Places and Persons
Sargent, Daniel
218 THE COMMONWEAL June 25, 1930 Places and Persons THE SCENE AT CARTHAGE By DANIEL SARGENT PRESENT Carthage is no more than a white cathedral on a tawny hill. It is so far from...
...It was the Eucharistic procession which was beginning, a triumph which would wind down the ancient Punic hill of Byrsa to the amphitheatre and then return to bless all Africa from the cathedral balcony...
...He was not interrupted, he was merely almost interrupted, by the crowds of children in white dresses going to their general Communion in the park outside the city...
...It loves Africa...
...There had perished the two young mothers, Saints Felicitas and Perpetua whom the Mass cannot forget—Dulcissima Perpetua, as was written on her tomb...
...Europe, France, Christendom rose in the Arab's esteem because of their profession of faith...
...Its stones have built other cities, notably Tunis...
...The children carried green palm branches...
...It was destroyed by the Romans...
...Above the ruins of Carthage rises the superb white modern cathedral, forty years old, which has such hope for Carthage, such hope for Africa...
...Yet present Carthage and destroyed Carthage joined in inviting this year to their common site that triumph of the Blessed Sacrament, a Eucharistic congress...
...Under the thousands that marched and sang lay the Carthaginian earth: tombs in such multitude...
...It is dedicated both to Saint Cyprian, the martyred bishop of the fourth century, and to Saint Louis, the Christian king who died on its very site while fighting against the Moslem on a crusade in the thirteenth century...
...O for the tongue of Saint Augustine to sing the wonders of God's mysterious ways...
...it was again half-destroyed by the Vandals...
...He had seen the joy of the martyrs for once in his life...
...Even its stones have been carried away...
...One day I encountered the bey of Tunis himself, he with his sword and gold braid, he with his even more-braided servitors, in solemn procession through Tunis to some Mohammedan festival...
...It was built by Cardinal Lavigerie...
...There was not an Arab on the outskirts of the crowd, not a hill with a white village on it in the distance, which did not speak to the pilgrims of the mission of the Blessed Eucharist...
...But it is said, and said truly, that the Arabs do not respect a man, friend or enemy, unless he be religious...
...It is white, it is in a style which befriends Moorish architecture...
...They were dressed in white, with red crosses on their breasts, after the manner of crusaders...
...The Mass began on this shelf by the sea...
...it was finally destroyed in the seventh century by the Moslem invasion...
...The amphitheatre to which they marched had once been proud and gigantic like the coliseum...
...Myriads and myriads of them are still sunk in the earth...
...The last day came...
...The pontifical Mass was to be celebrated that day in an ancient Christian basilica which had been uncovered by the celebrated archaeologist, Father Delattre of the White Fathers...
...Set like a ledge in a great rusty-colored ravine which slopes down from the plateau to the blinding-blue sea, it stands today: a pavement, a forest of stump-like columns, some crypts that gape, and a newly erected ciborium...
...It was now very much humbled...
...so truly the symbol of death and destruction...
...But in that arena had been thrown to the lions in the early Christian centuries thousands of martyrs...
...At half-past three on Sunday afternoon, the last day of the congress, the bells of this lone, confident cathedral began a roar, a melodious thunder...
...The procession flowed into the amphitheatre, with its palms, with its singing, with its youth...
...In the language of the Carthaginian faithful the Blessed Eucharist had come to be spoken of by a single word, Life...
...The next day I heard a man speaking of that sight...
...Life was going to bless all Africa from the forehead of a life-giving cathedral...
...And the rustycolored ravine black with the people...
...The church represents the charity of the king rather than his sword...
...I believe that these words were a literary afterthought...
...As a matter of fact there was not a man in that amphitheatre who when he saw those palms shaking as no forest has ever shaken—a singing forest—could help wincing from the depth of his emotion...
...What remain on the surface, or have been dug up from the ground—columns of pagan temples, a confusion called the Punic Admiralty, a theatre without seats, a cistern turned to a stable, tombs, endless tombs, and the noble emplacements of five Christian basilicas —serve but to show how much has disappeared...
...It has been identified as one of the three basilicas which were dedicated to Saint Cyprian, the martyred Bishop of Carthage...
...The black tiers which gave it a dignity that day were the ranks of living people who surrounded it...
...Ancient Carthage is dead...
...It is so far from the nearest living city, Tunis, that its cathedral, to that city, seems blue with distance...
...O how we all were conquered by those palms...
...It had been called back by the blood of the martyrs...
...God who belongs not to yesterday or tomorrow...
...Life was revisiting dead Carthage...
...Life was marching down the hill...
...filled it, and surrounding the chapel of Saints Felicitas and Perpetua, and facing the papal legate, burst forth in its last choruses brandishing its palms...
...And where there had once been the church portal facing the sea, a row of huge banners belonging to the Belgian parishes, depicting the Crucifixion, the Annunciation, brilliant against the brilliant sea, glorious like cathedral windows but rippling in the wind...
...And how royally the hills of Carthage entertained the pilgrims of thirty nations 1 Nature—O that noble perspective over Africa!—collaborated at all the ceremonies under the bare sky, at all the reunions...
...Said he: "The arches of that amphitheatre looked to me at that moment like the eyebrows of the earth gazing up in surprise...
...The bey did not feel challenged or affronted...
...God who is...
...They have gone as far as England to -decorate castles...
...And the crowd was on its knees, and the bells had tolled once more...
...On May 8 wound down from the cathedral of present Carthage to a demolished amphitheatre of ancient Carthage a procession of children, chanting a song, which, though it had been written for this congress, had the spontaneity which belongs to songs long known...
...He had been transported to heaven...
...It looks not toward Europe but toward Africa...
...A church which had been roofless for 1,300 years thronged with the red of cardinals, the purple of bishops, the black and the white of priests: a church 100 yards long and overflowing...
...Here in this buried city there had once been a deep and resplendent devotion to the Holy Eucharist...
...Never were ruins so much ruins...
...During five days the Moslem population, impressed, and the noble hillsides, the sea, the mountains, ever respectful, watched the ceremonies of Eucharistic triumph...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 8
