Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty
It is one of the ironies of Irish Christianity that our patron saint is not a native. Saint Patrick knew the pain of exile. So also did Saint Charles of Mount Argus, canonised by Pope Benedict XVI during torrential rain in Rome on Sunday the third of June.
St Paul claims, in his letter to the Romans, that the life and death of each of us has its influence on others. So let us recall the life of Saint Charles and reflect on the meaning it might have for us today.
He was born John Andrew Houben in 1821 in the village of Munstergeleen in Holland. He was the fourth of eleven children born to Johanna and Peter Houben. Peter worked in the flour mill owned by his brother. John was a shy child, inclined to holiness, who found school work difficult. At the age of 19 he was conscripted into the Dutch army where he served for five years, though he experienced only three months of active service.
He was a reluctant soldier, largely uninterested in the ways of war. He spent more time in the chapel than on the military training ground. After his release from the army he followed the direction of his heart and studied for the priesthood, as a member of the Passionist Order, in Ere in Belgium. Ordained at Tournai in 1850, his superiors transferred him two years later to England. Never again in the 41 years of life that remained to him did he see his native land, that fairytale world of windmills, clogs and tulips.
In England he had his first contact with the Irish. After the Great Famine Irish emigrants teemed into Britain, fleeing a land where hope had died. He got to like them. Perhaps as an exile he felt an affinity with their loneliness and bewilderment in an industrial society, so different from what they knew.
He was transferred to the newly -founded monastery of Mount Argus in Dublin in 1857. Dublin was then a poor city. All that remained was the faded grandeur of the 18th century when in the halcyon days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy it was the second city of the British Empire. At one level it might have seemed that Fr Charles would be more a hindrance than a help to the ministry of the Passionist Order. Members of the order are noted for their preaching. In the devotioned revolution in Ireland, encouraged by Cardinal Paul Cullen from 1850 onwards, parish missions started and the Passionists were among the orders who preached them. Fr Charles won no plaudits for his preaching. He never mastered English and Irish was way beyond him.
However, he had other, more important gifts. He excelled in the confessional and in his support of the sick. Many of those who came to him believed he had the gift of healing. In ‘Redemption’, the novelist Francis Stuart creates the character of Fr Mellowes and writes of him:
“He had a very great gentleness and those who needed gentleness came to him. Many of them did not know why they came to him, but it was in the first place because of this gentleness that was a rare thing and which they found nowhere else.”
The same could have been said of Fr Charles. His popularity brought him trouble. Some doctors, jealous of his gift of healing, alleged that he told sick people they did not need the services of a doctor. They reported him to Cardinal Cullen, though they later withdrew the allegations. Then some shady operators began to sell holy water throughout Ireland which they claimed had been blessed by Fr Charles. There are always those who try to take advantage of people’s devotions. It has been reckoned that if all the pieces that are purported to be of the true cross were gathered together there would be enough wood to build a ship of armada dimensions!!
To avoid scandal his superiors sent Fr Charles to England where he remained for eight years, before returning to Ireland for the last 19 years of his life. He restarted his ministry at Mount Argus and some days up to 300 people came to see him.
Towards the end of his life he suffered ill health to which he eventually succumbed in January 1893.
The Victorian Era was the age of great funerals. It is claimed that Fr Charles’ funeral in the harsh winter weather attracted a crowd even greater than that of Charles Stewart Parnell 15 months previously.
So how does a nineteenth century Dutchman speak to Ireland today? Ireland has attracted huge numbers of immigrants, many of them Catholics from Eastern Europe. Perhaps he can be seen as their patron saint. Like them, he had to make his way in a new world. Fr Charles was especially close to the poor. Ireland is no longer a poor country. There are still pockets of poverty here, places where that economic circus animal, the Celtic Tiger, has never roamed. And there are always people who need gentleness and spiritual healing as bulwarks against the harsh rigours of life. Of Fr Charles it can be truly said that he lived, in the words of Thomas Kettle, poet and politician, for ‘a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, and for the secret scripture of the poor’.
