FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST.

 Gospel: St. Luke vii. 11-16.

AT that time: “ Jesus went into a city that is called Naim, and there went with Him His disciples and a great multitude. And when He came nigh to the gate of the city, behold a dead man was carried out, the only son of his mother: and she was a widow: and a great multitude of the city was with her. Whom when the Lord had seen, being moved with mercy toward her,  He said to her: Weep not. And He came near and touched" the bier. (And they that carried it stood still.) And He said: Young man, I say to thee, arise. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. And He gave him to his mother. And there came a fear on them all, and they glorified God, saying: A great prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited His people/’

Q. Was this meeting of Jesus with the funeral a mere accident?

A. According to the history of this fact it would seem to have been simply an accident, but the sacred interpreters say that Jesus went purposely to Nairn and arranged all in such a manner that He was at the gate of the city at the proper time, in order to work the astonishing miracle, which inspired with faith those who beheld it, and which teaches us a lesson of the greatest importance.

Q. Of whom was that dead man a figure?

A. He was the image of a sinner dead in the eyes of God, more disfigured by his sins than a corpse, deprived of every spiritual good and of the strength to do works for life eternal.

Q. Of whom was the sorrowful mother who followed the bier a figure ?

A. She was a figure of the Church, which never loses sight of those of her children whom sin has deprived of life. She continually laments their condition, desires their conversion, and prays for it fervently and constantly from the mercy of God through the merits of Jesus Christ.

Q. What are we to recognize in the bier and in the four men who carried it?

A. In the bier we are to recognize our fallen nature in which we are obliged to lie, and in the four pall -bearers the ruling vices that carry us to destruction. One who is in the state of sin, not out of human frailty, but rather out of pure malice, lies, like a corpse on the bier, on the bed of sin, and the ruling passions carry him rapidly to the grave of eternal death.

Q. What do we behold in Jesus Christ moved to compassion for this mother?

A. We see the same Jesus Christ now reigning in heaven, Who by the constant and fervent prayers of our common mother the Church is moved to compassion for poor sinners and gives them the grace to rise again from their sins, as is daily the case in the conversion of so many Christians.

Q. What is meant by Christ touching the bier, and by the bearers standing still?

A. This signifies that God, in the conversion of sinners, who are carried to perdition by their ruling passions and bad habits, touches with His grace our weak human nature in such a manner that the soul is no longer carried away by the torrent of corruption, and that, moreover, He causes the vices and ruling passions which carried it to the grave of eternal death to stand still, and not as before to reduce it to further errors by their furious attacks.

Q. Why did Christ command with such power the dead young man to arise?

A. By this our Divine Master wished to teach us that for the conversion of a sinner, who is a slave of his passions and bad habits, a powerful and special grace is necessary, which almost like a miracle stops the course of the predominant passions, and hinders them from going further. Oh, how should habitual sinners tremble, when they reflect that God gives this grace out of pure mercy, notwithstanding our unworthiness, and that He does not give it to all, but only to whom He pleases, and when and how He pleases, for no one can merit this grace.

Q. The young man sat up; what are we to learn from this?

A. When God by His grace commands a sinner to rise from his spiritual death he is aroused from his deadly lethargy, he opens his eyes to the light of faith, he speaks confessing his sins, and those very passions that formerly controlled him he now controls and subjects to the power of his will. Recall to mind St. Paul, St. Augustine, and St. Margaret, and you will see how at the command of grace they shook off the sleep of death, and how from that very moment they made use of those talents, of that ardent character, and that tendency of their hearts, which had once been the sad cause of their transgressions, as a triumph of virtue.

Q. Jesus gave the young man into the care of his mother; what does this teach us?

A. When God by His grace converts a sinner, He restores him to the Church, his mother, who gains in him a son who was dead to her, and she rejoices at his return to spiritual life. Besides, God confides this son, risen to a new life, to her maternal care that she may help him to gain strength, that she may enlighten, direct, console, encourage, and guide him on the way of penance, perseverance, and perfection.

Q. What are we to think of the multitude that was so astonished?

A. This should not surprise us; it is rather surprising that so many Christians do not take notice of a greater miracle that God continually works in a spiritual manner in the Church. Every day His powerful grace recalls from death to life many souls, and perhaps even our own: yet scarcely any one thinks of giving Him that glory and thanksgiving which are His due.

Q. What are we to learn from this Gospel?

A. Let us learn to weep with the Church over the unhappy death of so many of our brethren who are the slaves of sin, and to pray with her that the Divine Mercy may recall them to life. Let us learn to beg Jesus to come to meet us in His great charity, as He did the dead young man of Naim, when we have had the misfortune to fall into mortal sin. Lastly, let us learn to thank God for all He has done for us, either by resuscitating us when we were in the state of sin, or by preserving us from what might again cause our spiritual death. 

 Taken from Analysis of the Gospel of the Sundays of the year. From the Italian of Angelo Cagnola.  By Rev. L. A. Lambert, LL.D.

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For children see here

Kindness

How many a noble work has been nipped in the bud by the blast of an unkind judgment; how many a generous heart has been crushed in its brightest hopes by a jealous criticism; how many a holy inspiration, destined to bear abundant fruit for God and souls, has been forced back into the poor heart from whence it had ascended, there to be stifled utterly, and forever, leaving that heart, as the poet so graphically represents it, “like a deserted bird’s nest filled with snow,” because unkindness
had robbed it of that for which, perhaps, alone it cared to live.

How much, then, we may believe has been lost to the world of all that is good and great and beautiful through the instrumentality of unkindness; and if it be thus, what developments, on the other hand, may we not expect, in the order of grace as well as of nature, in the hearts and minds of men beneath the genial sun of kindness?

Let us be kind if we would promote the interests of that Heart of which kindness was the special characteristic.

Let it not be in isolated acts, “few and far between”; this is not the kindness of Jesus’ Heart. No, it must be like prayer, a habitual disposition of heart which is ready to manifest itself without any effort and almost unconsciously, at all seasons and in all circumstances, and thus it will be with hearts which are united to that Heart of love.

Kindness will flow from them, as it were, naturally, just as the flowers give forth their perfume, the birds their song, and as the sun shines down alike on good and bad, as it goes on its daily circuit– because all this is of their very nature.
In the most trivial things of daily life the spirit of kindness should render itself evident.

