Catholic Drys

Talk about a dry and most people think of a Methodist or a Baptist bluenose. But the Roman Catholic Church also has its bluenoses. In Philadelphia last fortnight 400 of them assembled to attend the 72nd annual convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union.

The FBI furnished figures to spur the Catholic drys in their work: predominant among arrested last year were 18-year-old boys & girls; there was a 39% increase in the women arrested for drunkenness; a 69% increase in women arrested for disorderly conduct; many teen-age boys working in factories with older men have taken to the bottle.

Calling for a national crusade among youth, Father John W. Keogh, re-elected president of the Union, urged that families should not serve liquor at home, that banquets should not include it on the menu. Said he: "Total abstinence should begin with youth." In the Philadelphia Archdiocese (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Illinois are Union strongholds), last year 12,684 boys and girls in high schools, colleges, seminaries had signed the pledge.

Said Philadelphia's Dennis Cardinal Dougherty, spiritual director of the Union: "If it were possible for Father Theobald Mathew to give the pledge to about 600,000 Catholics when we were comparatively few in this country, why cannot the pledge be given to 25,000,000 today?"

Tosspot Teetotaler. The Father Mathew to whom the Cardinal Archbishop referred was a whisky-drinking priest turned teetotaler. He has been dead 86 years, but to many a Catholic in Ireland, England, the U.S., the name of the "Apostle of Temperance" is still as green as his native Eire.

Born in 1790, Mathew went to Ireland's famed Maynooth seminary, got expelled for his convivial ways. He joined the poverty-praising Franciscans, later got a parish in poverty-ridden Cork. Unlike most priests of his time, Father Mathew gladly worked with Protestants ("We should bear with each other as God bears with us all"). On one civic committee he sat with a Quaker, William Martin. When ever the evils of liquor were discussed Quaker Martin would say: "Ah, Theobald Mathew, if thou wouldst take the matter up." One day Father Mathew swore off whisky punch, signed a total abstinence pledge.

Within eight months 150,000 people of Cork and nearby areas had taken the pledge. Soon Father Mathew was drying up Irishmen by the thousand. Within six years Ireland's annual consumption of whiskey fell from twelve and a quarter million to five and a half million gallons.

There had been nothing like it since St. Patrick exorcised the snakes. As Erin's drink bill fell, so did the country's crimes. When the priest started a new church, Roe, the great Dublin distiller, sent him a big check: "No man has ever done me such harm, but it is a small thing beside the good you have done my country."

In 1849 the friar made a triumphant tour of the U.S. Manhattan gave him a civic welcome. In Washington the House and Senate both gave him a seat on the floor.

Seven years later he died and was buried among the poor people of Cork. Today his grave is still a place of pilgrimage, covered with pathetic rags and flowers which admiring Catholic teetotalers leave behind.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.