FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND THE CHURCH

New Zealand Tablet, 4 June 1914, Page 23

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND THE CHURCH

*A few years before* Florence Nightingale died, I wrote a short sketch in these pages of the Catholic influences that had crossed her path, in so far as they were then generally known (says a writer in the Catholic Magazine for South Africa). Sir Edward Cook has now given us the official Life of this wonderful woman; and we read with no little satisfaction that for her, the Catholic Church represented something very different from'the bogey which her contemporaries in England so hated. At one time her friends feared that she was about to join the Church; and there was this much truth in the rumor, that she felt strongly attracted by certain aspects of the Church. Her biographer says: — ‘The spirit of Catholic saintliness—and especially that of the saints whose contemplative piety was joined to active benevolenceappealed strongly to her; she read books of Catholic devotion constantly, and made innumerable annotations in them and from them. She was greatly attracted by the writings of the Port Royalists, on which subject there is a long correspondence with her father. She admired intensely the aid which Catholic piety had given, and was to many of her own friends givingto the Bermondsey Nuns, especially, and to the Mothers and Sisters of the Trinita de ’Montitowards purity of heart and the doing of everything from a right motive.’ The ‘wobbling’ of the Church of England in matters of doctrine repelled her methodical mind. It might be that'* John Bull had a Church and Liturgy made for him by Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth’; but she could not adlnire the inconsistencies which have resulted from John Bull’s initial mistake at the Reformation. ‘To be business-like was with Miss Nightingale almost the highest commendation; and in this character also the Roman Church appealed to her,’ says Sir Edward Cook: * its acceptance of doctrines in all their logical conclusions, seemed to her businesslike; its organisation was business-like; its recognition of women-workers was business-like.’ Seeing that one of the permanent results of Florence Nightingale’s career was to open up new walks of usefulness for her sex, it was to be expected that The Advanced Attitude of the Catholic Church, in regard to women, should have made a deep impression upon her mind. In the early ’fifties she wrote to Dean Stanley: ‘ The Catholic Orders offered me work, training for that work, . sympathy and help in it, such as I had in vain sought in the Church of England. The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work (good men make a great deal for themselves). For women she had— what I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head;' my heart, my hand; she would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother’s drawing-room; or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband’s table. . You may go to Sunday School, if you like, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.’ In order to extract as much as a Protestant can', of the secret of the success of thp nun’s method of life, she made the most of her opportunities during a visit to Rbme in the winter of 1847-8. She tells us that she never enjoyed any period of her life so much as this, especially the days spent' in the famous Convent of the Trinita de ’Monti. She recognised that at the time the greatest want among nurses was the spirit of real devotion to their work; and the appalling accounts of the hospitals show how terrible were the results that followed from this lack of devotion. She was allowed to make a Retreat, to study; the rules and organisation ,of the convent,- to have long , talks with the Madre Sta Colomba .and to be acquainted with the training of the novices. .

The Experience was a Delight to Her; and she left with the determination to found a Protestant sisterhood. But this project she dropped later, and we can imagine that it was hardly advisable to make such an experiment in connection . with ally of the Protestant denominations. The nearest thing of the kind that then existed was the nursing institute at Kaiserwerth in Germany. But her biographer tells us us that ‘ she thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance about the spirit of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserwerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience.’ And it was this experience. that led her to attach such importance to the religious motive in nursing. Three important motives, she tells us, go to form the perfect nurse—the physical, which means the natural liking for the work; the professional, i.e., the desire to excel in it when adopted as a profession, and, the religious which consists in serving God therein. All are undoubtedly required to complete the character of the perfect nurse. ‘But I do entirely and constantly believe,’ said Florence Nightingale, ‘ that the religious motive is essential for the highest kind of nurse. There are such disappointments, such sickenings of the heart, that they can only be borne by the feeling that one is called to the work by God, that it is part of His work, that one is a fellow-Worker with God. “I do not ask for success, said dear Agnes Jones, even while she was taking every human means to ensure success, “but that the will of God may be done in me and by me.” ’ Few women have been So Indifferent to Praise and Blame * as Florence Nightingale. It was one of the causes of her enormous success, whilst it was a natural result of her determination to work for God and humanity. She feared praise even more than blame. Abuse of all kinds she could accept with equanimity; but she shrank from votes of thanks and ; public welcomes and such popular ebullitions, with a terror which no one could have suspected in the woman who faced the plague and Crimea fever without flinching. ‘ Paid by the world, what doest thou owe Me?’ God might ask her ; and this she really did fear. After her unmatched services during the Crimea war, the Government wished to fetch her home in a warship and give her a public reception. She refused both, and returned under an assumed name, slipping quietly into London. The first visit she paid in London, the morning after her arrival, was to the Bermondsey Nuns. In a previous article I quoted the generous words in which she expressed her gratitude to the Mother Superior of this convent, who had been her mainstay in the Crimea. In the depth of her gratitude she had promised that her first visit, at home, would be made to Bermondsey Convent. It is a curious point, worth noting, that the first great opportunity of Florence Nightingale’s career cam© from British emulation of the work of French- Nuns with the French army. After the battle of the Alma in 1854, the whole of England was stirred by the terrible tale told about the British Army, by the special correspondent of the Times : ‘ The manner in which the sick and wounded are treated is worthy of the savages of Dahomey. . . . Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good, their surgeons more numerous, and they have also the help of the Sisters of Charity, who have accompanied the expedition in incredible numbers. These devoted women are excellent nurses/ - • When the British . Government was roused from sleep by these scathing attack's and the popular indig- ' nation, Florence Nightingale was called upon to do the work which' made her name famous. But there was no supply of . trained. English lay nurses to draw upon. First she applied to France, but she could not obtain French Sisters of Charity, who no doubt were fully occupied with the French army. Then she turned to the British Orders of Nuns; and her first party consisted of eight Catholic! Sisters from London, eight •

