Theobald Mathew (temperance Reformer) - Father Mathew in The United States

Father Mathew in The United States

On July 2, 1849, New York welcomed Fr. Mathew. Mayor Woodhull, a non-Catholic, placed City Hall at his disposal. For two weeks the crowds besieging its chambers practically eliminated all city business. Vice-President Millard Fillmore was one of the callers. In Washington, President Zachary Taylor invited Fr. Mathew to dine at the White House. Congress gave the humble Capuchin friar its highest honours. The House unanimously admitted him to a seat on the floor of the House. The Senate admitted him within the bar of the Senate, an honour given previously only to Lafayette.

For two years, despite grave illness, Father Mathew blazed a trail of success across the United States. Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Little Rock, New Orleans, and many places in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Delaware and other areas heard his exhortations and were won to the practice of total abstinence. Everywhere there were crowds and enthusiastic receptions.

When he left the USA in 1851, strong temperance societies carried on the work. “I thank heaven I have been instrumental in adding to the ranks of temperance over 600,000 in the United States,” he wrote. Mathew has a statue dedicated to him in Salem, Massachusetts.

Mathew, a high-profile visitor to the USA, found himself at the center of the Abolitionist debate. Many of his hosts were pro-slavery, and wanted assurances that their influential guest would not stray outside his remit of battling alcohol consumption. But Mathew had signed a petition against human bondage in 1842 when he had hosted former slave Frederick Douglass in his Cork home. Now however, in order to avoid upsetting his powerful American friends, he snubbed an invitation to publicly endorse Abolition, sacrificing his friendship with that movement.

Read more about this topic:  Theobald Mathew (temperance Reformer)

Famous quotes containing the words united states, father, united and/or states:

    The United States never lost a war or won a conference.
    Will Rogers (1879–1935)

    My father was a statesman, I’m a political woman. My father was a saint. I’m not.
    Indira Gandhi (1917–1984)

    Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.
    Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)