a more or less pacificist intonation. Certain conditions were laid down as a preliminary to peace, such as the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the unification of Poland, the independence of Bohemia, the liberty of small nations under Austrian rule, including Trent and Trieste. It would be impossible to describe the outburst of indignation with which the latter proposal has been received by all sections of the Italian press. What! Leave the people 01 a. rent and Trieste the power to decide their own lot! Could anything be more preposterous ? And the fun of it all is that these same newspapers, with hardly an exception, were, only a week ago, in ecstasies over the generosity of England in offering to allow Irishmen to settle their own destiny in their own way without interference from outside. In a letter addressed to the director of the Pious Association of St. Joseph for the Dying, the Holy Father gives expression to the satisfaction experienced on learning of the progress and spread of that work; and with a view to encouraging priests to offer up special Masses from time to time for this intention his Holiness undertakes that he himself will offer his Mass for this intention the first day of each month. Not only this, but to those priests who undertake to apply a number of Masses for this charitable object during each year he gives the power to bless, with the form to be found in the ritual, rosary beads, crucifixes, medals, small statues, and objects of devotion, attaching to them the Apostolic indulgences ; also the power to apply the Dominican and Crozier indulgences to rosary beads and to bless and invest with the scapulars of the Trinity, the Passion, the Dolors, the Immaculate Conception, Mount Carmel, and the cincture of St. Joseph, all under one and the same form, together with the faculty of a privileged altar each time they offer Mass for the dying. To priests thus offering Mass, the Holy Father also grants a plenary indulgence for themselves in the hour of death, as well as on the occasion of the principal festivals of our Lord, our Lady, and St. Joseph, on the Feast of St. Michael, and on the anniversary of their own ordination. There was a genuine union of hearts, a true Union Sacree, last Sunday (August 8), in the curious theatrelike chapel of the Little Company of Mary, commonly known as the English Nursing Sisters, when the Dominican, Father Esser, was consecrated bishop. The consecrating prelate was the Austrian Cardinal . Fruhwirth, assisted by the Archbishop of Cesarea and the Bishop of Tiberias, and the ceremony was witnessed by Irishmen side by side with Englishmen, , Frenchmen, and Germans, Belgians and Austrians, Dutchmen and Spaniards, belligerents and neutrals, all forgetting for the moments the political animosities of the hour, and intent solely on doing honor to the distinguished ecclesiastic on whom the Church was conferring the blue ribbon of her approval. The new bishop was secretary of the recently suppressed Congregation of the Index, and for more than 20 years has been a wellknown figure in the Roman Curia, where he has discharged more than one task of delicacy and difficulty. He is not unknown in other lands, particularly in Ireland, where he spent several years as professor of philosophy in the Royal College of Maynooth. His disciples and friends, and they are many, will heartily wish hint length of years and all happiness. . . The ; , previous Sunday witnessed .a A still. ;• more familiar gathering in the church of St. Isidore, where the Irish residents in the Eternal City met to celebrate

the golden jubilee of the ordination of the venerable Franciscan fellow-countryman, Father Luke Carey, as well as the diamond jubilee of his ten decades of Franciscan life. At High Mass the celebrant was Mgr. O'Riordan, and the music was rendered by his students, in memory of the unfailing ties that have existed between the Irish Franciscan house of St. Isidore's and the Irish College in Rome, ever since the foundation of the latter institution by Cardinal Ludovisi at the request of the Archbishop of Dublin and under the guidance of the great Franciscan, Luke Wadding, nearly three hundred years ago. Outside the dreary days of Charles 11., when a dry rot seemed to wither up the whole Church in Ireland, root and branch, the Franciscan house of St. Isidore's in this city has been steadfast in devotion to the motherhood. Other Irish houses in Rome have wavered, and sometimes appeared to walk the tight rope; but the Irish Franciscans remain to-day what they were three hundred years ago in the days of Wadding, true children of St. Francis and faithful sons of mother Ireland.

In the sixty years that have passed over his now snow-white head since he first came to Rome by coach from Leghorn— railway had not reached thus far in those days—Father Luke Carey has met many acquaintances and made many friends in nearly every land under the sun who will not have forgotten the many deeds of kindness experienced at his hands in one or other of the years of the half century he has spent in Italy. But lam afraid he is not so well known where he should be known best in his own country. For most people have forgotten, if, indeed, they ever knew, that it was to his energy and patriotic zeal that the priceless collection of manuscripts, gathered together in St. Isidore's by Wadding, his fellow-workers and disciples, were saved from spoliation at the hands of the Italian Government in 1873 and transferred to Ireland, where they are now worthily housed in the Franciscan house on Merchant's Quay.

. . . When the wind wafts the wavelets ' To the grey altar steps of yon shore, Each wearing an alb, foam-embroidered, And kneeling, like priests, to adore The God of the landl will mingle My prayers, aged priest! with the sea, While God, for thy fifty years' priesthood, Will hear thy prayers whispered for me."