^ CONFLICTING
STANDARDS

Catholic Theology vs. Worldly Philosophy

hit

Rer« James M* Gillis, C« S.

Editor of the CathoHc World.

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, spon-

sored by the National Council of Catholic Men,
with the co-operation of the National Broadcast-

ing Company and its Associated Stations.

(On Sundays from November 6, to December 25, 19S2)

L Religion and Politics.

Citizens and Aliens.

WMte Man and Black.

Radical and Conservatiye.

Gentile and Jew.

The Indiyidual and the Organ-
ization.

Christianity, Challenge or Com-
promise?

Christmas.

vn.

vra.

National Council of Catholic Men,
Sponsor of the Catholic Hour,
1312 Massachusetts Avenue,

Washington, D. C.





CONFLICTING
STANDARDS

Catholic Theology vs. Worldly Philosophy

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,

Editor of the Catholic World.

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, spon>

sored by the National Council of Catholic Men,

with the co-operation of the National Broadcast-

ing Company and its Associated Stations.

(On Sundays from November 6, to December 25, 1932>

I. Religion and Politics.

II. Citizens and Aliens.

III. White Man and Black.

IV. Radical and Conservative.

V. Gentile and Jew.

VI. The Individual and the Organ-

ization.

VII. Christianity, Challenge or Com-

promise?

Vni. Christmas.

by

Second Edition 15,000

National Council of Catholic Men,

Sponsor of the Catholic Hour,

- 1312 Massachusetts Avenue,

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



imprimatur

:

+ JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.

Bishop of Fort Wayne



DEDICATION

To my Patron

St. Paul

Lover of Social Justice.

^^Who is weak, and I am not weak ? Who

is scandalized, and I am not on fire?”

II Cor. xi. 29.



AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

I have indicated in the Dedication the spirit in which I

have approached the difficult problems treated—so briefly—in
these talks. My greatest desire in connection with this task

would be that St. Paul could be reincarnate and make use

of the radio, this new and miraculous method of sending a

message to the ends of the earth. He would make the world

listen! After St. Paul, comes the scarcely less powerful St.

Gregory the Great, of whom it has been said that his hunger

and thirst for justice was so great that no one who made

appeal to him, even from the remotest corner of the empire,

was left without a champion. And later, St. John Chrysostom,

from whose mouth might very well have come Robert Brown-

ing's sentiment, ‘T was ever a fighter." Centuries later, Savon-

arola, and again after some centuries, Bartholomew de las

Casas, and to mention at least one champion outside the fold,

William Lloyd Garrison. It were desirable that our present

generation should have such giants as these, for I cannot but

feel that we who attempt to speak the message they would

speak must sound by comparison like a ‘‘tinkling cymbal."



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 5

RELIGION AND POLITICS

(Address delivered on November 6, 1932.)

The phrase “Religion and Politics” bursts like a

bombshell upon American ears. Not that we have

suffered more than Europeans from the conflict of

Religion and Politics. We have not. In Europe for
the 300 years preceding the American Revolution

almost every war was wholly or partially a war of

religion. Between 1689 and 1763 France under Louis

XIV waged four wars with her various neighbors

(amongst them always England) and every one of

these wars had its repercussion in America. All the

wars on the North American continent previous to

the Revolution were, as Professors Hayes and Moon

remark in their Modem History, “side shows” of

“more grandiose military conflicts” in Europe. The

last of them (called in Europe the Seven Years’ War,

but in America, The French and Indian War) clos-

ing only thirteen years before the Declaration of

Independence, was still fresh in the minds of the

Colonists, and they were determined that once they

got rid of England they would fight no more of Eng-

land’s wars. It may not be amiss to remark in

passing that with the World War we have recom-

menced after 150 years the old custom of fighting

Europe’s wars. But the principal point in mind now

is that those 17th and 18th century wars were com-

plicated and embittered by. religion. An old profes-

sor of mine. Father Vuibert, used to say that civil

wars were fiercer than international wars and that

religious wars were the fiercest of all. Having

perienced that fact, the colonists were detern



6 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

to ban religious wars forever from American soil,

so they wrote into the Federal Constitution clauses

to prevent the mingling of religion and politics.

Hence the American tradition. With those laws and

that tradition no good American will find fault.

They have probably saved us from a great deal of

bloodshed. The provisions of the Constitution have

not always been obeyed, nor were they corroborated

immediately by the constitutions of various states.

Even in our own day we have seen religious animos-

ity in politics that might have eventuated in a minor

civil war if the victims of discriminaton had retali-

ated. Quite recently Walter Lippmann in one of his

invariably judicious syndicated articles speaking of

the religious issue in politics, declared that there are

still amongst us “passions of such force that if they

are not wisely guarded will tear apart the bonds of

the community here as they have in the past and in

other lands.” But all in all the tradition, properly

understood, has worked well.

However, there is another sense in which we

may understand the alienation of religion from

politics, and in this second sense it is not only un-

desirable but impossible.

Indeed it is true to say that religion is essential

to politics. Politics is a notoriously dirty business

and nothing short of religion can make it clean. It

sometimes seems so hopelessly filthy that no one but

God can purify it. Hercules did the legendary job

of cleansing the Augean Stables, but to clean away

all the muck from the political life of New York and

Chicago and Philadelphia and Washington would

overtax the strength of an army in which every man

was a Hercules. Only God can do that job. Now if

you rule out religion you rule out God. If you rule



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 7

out God you hand politics over to the devil. Some-

times even the stoutest hearted patriots feel in-

clined to do just that. The Puritans felt that way

about art and literature and music and the drama.