Anglican Sisters and twenty others. Of these English Catholic Nuns she said afterwards: ‘They are the Truest ; Christians ‘I ever met with—invaluable in their work—devoted, heart and head, to serve God and mankind—not to intrigue for their Church.’ ihe rabid Protestants complained that she did not substitute at once, laywomen or Anglican nurses lor the Catholic Sisters, but her views are doubtless reflected in a private letter written by her sister. Lady Verney, to Mrs. Gaskell; ‘When I hear estimable people talking as if you could turn forty women of all ranks, degrees of virtue and intelligence, into a military hospital, with drunken orderlies, unmarried chaplains young surgeons, etc., etc., and expect that , they are not more likely to be unwise or tempted astray than’ the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, who are bound by well-considered vows, love of their kind and the fear of Hell fire, then we feel that the “estimable people” have very little, knowledge of human nature.’ These estimable ones went a step further in their Evangelical folly. ,it was bad enough not to recognise that the Catholic Sisters had been chosen, because they alone could do the work at the time; but it was surely worse to refuse to thank them afterwards: on one occasion they escaped being mobbed by a crowd hostile to their faith, and they escaped only because a British officer and-his men stood in the way. Whilst Florence Nightingale has received her meed of merited praise from thousands of tongues, this biography is the first attempt to give the Sisters their full due. The heroin© of the Crimea did her best to impress upon the public how much she and it owed to the Sisters; but her voice fell on ears that would not hear. Her Esteem for the Catholic Church arose in great degree from the fruits of good works that she saw it produce. At home in England, in Ireland, and in foreign lands she saw the devotion of the secular clergy who were in charge of the poor. In one of her private note-books, which her last biographer has seen, she says: ‘ln all the dens of disgrace and disease, the only clergy who deserve the name of pastors are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations—Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters —are only theology or tea mongers.’ But she did not despise doctrine, as so many do outside the Catholic Church, when they give themselves to good works. She naturally did not perceive, as a well instructed Catholic would, the connection between faith and good works. Yet she saw that the Catholic Church alone was the home of certain Christian truths that attracted her. Thus, in 1841, she assisted at a ‘ procession of the Blessed Sacrament ’ in a famous Puseyite church at Leeds, and greatly admired the ritual and the teaching; but she says: ‘ I could not help looking in the faces of the clergymen, for the impression I expected to see, as they walked down the aisle, and wandered about (this immense crowd) after the Sacramentand oh ! I was woefully disappointed they looked so stupid ; and I could not help thinking, “If you been Catholics, you would all have been on your knees during the service, without minding your fine gowns and the cold stones.’” She evidently remembered The Real Catholic Processions that she had seen elsewhere. And in one of her letters from Rome, she describes a golden-letter day that, she spent in St. Peter’s, amongst the tombs and • statues of the Saints. With a friend she wandered from point to point until night fell. ‘ And at last the sacristan took us out of that vast solemn dome through a*. tomb ! and we glided into the silvery moonlight, and walked home oyer Ponte Sant’ Angelo, where I. made a little invocation to St. Michael to help me- to think; for why the Protestants should shut - themselves out, in solitary, pride, from the Communion of Saints in heaven and in earth, I never could understand, In. the very beginning of < her life; when the sense of a great vocation was ; gradually dawning upon: her,

we find in one of her common-place books a long quotation from the great Catholic preacher, Lacordaire° which evidently helped to shape the frame of mind in which her work was done. ‘ I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation, that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence on society.’ Thus, although Florence Nightingale was never received into the Catholic Church, we have some reason for claiming her as almost one of our own. The Church had more to do in shaping her character than any of the Protestant denominations, and she frankly recognised that she owed it much, though perhaps she herself hardly realised how much.