FOOTPRINTS OF THE CELT IN MALTA

New Zealand Tablet, 31 July 1913, Page 13

FOOTPRINTS OF THE CELT IN MALTA

I never felt more proud of my Irish blood and of my Catholic faith than on the day I first landed in Malta. If I did, it must have been the day after (writes a correspondent of the New York Freeman’s Journal, who attended the Eucharistic Congress). The Union Jack floated from every fortressed hilltop. Several British battleships lay at anchor in the harbor awaiting orders for Constantinople ; and, as our boat hove to, an officer in English buttons came aboard and asked each passenger as we passed in line before him in the cabin: ‘Are you a British subject?’ The question was put in English with a Maltese accent, and I glad to be able to answer, ‘ No, I am an American citizen.’ It was well into the night when we had passed this inquisition, and told the cabman to drive us to the Hospice of the Blue Nuns. This was some two or three miles distant. The cab passed along ramparts and beneath forts skirting the inner quarantine harbor until it emerged on the farther side and began the climb of Sliema Hill, the highest point on the North-east coast.

Church and School of St. Patrick. On the way to Sliema that night wo passed ft largo institution, newly built and surmounted by the symbol of man’s redemption. Looking out of the cab window I read in large letters high above the entrance, ‘ Church and School of St. Patrick.’ Truly, I said, if the flag of England has encircled the globe, there is something else more dear to me that has followed it into every corner, and dogged its footsteps with a holy vengeance. Owing to the late hour we put up at a hotel adjoining the Sisters’ hospice, and next day moved into the quarters provided for us by the good nunS. The Mother Superior is an Australian born. of Irish parents, two other Sisters are English, and the remainder are all from the Emerald Isle; On the very first day I visited the seamen’s ward, where I found an old Irish sailor with his rosary on the stand beside his bed. He was a John White from County Wexford, and if there was any part" of the world that he had not been in during his forty-five years of seafaring I did not succeed in finding it out. There was an Englishman and a Swede in the same ward. In answer to some question I put in regard to religion, John said: ‘Oh Father, I can always hold my own with them when they come to talk of religion. I always keep that with me,’ and he pointed to a little book on the table. ‘When the officers and all are around and we talk about religion, I always say to them, where are the good men that ever left the Catholic Church and became Protestants? We get the best of your men. Look at Cardinals Manning and Newman; and then I say to them, did you ever know or did you ever read of any Catholic wanting to be a Protestant or sending for a Protestant minister 'when he was going to die?’ One of Nature’s Noblemen. John was one of Nature’s noblemen, and, indeed, he may have been descended from some noble chief of a gallant Wexford clan. He showed it in every act, and was as different from the other seamen in the ward as day from night. I dropped in one morning to see him when he was preparing to leave for his home in Wexford, and he said: ‘Oh Father, I have decent people to go to. I come of good stock. I drank good milk.’ As I left him, I thought of Dean Swift’s saying: that he could discern the descendants of the old Irish nobility in the laborers who worked on the Dublin quays. And, after all, may there not be much in that old Irish pride of race and pedigree ‘ I came of good stock,’ said John, ‘ I drank good milk.’ Who will deny that it matters much whether men have drunk the milk of mothers whose blood has coursed down the centuries through the channels of chastity. These Blue Nuns, who do nursing also in the home, are properly known in religion as the ‘ Little Company of Mary.’ Their hospital building at Malta, just completed last year, is the gift of a New Englander named Clapp, who married a Maltese lady at Washington, became a Catholic, spent his last days at Malta and left his money to erect a hospital where these Irish virgins of Christ dress the wounds of British seamenNext door to the hospice, and occupying a beautiful plot of five or six acres, is the convent school of the Mesdames du Sacre Coeur. Including the day scholars they have a school of three hundred pupils, and the Rev. Mother Superior is a Madame Stewart, hailing from Armagh, the primatial city of St. Patrick. When I had settled down in my room after making the acquaintance of the good nuns and after my interview with John, I found that thought was still haunting me which had warmed my Irish blood on the night previous. It has often been expressed by lips no less eloquent than those of Webster. It is that if England has carried her drumbeats and martial airs around the world, Ireland has followed with the faith of St. Patrick, and raised the Cross of Christ wherever the Union Jack has been planted. With this thought I inquired for St. Patrick’s school, and soon found myself looking up at the statue of Ireland’s Apostle that guards its

entrance. On the night before I thought this must be a school for Irish soldiers of the Malta garrison. But in the clear daylight I now saw that it was too big for that . purpose. My finger was on the electric button, and the door swung open in obedience to the strong arm of a smiling porter with a decidedly Irish cast of countenance. , I was taken aback when he answered my questions in English, but with a distinctly foreign accent. ‘Why,’ I said, you are surely Irish?’ ho,’ he said, ‘I was born in Malta, but my mother was Irish.’ I heard the hum of workshops within as I stood in the hall waiting for the arrrival of Father O’Grady. When he came there was no doubt of his nationality, nor of his accent, nor of the Irish welcome for a transaltantic Gael. The Irish are TJbiquitous. My conversations with Father O’Grady must always remain among my most pleasant memories, as well as the most instructive lessons I have had in Malta. They reminded me that the world is getting small, that the Irish are übiquitous, and that now, as in the early Middle Ages, they are in the forefront of the noble army of missionaries who carry the banner of Christ into every part of the earth. This Irish boy, who had first seen the light in the County Sligo, early developed the missionary spirit of his race. He heard the call, and he hesitated not to follow. He volunteered first for the Canadian mission , whither he was invited by the great Archbishop Walsh of Toronto, who was himself an Irish boy and a great missionary. The boy was sent for his studies to Italy, where during one of his vacations he came to Turin and there met the priest, the very first interview with whom determined his whole future life. This priest was no other than the great Don Bosco, the founder of a new religious Order that is now doing missionary work in every part of the world, whose canonisation as a saint of God’s Church will be one of the events of the near future. The Don Bosco Society. Father O’Grady tells with evident pride how the first meeting with Don Bosco captivated his soul and determined his vocation. Having made his novitiate at Turin and completed his studies under the watchful eye of the future saint, he was sent with others of the Don Bosco Society to do missionary work in the Argentina. Between that country and the Falkland Islands —which you will find on the map off the coast of Argentinahe labored for twenty years. , His health failed, and he was recalled to Europe. But his vigor returning, a new field of labor opened providentially for him in Malta. A wealthy Maltese gentleman, seeing the sore need among the rising generation of Malta of learning some trades, donated a large plot of land here in Sliema to build a technical training school. In his will he left 5000 dollars to commence the work, and a Maltese lady gave a like sum. A condition of the gift was that the work should be entrusted to the Salesian Society, a community of priests and Brothers, founded by the venerable Don Bosco. Such was the work that Father O’Grady undertook at Malta six years ago, a training school for poor Maltese boys. At present along with reading, writing and elementary studies, they are taught the English language and their choice of three —shoemaking, tailoring, and printing. They are taught by priests and lay brothers who have been specially trained for the purpose in the Salesian house at Turin. Father O Grady’s first assistant and prefect of studies is a Father Kilkenny, who spent six years on the Salesian mission in Central Africa before he was recalled to this work in Malta. The second assistant is a Father M. Cambridge, also from the Emerald Isle. But the Fathers themselves would all declare that the finest type of manhood and the most successful teacher at the institution is a Sicilian lay-brother, who is at the same time bandmaster, teaching in the grammar department and head master of the tailoring shop. He has made St. Patrick’s boys’ band the first in Malta..