And now again in our epoch decent men and women

are subject to the temptation to be puritanical. Art

has become so vulgar and obscene, literature has be-

come so erotic, music has so degenerated that even

the lovers of culture feel like saying “The devil take

them all.” Just so of politics. In our impatience we

may be tempted to believe that politics is hopelessly,

incorrigibly foul. What with the Teapot Dome revel-

ations, the report of the Wickersham Committee, the

incessantly repeated disclosures of municipal corrup-

tion, even a brave heart might be excused for de-

spairing.

But no hona fide patriot can remain for long a

defeatist. He would hate to see this government,

built at the cost of so much bloody sacrifice, surren-

dered without a struggle to the new horde of bar-

barians that has descended upon our civilization:

bootleggers; racketeers; organized bandits; graft-

ers, great and small
;

boodling politicians
;

con-

scienceless lawyers who instruct criminals how to

evade the law and defend them with sophistries

if they are apprehended; judges on the bench

who play both ends against the middle, the both ends

being the “big shots” of crime and the petty thugs

who do their bidding, and the middle being the mass

of honest citizens; and even beyond and above the

corrupt lawyers and the venal judges, the Grand

Moguls of Crime who have their lair under the very

dome of the national capitol or in its shadow. Truly

it does seem that these cohorts of corruption are as

numerous and as ruthless as the Goths and Huns and



CONFLICTING STANDARDS

Vandals who swarmed down upon the Roman Em-

pire in the days of the last Caesars, or the Saracens

who inundated Spain like a tidal wave and left

their high water mark in the centre of France in

the 8th century, or the Mongols, Turks and Tartars

under Tamerlane and Genghis Khan who threatened

Europe in the middle ages. But if the ancient

Romans and the medieval French had the courage

to meet those semi-savage tribes, shall the modern

American be too cowardly to withstand the rising

tide of neo-Barbarism?

However, it must be admitted that the task is, as

I have said, more than Herculean, and if it is to be

accomplished, it will be only by virtue of a power

that is supernatural. Religion, the deepest and pur-

est passion known to man, is the only agency power-

ful enough to wash away, or let us say rather burn

away with a refiner’s fire, the ever-accumulating

mass of corruption that has cursed our American

politics. To keep God out of politics is to hand over

the nation to the powers that are not of God.

Years ago when Robert G. Ingersoll went hither

and thither preaching his gospel of Agnosticism, he

fell foul of at least one antagonist who was more

than a match for him. Bishop John Lancaster

Spalding’s reply to Ingersoll on the question of God

in the Constitution is a masterpiece packed with

logic and afire with the spirit of religion. Ingersoll

had said, “If God is allowed in the Constitution man

must abdicate. If the people of the great Republic

become ignorant enough and superstitious enough to

put God in the Constitution the experiment of free

government will have failed.” Bishop Spalding ans-

wered, “If to recognize God in the Constitution is to

be ignorant and superstitious, to believe in God at



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 9

all is evidence of ignorance and superstition, and

since Americans as a matter of fact with few ex-

ceptions do believe in God, Colonel Ingersoll must

hold the whole people ignorant and superstitious.”

“I know not the method,” said Edmund Burke, “of

drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”

But Burke was a responsible statesman, Ingersoll

only a rhetorical demagogue.

Ingersoll, furthermore, had made the extrava-

gant statement that the sentence in the Declaration

of Independence, “All governments derive their just

powers from the consent of the governed” must

seem in the eyes of religious people “blasphemy—

a

renunciation of the Deity,” and that the fathers of

the country who wrote or signed that statement

“politically tore down every altar, denied the auth-

ority of the Sacred Book and appealed from the

providence of God to the providence of man.”

The bishop had no difficulty in dealing with that

bombast. The founders of our country were almost

to a man deeply religious. Ingersoll’s interpretation

of the thought in their mind would have appalled

them if it did not seem too ridiculous to be appalling.

The simple fact is that without God there can be

no stable government of rational men. All authority

is ultimately of God. If God be not the prime author

and final sanction of law and of government, then

the first cause and last support for law is the mind

of man. But who is man that he should legislate for

man? The laws that man makes, man breaks, but

if God be recognized as the alpha and omega of law

you shall have at least some stability in government.

Man will obey God, and he will obey man if he be-

lieve man represents God. But to obey man as mere

man is obsequious and servile!



10 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

I am fully aware that talk of this kind sounds
preachy and smacks of the sermon, but we need no

preacher to tell us that without religion morality is

uncertain, precarious, and even impossible. If, as is

obvious, our only salvation is to inject morality into

politics, where I ask will you secure morality—

I

mean a virile, certain, sure, unwavering morality

—

without religion?

And what, I ask, is the value of religion if it

exist only in the home, or as the Scripture says if it

be hid under a bushel ? Is it not a commonplace re-

mark that if a man considers his religion a matter

for the Sabbath, throwing it aside like a Sunday

suit when he goes to business or to pleasure, that

man’s religion is vain, his business probably dis-

honest and his pleasure sinful? By what principle

then, or by what rule of reason shall a man leave his

religion behind when he goes into politics, or—if he
be not a professional politician—when he goes to
the polls to select the representative he shall send

into political life?

The truth is that when a man says glibly—and
as is usual, dogmatically

—
“Religion must be kept

out of politics,” he doesn’t mean what he says. He

says “religion” but he means religious bigotry. He

says “politics” but he means partisan politics.

