There was no doubt any more that the ship was going to sink to the
bottom of the ocean. A deck hand urged the priest to get on a lifeboat but
he refused. In the last minutes of his life he ministered to dozens of
frightened people, hearing confessions and giving absolution. Gathering
perhaps one hundred people around him, the priest led them in the Rosary.
Everyone, Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, recited with fervor: "Holy Mary
Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death...."
Then waves swamped the boat deck and washed them all into darkness.
Although the body of the priest, Fr. Thomas Byles, was never found, many
survivors remembered his courage and selflessness on that fatal night. How
he came to be a Catholic, then a Catholic priest, and finally a casualty at
sea, is an interesting story.
Conversion and Priesthood
He was born Roussel David Byles, in England in 1870, the year of
Vatican Council I and the seizure of Rome by the Italian Republic. His
father, Dr. Alfred Holden Byles, was a well-known Protestant minister. The
Byleses would have seven children in all, and at least three, including
Roussel (who took the name Thomas when ordained), converted to Catholicism.
Roussel studied mathematics and theology at Oxford. Dissatisfied with
the theological shortcomings of his Congregationalist upbringing, he
converted to the Church of England. He soon became dissatisfied with
Anglicanism, and wrote his brother William: "The fact is I find myself
unable to recognize the Anglican position. I do not, however, feel myself
anymore satisfied with the Roman position. I have given up going to
Anglican communion, and have postponed my ordination as a deacon."
William had already converted to Catholicism, and the two brothers had
a lively religious correspondence. Roussel converted in 1894, an event of
which The Table wrote:
Probably no one on earth knows all he went through-all the prayers he
offered, all the works of mortification which he
practiced…. About Trinity Sunday arrived a letter which seemed to breathe
a note of despair that he was ever going to get the grace he was looking
for, but on Corpus Christi the last letter came. Two days, before, whilst
making his meditation, the fog had cleared away.
There had been a short visit to the Jesuits at St. Aloysius and he was
to be received into Holy Mother Church and to make his first Communion on
the feast day of Corpus Christi, surely an appropriate festival for one who
had been led perhaps more by his devotion to the Eucharist than by anything
else to the altar where alone the Eucharist has its dwelling.
After converting, Byles tutored a German prince, then worked as a
professor at a seminary. In 1899 he went to Rome to study for the
priesthood, and was ordained in 1902 as Fr. Thomas Byles. An intellectual
of slight build and frail health, he was eventually assigned to St. Helens,
a small, rough, rural parish in Essex, England. Many of the parishioners
lived miles away from church, and Fr. Byles would bicycle through the
country in search of Catholic houses. The efforts took a toll on him, but
Mass attendance at St. Helens increased dramatically.
Although Byles also taught local boys how to box in a barn behind the
Church, he was more of an intellectual athlete, a thinker and a writer. He
had a somewhat nervous disposition, and a tendency to be argumentative. A
nearby priest who knew Byles found him so, anyway, yet nevertheless
admitted:
But all his work was good, in the judgment of all, whether conference
papers, or the ensuing debates, or public controversy. A thorough grasp of
facts, exact reasoning, and clear enunciation of conclusions characterized
his writing. In a word, he was just what one would expect a scholar of
Balliol to be.
No one knew if Fr. Byles experienced internal rebellion at being
placed in the rural outback. The objective evidence is that he was deeply
committed to St. Helens and his parishioners, and expended all his energies
for their spiritual welfare. In a letter to another brother, Byles wrote:
I wish I could impart to you something of the bliss of knowing with
certainty what God has revealed for our support and help. It is a happiness
that grows more and more every day and which affords a truly marvelous and
altogether supernatural support in all temptation, and against all evil. It
is however beyond my power to impart this -- the most I can do is to pray
God to give to all I love this wonderfully great Gift which I have
received....
Fr. Byles's brother William studied with the Jesuits until he realized
he did not have a religious vocation. He relocated to America and became
president of a business. In 1912 William wrote his brother to ask him to
celebrate a wedding Mass in New York for William and his fiancee. Fr. Byles
agreed, and booked ship transport to New York through White Star Line, a
major British shipping firm. When he received his ticket he saw he was
booked for the maiden voyage of the sensational new ship, the RMS Titanic.
The "Ship of Dreams"
At the time, transporting people across the ocean had become a
lucrative business: there were growing numbers of wealthy travelers, and
even more immigrants wishing to come to America. There was fierce
competition for passengers between shipping lines in England and Germany.
The idea for Titanic grew out of this competition.
Originally, White Star Line intended Titanic (and sister ship Olympic]
as a response to arch rival Cunard's introduction of the Lusitania, the
fastest, most elegant ocean liner in the world at that time. Bankrolled by
American millionaire J.R Morgan, White Star Line created plans for a ship
whose size, luxury, and modern conveniences would be on a hitherto
unimagined scale. In the shipyards of Belfast, Ireland, 15,000 men began
building Titanic.
Three years later, the largest moving object ever constructed was near
completion. An observer described Titanic as a ship "so monstrous and
unthinkable that it towered over the buildings and dwarfed the very
mountains by the water....A rudder as big as a giant elm tree, propellers
the size of windmills-everything was on a nightmare scale."
The ship was the length of three football fields, and weighed over
46,000 tons. Three anchors, each weighing 15 tons, were required to slow
it. Each link in the anchor chain weighed 175 pounds. The rudder weighed
over 20,000 pounds. Twenty-nine boilers, each large enough to house a
double-decker bus, were daily fed the 5,000 pounds of coal required to move
the ship. Dubbed "the monster of the sea," when fully completed Titanic was
as elegant as she was powerful. The architect, Thomas Andrews, spared no
expense to ensure the comfort of the ship's wealthy customers. A Turkish
bath, a squash court, gymnasium, and a special dining room for maids and
valets were some of the features. Expansive, winding staircases, ornate
imported wood paneling, luxurious carpeting, glass-domed ceilings, a
telephone system, world class cuisine, and other detailed amenities made
first class accommodations on Titanic equal to that of luxury hotels.
The Titanic's captain, E.J. Smith, declared: "I cannot imagine any
condition which would cause the ship to flounder....Modern ship-building
has gone beyond that." Noting the ship's watertight design, an engineering
magazine declared that Titanic "embodied all that judgment and knowledge
could devise to make her immune from all disaster." A seaman spoke for many
when he said, "God Himself could not sink this ship."
Some called Titanic "a monstrous floating Babylon." More commonly she
was called "the ship of dreams," for the undreamed of luxury afforded its
first class passengers, and the chances for a new life offered to its third
class passengers, mostly immigrants seeking their fortunes in America. The
maiden voyage of Titanic included a cross-section of humanity: millionaires
like John Jacob Astor, celebrities, politicians, and hungry immigrants from
Ireland, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Croatia, and Syria.
They all knew they were part of an historic event.
Fr. Byles boarded in Southampton. Upon finding his second-class
lodgings, he wrote a letter to his parish housekeeper, Miss Field. After
complaining about losing his umbrella, Fr. Byles described the ship,
concluding:
That makes eight decks above the water line. When you look down at the
water from the top deck it is like looking from the roof of a very high
building. The English Channel was decidedly rough to look at, but we felt
it not more than when we were in Southampton water. I do not much like the
throbbing of the screws (the ship's engine), but that is the only motion we
feel. I shall not be able to say Mass tomorrow morning, as we shall be just
arriving at Queenstown and there will consequently be some confusion, but
after that there will be no difficulty about it....I will write as soon as
I get to New York....