Kindness is as the bloom upon the fruit– it renders charity and religion attractive and beautiful. Without kindness, even charitable works lose their power of winning souls; for without it the idea of love of anything supernatural –in a word, of Jesus, is not conveyed to the minds by the works performed, even though they be done from a right motive.

There is such a thing as doing exterior actions, which are intended to be charitable, ungraciously.
Now, actions thus performed do not manifest the kindness of the Heart of Jesus, nor will they be efficacious in extending the empire of His love or in winning souls to His kingdom.

My son, in thy good deeds, make no complaint, and when thou givest anything, add not grief by an evil word. Shall not the dew assuage the heat? So also the good word is better than the gift. Lo, is not a word better than a gift? But both are with a justified man. –Ecclus. xviii. 15-17.

 Father Lasance

The Crack in the Board Written by Solange Hertz

Remnant Archives | July 1972

"Any parent tempted to think his home is his idea, to do with as he pleases, heads a house of slavery." - Solange Hertz

Many years ago, squarely facing our ignorant brood and the inescapable fact that somebody had to teach them the truths of the Faith, I began looking around for tools. Among my youthful wild oats was a degree in Education which led me to believe I would need, at the very least, a blackboard.

As luck would have it, I heard genuine slate ones were to be had from a dismantled school a mere 30 miles away. Deo gratias! It was, believe it or not, the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, so I crudely credited her with this windfall. Fetching the thing would provide a most suitable pilgrimage in her honor. Off we went.

I’ll come to the point quickly, as I think our Lady did: when we got home with the monster carefully packed in the trunk of the car, it was split. It was so split that not one portion of it was usable. We didn’t return for another. In the first sickening sight of cracked slate, a luminous message had been communicated, wordless but efficacious. No room in our house was ever converted into a classroom. We never dared.

Transmitting the Faith live and kicking from parent to child does seem to depend a lot on what you don’t do. Like the Ten Commandments, most of the directives prove to be negative. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no gods except Me!”

Any parent tempted to think his home is his idea, to do with as he pleases, heads a house of slavery. He doesn’t know the first thing about religion and couldn’t even teach it in CCD. Before creating His Church, God laid it out in natural form in the human family. Each in its own way follows the same divine pattern used in the beginning in Eden, and each is subject to divine laws which may not be broken without mortal penalties.

A Christian home is furthermore a cell of the Mystical Body of Christ, a whole church in miniature, an ecclesiola, as St. John Chrysostom so goldenly put it. By its very nature it partakes of the promises Christ made to the greater Ecclesia. Whatever the world says, the home is here to stay. Founded on the same rock as the Church, it too shall withstand the gates of hell as long as it remains in union with Peter. And like her it will teach its children, and through them the world.

As a true communion of saints, the home has many more members than those immediately visible. Generations of its deceased relatives may be dependent on its prayer and good works to hasten their entry into the Beatific Vision. In return, although no longer able to merit for themselves, these ancestors may and do offer efficacious supplication for their descendants on earth in the Church Militant. God’s gifts are without repentance. Once a parent, always a parent, not only in the Church Suffering, but even more so in the Church triumphant. The ancestors intercede for their families before the throne of God along with our patron saints, not to mention the angelic spirits assigned by God to the members on earth. All have a vested interest in what instruction the children are receiving!

As in the Church, the members of any given family are predestined. They are created and chosen by God, not man, to occupy a certain place in this particular family and not in that one, with these brothers and sisters and not those, and with these selected two appointed parents. No one has the slightest control over the personnel of his family, least of all the parents, who must get acquainted with their children as they would anyone else as they arrive on the scene. Please God, all were at least permitted to be born!

There are house rules we must follow, and these weren’t laid down by us either. We are commanded to honor father and mother as God’s representatives, and to welcome each child as we would the Son of God. We must, furthermore, all love one another as He loved us. The Sacred Heart has told us He wished to rule as the invisible but real head of every household. In any program for teaching the Faith in the home these facts must be kept in mind.

Because the family is a divinely created organism existing in its own right, obeying its own inner laws, it cannot be subjected to organizations serving other gods without incurring the wrath of its Creator. Any attempt to manipulate its membership artificially by legislation, birth control, genetics, euthanasia, indoctrination or other human engineering is an attempt to displace God as Creator and Lord of the home. It is doomed to ultimate failure by destroying the society supporting such practices.

It’s to weep the way the home has permitted itself to be invaded and dictated to by self-appointed experts. Mothers deprived of the technical assistance whereby they might nurse their sick at home meekly allow themselves to be ordered out of hospital rooms where their nearest and dearest are relegated. Schools have literally torn children away from their parents, setting themselves up as despots decreeing even what time they may spend together, let alone imposing curricula in no way subject to parental control. Private industry—and some government overseas agencies—assume without question that hiring the husband and father automatically entitles them to the extra-curricular services of wife and children, even dictating their social contacts.

In every case the organization, which originally sprang from the home and was designed to fill its needs and implement its apostolate in the world, has in fact turned upon it and is preparing to displace it entirely in pursuit of its own mindless ends. Generations of fathers have been encouraged to put careers ahead of family duties, relegating the bulk of parental responsibility to their wives. Now even these are joining them in the ranks of the enemy, swelling the work force of the world while even their newborns are left to the tender mercies of daycare centers and experimental social projects. That many such travesties are church-supported proclaims the depth of the disorder.

Sins against the gentle inspirations of grace are long behind us. Sins against the Commandments are being taken in stride. All that remains to fill up our measure of iniquity are sins against nature itself, now being committed in the name of science and progress. When we refuse to accept even the way we are made, we pronounce the final non serviam against the Creator.

With this state of affairs, transmitting the Faith becomes mainly a matter of reaffirming the obvious. Only the home can do it, because the home is about the only place left where the obvious can still be seen and recognized with the naked eye.

The last Council urged us to regain our footing by a radical return to the charisms of founders, so let’s begin with mother, the very personification of the home. The whole family begins in her. Mothers are designed not only to bear life, but also to nourish and sustain it after it leaves the womb. “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that nursed you” was spoken under inspiration in praise of the Mother of the Church herself. Like all great truth, it celebrates the obvious.