But why damn religion by confounding it with

fanaticism, and why damn politics by confounding

it with partisanship? “Religion” and “politics” are

good words. Sometimes indeed good words like good

men go wrong. “Sanctimonious” for example used to

be a good word until it fell in with hypocrisy and

was corrupted. “Propaganda” was and is a perfect-

ly good word, though it is so often seen in company

with organized systematic deceit that its reputation



CONFLICTING STANDARDS II

has suffered. So too “religion” smacks of fanaticism

in the ears of those who have suffered in one way

or another from a bogus religion. And “politics”

used to mean and still is defined in the dictionaries

:

first, “The science and art of government”; and

second, “The theory or practice of directing affairs

of public policy.” Politics has a noble etymology.

Only by association with chicanery, duplicity and all

that is Machiavellian has politics come to have a

sinister sense. I grant you that pure religion would

be abased by an alliance with dirty politics
;
and on

the other hand, that decent politics is dragged down

by association with fanatical religion
;
but a coalition

of true religion and pure politics would be to the

advantage of both of them.

If you ask me what ails our country and, by way

of good measure, what ails Europe and South Ame-

rica and most of the remainder of the civilized

world, I shall say that we are suffering because re-

ligion is booted out and bolted out from the great

conventions wherein the fate of mankind is discus-

sed and determined. Religion is at the present mo-

ment locked out of the council halls at Geneva where

men are discussing disarmament. It was ruled out

14 years ago at Versailles. Religion would have in-

culcated “Forgiveness,” but the dominant note at

Versailles was “Revenge! Retaliation! Repara-

tions !” The most unwelcome sentiment at that

meeting of the victors in the war (victors—what a
hollow sound that word has today) would have been

the sentiment from the Sermon on the Mount, “You

have heard that it hath been said ‘an eye for an eye

and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you to return

good for evil
;
it hath been said ‘thou shalt love thy

neighbor and hate thine enemy,’ but I say to you,



12 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

Love your enemy.” If that religious principle had

been followed instead of the savage demand for

“Revanche” the world would have had no depression

today. When men get together to patch up a broken
world and follow only man’s wisdom, they make a

mess of the job; if they would permit God to have a

look in, and to take a hand, the result would be uni-

versal good will, and universal good will would pro-

duce prosperity in the twinkling of an eye.

To descend from world politics, what a beneficent

revolution would quickly be wrought in this our own

nation if we could persuade the campaign orators to

stop in their blatant denunciation of one another

and hearken to this piercing sentence from one of

St. Paul’s epistles, “Why judgest thou thy brother?

. . . thou art inexcusable, 0 man, whosoever thou

art that judgest. For wherein thou judgest another,

thou condemnest thyself. For thou doest the same

things which thou judgest” (Rom. xiv. 10; ii. 1).

To any one who really loves his country and

hopes for its regeneration the most distressing fact

in our political life is not the existence of corruption

but the spectacle of candidates for office, even for

very high office, berating one another, flinging

epithets at one another, telling half truths and per-

haps whole lies about one another, misinterpreting

one another’s statements, misjudging one another’s

motives, dissipating energy, mental and moral, when

it should be concentrated, seeking partisan victory

instead of the good of the nation, at the very height

of the worst economic crisis we have ever known!

In Babylon they feasted and drank themselves drunk

while the Mede was at the gate. In Rome they dined

and danced and enervated themselves with debauch-

ery when the hale and rugged Barbarians had al-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 13

ready crossed the Alps and were about to storm the

walls of the capital. In one of our liberal journals

of opinion I see the advertisement for a little book

by a former professor of Economics—a book entitled
MvM We Starve ?—and with the caption in heavy
black type, underscored, “The World Stands Face to

Face with Mass Hunger.” Making allowance for ex-

aggeration—the author is a Socialist and perhaps a
Communist—is there any sober minded person who
dares to say that the threat of mass starvation is

nothing but the product of a mad imagination ? One

fact is beyond question, whether or not we are face

to face with starvation, we are in the depths of the

most desperate economic predicament we have ever

experienced and yet the candidates who one and all

profess to be our saviours are browbeating and

ballyragging one another, bawling at one another

like Hector and Achilles before the walls of Troy.

Now the sardonic feature of this painful phe-
nomenon is that every one of these men, or almost

every one, has a religion which inculcates justice,

mercy, charity, forgiveness of injuries, the golden

rule and the commandment, “Thou shalt not bear

false witness.” Where is that religion? Where have

they left it? In church? Locked up with a beautiful

silver hasp inside the family Bible? I suggest that

they go home and get it out of the Bible, or go to

church and rescue it from its hiding place in some

dark pew or under the kneeling bench, and bring it

with them and show it to us from the platform

whereon they stand to plead their cause before the

people.

Do I hear some one say, “Ridiculous ! the father

is pleased to be facetious! Religion has no place in

the political arena?”



14 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

Well then listen ! I have used the analogy of the

Barbarians swooping down on the Roman Empire

laying waste all in their pathway. It may be of ser-

vice to our politicians to remind them that the re-

mote impulse that drove those Goths and Huns and

Vandals westward and southward came from what

is now Russia. If our leaders and our voters persist

in divorcing Religion from Politics there may be an-

other Barbarian invasion having its impulse from

Russia, and in the end we may succumb to Bolshe-

vism, the only system thus far known in the history

of the world that professedly bases itself upon the

absolute separation of Religion from Politics.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 15

CITIZENS AND ALIENS
(Address delivered on November 13, 1932.)

It has recently come to be recognized by the

more enlightened students of human affairs that

.the chief enemy of peace and prosperity is nation-

alism—exaggerated hypertrophied nationalism. If
the Disarmament Conference at Geneva dissolves

with insignificant results, nationalism is the cause

of its dissolution. If the League of Nations, in

itself a majestic ideal and a noble project, fails to

function, nationalism is the impediment. If a live-

and-let-live international policy is abandoned in

favor of a dog-eat-dog policy, nationalism—I re-
peat—excessive nationalism is the diplomatic mar-
plot.

