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Coffins And Grave Clothes

Coffins And Grave Clothes image
Parent Issue
Day
4
Month
July
Year
1902
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

COFFINS AND GRAVE CLOTHES

An Answer to Father Kelly's Recent Criticism

A CORRESPONDENT

Tells of the Renting of Coffins and the Way Funerals Are Conducted in Naples

The following letter has been sent to the Argus for publication by a correspondent who requests that his identity be not known. It is evidently a reply to the recent criticism of Rev. Father Kelly on a coffin which he purchased from the county authorities, for a man who died at the county house, but which is said to have been badly damaged when it reached St. Thomas church:

One half of the world does not know how the other half lives. This is such a hackneyed saying that one scarcely realizes how very true it is. As for that matter, one half of the world does not know how the other half dies and is buried. If they had known a little more about it, there need not have been manifested a few days ago so much thin-skinnedness about rented coffins. But ignorance is a curse. And partial ignorance often leads to a heap of quarreling even if there is no bloodshed.

No one can have passed a few days in Naples sauntering around in and out of the churches there, without having learned how the poor bury themselves. And when I say "poor" I mean such miserable, abject poor as we can have no idea of in any part of this country.

In each parish there is a fraternity of these poor men who never expect to own a whole coffin to themselves when they die. They know they will never possess even the grave clothes in which they are covered. Membership in this society and the payment of an occasional obole, entitles each one to the use of both coffin and winding sheet- not by any means a regular shroud. And as soon as the paltry funeral is over, the dead man is disrobed and turned out naked into the earth. The coffin is kept tor the next member.

Far from being "insulted" when the jolly parish priest is questioned concerning this singular usage, so gruesome to a Yankee traveler, he seems proud to be noticed and thinks his lazzaroni have found out the thriftiest dodge in the world just as they are getting out of it.

If this is timely you may use it, with no name, however.

A postscript to the above letter says that the writer is a Catholic and makes a rather indefinite reference to "the quarrelsome priest." It might be said that Father Kelly spoke of a coffin that he had bought and not rented. The above communication, it will be noticed, refers altogether to rented coffins.