Due proportion kept, it applies equally to the mother of the humblest ecclesiola, who is, like her exemplar, both mater and magistra. The first doctrinal milk must flow from her, from her very being, as it does from the Church. It’s hardly coincidence that the decline in home teaching has kept pace with the disappearance of breast-feeding. Both are symptoms of the same irresponsible motherhood, rooted in a denial of nature. Even animals know they must feed and teach their young, but as prepared formulas and plastic bottles substitute for mother’s breast, so classrooms and audio-visual aids are expected to substitute for the living teaching of the home.

There is nothing so intimate as transmitting the Faith. It can be done only person to person, in an atmosphere of supernatural love. Where this is missing, it degenerates into just so much information to be conveyed—into teaching religion. Luckily secular schools don’t concern themselves with teaching the Catholic Faith; but with the breakdown of Church schools, Catholic parents will be forced to teach it themselves or watch the world bring their children up pagans. Those who do take up the obligation soon realize, as many have already, that not only are they capable of it, but that they are indeed specially endowed for the task by nature and grace.

I don’t know why it is, but almost everyone talks down to parents, especially to mothers. As single girls they may have excelled as Madison Avenue executives or Sanskrit scholars, but just let them settle down to devote themselves exclusively to their families, and it’s immediately assumed they know nothing and are out of touch with everything. This is very odd, inasmuch as the housewife produces every professional in the world, lays the groundwork for every science, and plies every trade at grassroots level. Being out of touch with the world doesn’t mean being out of touch with reality. Quite the contrary! Calling the housewife an ignoramus would do little harm, if only she didn’t believe it.

“This place was made by God, a priceless mystery; it is without reproof,” runs the ancient Mass for the dedication of a church. Unabashedly applying it to the ecclesiola, we can continue, “O God, from living and chosen stones you prepare an everlasting place for your majesty. Hear the prayers of the people who call upon you!”

God hears parents. If the Faith can’t be taught in the home, it isn’t Catholicism, and can’t be taught anywhere. That’s where it started in the beginning. It’s not God, or his Church, but pedagogical bureaucrats who have made it so complicated—or abstruse, as the case may be—that only trained technicians can handle it.

The same self-appointed experts who have helped demolish CCD and parochial schools are now turning their sights on our living rooms. Catechetical congresses have already discovered a brand new apostolate in “Home Religious Education.” Canned lessons are being prepared for benighted parents to dole out to their children, on the just barely implicit premise that mothers (and fathers) are incompetent teachers of their own children. Soon whole batteries of tapes, records, filmstrips and other audio-visual paraphernalia will be cluttering every room in the house.

Not that technology shouldn’t benefit the home. Already it would be feasible to transfer the bulk of schooling to the fireside via TV, tapes and microfilm, thereby effecting a significant reintegration of home life. The Faith, however, isn’t a school subject, and can never be successfully taught like one. Like sex education, it’s altogether special, and has already suffered cruelly from being crammed into secular molds by those who should know better. The fruits to this approach are woefully apparent.

Outside services could in fact be very helpful in teaching religion at home; above all, parents need orthodox doctrine aimed directly at them. This they have a right to demand from the appointed teachers of the Church, for parents in the home share fully in the pastoral office under the Magisterium as teachers of the children in their care, and in the ecclesiola as in the Ecclesia, governing power and teaching power are indissolubly one. They must not be divided by pedagogues who have experienced home life only as children in it and never as parents in charge.

Nothing can be brought into the home that isn’t there already, at least potentially. Every successful pedagogical technique was first taken from the home and artificially adapted to the classroom, never the other way around. The genius of Maria Montessori lay precisely in grasping this truth, rendering classroom instruction more fluid and less artificial. As far as it went, hers was an inspired return to origins.

Any home can outdo Montessori if it will. There in natural state are found all the elements of the best classroom, painstakingly transferred from the home over the years. What is modern coeducation, for instance, but a clumsy approximation of home atmosphere where both sexes have always lived and learned together? But schools are hopelessly far behind. At home, it’s still possible to address many different ages at once, and let them address one another as God intended. Is there a practice sillier than incarcerating 30 or so children all the same age in one room to teach them something?

See where rationalism has led us. The modern school is an artificial environment found nowhere in nature and prepares students for nothing but more artificiality. It prepares them, for instance, for suburbia, where people of one income level are herded together, or for other forms of totalitarian regimentation like the concentration camp. It hardly prepares them for real life.

In the natural God-grown community, the outlines of the Ecclesia can always be discerned. All ages and both sexes mingle, and each individual shows forth some particular gift in his relation to the others. Varying levels of development are evident, with no segregation based on I.Q., size and weight, income or other arbitrary norms. There is, in other words, true unity based on true distinctions, as in the triune God-head in whose image we are created. Because the home is so constructed, each one is unique.

In such an atmosphere “methods” mean little, for what works in one home will be completely foreign to the spirit of another. Parents must realize the wealth of obnoxious pedagogical overhead they are privileged to do without. Divesting themselves of the hardened preconceptions acquired from their own artificial schooling may prove difficult at first. Those who allowed themselves to be soughed out of their homes to teach other people’s children in classrooms will certainly fare the worst. How few of us have known the joy of studying Scripture at home, where all ages take part, where the younger share insights with the still younger, and the dumbest may amaze us all!

The house itself bespeaks the home as magistra. The very plumbing illustrates the mysteries of grace. Holy images and pictures on the wall reveal its visible ecclesiola, house of God, holy and awesome. The Eucharist is shadowed at every meal, the Sunday roast as victim proclaiming both supper and sacrifice. How could a child instructed at home look at the meat immolated on his plate and believe the Mass is merely a banquet? The Cross is embedded in the very bones of the house, in rooftree and window mullions; the youngest dweller can be shown from a thousand props that the whole world around him is fashioned on the lines of Calvary.

How is it possible not to teach the Faith of the Apostles at home? That so many of us are unable to, certainly isn’t for lack of teaching aids. Could it be we’re trying to teach a different faith? One not rooted in nature, but in the disciplines of a corrupted world? Where there are so many gods, the teaching would necessarily become very unwieldy!

