CARDINAL MORAN ON CATHEDRALS AND CATHEDRAL BUILDERS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 49, 7 December 1899, Page 10

CARDINAL MORAN ON CATHEDRALS AND CATHEDRAL BUILDERS.

Preaching at the Sacred Heart Church, Darlington, a few Sundays ago his Eminence Cardinal Moran said : — Perhaps no monuments of medieval piety surpassed the grand old Cathedrals of England, and with those sanotuaries of her early piety are linked some of the most endearing monuments of those ages of faith. Many of those Cathedrals have been usurped by an alien Church, not a few of them are in ruins, but around them all still linger the Catholic traditions of those ancient days, the fragrance of the piety of the religious hearts that erected them. A distinguished American writer, who a few years ago visited those monuments, declared that the Catholic Church in ereoling those grand Cathedrals made ' architecture ' A LIVING SYMBOL OP CELESTIAL ASPIRATION,' and he added : ' I am not a churchman ; but I would also say that the best hours of my life have been hours of meditation passed in the glorious cathedrals and among the sublime ecclesiastical ruins of England. I have worshipped in Canterbury and York, in Winchester and Salisbury, in Lincoln and Durham, in Ely and in Wells ; I have stood in Tintern, when the green grass and the white daisies were waving in the summer wind, and have looked upon those grey and russet walls, and upon those lovely arched casements — surely the most graceful ever devised by human art — round which the sheeted ivy droops, and through which the winds of heaven sing a perpetual requiem, I have seen the shadows of evening slowly gather and softly fall over the gaunt tower, the roofless nave, the giant pillars and the shattered arcades of Fountains Abbey, in its sequestered and melancholy solitude, where ancient Ripon dreams ; and the spacious and verdant Valley of the Skell. At a midnight hour I have stood in the grim and gloomy chancel of St. Columba's Cathedral, remote in the storm-swept Hebrides, and looked upward to the cold stars, and heard the voices of the birds of night mingled with the desolate moaning of the sea. With awe, with reverence, with many strange and wild thoughts I have lingered and pondered in those haunted, holy places ; but one remembrance was always present — the remembrance that it was the Catholic Church that created those forms of beauty, and breathed into them the breath of a Divine life, and hallowed them for ever, and, thus thinking, I have felt the unspeakable pathos of her long exile from the temples that her passionate devotion prompted and her loving labour reared ' Go to the sister isle. The hallowed ruins scattered broadcast over her smiling valleys and green hills tell you of those ages when A PEERLESS NAME AND AN UNDYING FAME were the proud heritage of the sainted island of the west. From those sanctuaries and shrines went forth the missionary heroes who stemmed the tide of barbarism in the fairest lands of Europe, and brought to many peoples that were in the darkness of paganism the lessons and blessings of mercy and peace. Those sanctuaries now in ruin tell of the storm of persecution that swept over the land and laid waste the garden of God. They tell of a whole nation's martyrdom, and of a heroism of devoted piety that shall remain for ever a golden page in the history of Holy Church. And when we turn from those ivy-clad ruins to the stately cathedrals and other grand monuments of piety erected in our own day throughout the length and breadth of the land, do we not see a record of religious triumphs unparalleled perhaps in the annals of Christendom ? Those glorious works of religion erected by the sons and daughters of Erin in this 19th century attest that the heroism of her martyrs has not been in vain, and that the fruitfulness of sanctity continues to crown the green hills of Ireland, and that the diadem of piety is still the priceless heritage of her children.

Thus, then, it is no exaggeration to Bay that the Cathedral, with its solidity of work, its architectural splendour, and its richness of ornament, and in all the sweetness and majesty of its beauty, muat be regarded as a tribute of adoring love, an outpouring of gratitude and a manifestation of Catholic piety, giving glory to the Most High.

We should feel proud that this young country of ours, whilst emulating in other spheres of enlightenment all that is best and noblest in the old centres of civilisation, so in the making of religious architecture is privileged to renew the grand Christian glories of the ages of genuine piety and faith. What shall I say of the Cathedral of St. Patrick's in Melbourne, so complete in its array of beauty ; of the grand cathedrals of Goulburn, Bathurst, and Armidale. in this ecclesiastical province ; of Brisbane and Ballarat ; of Perth and Hobart and Dunedia 7 A few days ago I returned from Rockhampton, where a fair portion of the new cathedral, a miniature of our own St. Mary's, was dedicated to God. In Sandhurst another grand building is being erected, whilst in Christchurch and Wellington (New Zealand) the foundations are being prepared for no less noble struotures.