In the midst of the vast deluge of campaign

oratory that recently flowed over the land a state-

ment was made by Newton D. Baker that the inter-

national policy of the United States for the past

few years could be expressed in brief, “let the for-

eigners stew in their own juice. We’re going to be

fat and comfortable ourselves, no matter what

happens to the rest of the world.” I pass no judg-

ment upon the accuracy of that statement. I quote

it as a vivid expression of the sad lengths to which

nationalism may go. There is much talk in cer-
tain circles amongst us about “splendid isolation.”

But I fear that some of our fellow citizens fail to

distinguish between splendid isolation and selfish

isolation.

I have heard men boast that such and such a
state (Colorado, for example) could build a wall



16 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

around its borders and live by itself, buying and

selling, manufacturing and consuming without

having recourse to its neighbors and still less to

foreign countries. I doubt if that were ever true.

Even if it were true at some time, I feel sure it is

not true now. And on one fact I am sure all econo-

mists will agree. A nation of 123 millions cannot
shut itself off from the rest of the world and sur-

vive. The days of the Great Wall of China are

past. The Roman Wall of the Emperor Hadrian

was smashed through. No nation, no empire is

resourceful enough to despise all contact, social,

political, mercantile, with all other nations. What

Benjamin Franklin said of the thirteen colonies,

“If we don’t hang together we shall hang separate-

ly,” may now be said after one hundred and fifty

years not merely of the states of the Union, but of all

the civilized nations on the globe. The hand can-

not say to the eye, “I have no need of thee,” the

foot cannot say to the brain, “I can walk without

thee.” Even the ignoble belly is essential to the

organism. If we arrogate to ourselves the position

of the brain in the international body and think of

some less progressive nation as the belly, still we

ought to remember that if the belly is empty the

brain sickens and dies.

As we talk of “isolation,” France talks of

“security.” But there is no such thing as security,

achieved by physical means. If France in the in-

terests of security cripples and paralyzes Ger-

many, France will commit suicide. France cannot

live if Germany dies. Likewise Germany cannot

live if France perishes. Armies and navies, fleets

of airships and battle tanks ruin the nation they

are supposed to save.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 17

And by the same token, a nation cannot isolate

itself and save itself with a tariff wall any more

than with a wall of steel. To revert to Mr. Baker’s

phrase about our getting fat no matter what hap-

pens to the rest of the world, the prime objection

is that it cannot be done. If Europe and Asia

starve, America starves. For weal or for woe the

whole world has become a unit. Therefore, a mis-

guided, unbalanced nationalism is not only a crime

against the rest of the world : it is felo de se, suicide.

Obvious and platitudinous as these observa-

tions may be, it is going to be difficult to root out

extreme nationalism from the human heart. A
selfish nationalism is only an amplified clannish-

ness and clannishness is a primitive passion. At

least as far back as Abraham and Lot, perhaps we

should say as early as Cain and Abel, local and

racial animosity began. Of Ishmael, the son of

Abraham by the serving maid. Agar, it is written

“his hand will be against every man and every

man’s hand shall be against him, and he shall pitch

his tents over against all his brethren.” The spirit

of division and antagonism between man and man

is, therefore, at least as old as the first book of the

Bible.

William Beebe, the naturalist, has assured us

of the existence of an earthly paradise, Galapagos,

where the wild animals show no timidity at the

approach of man, and where they seem to dwell in

amity with one another. But there is, alas, no

human Galapagos. As far back as we have the
annals of the race, distinction has been made be-
tween friends and enemies, citizens and aliens. It

was understood that the tribe on the other side of



18 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

the mountain or the other shore of the sea, or the

other edge of the desert, was an enemy, not for any

particular reason, but simply because it was on

the other side. In fact, “alien” means merely

“other” and “rival” comes from “riva” the river

bank. The fellow on the other bank was ipso facto

your rival
;
you must kill him or he would kill you.

Not that he had done you any wrong or that you

had done him any wrong, but that he was born on

one side of the river and you on the other. When

the “black robe” missionaries came among the

savages of North America, they found the Chero-

kees periodically on the war path against the

Iroquois and the Apache against the Sioux, and

when they asked the reason, the red man thought

he had sufficiently explained by saying, “He one

tribe, me another tribe.”

This of course is primitive, raw, naked sava-

gery, but thanks to the sophistication that we

are pleased to call civilization, we have a way of

disguising our savagery. We prate of “patriot-
ism,” of “security,” of “national honor,” of “mak-

ing the world safe for democracy” (what a hollow

pretense that has turned out to be). The problem

of the causes of war is entangled with discussions

of “concordats” and “alliances” and “ententes.”

But if we were as naive as the Indian we should

say, “he one nation, me other nation,” and let that

suffice as justification for drowning a continent in

blood and dislocating the civilization of the world.

It will be seen from what has been said, that I

believe the root cause of war and hence the root

danger to civilization to be national antipathy. I

do not say the only cause. There is always a host

of secondary causes, most of them trumped up.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 19

many of them, as we have learned in the late world

war brazenly manufactured. Adventitious and

fictitious causes are on the surface; the radical

cause remains undetected like the subliminal self

in the Freudian psychology. In other words I be-

lieve that the most deep-seated cause of wars and

all manner of international conflict is something

mental, a fear, a hatred, a suspicion, a sentiment,

and I believe it was one of the chief purposes of

Christ to eradicate that mania or that phobia from

the hearts of men.