Religious instruction for children apart from the home is a modern phenomenon rendered necessary only by the rise of rationalism and scientism, the breakdown of natural community, and last but not least, the Protestant revolt. If parents would resume their proper role in today’s structural wreckage, they have only one job to do, really: they must restore their home to its true character as a center of contemplation in the world. Such was the home in the beginning when God walked there in the cool of the day, and where He walks, everything necessary comes with Him.

Nothing less than a deep interior renewal can reinstate parents as teachers. Catechesis is after all only a means to contemplation, or its agent. Let’s not get unduly wrapped up in the mechanics. Before shopping for texts and tapes, let’s enlist the help of the family angels whose duty it is to enlighten those confided to them. Patron saints, ancestors, parents and children must all join them in what is truly an ecclesial family affair. No matter how educated we get, we can never get around the Lord’s dictum that “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Every tree is known by its fruit.

God’s house, he told us, is the house of prayer for all nations. It’s designed to produce and nourish the life of God Himself, as the home in Nazareth did, and as the Church continues to do. With the progressive neglect of the liturgy, prayer and pedagogy have gone sadly separate ways. They must be reunited in the home as in the Church, for their goal is the same. The patriarch Job found it good to offer a holocaust for each of his children, saying, “Perhaps my sons have sinned in their hearts and affronted God.” He was at grips with the fundamentals of parenthood.

We have the divine promise that the Spirit of truth will teach us all the truth, but unless the sins of the family are forgiven and expiated, how can we expect the divine Educator to teach in its very bosom? He is the only religion teacher.

Courage we need - and Compassion.

 

I have never seen a compassionate and charitable man die a bad death

St Augustine

George was a man who was greatly blessed in life. He had good and loving parents and a happy childhood. He had a quick mind and did well at school. He was successful in his work and enjoyed a comfortable income. He married a woman with a happy disposition, who was a topnotch homemaker and saw her husband as the finest man God had ever made. His home was in a pleasant, quiet neighbourhood. In short, George lived in a fairly tranquil atmosphere with few frustrations or tensions. He led a blameless life and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a man of virtue.

Joe was a man of different calibre. His childhood was full of insecurity, with parents who argued incessantly and who were constantly threatening to separate. Whether from emotional strain or from lack of learning power, Joe did consistently poor work in school. He was in the principal’s office often, and finally graduated only through the charity of his teachers. He held a routine job that just barely provided enough to pay the bills. With no financial margin of safety, Joe worried about the possibility of losing his job and about the possible disaster of a major illness or accident. He lived in a less desirable neighbourhood, with houses close together and the noise considerable. His wife was a poor manager and a nagger besides. Joe frequently drank too much, had an explosive temper and was much given to profanity; definitely not a candidate for Virtuous Man of the Year.

George and Joe both went to Church regularly. George was a frequent communicant, while Joe received the sacraments at less regular intervals. In due time, both men died and appeared before God in judgment. Both got to heaven, but both experienced some surprises in the process. George’s big surprise was to find that he did not stand as high on God’s roster as he had expected. “Yes you were good,” was God’s verdict, “but why shouldn’t you have been? Your life fell along pleasant lines with very few worries or problems. By nature you were a man of moderate passions with comparatively few temptations. Is it any credit to yourself that your life was virtuous? Really you should have been a great saint.”

Joe was surprised to find that he had made the grade at all. He was even more surprised to find that he was several degrees above George in glory. “You could have done better,” is the judgment he hears, “but you did stay in there, fighting. You didn’t give in to self-pity and make your tough breaks an excuse for surrender. Considering your weaknesses and your handicaps, you didn’t do too badly with the graces which I gave you.”

This little parable of George and Joe is intended to illustrate a truth which we sometimes forget: the truth that there is much more to sin and virtue than appears on the surface. If all men were born with exactly the same endowments: if all men had exactly the same kind of opportunities and faced temptations of exactly the same strength then we could safely make comparisons and say “This man is good. That man is bad.” Life however is not that simple. And so, only God can know the relative virtue of any individual. Only God can know how hard each one has tried, view of his own particular personality and his own particular problems, to use the graces which God has given.

Understanding this, we take courage. Each of us has his own individual handicaps. Few of us come to adulthood with a perfectly balanced personality. Few of us escape all scars in the process of growing up. Moreover, our passions may be strong and our judgment warped. Our living conditions may be harassed and our associates disagreeable. Our worries may be numerous and our tensions constant. God knows all this. Of each of us He asks only that we do the best we can with what we have. He asks only that we keep stubbornly trying, no matter how often we may seem to fail or to slip back. It is not so much a complete victory that God looks for from us as it is a dogged perseverance in our efforts to achieve victory. We might say that it is the trying, rather than the getting, that God judges us by.

It may be that none of this applies to us. It may be that we have enjoyed many advantages in life which make it fairly easy for us to be good. Then depend upon it, God expects more than ordinary goodness from us. He knows our assets as well as he knows our handicaps. We dare not let ourselves rest upon that level of virtue which ‘comes natural’ to us. However, there probably are more of us who need encouragement in our struggle than there are those who need a prick of the spurs. And we do find encouragement in the knowledge that God understands and duly assesses all the influences that enter into our decisions and our deeds.

Along with increased courage in our own efforts to do Gods will, there should be a corresponding growth in our understanding of our neighbour and his problems. This means that we shall be quicker to make allowances for the weaknesses and the mistakes of our fellow man. Words of harsh criticism seldom will be heard upon our lips. We shall remember that , with our advantages, we probably are not doing as much for God as the person who, with his handicaps, seems to do much less. The man(or woman) whom I and tempted to condemn, may stand far higher in God’s eyes than I do.

We do not know all the hidden influences which affect our neighbour’s actions. We do not know the kind of home and parents he may have had, the inadequacies of childhood training or the inner wounds he may have suffered. God knows all these things and takes account in His judgment. I do not know them, therefore I dare not make myself the judge of my neighbours virtue.
 

Certainly I cannot condone, as though they did not matter, the sinful actions which my neighbours may commit. But, with compassion strong within me, my attitude towards the errant one will be that pf pity rather than contempt. It will be a prayer for him, rather than abuse of him, that my mouth shall speak. Compassion is, indeed, a most essential ingredient in my practice of charity towards my fellows. And I easily can measure the degree of my compassion by the frequency of my unkind criticism of others.

