Now, understand that this man is the lawyer, the friend, the guide and director in temporal as well as spiritual matters of the entire population of this district. If a husband and wife quarrel it is his duty to hear and decide. If a tenant gets into trouble with his landlord he is the go-between to arrange it. In short every trouble, great and small, in the Parish is referred to him, and he must act. He is their lawyer as well as their priest. He is their everything. He supplies to them the intelligence that the most infernal Government on earth has denied them.
But this is a small part of his duties. He has to conduct services at all the chapels in this stretch of country. He has to watch over the morals of all the people. But this is not all. No matter at what hour of night, no matter what the condition of the weather, the summons to the bedside of a dying man to administer the last sacraments of the church must be obeyed. It may be that to do this requires a ride on horseback of twenty miles in a blinding storm, but it must be done. Every child must be christened, every death-bed must be soothed, every sorrow mitigated by the only comfort this suffering people have—faith in their church.
What do you suppose this magnificent man gets for all this? The largest income he ever received in his life was one hundred pounds, which, reduced to American money, amounts to exactly four hundred and eighty-one dollars. And out of this he has to pay his rent, his food, his clothing, the keeping of his horse, and all that remained goes in charity to the suffering sick—every cent of it.
When the father dies his nephews and nieces will not find good picking from what is left, I assure you.
“Why do you,” I asked, “a man capable of doing so much in the world, stay and do this enormous work, for nothing?”
“I was called to it,” was the answer, “what would these poor people do without me?”
That was all. Here is a man capable of anything, who deliberately sacrifices a career, sacrifices comfort, sacrifices the life he was fitted for, sinks his identity, foregoes fame, reputation, everything, for the sake of a suffering people!
“I was called to it—what would these poor people do without me!”
I am a very vigorous Protestant, and have no especial love for the Catholic Church, but I shall esteem myself especially fortunate if I can make a record in this world that will give me a place in the next within gun shot of where this man will be placed. I am not capable of making the sacrifices for my fellows that he is doing—I wish to Heaven I was. I found by actual demonstration why the Irish so love their priests. They would be in a still worse way, if possible, without them.
Ignorance of the real condition of the farming Irish is almost as common among the better class of Irishmen, I mean the dwellers in the cities, as it is among Americans. At one of the fine hotels in Glengariff, a watering place, I made the acquaintance of an Irish lady, a resident of Cork. Her husband is a wealthy citizen, a thorough Irishman, a Land Leaguer and all that, and she is a more ardent Land Leaguer than her husband. She is a more than usually intelligent lady, with a warm heart, and she realized, she thought, the wrongs Ireland was suffering, and was doing, she supposed, all she could to aid the oppressed people.