"A HAPPY DEATH"

New Zealand Tablet, 17 October 1918, Page 9

"A HAPPY DEATH"

While the phrase "a happy death" connotes of course, in the Catholic mind, a death-chamber with the blessed candles alight, the priest administering Extreme Unction and the Viaticum, relatives and friends piously reciting the Church's prayers for the dying, and the like solemn Offices, it would be a mistake to suppose that only under such typical circumstances can a given passing from time to eternity be a happy one (says the Avc Maria.) Not all Catholics have a horror of a sudden death. True, one of the petitions in the Litany of the Saints runs. "From a sudden and unprovided death, O Lord, deliver us," but it is scarcely necessary to remark that the major stress should be laid on the second of the two adjectives, An unprovided death is an irreparable misfortune; a sudden death may be an inestimable grace, and many a saint has prayed to be spared the trials and temptations of a lingering illness and a protracted agony. "As a man lives," says our Divine Lord, "so shall he die" : and if one's life is habitually lived in union with God, in the state of grace, then there is excellent ground for hoping that, come death swiftly or slowly, it will come as a compassionate friend, not as a hideous monster. There are thousands of sudden deaths occurring every hour all the world over, — tens of thousands of them'taking place in the war-torn territories beyond the Atlantic ; but we have no doubt whatever that very many of them are, although sudden, not unprovided, and therefore happy.