Blessed Donkey

A plump little donkey named Juanita kicked up a mighty rumpus in New England last week, brought pain and embarrassment to the American Red Cross. In the January Junior Red Cross News, monthly journal for children, was a story about a 10-year-old Spaniard named Rafael and a donkey he found abandoned at the foot of a cliff. Uncle Bastiano and Aunt Ana did not care for their nephew's asinine Juanita. On St. Anthony's Eve, Rafael begged a peseta on the road, set out to have Juanita bedecked and blessed next day in front of the church. "Surely," thought he, "the Gentle Lord would heed his prayer that he and Juanita might not be separated." Sure enough, after the priest blessed Juanita, along with other donkeys, mules and horses, she was saved from being sold at Uncle Bastiano's order. Spain's great bullfighter, Jose, happened along, bought Juanita for Rafael. . . .

When school committeemen in Somerville, Mass, read the story last week and saw the picture that illustrated it, they angrily suppressed that issue of the Junior Red Cross News, and all Junior Red Cross activities in Somerville.* The pen-&-ink drawing of Rafael, Juanita and the priest was captioned: "Rafael and Juanita stood before the priest, who murmured a blessing and placed a barley wafer in Juanita's mouth." The Somerville schoolmen called this "sacrilegious . . . offensive . . . un-American . . . ridiculing the great central act of worship of a great religious denomination." Other Massachusetts cities--Cambridge, Lowell, Lawrence, Everett, Fall River--joined in the ban, were followed by New York City.

Deeply concerned was John Barton Payne, national chairman of the Red Cross. "I am very sorry indeed," said he, and made public a letter of apology to the U. S. Catholic hierarchy.

But Very Rev. William Coleman Nevils, Jesuit president of Georgetown University, found nothing harmful in the drawing, and a Catholic editor of the Junior Red Cross News pointed out that a Spanish parish priest might very well add "such homely touches" as giving a barley wafer (not a consecrated wheat wafer) to an animal. St. Anthony the Abbot is the patron of domestic animals as well as of hospitallers, basket-makers, butchers, gravediggers. On his feast, Jan. 17, the Italian and Spanish faithful may bring their animals to be blessed with a special prayer and be sprinkled with holy water.

* A onetime mayor of Somerville is Leon M. Conwell, son of the late Russell H. Conwell who founded Philadelphia's Temple University and delivered to thousands of audiences what was undoubtedly the world's most famed lecture, "Acres of Diamonds." Last week Leon Conwell announced he would revive this lecture which tells of a man who roamed the world looking for diamonds he dreamed of, died without knowing that they existed in his own garden. It contains quotations from the Bible, Grant, Garfield, Lee, Rockefeller, Tennyson and a Mr. Bailey. Solemnities abound like these: "He is an enemy to his country who sets Capital against Labor. . . . Even if a rich man's son retains his father's money he cannot know the best things in life. . . . We must know what the world needs first and then invest ourselves to supply that need, and success is almost certain."

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