An American “Newman”

I am reading for the second or third time a splendid old biography of American Passionist Father Fidelis of the Cross (1840-1921), one of the nineteenth century’s most eminent converts to the Catholic faith. Born of blue-blood New England parents, James Kent Stone entered Harvard at sixteen years of age, studied in Germany, scaled the Swiss Alps, and saw action in the Civil War. Ordained a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, he married Cornelia Fay in 1863. The Reverend Mr. Stone served as the president of Kenyon College in Ohio, and of Hobart College in Geneva, New York.

Stone’s dear wife, Cornelia, died after giving birth to their third child in 1869. Shortly thereafter, he was received into the Catholic Church. Entrusting his children to Mother Frances Xavier Warde and her Religious Sisters of Mercy in Manchester, New Hampshire, Stone entered the Paulists in 1873, and was ordained a priest on December 21, 1872. In 1877, drawn to the austerity of Saint Paul of the Cross, he entered the Congregation of the Passion, becoming Father Fidelis of the Cross.

Father Fidelis of the Cross served the Congregation of the Passion in a number of important positions in the United States, in South America, and in Rome. At 81 years of age, he was reunited in San Mateo, California with his two surviving daughters and grandson. On October 14, 1921, he died there in the arms of his daughter Frances, holding his crucifix, with his rosary about his neck.

The following passage is taken from a letter to his Protestant mother, written on January 6, 1871:

The Secret of the Life of a True Catholic
“I have touched upon the secret of the life of a true Catholic. What is this secret? It is the presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. What is which makes this house so ineffably holy to me, and fills its silence with such a meaning? It is the fact that my Lord is here, not merely by that spiritual omnipresence by which He is everywhere, but in His Incarnate Divinity, in His Divine Humanity, in the very Flesh and Blood which He took for us from His Virgin Mother, and which He gave for us on the Wood of the Cross. Under this very roof He abides night and day, in the tabernacle over the high altar, where the little lamp is always shining, and at any hour I can go and visit Him, can fall down on my knees close before Him in the silent Sanctuary, and as often as I wish (Oh, wonder of wonders), He gives Himself to me in Holy Communion, and every morning I see Him offered up–yes! I may one day offer Him up myself — to God the Father in Holy Sacrifice, in the one, perpetual Sacrifice of the Christian Law.
No doubt this seems to you only a wild delusion. It is a delusion, however, for which thousands upon thousands have joyfully shed their blood, and if you should ever come to realize, even for a moment, what it is to believe this, to believe it as firmly as the existence of God, or heaven, or hell, then you will have understood why the Catholic Church is invincible, and what that strange power is which animates the life and the faith of a Catholic.”