There was an elderly man confined in the prison hospital who always found great pleasure in seeing to the wants of his companions. He told the Sisters it made him happy to see them get what they most desired. Toward the close of the war he obtained his release, and afterwards sent fifty dollars to the Sisters to supply the wants of the suffering sick. His son soon after this was charged with some military offense, tried by court-martial sentenced and executed. The young man became a Catholic, and in his last moments received the consolations of the Church. His remains were given up to his family, and his father requested the clergyman who attended him before his execution to preach the funeral sermon, which the priest did in a Baptist church, where his hearers were all Baptists.
One of the priests who was untiring in his work among the soldiers in St. Louis during those heart-breaking days was Father Patrick John Ryan, now the Archbishop of the great Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Early in the war he was appointed a chaplain by the Government, but resigned his position, feeling that he could do better work among the Southern prisoners of war if he appeared among them simply as a priest. The rector of one of the Protestant Episcopal churches in St. Louis succeeded him as chaplain. Father Ryan is authority for the statement that there were probably more baptisms in this military hospital than on any of the battlefields or in any other hospital of the Civil War.
He was a witness to many pathetic and humorous incidents in the daily routine of hospital service. On one occasion he was attending a poor drummer boy who was only too surely approaching the end of his life of warfare. He spoke to him gently of the things necessary to do under such circumstances, instructed him to glance over his past life and try and feel a genuine sorrow for all of his sins and for anything he had done against his fellow-man.
The boy listened meekly for a while, but when he was told to be sorry for all his wrong-doing a new light flashed upon him. He half rose in bed and defiantly declared that if this contemplated the severing of his allegiance to the Southern Confederacy and an admission that the “Yankees” were right he would have none of it. Half-amused at the outburst, and not entirely unmoved at this flash of spirit in what the lad no doubt deemed a righteous cause, the good priest soon assured him that his mission was not of the North or the South, but of God. The young sufferer died soon after this with most edifying sentiments upon his lips.
Sister Juliana, a sister of Bishop Chatard, of Vincennes, who did good service in this and other hospitals, was the witness of many affecting death-bed scenes and many wonderful death-bed conversions. Fervent aspirations to heaven went up from the lips of men who had never prayed before. Soldiers from the backwoods who had known no religion and no God were in a few hours almost transformed. It is estimated that priests and Sisters baptized between five and six hundred persons at this one hospital.
Archbishop Ryan tells the following incident that came under his personal observation, and which John Francis Maguire, Member of Parliament from Cork, has incorporated in one of his works:[5]
“A Sister was passing through the streets of Boston with downcast eyes and noiseless steps when she was suddenly addressed in a language that made her pale cheeks flush. The insult came from a young man standing on a street corner. The Sister uttered no word of protest, but raising her eyes gave one swift, penetrating look at the brutal offender.”
Time passed on; the war intervened. The scene changed to a ward in a military hospital in Missouri. A wounded soldier, once powerful but now as helpless as an infant, was brought in and placed under the care of the Sisters of Charity. It was soon evident that the man’s hour had arrived; that he was not long for this world. The Sister urged the man to die in the friendship of God, to ask pardon for his sins, and to be sorry for whatever evil he might have done.
“I have committed many sins in my life,” he said to the Sister, “and I am sorry for them all and hope to be forgiven; but there is one thing that weighs heavy on my mind at this moment. I once insulted a Sister of Charity in the streets of Boston. Her glance of reproach has haunted me ever since. I knew nothing of the Sisters then. But now I know how good and disinterested you are and how mean I was. Oh! if that Sister were only here, weak and dying as I am, I would go down upon my knees and ask her pardon.”
The Sister turned to him with a look of tenderness and compassion, saying: “If that is all you desire to set your mind at ease, you can have it. I am the Sister you insulted and I grant you pardon freely and from my heart.”