Compassion was one of the Lord’s most striking characteristics during His life upon earth. At Jacob’s Well there was His gentle treatment of the Samaritan woman who was living with a man living with a man not her husband. There was his gentle patience towards the reputedly dishonest Publicans. There was His forgiving dismissal of the woman convicted of adultery. There was His compassion towards Mary Magdalen, towards the ambitious brothers James and John, towards the cowardly Peter and the doubting Thomas. The Pharisees were the only ones towards whom Jesus was severe. These were the men who had every advantage of family, training, and high position; yet they condemned and oppressed those less fortunate than themselves. Because He was God and could read hearts, Jesus had the right to judge the Pharisees. We, however , have no such right. When bitter words rise to our lips we remember that we are not God. We cannot read hearts. We can only be compassionate – and silent.

The woman next door is a sloppy housekeeper. Yes, but did she have the training I had? Does she have my mental and emotional health. The man down the street is such a braggart; I get tired hearing him talk about himself. Yes, but what hidden battle is he fighting? From what deep feelings of inferiority does his bragging flow? The woman across the alley is such a bore: she can talk only about her aches and pains and troubles. Yes, but what did she miss in her childhood that makes it so necessary now for her to seek attention and sympathy? The man I work for is so domineering; a slave driver if I ever saw one. Yes, but what twist of fortune left him so inwardly insecure that he must constantly bolster himself up with an overbearing manner? In the compassionate person, it is considerations such as these that quiet the impulse to criticise and condemn.

Courage and compassion! These are twin virtues that can make the practice of our religion a satisfying and joyful experience. We are courageous and cheerful in our own spiritual efforts because we remember that God does not ask of us more than we are able to give. He knows our capabilities, but he knows our handicaps, too. We do our honest best, and are confident that God will be satisfied with that.

Towards our neighbours we are gentle, kindly and understanding. Our compassion makes us ever mindful of their hidden disadvantages, the disabilities and defects which can be known only to God. And in our practice of compassion we discover, perhaps with some surprise, that charitableness is so much more fun than harsh judgment and criticism. In faultfinding and vindictive criticism there is a venom that corrodes and destroys the heart of the one who sits in judgment on his fellows. In compassion there is a constructiveness, a creativity that brings a sense of achievement to the understanding soul; almost a feeling of exhilaration. Because of our compassion we are happier persons – and there are few virtues, incidentally, which will bring us so close to the heart of Christ.

Everyman’s Road to Heaven by Fr Trese

Men and the home

But time and again Odysseus turned his face toward the radiant sun, anxious for it to set, yearning now to be gone and home once more ... As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare down a fallow field – how welcome the setting sun to him, the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle, struggling home at last.
 – The Odyssey

(Gilbert! Magazine) - G.K. Chesterton's famous quip – “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.” – has not endeared him to feminists, for whom it smacks of radical sexist reactionaryism. But while I do not question the quip, I do question if it is sufficiently radical. For what, I ask, were those 10,000 men doing, such that they needed those 10,000 stenographers? For as long as the present generations can recall, it has been the norm that a man should leave not only mother and father, but also wife and children, and cleave to his desk. And while the two do not thereby become one flesh, the unity of man and desk at times eclipses that of man and wife. But it was not always so.

In 1820, the earliest date for which I can find reliable statistics, some 2.1 million men in the United States worked in “farm occupations” – that’s 72% of the work force. It is worth remembering that by 1820, the industrial revolution was in full swing, siphoning men off the land and spitting them into the factories, meaning that were we to possess reliable statistics going even a little farther back, we would find a considerably higher percentage of men working the land. A significant percentage of the remainder would have been employed in the trades: blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers. Many of these, especially in the smaller towns, would have worked out of shops attached to their own homes. And while some of those working in “farm occupations” would have been working as hired labor, most would have been tilling the fields of their own ancestral homesteads.

In other words, until quite recently, a huge percentage of men worked – as we now say about a privileged class of telecommuters – “from home.” There are fantastically good arguments in favor of this arrangement. Not least of these are the psychological and spiritual health of the man and the unity and stability of his family. Any man in a happy marriage with children who has had the good fortune (as I have) to work from home will know what I mean: there is a “wholeness” that comes of having the whole of one’s life revolve around that most vital fact of one’s identity: one’s vocation as husband and father. A man working from home is a man with an undivided heart. This is especially true if his spouse is also at home, for there then opens up the possibility of forging an intimate partnership of effort: two souls striving for one goal, united in one mind, one heart, one flesh.
"We are so accustomed to scoffing at the anachronistic arguments against women’s working in what was once the sole domain of men, that we have forgotten to ask how it is that nearly all our men got there in the first place."

Camille Paglia recently complained that, because children are no longer taught the rudiments of history, most people are incapable of conceiving that anyone has ever lived any way other than how we currently live, or that any other way of living could possibly have anything to recommend itself. Our chronological snobbery is such that our forbears are deemed inferior merely because they did not live precisely as we do, not having, for instance, the cleverness to invent air-conditioning, or advertising, or abortion. History is therefore conceived of as a dauntless march to the pinnacle of human progress – i.e., the present.

Most of us are aware of the sexual revolution and the secondary migration of women from the home that preceded it, but no one considers the primary migration that preceded both, and which set the stage. Conservatives are fond of pointing out how an autocratic feminism that urged women to join the workforce at pain of being branded traitors to their sex has fragmented the family. But they are not nearly conservative enough. They have forgotten how the mass movement of men from the household, often under coercive external pressure, drove in the first wedge. If the subject ever comes up, it is assumed that it was necessary, unavoidable. But usually we don't even get that far. Because our historical memory is so short, we cannot conceive that things ever were, or could still be, otherwise.

Perhaps there even is something to be said of the remnants of a “toxic masculinity,” which can think of its women only in terms of the caricature of the 1950s housewife, but which never thinks to turn its critical gaze back upon itself. Some, it seems, still do consider the 1950s housewife the crowning archetype of femininity. This is not so. She, poor creature (and I speak of the collective caricature, and not its individual incarnations) was a freak of nature, a curious experimental specimen cultured in a petri dish. The 1950s housewife found herself squeezed into the airless space between two epochs – between the old economy with its farms and household shops and the new with its steel skyscrapers and computers. She played the part of the housewife as in a pantomime: Hoovering the floors, catching up on her soaps, and donning high heels and a dress to welcome home her man after a hard day’s work flirting with his secretary. What a difference between this evanescent, eviscerated figure and the commanding mistress of the household of old, skillfully managing the myriad details of the lives of her husband, children, and (in any family of means) household staff, whilst often contributing directly and meaningfully to its solvency. It is no wonder that this shadow of femininity yearned for something more and settled upon what appeared from afar to be the more substantial world inhabited by her husband.

