Page 28 - LOTN Advent issue 57

FAITH AND CULTURE

Fr Verstraeten was approached on this issue by the Procurator
Fiscal Baillie Duncan, who acted as the Belgian Consul. Then,
Fr Fitzgibbon writes, he made the 'unusual' decision to
voluntarily go onboard and persuade the captain to move his
ship out of the nearby bay. The result was a tragedy: "Though
Father Verstraeten's visit onboard Le Phare had secured the
town from infection, it proved fatal for him." He had given a
sick crew member the last rites and got smallpox himself. The
crewman recovered, but he died a short time later, “victim of
his zeal and self-denial.”
Immediately after his death, his house was thoroughly
cleaned and disinfected. Other residents had to remain in
quarantine and were not allowed to communicate with others.
A guard was put in front of the door. Father Verstraeten's body
was immediately placed in a lead coffin. A short time later, the
A chapel dedicated to St Anne once occupied the basement of ship, which he had boarded some days previously as a healthy
what is now Pete's Coffee Shop man, brought his body to Ostend and from there to Bottelaere
present in the 1860s, has been demolished. Eventually Mass near Ghent to be buried there.
was celebrated in the Zetland Hotel, now the Shetland A few words from the Belgian consul in his obituary make
Times Bookshop. it clear that Fr Verstraeten had left a strong impression in
Fr Verstraeten’s arrival was not appreciated by everyone. the ten years of his ministry in Shetland:
Three hundred years after the Protestant Reformation, in "It is impossible to describe the sadness that this sad
Scotland the North Pole mission was considered as ‘papist event has caused in the town where it is seen as a general
aggression’. In Shetland the mission was preached against disaster. Our friend had acquired the affection of all classes
and one night a fanatical opponent set off a gunpowder in society through his kindness, his godliness, his great and
explosion around Father Verstraeten’s lodgings, blowing also moral charity, always willing to do all possible services,
even in a land of strict Presbyterians, who do not tolerate
the Catholic Religion.”
A few days later, the minutes of the Burgh Town Council
read:
“Before moving to Business, the Meeting deemed it due
to the memory of the lamented Mr Verstraeten, late resident
Catholic priest, to put on record their deep sense of the loss
of one who during a residence of nearly ten years among
a community of strict Protestants had not only lived down
all religious prejudice but had personally won the respect
and esteem of all classes by the unobtrusive discharge of
his professional duties, and his amiable disposition, and
who latterly fell a sacrifice to his praiseworthy endeavour
to protect the community from the plague of smallpox."
These minutes can be read on a plaque which was placed
in honour of Father Verstraeten in St Margaret's Church in
Eventually Mass was celebrated in the Zetland Hotel, now the Lerwick.
Shetland Times Bookshop. Fr Verstraeten's body was taken back to his home village

out the windows. Nevertheless, he worked hard to reverse
this hostility, until his untimely death at the age of 39 years.
In 1871, Le Phare, a Belgian fishing smack, had anchored
near Lerwick. A year earlier, in 1870, a pandemic of
smallpox had broken out in Europe, the largest outbreak
since the introduction of smallpox vaccination at the end of
the eighteenth century. The news that a sailor on the ship
was sick with smallpox caused a quick response in Lerwick
where people could probably remember the horror of
previous outbreaks, in which some islands had almost
been completely depopulated. The ship was quarantined
and any communication between population and ship was
prohibited.
Father Gerald Fitzgibbon, a former Lerwick parish priest,
who published Father Verstraeten's story in 1994 (Shetland Life
No162), says the ship had dropped anchor in the wrong place. The original site of Fr Fr Verstraeten's burial

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