24 How the Church Has Changed the World that he had been suffering was irreversible. For his last two days, he could not eat, and he would not take even enough water to wet his tongue, but the name of Jesus was ever on his lips, and he would talk of the faith and nothing else. The eighty-eight year old Cardinal Archbishop of Genoa himself came with his priests to give O’Connell Viaticum and the last rites. All of Genoa prayed for the great man. He died on the 15th of May, 1847. His heart was embalmed and placed in a silver chalice, to be entombed in Rome, in the Church of Saint Agatha, but his body is buried in the land of his fathers. Wrote his physician: “The heart of O’Connell at Rome, his body in Ireland, and his soul in heaven: is that not what the justice of man and the mercy of God demand? Adieu! Adieu!” A man for the ages O’Connell was a man of straightforward piety, a determined patriot, and a loyal son of the Church. In our time, cultural amnesia is the rule, but O’Connell’s reputation went round the world. His young son Morgan, at the age of fifteen, fought in the army of Simon Bolivar, for the deliverance of another man’s nation from rule from abroad. Stephen A. Douglas once sneered at Lincoln for allowing his wife to ride in a carriage with Frederick Douglass, but O’Connell met the former slave
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