Well-meaning Christian wives are sometimes wont to unearth the syrupy advice aimed at the 1950s “good housewife.” Here, for instance, is a brief excerpt of some such advice that has made the rounds widely on Christian blogs: when your husband gets home from work, “Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. ... Speak in a low, soothing voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.” Certainly, don't speak first or complain about your day, but instead “try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his need to unwind and relax.” Much of this advice has the advantage of being deliciously counter-cultural, recommending an ethos of radical self-sacrifice that subverts the excesses of feminism and bears at least a superficial consonance with Paul’s epistolary advice to wives. And yet, while there is certainly something to be said for correcting the swing of the cultural pendulum, there is a sinister side to this Good Housewifely advice: namely, it assumes that the worlds of husband and wife have scarcely anything to do with one another. This is especially true of the husband's world, that higher orbit in which he spins and from which he daily deigns to descend into the nucleus of the home, and into which the wife can only peer uncertainly.

Indeed, it is curious that while the mockery of this caricature of femininity has long been common sport, so little attention has been paid to the equally questionable caricature of the 1950s husband, with his briefcase, brown suit, political cant, thinly veiled misogyny, and tragic cluelessness about the lives of those closest to him. It is here that we find the genesis of that now ubiquitous clown of modern media: the weak and hapless father who is an obstacle and an embarrassment to his children, a man who knows how to manage spreadsheets and his expense account, but little more. If a woman’s choice to self-sacrificially adopt the role of the “Good Housewife” might offer a kind of corrective to the radical individualism of the feminists, we ought still to wonder where we might find the companion “Good Husband” handbook – the one in which men are enjoined, upon arriving home, to resist the temptation to recede into the interior fog of their weariness and to turn on the TV, and instead to be present to their wives and children.

If we simply accept that the industrial revolution drove men into the factories, and from there the technological revolution drove them the cubicles, it is time to expose the hidden cost upon which both were predicated. It is quite simply true, historically speaking, that for the average man to wake up every day and to leave his home and wife and children – not as an exception in time of war or other necessity, but as the universal norm – and to spend the better part of his life in an office working amidst perfect strangers is an anomalous thing.  We are so accustomed to scoffing at the anachronistic arguments against women’s working in what was once the sole domain of men, that we have forgotten to ask how it is that nearly all our men got there in the first place.

Let us at least disabuse ourselves of the notion that it was voluntary. Dickens first memorialized the sufferings and degradation of the first-wave industrial workers, seized by abject want from their farms and crowded into fatally filthy cities and factories. Later Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, scathingly dramatized the Depression-era travails of American farmers, whose lands were repossessed and turned over to industrialists when they defaulted on their loans. Then, a few decades later, in The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry exposed the federal policies in the U.S. that deliberately drove small farmers off the land in favor of large-scale industrial enterprises. That process continues today. And yet, if the gleam of highly efficient factory farming seemed irresistible in the ’50s, surely it is less so now, when some 1% of our population – and a rapidly aging one at that – is engaged in the one industry that keeps the other 99% of us alive.

While it is true that we oughtn’t romanticize pre-industrialism, which, for all its cultural vitality, suffered rampant warfare, disease, and child mortality, neither must we romanticize the industrial and technological revolutions, with their callous, impersonal, and antiseptic cult of efficiency. We may never be able to return en masse to the farms or workshops, but there is value to be had merely in mourning for what has been lost, which process reminds us of what we might yet be. A man working his own fields was his own master, the sweat of whose brow was poured out directly, visibly in creating a home; his partner was not an impersonal investor, but flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and the subordinates alongside whom he toiled were not querulous strangers, but his own children, fruit of his loins. This is what has been lost in the two-century-long transformation of house as home into house as waystation: that luxurious modern repository for food, a bed, and distraction, barely inhabited by a loosely knit community of transients, for the sake of which we shoulder a lifetime’s servitude to debt.

Chesterton was the great champion of the romance of domesticity. For this he has been deemed a sexist reactionary. I would like to rescue him from the charge simply by observing that a great deal of what he wrote about women could and should be applied to men. Consider:

There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies... The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labour.

This is a typical example of Chesterton's argument that, by and large, women's lives were impoverished when they “advanced” from the broad and mystical realm of the home into the narrow and mundane world of the office. It seems obvious, however, that if the realm of the office is so narrow and mundane (which, if it is a rhetorical exaggeration, points to the truth), then it must be equally narrow and mundane for the men as for the women, and if it is a terrible impoverishment for a woman to go from being the goddess of the hearth to the purveyor of widgets, certainly there is something equally tragic for man to have gone from being the master of fields to the pusher of pencils.

When it comes to the differences of men and women, Chesterton argues that women are generalists and men are specialists. There is something about men that has tended toward a narrower specialization of effort, and that has always been more outward-looking. The hearth has never been the dominant domain of men. The field and the forge are intimately connected to and draw their life from the hearth, but they are nevertheless apart, in the peripheries of the homestead. Men naturally tend toward the peripheries, and at times, by necessity or innate drive, to the far extremities, as adventurers, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors. Nevertheless, this drive to the extremities has ever been healthy only insofar as it has referred back to the hearth. A man who has forgotten the hearth has forgotten his heart: he is a man adrift at sea, and there is no telling upon what alien shore he may be washed up, or to what mischief he may then direct his powers.

It may not be immediately possible to change the place they work, but it is possible to change the way they work, and live – that is, with an eye always to the locus to which all of their work ought to be referred: the home. Odysseus wandered far, as men are apt to do, and at times allowed his heart to wander with him, as men are also apt to do, but there was that in him which was akin to the sturdy, rooted trunk of the olive tree that formed one of the four posts of his marital bed, a symbol of fruitfulness and permanence in the heart of the home. And that something worked to his salvation, referring all of his wanderings, labors, and sufferings back to the center, and ever enticing back to his rightful place, that rightful place of every married man – in the home.

