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Show Noted Priest Dead. From the Irish Dominican Convent of San Clemente, in Rome, comes word ' of the death of a remarkable but little ! known personage, Father Costelloe, at S the fine old age of 82. It may be safely I raid, writes the Rome correspondent of I" the London Catholic Weekly, that few men of the century whose boundary we have just crossed have done work more valuable or of more lasting and im- portant consequences. This will look like thoughtless hyperbole to almost every one who reads it. And nothing more natural, because few have ever heard his name, and those in Ireland who knew him once have either preceded pre-ceded him to the grave or have long since forgotten him. In Rome he was not known to many: the ordinary visitor never met him. Yet he has been a remarkable figure. He was well known in the Vatican library in the Lateran: he knew the Barbarini archives arch-ives and those of Propaganda ,as well j as a man knows the contents of the drawers of his writing desk. He was nttached to some convents of his order in Ireland during the first years of his priesthood, but he was transferred to the Irish house of the order in Rome about half a century ago, and has been attached to It ever since. In early life he suffered from deafness, which practically prac-tically incapacitated him for mission work. But he was not the man to waste his life bemoaning his misfortune. misfor-tune. With his buoyant nature he thought within himself that he had i other faculties left which he could 1 use, and he has used, them persevering- y day by day for the last fifty years. He has ransacked the archives and libraries li-braries in Rome, public and private, and has copied out almost every document docu-ment bearing on the relations of the Irish church with the Holy See down to the time of the Reformation. The labor and patience which that means k cannot be realized unless by one who has ever tried to decipher one of these medieval documents. But use makes master. - Father Costelloe, with the patience pa-tience of an Irish monk of old time and the plodding of a modern German, wrestled with the work until he got ; used to the characters, and then those documents became to him as the letter of yesterday's post. Hardly a day found him absent from his chair at one of the archives or libraries, li-braries, deciphering, copying and verifying,' veri-fying,' and during the long span he has filled up an enormous heap of manuscript man-uscript material for Irish history, ecclesiastical ec-clesiastical and civil, every page neatly and carefully written. Thus has this good man, with his silent and hidden life left a legacy to the Convent of San Clemente and to his native land that is beyond all price. Ireland badly wants an ecclesiastical history, for it has none. Curiously enough, the only one worthy the name is by a German-Canon German-Canon Belksheim of Aiix-la-Chapelle compiled at the instance and with the help of Cardinal Moran. But that is in German, and, of course, has some drawbacks. draw-backs. But it will be impossible to prcdo.ee a complete history without the hitherto undiscovered materials which tlie painstaking priest who has just passed away has stored up for the sake of faith and fatherhood. Leader. |
