The Young Priest's Keepsake Part 12

It was not an unusual thing to see young boys feigning drunkenness and staggering through the village. Why? They were at an age when pride began to crave for notoriety and applause. They knew the public to which they appealed, and they took the shortest cut to win its approbation, and that was by pretending to be drunk.

An action like that is a terrible verdict against the national conscience. If public opinion were healthy, if it held for such mock heroes, not the incense of applause, but a lash of scorn, if boys were persuaded that so far from exhibiting in their conduct a manly trait, they were only proving themselves degraded puppies, the cure would be immediate.

[Side note: Perverted Judgments]

Listen to people talking of a man who has sent his children out on the world, and his wife to an untimely grave, and you would think it was some visitation of Providence overtook him, and that he deserved all our sympathy.

The agent that dares to threaten an eviction has to carry revolvers and walk the country under the shadow of police protection; but the father and husband who evicts his own children and flings them into the slums of foreign cities, and sends his broken-hearted wife to the grave, not only has his crime condoned but, by the same people, he is daily smothered in the rose-leaves of apology. "Poor fellow! Ah, it is a good man's fault!" Not one hard word. Yet the world outside the sh.o.r.es of this country are pouring scorn on the degraded name of drunken Ireland.

[Side note: The Young Men's Pride]

Why not appeal to the patriotic pride of the young men by showing the contempt and distrust that follow our race because of this vice? It would touch them to the quick.

[Side note: The Hereditary Taint]

Another point to be insisted on is:--The crime of the drunkard does not die with himself. Like lunacy or consumption it transmits a sad heritage to his offspring. Ninety out of every hundred are drunkards because they inherited tainted blood.

Parents shudder at the bare possibility of their child being born an idiot, or with some repulsive birth-mark. Yet, before the infant can lift its hand in protest, the parents poison its life at the very source and send it on the world with a moral deformity marking its nature.

[Side note: The Dawn]

These were the two sources of weakness in the past: a public opinion that fostered, instead of smiting, the curse, and an hereditary taint that grew stronger with every generation, while the will to resist became more feeble. Thank G.o.d, the dawn of a brighter day is with us: there is a healthy awakening of public opinion. The Gaelic revival has for the first time in our history linked sobriety with patriotism: the word has gone forth that reconstructed Ireland must not rest on staggering pillars. The young priest of the future has the rising tide with him, and Ireland has seen her darkest day.

No matter how we may deplore emigration, we must deal with it as a fact.

[Side note: Is the Emigrant Prepared]

[Side note: His Peril Abroad]

From what cla.s.s are the emigrants drawn? From the young. It is hard to part with them: but there is one consolation. They go to build up the Church in other lands, but every precaution must be taken to strengthen them for the trials awaiting them. Now, every returned American and Australian priest will candidly tell you that the Irish emigrant is poorly equipped for his new surroundings.

Dr. Kenrick and Cardinal Gibbons go so far as to say that the neglect of the Irish priest in preparing his emigrating flock, is the main source of leakage in the American Church. They are not able to answer the most ordinary objections, and they have not moral strength to withstand the shafts of ridicule. In the fierce cross-currents of unbelief, he is poorly able to keep his foothold. Many stagger; some fall, never to rise.

We reply:--Look at our Confirmation cla.s.ses, and at the admirable lives of the youth before they leave us. Neither of these weaken the contention. At the age a child is confirmed, he is incapable of reflective reason; his knowledge is three parts memory. It is between the Confirmation day and the twentieth year that the convictions and principles that guide a lifetime are formed. Yet, this is the precise period during which the young boy is permitted to starve.

Secondly, the good life of a person reared in a purely Catholic atmosphere is no guarantee of what he may become when transplanted to a country where the very atmosphere palpitates with doubt and denial.

[Side note: Activity III]

Here surely is a field that urgently demands a young priest's activities.

_Every young priest should be the eldest brother to the young men of the parish_, the repository of their confidence, the director of their sports, the organizer of their Feis; and when there is danger of angry pa.s.sions running high or of drunkenness getting in among them, the curate's place is not the study, but the football field.

To such a curate it would be an easy task to organize the young men of the parish for a Sunday meeting during the four winter months, and give them a thorough course in "Catholic belief" or "Faith of Our Fathers."