Originally titled 
 Call me sexist, but a man’s place is in the home 
lifesitenews.com  

This article first appeared in Gilbert! magazine, the official magazine of the American Chesterton Society, and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe to Gilbert!, click here.

How to convert Catholics by Carol Robinson

(https://traditionalcatholicresistance.blogspot.com)  This wonderful article by Carol Robinson from 1947 is included in the strongly recommended, recently published, Breaking the chains of mediocrity available from the excellent publisher Arouca Press. see here

 IT IS HARDER TO CONVERT CATHOLICS than it is to convert other people, but it is very rewarding. As a Catholic Action lecturer once said to me: "Don’t worry about the Protestants; if we could only get the Catholics to be Catholic, the protestants would fall over themselves in their haste to join the Church." I have myself observed the truth of his statement. People are not attracted to the Catholic Church on the basis of average virtue. They do not reckon: "Let's see, taken as an average, ninety per cent of the Catholics I have met have practiced forty per cent more virtue than the Lutherans and eighty percent less adultery than the Unitarians; so I guess I'll join the Catholic Church." No, that's like figuring that if there were 1o,ooo missionaries in China, and if each converted 100 Chinese per year, etc. The truth is, of course, that the job could conceivably be done by one St. Francis Xavier, and might very well fail of accomplishment with 100,000 missionaries.

A man may meet in his life several  thousand "unconverted' Catholics. Let them be virtuous, respectable church-going people; yet our man may never feel drawn to Christ's Mystical Body. On the other hand a man's Catholic encounters may include several first-class heels, along with sundry drunks and murderers. But let him just once meet a man who has allowed Christ's life to transform him, just once see someone in whom God is fleetingly rejected, and his pulse will quicken, his steps will turn in the direction of the Source of that Life. Leon Bloy, in the intensity of his inner life and the miserable conditions of his material life, was such a magnet, The beauty of the Faith penetrated his writings, which were otherwise and literarily no great masterpieces. This was so much so that the impoverished Frenchman could cry out that "there is only one unhappiness, not to be one of the saints!' Jacques Maritain was one of the those who heard his echo of Christ and drew near.

Let us get back to the matter of converting Catholics. The reason it is hard to convert them is that they are suffering under the illusion that they are already Catholic. What then is lacking? From what must they be converted? Well, chiefly from mediocrity and unbelief.

MEDIOCRITY: DIAGNOSIS

As aforesaid, quality not quantity is the measure of the Church's strength. The same Catholic Action leader told me: "It would be better for the apostolate if we had fewer Catholics in the United States and they were better ones. We are weighted down by mediocrity, which throws a smoke screen in front of the faith."

Too many Catholics are wearing the Faith like a comfortable old shoe instead of a sparkling new diamond. They have watered it down to external activities, instead of to a change of heart. They recite perfunctory prayers and sing sentimental hymns, instead of crying out to God from the depth of their being. Religion is something they do in their spare time, instead of the pivot on which their lives revolve.

In the Apocalypse St. ]ohn writes: "And to the angel [bishop] of the church at Laodicea write: Thus says the Amen the faithful and true witness, who is the beginning of the creation of God: I know thy works; thou art neither cold nor hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit thee out of my mouth. . . ." What does that mean? It means what we dont like to believe, that God may prefer the Bowery bum, perpetually drunk, to the respected citizen and the complacent Catholic Committee woman; and the reason is that the former at least bears testimony to God by his anguish at being separated from God, while the latter fails to catch fire in the very presence of the flame. Holiness does not consist in self-righteousness (this was the pharisees' error and has characterized Protestantism in practice. That is the reason for the widespread revolt against religion today in our post-Protestant country. Let no one say that the contagion has not spread to, and diseased, many a Catholic). Holiness especially does not consist in negative righteousness (I never blaspheme, never look at women - "thank God, I am not like other men, sinners"). It does not even consist in our own virtue. Holiness is the supernatural life, is God’s life, surging through us and pervading us. Our role is to allow it to do so. We get the Life from the Sacraments, and the only predisposing condition on our part is humility. So the drunk in the gutter who cannot help but know his own utter failure, is in a way terribly near to God. Natural despair is very close to supernatural hope, because it is when we know we are nothing that we are ready to admit that God is everything and to cast ourselves on His mercy. This is the key truth discovered by Alcoholics Anonymous. They do not go to fellow alcoholics when they are on the wagon, but when they are in Bellevue alcoholic ward, just having failed utterly for the nth time. They do not say, "Pull yourself together, man," but they do say, "See how persistently and utterly you fail by yourself. Cast yourself upon the mercy of God!

Look at it another way. Christ said that He is the living water, and that if a man drinks of Him he shall no longer thirst. This is the secret that the saints have discovered and the source of their peace. But many a man who is thirsting for the Living Water, not knowing where to find Him, tries to slake his thirst with the firewater of whisky, and finds it unquenchable.

The mediocre on the other hand are those who have neither drunk deeply, nor do they thirst. They are those who sip Coca-Cola and wonder when the new automobiles will be generally available. Mediocrity hangs over America like a pall. That is why Monsignor Sheen can say that God may be more pleased with the Russian people than with us. There is an intensity, a spiritual intensity, deeply imbedded in the Russian temperament. It is hard to imagine any considerable number of Russians falling for an ideal of 'comfort." Asceticism, suffering, intense joy, profound melancholy, wild gaity, are all part of the Russian nature. They incline to hate God or to throw away everything for the love of Him. They are either hot or cold.

MEDIOCRITY: PRESCRIPTION

The essence of mediocrity is that we cling to our lives instead of dying to ourselves that God may live in us. In the case of Catholics it is not usually because they have not received grace in the Sacraments, because many mediocre Catholics are even daily communicants; the difficulty is that they have not died to themselves.   Granted that it is hard to die to yourself in an age which encourages feverish activity and endless concern with what we shall wear and how we shall decorate our houses, and which pyramids committee meetings on top of committee meetings. Nevertheless it must be done. The first step away from mediocrity is to realize that it takes heroism to be a Christian today.