He set about that prodigious work—men will
say “impossible” work—not merely by preaching
abstract virtue, but by that most effective of all

rhetorical devices, the parable—and of the par-
ables none is more touching, none more significant

than that of the Good Samaritan.

Now the Samaritans, as all readers of the Gos-

pel will remember, were detested by the orthodox

Jews. Their history for a thousand years seemed

to provide reason aplenty for detestation. Achab,

prince of Samaria in the tenth century, B. C., had

married the infamous heathen Jezabel and had in-

troduced into Palestine the lascivious worship of

Baal and Astarthe. The fate of Jezabel was

scarcely more hideous than that of her husband,

for “the dogs licked the blood of Achab in the gut-

ters of the city.” But the worship of the impure

gods and goddesses had continued, and the high

hill of Samaria had even been enriched with sacred

spoils from the temple of Jerusalem. Samaria

was known not only for these heathen abomina-

tions but for regicide and frequent assassinations.

Worst of all in the eyes of the Jews was the fact



20 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

that when Sargon took to Assyria some thirty

thousand captives from Samaria there were plant-

ed in their place a motley horde of Chaldeans,

Syrians, Arabs—heathen all. Again in the days
of Alexander, the Greeks overran the province, and

so the population in Jesus’ day was a mongrel

group, hated by the Jews. Now therefore we see

the full significance of the fact that in the best

known and most beautiful of the parables a

Samaritan is the hero, a better man in the eyes of

Christ than priest or Levite, who considered them-

selves the purest of the pure. The moral is not

only obvious, it is stunning. It is as though at the

height of the war a great popular preacher in

Paris had driven home a point with a story of a

noble German at the expense of a couple of ex-

tremely patriotic Frenchmen. Or as if Christ were

to say that a conscientious Bolshevik is nearer the

kingdom of heaven than a hypocritical 100 percent

American.

One of the few contemporaries of Jesus keen

enough to see the moral, and brave enough to pro-

claim it was St. Paul. “The middle wall of parti-

tion,” the wall that excluded Gentiles from the

holier courts of the temple, “is broken down,” he

cries. There is now no longer Jew or Gentile, there

is neither Greek nor Barbarian, bond or free. All

who have God for their Father and Christ for their

Brother are brethren one of another! That mag-

nificent revelation if apprehended would recreate

the face of the earth, abolish warfare and solidify

civilization. St. John the Evangelist caught the

same divine truth, but being of a mystical temper-

ament expressed it by means of a vision. He saw

in heaven, he says, “A Great Multitude which no



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 21

man can number of every tribe and tongue and

people and nation.”

The idea is that no race and no nation can call

itself exclusively the people of God. No people

has a monopoly of salvation. Harlots shall enter

heaven before Pharisees. Heretics who are such

unwittingly, and heathen, “lesser breeds without

the law,” will be judged without the law and will

sooner achieve everlasting happiness than those

whose only claim to salvation is a meticulous

orthodoxy, without humility, without mercy, with-

out pity. “Many shall come from the east and

from the west,” says Jesus, “and shall sit down in

the kingdom with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,

and the children of the kingdom shall be cast out.”

Friends, shall I be accused of cynicism if I say

we have not yet learned that lesson? Have we

eliminated race hatred, and nationalistic anti-

pathy? Do Anglo-Saxons look down with con-

tempt upon Latins? And do the Latins shrug the

shoulders and tilt the nose at the very word of

Anglo-Saxon? Does the Celt hate the Briton with

an ineradicable hatred? And does the Briton say

of the Celt what the polite and sophisticated

Roman pagan said of the vulgar horde: “I hate

them and shun them”? Does the Englishman in

India insult the native, be he Brahmin or pariah?

Does the native American spew forth his contempt

for the Canuck, or the Paddy or the Bohunk or the

Greaser? And do these self-imagined superior

races count themselves Christians? Have they

never read the parable of the Good Samaritan, or

the story of Magdalen, or the withering denuncia-

tions of Phariseeism?



22 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

If this were a sermon, I might venture to con-

clude with a prayer asking all to join with me:

“Lord, I dare not ask Thee overmuch, knowing the

limitations of my character. I ask Thee not that
I may be a saint. I ask only that Thou make me

just a Christian, that and no more.” But the Lord

cannot grant that prayer unless the heart be first

cleansed of all sense of class superiority, all trace

of race hatred, and every remnant of nationalistic

antipathy.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 23

WHITE MAN AND BLACK

(Address delivered on November 20, 1932.)

We come today to a ticklish problem, the inter-

relationship of the white race and the black. I shall

probably be condemned as rash for even proposing

a problem that is usually considered too hot to

handle, and whatever opinions I presume to submit

will probably be rejected out of hand by those who

feel that the simple and sufficient solution of the

problem of the Negro is to “keep him in his place.”

That familiar formula, however, begs the ques-

tion. What is the black man’s place? Was he de-

signed by nature to be, and must he ever remain a

subject race, less than wholly human, a footstool for

the white man, a “lesser breed without the law,” a

pariah, an “untouchable,” segregated, disfranchised

(constitution or no constitution), an alien in the

land of his birth, a victim of discrimination and of

persecution? Was there placed upon him aboriginal-

ly by his Creator the mark of the beast, or the stigma

of Ishmael? Was he in the beginning anathematized

by God, and must he be in consequence, interdicted

and excommunicated by God’s favorite, the white

man?

