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Show Relic of St. Paul Converts a Family. i . I Mrs. Thomas Baxter of 740 East One Hundred and Forty-third streets. New York, is so firmly of jthe belief that she has been I restored to health through the instru-I instru-I mentality of a relic of St. Paul the I Apostle that she has become a Cath-; Cath-; olic for the second time and her hus-; hus-; band and children have also embraced em-braced the faith. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter are more than 4o years old. She was a Catholic when she first met her husband, in 1S79 They were secretly married by the Rev. Dr. Ammeriman, a Baptist clergyman, cler-gyman, at his home in East Eighty-! Eighty-! fourth street. T.o please her husband's ! family, Mrs. Baxter says, she gave up her religion, and her children were reared in the Baptist faith. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter were members of the Alexander Baptist church and the children w-ere members of the Sunday school. Mrs. Baxter has suffered for the last seven years, and was told that she could find relief only in an operation Recently friends spoke to her about ' the relic of St. Paul, which the Pas-s'onist Pas-s'onist fathers of Hoboken were exhib- I iln.? ? a mlsson in St. Jerome's I Catholic church, One Hundred and Thirty-eighth street and Alexander avenue. They induced her to go there I Father Hubert, one of the missionaries appned the relic. Instantly, she says she felt a relief from pain, and she de- ! Clares that since then she has felt j uinii ttL einy nme in years. On I Sunday she ate meat for the first time In two years. Grateful for the improvement in her condition, she expresssed a desire to re-enter the church of her girlhood. Her husband said he, too, would embrace em-brace Catholicism with his three sons-Thomas, sons-Thomas, 20 years old: Frank, 14 years and Irving, 9. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter then asked Father Hubert to take the measures necessary -to validate their marriage, which, as performed twentv-two twentv-two years ago, was in violation of the law of the Catholic church, of which Mrs. Baxter was then a member. In reporting the above case several th X ?uY- Tork dailles state(i that the Catholic church does no recognize recog-nize marriages made in the Protestart I faith, so the couple were married by one of the priests attached to St. Jerome's church." The error contained in this statement state-ment is pointed out by Vicar General Mooney of New York, in a letter to the papers, saying: "In your paper of today, describing an occurrence in St. Jerome's church, j One Hundred and Thirty-eighth street I and Alexander avenue, is the expres-ision: expres-ision: 'The Catholic church does not I recognize marriages made In the Prot-i Prot-i estant faith.' "Such is not the teaching of the Church. ,-It recognizes th? marriakea of Protestants when both parties are bap-I bap-I tized. When, however, one of the i parties is unbaptized and consequently not a Christian subject, the marriage I of such a persoa with a baptized Catholic Cath-olic or Protestant is held to be invalid. in-valid. "To validate the marriage in that case a dispensation is to be sought, which the Church always issues, when , it deems the. reasons therefor good j and sufficient. This was the precise method followed in the case of the parties named in your article. By publishing pub-lishing the above you will possibly do away with some of the misapprehensions misapprehen-sions that exist as to the attitude of the Church toward the marriages of Protestants. |