A Priest in a Railroad Wreck

The Galway Observer, Saturday, April, 8, 1899.

A Priest in a railroad wreck heard the confession of an engineer penned under his engine.

In the railroad wreck on the Lehigh Valley Railroad at West Dunellon, N. J. recently, when sixteen persons were killed and thirty injured by two trains coming into collision, several priests from neighboring towns were quickly on hand to give spiritual consolation to the dying. One newspaper thus describes one scene:

Engineer Prendergast was trapped. One engine lay upon its side, the other over it, the forward driver of the under one pinning his legs to the rail. The tread of the wheel stretched across his ankles, and as he tried to move them he shrieked with the shock. Both were crushed beneath the mountain of metal upon them, and there he lay upon his face, to die slowly from the scalding steam. He lay trapped but calm and underpaying. Although suffering exquisite agony, he clenched his teeth to stifle it and directed the work of rescue.

A wild cat engine came steaming along at the this point. Its passenger was a priest, a grey—haired man, with a clean, kindly face. He peered through the pen of twisted steel that held the engineer. Without a word he went down on his hands and knees, and through the mud and grime crawled and twisted his way underneath the engines.

"My man," said he to the engineer, "Are you a Catholic?"

"Yes, Father," answered the engineer.

"Then confess your sins to me. I am Father Laurence."

Here, then, was beheld a strange scene. Overhead a chapel of torn and twisted steel and beneath it a dying man pinned down by its weight telling his sins to a priest. The dying fire in the engine box cast an uncanny glow upon their persons.

Inch by inch the jacks were raising the weight upon the man, and while the men worked with the jack, the priest, huddled in the rain, administered the last offices of the Church. Presently they had poor Prendergast free, and the priest turned elsewhere. In the coaches still standing on the tracks were the dead and the dying. From one to another went the priest, calmly performing his work of mercy.