By way of answer, let us first be rid of the im-

possible theory that the Negro is not wholly a man

:

impossible theologically, for it is heresy to say that

the Negro has no soul or that he is not destined to

the kingdom of heaven; impossible ethnologically,

because there is no atom of scientific evidence that

the Negro is sub-human. *>



24 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

Of course there are evolutionists, of a most ex-

treme type, who insist that all men, black or white,

are essentially animals and nothing more, but even

the most materialistic evolutionist admits that all

human branches are derived from the same animal

source. If the Negro, therefore, is a mere animal,

the white man is a mere animal. Color doesn’t mat-

ter essentially. A white horse is a horse, a black
horse is a horse; a Jersey cow is a cow, and a Hol-

stein is a cow. Nor do certain other dissimilarities

of shape or of size matter. A bull dog, a mastiff, a
collie, and a Newfoundland are all equally dog. Even

a Pomeranian and a Pekinese are dog. And so, a

white man, a red man, a yellow man and a black

man are all equally man.

Discrimination because of color is therefore not

scientific. It is merely snobbish. “The Colonel’s lady

and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin,” no

matter how high the Colonel’s lady may tilt her nose

at mention of that simple biological fact; and so,

too, the black man and the white man are brothers

under the skin, no matter how much the white man

may rebel against that incontrovertible scientific

dogma. We may talk of the black race, the brown
race, the yellow race, the red race and the white

race, but there is only one race, the human race. I

am speaking now, not metaphorically, but scien-

tifically, physiologically, anatomically, biologically;

the white man and the black man are brothers, not

even cousins in a collateral line of descent, but

brothers, children of the one original couple.

As a matter of fact, one of the results of the in-

vestigations of Darwin was to strengthen the argu-

ment for monogeny, the theory that all men are

descended from one pair of ancestors, and to weak-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 25

en the argument for polygeny, the theory that there

were two or more source-origins of the human race.

And in this, at least, the Catholic teaching coincides

with Darwinism. With us it would be heretical to

say that the white race is from Adam and Eve and

the black race from some other aboriginal pair. We
are all of the one same stock.

Another physiological fact links the black man

with the white and separates him from the brute.

The cranial capacity of the highest apes is about

45 cubic centimeters. The cranial capacity of men

is from 1250 to 1600 cubic centimeters. It is true

that certain Negroes still in the jungles show a lower

figure normally than that of most white men, but

whereas the skull of the highest ape has never a

capacity of more than 450, the skull of the lower''

Negro seldom if ever goes below 1100; it is generally

from 1250 to 1400; the skull of the white man is

never larger than 1600 and there are vast numbers

of white men whose cranial capacity is no more than

that of the Negro. Not that the precise number of

cubic centimeters matters, for at least one excellent

scientist tells us (Guibert: Les Origines), “above

1100 c. c. the size of the brain is no guide to the

power of the intellect.”

And finally if any further proof be necessary that
the Negro is fully and exclusively human, there is

the fact that marriage of white and black is not un-

fruitful. In fact there are those who maintain that

as much as one-third of the whole population of the
United States has some strain of Negro blood. Be

that statement accurate or exaggerated, the unques-

tionable fact remains that however much man, both

white man and black man, may revolt from mis-



26 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

cegenation, Natui'e does not abhor the union of the

races. If Nature does not, God does not, for the laws

of Nature are the laws of God. And the Church

takes Her cue from the law of God, rather than from

the feelings or prejudices of man. The Church will

baptize a mulatto, ordain him priest or consecrate

him bishop. She has done so here in the United

States. She does not consider the’ offspring of a

Negro and a white as a monster.

Enough ! The ape is an ape, and man is man, be

he black or white.

Now therefore, if the Negro is man just as truly

as the white man, it follows that whatever rights or

prerogatives belong to man as man, must not be

denied to the Negro.

And yet in certain parts of our country disabili-

ties are heaped upon him because he is a Negro. In

many localities he is denied the vote, even though

that denial involves fraud or force upon the part

of the white man. In some sections he receives lower

wages than the white man for the same work. In

other sections, he is charged higher rent than the

white man for the same housing. His natural am-

bition to rise to something better than menial occu-

pation and to fit himself for it is frustrated by local

law, by custom or even by physical violence; he is

refused admittance to certain trade unions ; in many

states he is denied membership in white churches;

he dare not attempt to take Communion with the

whites; likewise except in the north, he cannot at-

tend schools, public or private, with the whites, and

the public schools into which he is segregated are

inferior in architecture, in location and in scholastic

standing to the others, although the black man pays



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 27

his school tax like any other man. He is kept out of

select hotels, restaurants and places of public enter-

tainment, not only in the south but in the north.

Where the Jim Crow law is in effect, he is taxed for

parks, libraries and other places of instruction or

entertainment which he is not permitted to use. In

some localities there are different standards of jus-

tice in the law courts for blacks and for whites (a

crime in the very place where crime is supposedly

punished). In a thousand cities and towns and vil-

lages, he is segregated with his fellows away from

white neighborhoods as strictly as if he were a leper.

If he ventures to buy or to rent a house in a “white”

district, his home may be bombed (one wealthy

Negro’s home in Chicago was bombed seven times)

and he will be granted no legal redress. He is sub-

ject to mob violence, denied trial by jury and if sus-

pected of certain crimes, he is lynched. His women

folk suffer molestation, but, if in a fit of mad resent-

ment, he retaliates, he is shot down or perhaps burn-

ed alive. And, of course, he is prohibited in certain

states under terrific penalties from intermarriage

with whites.