This would be a distinct advantage not only to those who are leaving, but to those who remain. The Catholic mind of this country is now, by travel and reading, brought into constant contact with Protestant and infidel thought.

These meetings should wear as little of the appearance of a cla.s.s as possible. Boys should be taught to look upon them as friendly meetings of brothers discussing the weapons with which to face the future: the session might appropriately close with an excursion or a social evening.

Now that we have treated emigration as a fact, let us turn to a few of the means by which it might be lessened.

[Side note: The Summer Swallow]

A constant source of temptation is the sight of the returned emigrant with flash jewellery, superior airs and stories of boasted wealth.

[Side note: Activity IV]

When summer brings these returned swallows, a spirit of discontent with their social surroundings seizes the youth. The priest's duty is to impress upon them that the bright side of the picture alone is presented to them: there is another side of awful darkness.

The successful one they see, but the fate of the submerged ninety-nine is hidden from their eyes.

Our people emigrate without a knowledge of skilled labour; they have to take the lowest occupations and bring up their children in vile surroundings: they are lost in shoals.

Had the youth of this country the writer's experience: did they see hundreds of their countrymen sleeping in the parks of Sydney, without the shelter of a roof and without knowing where to turn in the morning for a bit: could they hear the thirty-two accents of Ireland in the low streets of dens where souls and bodies rot, they would try their hands at a dozen means of winning honest bread before turning their faces towards the emigrant ship.

Could we but take the twenty-two thousand Irish-born convicts out of the jails of one city--New York--with their clanking fetters and arrow-branded jackets, and march them through the length and breadth of Ireland, and show the youth, that, if some wear bangles, others wear handcuffs, it would go far to cure the microbe of unrest.

Every tale of distress, failure and hardship abroad should be repeated in the Irish provincial journals. No effort should be spared to show the people, not one but both sides of the picture.

[Side note: Activity V Amus.e.m.e.nts]

One of the most important problems facing the young priest of to-day is:--How to organise healthy and sinless amus.e.m.e.nts for the people. Our skies are gloomy, our climate depressing, and the very dreariness of country life causes thousands to fly. Look at the groups of young men at the village corners, where is the hope or contentment in their looks?

[Side note: Goldsmith's Days]

I think you may challenge the world's literature for more wholesome pictures of rural pleasures than those mirrored in the "Deserted Village." They are not creations of the poet's fancy, but chronicles of facts that lived before his eyes. In them, you have the image of Ireland as she lived before the black shadow of '47 fell upon her. All went on in the open daylight, under the eyes of parents and friends.

"The young contended while the old surveyed."

Virtue was safe, tired hearts were cheered, and, whilst these sports flourished, few Irish boys or girls wanted to know the road to the emigrant ship.

Would it be possible to re-create the Ireland of Goldsmith's days?

[Side note: The Winter's Night]

One thing, however, is not outside the range of possibility--to persuade parents in rural districts to make some effort to brighten the lives of their children; to have all household work done two hours before bedtime, to have a bright fire on the hearth and a bright lamp on the table, and a plentiful supply of the Catholic Truth Society books, Catholic papers and periodicals always at hand. Many a poor boy and girl, whose thoughts to-day are turning to Sydney or New York as an escape from cheerless drudgery, would then read a new meaning into the word "home." No matter how toil presses during the day, the prospective two hours of brightness and pleasure cheers them.

"Give a man a taste for reading and the means of gratifying it,"

says Sir John Herschel,[1] "and you can hardly fail to make him a happy man, you place him in contact with the best society of every period of history--the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest and the purest characters that adorn humanity." A parent who cannot line his child's pocket with gold has in this simple plan a means of enriching his head with knowledge, and so sending him on the world armed. Self-respect would grow; the gross pleasures of the card-table or the public-house would lose their charm. Your own words would fall on ears steadily becoming more intelligent. The parish after five years would wear a new face.

[1] Eton Address

[Side note: Activity VI The country Schoolhouse]

Could not the young men be gathered once a week during the winter months, and the school house be converted into a literary, debating or lecture room?

If the young priest prepared one lecture a month, he might revolutionize the district by teaching the people how to organize and foster small industries or technical branches suited to the localities. There is wealth in the mushrooms on the field, the blackberries on the hedge, and the cresses by the stream. In other countries thousands are made by these unnoticed products.

Why not here?