Spiritual Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Dominican Bravery During a Cholera Epidemic in Italy)

“I have heard of many things that redound to the credit of the priesthood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the prevalence of the cholera last year. I speak of the Dominican friars—men who wear a coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, in this hot climate, and go barefoot. They live on alms altogether, I believe. They must unquestionably love their religion, to suffer so much for it. When the cholera was raging in Naples; when the people were dying by hundreds and hundreds every day; when every concern for the public welfare was swallowed up in selfish private interest, and every citizen made the taking care of himself his sole object, these men banded themselves together and went about nursing the sick and burying the dead. Their noble efforts cost many of them their lives. They laid them down cheerfully, and well they might. Creeds mathematically precise, and hair-splitting niceties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the salvation of some kinds of souls, but surely the charity, the purity, the unselfishness that are in the hearts of men like these would save their souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion—which is ours.”—American humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869)

As a religious skeptic for much of his adult life—and particularly in the case of Roman Catholicism—Mark Twain would have been among the last people I would expect to include in my Sunday “Spiritual Quote of the Day.”

But the circumstances surrounding the package tour to Europe that inspired his Innocents Abroad were extraordinary, as was the courage of the Dominicans he encountered in Naples, Italy, during a cholera epidemic in 1867. In a season when the COVID-19 pandemic rages again worldwide with renewed force, it does not hurt to pay tribute to an earlier group that many people a century and a half ago regarded as “essential workers.”

In Italy as a whole, an estimated 100,000 people died of cholera in 1867. The fear and frustration were particularly virulent in Naples, where mobs, enraged at prior broken pledges to improve the city’s sanitation and infrastructure, attacked government offices.

In March of this year, a Charles Collins post on the Catholic Website Crux Now gave further details on the trip in which Twain saw how the Dominicans bore witness to their faith. It is well worth reading.