On the whole the Negro is considered an alien,

an outcast, and as it were, a leper in our midst. He

is ostracized if not exiled. He is the victim of such

discrimination and injustice as would precipitate

unending race riots if he were not more tolerant,

more patient, and more law-abiding than his white

neighbors. He must suffer incessantly and cruelly

from them, and if he were to rise in rebellion for

even so much justice as is guaranteed to him by the

Federal Constitution, he would be shot down like a

dog, and I fear that vast numbers of “liberty-loving

Americans” would say that it served him right : that



28 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

he should take what he gets and be thankful for it

:

that he should know his place and be content with it.

Now, fellow citizens of the white race, let us con-

fess that all this is manifestly and outrageously

wrong. We are treating the Negro as unjustly, if
not with quite so much bloody cruelty, as we treated

the Indian. Whatever we are doing now to atone

for our crime against the red man from whom we

stole the continent, we are doing little or nothing to

atone for the crimes we commit against the black

man. We have not even ceased to deal unmercifully
with him.

If we have, as the government now recognizes

that we have, a duty to protect the Indian, why shall

we not recognize our responsibility to the Negro?

We have done him more bitter injustice than the
red man. We robbed the red man and killed him.
But we kidnapped the black man and enslaved him.

The traders in human flesh and blood who sailed

from New England and elsewhere to Africa, swoop-

ed down upon the blacks, butchered thousands of

them, brought the rest back in chains and sold them

into bondage, were guilty of as great a sin as that

of Oliver Cromwell who slaughtered thousands of

the Irish and sold the remainder into slavery in the

Barbadoes. They were a “Godly” generation of

church goers, Bible readers and psalm singers, but

they brought down a blight upon this country and

a curse upon their own souls. And if the curse of

God, as the Bible seems to say, can pass to the third

and the fourth generation, the stain if not the guilt

of that sin against the black man is still upon the

soul of the white man. It is for us to wash it away

with the baptism of humiliation and with works of

penance.



CONFLICTING STANDAEDS 29

If works of penance are too much in these soft

degenerate days, if in contrition for the sins of our

predecessors and our own sins, we cannot bring our-

selves to works of mercy to the colored man, at least

let us give him simple justice.

If not—if we persist in the outrage our ancestors
have done the black man, or the lesser crimes that

we ourselves commit against him, let us under-

stand that we are storing up danger for our

descendants. The black man, thank God, is no long-

er a slave, nor does he continue to be as obsequious

and subservient as the old tradition would have him.

He is emancipated in more senses than one. Lincoln

struck off the shackles from the black man’s limbs,

but the black man is now progressively throwing off

the shackles of his mind. As one of his own news-

papers has said, the black man is done with the “hat-

in-hand, yes-sir boss” attitude. He will not always

be bootblack and lick-spittle for the white man.

The black man has emigrated by hundreds of

thousands from the south. Perhaps he was happier

there. But his leaders kept taunting him to come

away from what they called “peonage,” and be free

men in the north. “All you have to do,” they said,

“is to step on a train and ride for a day and a night

to freedom. You don’t have to wait year after year

for the white people to build you a school. The

schools are here and you are welcome to them. You

don’t have to tip your hat to a white man unless you

know him and like him.”

So they came north and they are feeling their

freedom. Their new confidence, their strength, their

talent (yes, they have abundant talent) can be used

for this nation or against it. Some of them have



30 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

turned Bolshevik, like one of their poets (Claude

McKay), who sings this terrible song:

^‘0 kinsmen, we must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave.
And for that thousand blows, deal one death blow.
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we^l face the murderous, cowardly pack
Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back.”

If that hymn of hate had been composed in 1776

and sung against the power that was taxing Amer-

icans and refusing them adequate representation

we should call it patriotic. But the black man suffers

almost if not quite as much from us as we suffered

from King George. The difference between patriot-

ism and Bolshevism seems sometimes only in the

point of view. Let us then be careful that we do not

give the black man cause for rebellion.

But above and beyond that selfish reason for ac-

cording him justice, let us return to the first reason;

the black man and the white man are by God’s crea-

tion brethren, children of the same father on earth

and the same Father in heaven, redeemed alike, the

one and the other by Jesus Christ, and having equal

rights to the kingdom of heaven.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 3i

RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE
(Address delivered on November 27, 1932.)

It is a natural tendency of mankind to affix a

name, a title or a label to everyone and everything.

Natural and necessary. It would be impossible to

live in a world where nobody had a name, or where

every one’s name was changed every day. If a man

writes you a check, signing a name he never used

before and never will again, your banker may have

a scruple about honoring the check. So ! every man

must have a name, a name that is permanent.

However, the idea of pinning a man down with

a designation other than his given name may be a

mistake or an injustice. In India it is true, a man

is born into a caste and in that caste he must re-

main. “From first to last, he sticks to his caste.”

In England also it used to be understood that a

man of one “class” could not pass over into another

“class.” If he was born middle class, he remained

middle class even though he became prime minister.

He couldn’t even pass from “lower middle class”

to “upper middle class.” It simply wasn’t done.

But in our own country, thank Heaven, we have

neither class nor caste. We are not tagged, cata-
logued, docketed in perpetuity. America is still to

some extent the land of the free, and however much

our freedom may have been impaired, we yet may

pass at will, if we have ambition and ability, from

one grade of society to another.

In a word, we do not have to “stay put.” That

principle being established, I beg leave to apply it

in the matter of the designations “Radical” and



32 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

“Conservative,” with which we are concerned spec-

ifically today. The point is that a man, or an insti-

tution or a church may be sometimes “Radical”

and sometimes “Conservative,” or both Radical and

Conservative at the same time; radical in some

things and conservative in others.

Take for example the Catholic Church. In the

minds of many of those who look at Her not very

closely. She seems ultra-conservative, or, as they

would say, “hide-bound,” anti-progressive, anti-

modern, ancien regime, reactionary, crystallized,

fossilized.

