THE SHEEHANS
We waited at Agnez-lez-Duisans a few days longer, but “old Fritz” did
not strike on the Arras front, though all the world knows that he
continued to gain elsewhere. Two or three times during the week, Father
Sheehan went up to Arras with a quantity of provisions to two Poor
Clare Sisters who lived on in the basement of their ruined convent in
order to pay court to their King.
In the evening we were kept busy hearing confessions and giving Holy
Communion to soldiers in the parish church. One evening when we had
heard the confessions of all the men present, I stepped into the
sacristy to say a word to Father Sheehan, who was just going out to
give Holy Communion.
“Ah, Father!” he said in his gentle, friendly manner, “I am glad you
came in. Will you please go down there to Pat and tell him not to go
to Communion now. You see, Father, he was there this morning, and he’s
such a pious lad that when he sees the others going to the rails, he
might forget that he was there this morning and go up again.”
“All right, Father,” I said, but somehow or other I found great
difficulty in suppressing a strong inclination to smile as I walked
down the flagged aisle of the church. Pat--Father Sheehan had pointed
him out to me--who was intently reading his prayer-book, looked up
kindly at me as I drew near. “God bless you, Father,” he whispered, as
I stooped over him and he disposed himself elaborately to listen. It
actually pained me to keep from laughing as I prepared to deliver my
message.
“Pat,” I said, “Father Sheehan sent me to tell you not to go to
Communion again. He is afraid that you might forget you were there this
morning and go back again.”
Pat just looked at his book and shook his head as he smiled
indulgently. Then he looked at me, still smiling, “Shure, Father dear,
I had no intention of going again!” Then he said, as if to himself,
“God bless Father Sheehan!”
Pat’s words were echoed strongly in my heart; for every one that met
Father Sheehan would feel like wishing him the very best they could,
and what is better than the blessing of God?
Just about this time I received from my mother a birthday present,
which had been delayed along the way. It was a large volume entitled
“Canon Sheehan of Doneraile,” by Father Heuser. I had long enjoyed the
works of the gentle Canon, and I had always felt that I owed a lot to
this seer and prophet. I had long wanted to read the life of one who
had made many such unerring prophesies as the following some twenty
years before the signing of the Armistice:
“Meanwhile, the new Paganism, called modern civilization, is working
out its own destruction and solving its own problems. There are
subterranean mutterings of a future upheaval that will change the
map of the world as effectually as did an irruption of Vandals or
Visigoths. In the self-degradation of women; in the angry disputes
between Labor and Capital; in the dreams of Socialists, and the
sanguinary ambitions of Nihilists; in the attitude of the great
Powers to each other, snarling and afraid to bite; in the irreverence
and flippancy of the age manifested towards the most sacred and
solemn subjects, in the destructive attempts of philosophers, in the
elimination of the supernatural, in the concentration of all human
thought upon the fleeting concerns of this life, and the covert,
yet hardly concealed, denial of a life to come; in the rage for
wealth, in the almost insane dread of poverty--and all these evil
things permeating and penetrating into every class--there is visible
to the most ordinary mortal a disintegration of society that can
only eventuate in such ruin as have made Babylon and Nineveh almost
historical myths, and has made a proverb and by-word even of Imperial
Rome. Where is the remedy? Clearly, Christianity; and still more
clearly the only Christianity that is possible, and can bear the
solvent influence of the new civilization. Nothing but the poverty
of Christ, manifested in the self-abandonment of our religious
communities; the awful purity of Christ, continued in a celibate
priesthood and the white sanctity of our nuns; the self-denial and
immolation of Christ, shown again wherever the sacrificial instinct
is manifested in our martyrs and missionaries; the love of Christ, as
exhibited in our charge of the orphaned, the abandoned, the profligate,
the diseased, the leprous and insane--can lead back the vast masses
of erring humanity to the condition not only of stability, but of
the fruition of perfect peace. For what is the great political maxim
of government but the greatest good to the greatest number--in other
words, the voluntary sacrifice of the individual for the welfare of
the Commonwealth? And where is that seen but in the ranks of the
obscure and hidden, the unknown and despised (unknown and despised by
themselves above all) members of the Catholic church.”
I took the book down to the convent to show it to Father Sheehan. To
my question if he had ever met Canon Sheehan, looking at me in that
quizzical half smiling way that one regards a questioner when the
information to be given far exceeds that asked, he said: “Yes, I have
met him. I knew him, and he was my cousin.”