There is no way out of mediocrity which does not involve a conversion from worldliness to other-worldliness. One must cultivate precisely those habits which we tend to overlook, precisely those habits which will make us unpopular, singular, conspicuous, and all those other things which we so long to avoid. It will not always be tough going because in the end we will have maneuvered ourselves into another set, another way of life, far better than the original one. But we might as well face the fact that the beginnings will be difficult.

The essence of the new program will be penance, mortification, intensification of the Sacramental life, development of the interior life, prayer. Start going to Mass instead of to novenas. Turn off the radio and see if you can endure the silence. Drop out of the mad race to be well dressed. Start giving alms at the sacrifice of luncheon desserts. Observe strictly the fasts prescribed by the Church. Try to pray without a book or a rosary. Do spiritual reading. Cut down on the movies. All these things will be the first beginnings of the road which leads to sanctity. You will need a spiritual director to help you along.

Now it is an odd thing about Catholics that it is precisely this conversion they resist with all their might. They will go to more and more meetings, give more and more money, talk more and more; but please do not ask them to about-face. If they did, they would cease to be mediocre.   A conversion means a turning away from something, and a turning to something else. The first conversion (the spiritual life is a series of them) means a turning away from the world and a turning to God. Most converts from outside to the Catholic Church are strikingly aware of this and are quite prepared for their lives to be transformed. They have entered into a new economy, the economy of salvation, and everything they do from there on is a step toward God.

Mediocre Catholics are the people who won’t come in or go out. They shy away from mortal sin, but they won’t turn all the way toward God. That's why they don’t progress in holiness. They mark time, but they can’t mark time forever.

"In our time it is impossible for anyone to be mediocre," said Pius XI. And so it is. These mediocre Catholics are under an ever-increasing strain. Presently they will fall either all the way in or all the way out of the Church.

UNBELIEF

"Yeah, but you've got to earn a living!" This is the theme song of the unbelieving Catholic. The thing he chiefly doesn’t believe in is the Providence of God. If you say to him: "But Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be given you besides,) he will answer you, in effect, by saying that you have to be practical. Practical means you have to seek first the kingdom of mammon, lest you starve to death, and that is to say that you just don’t believe what Christ says. Some people may not think that it is very important not to believe just some certain things in the Gospel, but as a matter of fact the whole goes together.

Either you believe the Church or you don’t! There are no intermediary stages (although there is a lot of procrastination, ignorance, and vacillation). The people who don't believe that the just man lives by faith will be found upon investigation to be somewhat incredulous about dogmas beginning "Credo in unum Deum...." In my own experience this is more and more borne out. The other night I was discussing her business with a greeting card saleswoman, of Irish descent and convent education. She was trying to explain why you can't have a religious theme on your Christmas cards because that will make them unsuitable for the Jewish trade, and I was telling her, somewhat irritably, that her position just didn’t make any Catholic sense. Later on in the evening it came out that she was, as she put it, "tormented by the Devil with doubts." What she meant was that she had as good as lost her Faith.

There are thousands and thousands of Catholics in the same spot. They still go to church, usually. They still know the Catholic lingo, although they have a distaste for discussing spiritual things. They are still held by the thin thread of sentiment to a Church in which they no longer believe.

Now, we live in a world of middle thinking, but out of it all there comes a certain secular creed, having dogmas like these: "God is unimportant!' "This world is the one we have to make into a paradise' "Science is omniscient!' "Money is all-important!' "Psychiatrists (not priests) know all about the soul!' "You can't live without sex!' Etc. Etc. It comes in over the radio. It's knee-deep in all the mass-circulation magazines. It utterly pervades secular education (I know a major public college in which, as far as investigation can tell, not one single truthful proposition is taught). It is hawked in the movies. It is common gossip. It is the basis of all business. It is so bad that it is almost true to say that "either what the Church says is true, and therefore everything the  world says is wrong, or vice versa, the world is right and the Church out of its mind."

The sad situation of Catholics is this: they want to believe the Church, but they eat up everything the world says and, in effect, order their lives accordingly. How can they do both? They do it by a combination of ignorance and sentimentality. You never catch them reading a Catholic book of theology, even if they are studying secular philosophy. They go in for novenas, partly with the ‘gimme' spirit, but partly too for the emotional satisfaction they get out of it. Emotion does not carry over into daily. Out of this situation arises the curious and sad phenomenon you very often see in the Church: a pious mother (as measured by devotions) who opposes every effort of her daughter to go into Catholic Action, while pressing her to become a worldly and financial success.

The advantage of coming into the Church from the outside is that you already know when you become a Catholic, the secret that is still hidden to the Catholics; the utter bankruptcy of the non-Catholic world. We are in a world which is dying of despair, while Catholics (hastily throwing the pearl of great price under the kitchen stove) sit around and admire it. They think (having been themselves poor for so long) that the rich build country estates and go about on yachts in a delirium of joy. They do not. They keep erecting palaces, making music, laying out gardens, and changing dresses to hide from themselves their internal disquiet, the aching of their own hearts. The emptiness of their godless lives. The last place that they who so need help will look for hope, is among those who keep copying and admiring their own futile efforts.

The pagans keep writing stuff that they themselves do not believe, saying things that have a tinny ring even in their own ears. How we betray them when we believe it! There are thousands of examples. One interesting one is found in psychoanalysis. There are plenty of Catholics ready to find this pseudo-science "very interesting” and containing a number of truths. While we sit by and admire (kicking off into a corner the sword of the spirit which is the word of God and which happens to be lying around), someone like Clare Boothe Luce slashes through its error like a knife.

Does the Freudian say we all secretly desire to return to our mother's womb? All that means, says Mrs. Luce, is that plenty of us wish we had never been born. Has St. Augustine said: "Thou hast made us for Thyself O Lord...."? It is Mrs. Luce who has just fished it up from the dust-heap in the corner and is lost in the joy of knowing it.

The remedy for unbelief is Faith, and Faith is a gift. Don’t be too proud to believe something you haven’t thought up and examined for yourself. Take God's word for it. Don’t think that everything God says has to be examined in the light of opposing errors. Faith increases, and becomes more and more luminous, and makes us sing out that what the Church teaches is true, in proportion to how much we cherish and believe it. Cut out the national weeklies and the national monthlies. Abstain from the radio. Skip the tabloids. Subscribe to a Catholic library. Where was it that you dropped that sword? It ought to be lying around here some place; let it shine it up and gird ourselves with it.