CARDINAL WISEMAN AN IRISHMAN.

New Zealand Tablet, 5 February 1920, Page 35

CARDINAL WISEMAN AN IRISHMAN.

A Catholic lecturer recently seemed to surprise as much as delight his audience in a Middle West town with a reference to Cardinal Wiseman as an Irishman (said Abbe Ernest Dimnet, who was recently in America obtaining aid for the reconstruction and refitting of the University of Lille). Probably the name of Cardinal Wiseman is responsible for the mistaken idea that he was English, but if we were to deny Irish nationality to whomever was not called Patrick Murphy or McMahon or O'Connell, things would go hard indeed with many Irishmen whose features, as much as their feelings, show an unadulterated origin. Nicholas Wiseman was born not in England, but in Spain, at Cadiz, of Irish parents, engaged like so many of their countrymen in the wine business. His mother came from Watertown, Co. Cork, whither she retired when her husband died. Young Nicholas was at that time only three, and although he seemed almost preternaturally to remember whatever of Spanish he had mastered at that age, it must be admitted that all his early associations wero Irish.

This ought not to be overlooked at a time when Ireland takes stock of all her great men as well as at a time when an almost yearly crop of books on the early Christian times has brojight attention back to the unique masterpiece called Fabiola.

It should be remembered that Fabiola came before all the fiction of the same kind, even Callista or Hypatia. It was written in pure joy at inns or rectories, in the train or in the sacristy waiting for confirmation children to arrive, by a man who had never attempted fiction but who knew antiquity better than most scholars, and lived in such continuous and happy commune with his characters that in little over six months the book was completed. The manuscript was perfect with hardly an erasure, in the graceful script remarkable on the all too rare autographs of Wiseman. It is this wealth of pure and happy feeling that insures to Fabiola its everlasting freshness and keeps it green while so many imitations by writers of all creeds have long been faded. .; :..'.-. - -

Let Irishmen be proud of the greatest Catholic churchman and writer that wielded the English pen in the nineteenth century. -