However, the very alarm of the enemies of

Catholicism indicates that they do not believe the

ancient Church to be really dead. Do curbstone

orators froth at the mouth about the wickedness of

Amenhotep, or of Rameses II, one of whom passed

away 3,300 years and the other 3,100 years ago?

So, if the Catholic Church were as dead as the

Pharaohs, anti-Catholic agitators could stop fret-

ting and fuming about our being a very present

menace. But the trouble is, as they very well know,

that the Church is not a ruin but a living organ-

ism, not a dinosaur but a dynamo; not imbedded

within the rock but standing erect upon the rock.

But to return to our immediate subject and to

present-day reality. Is the Church radical or reac-

tionary, liberal or conservative? The true answer

I have indicated in the introduction. She is both.

And still stranger. She is both at the same time.

In theology She is conservative, in economics She is

liberal. Perhaps some apostles of accuracy would

prefer that I should say the Church permits Her

members to be either conservative or liberal. And

that is true. Our membership includes extreme



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 33

conservatives, and liberals so advanced that they

are sometimes called radicals. In Catholic pews

and at the Catholic Communion rail capitalist and

anti-capitalist touch elbows, and neither dare call

the other a heretic. But it is significant that the

present head of the Church, Pius XI, and forty

years before him Leo XIII, the two popes who have

dealt most pointedly with economics, wrote encyc-

licals containing such liberal teaching upon social

justice, the relation of rich and poor, capital and

labor, that even certain petulant Catholics have

been known to accuse these popes of Socialism,

because—and here is the irony of the situation

—

because of the very documents in which they con-

demn Socialism. Those documents I shall not now

discuss. I am for the moment concerned only with

the fact that the Church, conservative in dogma,

can be and is liberal in economics and social science.

Naturally, She doesn’t satisfy either of the ex-

tremists, the stand-pat capitalists who think the

present order good enough, or the Communists who

would wreck the present order and build from the

ground up a different social structure, not out of

the ruins of the old but of brand new material.

Let us deal first with the latter. Capitalism,

they say (if I may hurriedly change metaphors),

is diseased from top to toe, gangrened to the heart.

It cannot survive. It ought never to have been born.

It is doomed, it is breathing its last. To suggest

that its ills can be remedied is like suggesting a

flax-seed poultice for a wooden leg. If the doctors

were to pump oxygen into it, its lungs would burst;

it cannot stand anything so vital as oxygen. So

“stand back from the death bed,” say the Social-

ists, “and let Capitalism die a natural death.” No!



34 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

say the Communists, “rush up to the death bed

and give Capitalism the coup de grace with a

dagger in the heart—or perhaps they would prefer
to throw a bomb under the bed and blow the mori-

bund old carcass to smithereens.

Now it need scarcely be said that the Catholic

Church will take no part in such violence. There

is an old Latin formula, familiar to all ecclesias-

tics, Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine: “The Church

abhors Blood.” She prefers a peaceful social evo-

lution rather than bloody revolution. The antagon-

istic attitude of the popes towards the Soviet gov-

ernment, for example, was not caused by any

particular desire to perpetuate the rule of the

Czar. The Czar was no friend of ours. He was in

fact head of a Church that had given ours trouble

for a thousand years. He was officially if not per-

sonally guilty of much cruelty and injustice. No

doubt the time had come in Russia for a new deal.

But that was no reason why the Bolsheviki, like

a pack of savages, should murder the Czar and

spatter his blood and that of his wife and children

about the walls of a cellar in Ekaterinburg. Even

a revolution can be conducted decently. In Ger-

many when the Kaiser took train with his wife and

children, goods and chattels to escape to Holland,

the Germans didn’t blow up the tracks. When Al-

fonso jumped in his high powered car and drove

at 100 miles an hour across Spain to get over the

French border, the Spaniards didn’t even scatter

glass on the road. They probably even said with

their invariable politeness, adios.

Furthermore, and this is of greater import-

ance, the Bolsheviki, not content to get rid of the

Czar, put a price upon the head of God, Now, you



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 35

can kill a Czar but you cannot kill God. God re-

mains when all else goes. But since God is Truth,

Truth remains when all else goes. You must not

dismiss God when His presence becomes inconveni-

ent, and recall Him when you need Him, as if God

were an oriental slave who must disappear when

the master says “Go” and reappear on the instant

with an obsequious “Yes, Sahib,” when the master

claps his hands. As with God, so with Truth.

Truth does not come and go, appear and disappear.

We consider that our Church has no right to add
to or subtract from the “truth once delivered to

the saints.” We dare not tamper with the Apostles’
Creed any more than we dare knock off one or two

or more of the Ten Commandments.

Something must remain permanent, fixed, im-

mutable. Archimedes the great Greek astronomer

used to say that if he had a Pou Sto, a sufficiently

rigid fulcrum for his lever, he could move the

world. But if all is fluid, as some philosophers

say, if Truth itself be like water or quicksilver that

runs away when you try to grasp it, how can there

be knowledge or education, or science, or religion,

or morality? To move the world you need both a

lever and an immovable fulcrum. Your lever and

your fulcrum are Truth. Truth therefore—some
truth—must be fixed. If it be “conservative” to
hold to some fixed truth, then indeed the Catholic

Church is conservative. However, a belief in cer-

tain fixed truth or permanent principles does not

necessarily cramp one’s liberty. A man may be-
lieve in the Declaration of Independence or the

Constitution and yet be progressive and liberal.

So a Catholic who believes in a fixed creed may yet

be “liberal,” or even in the true and good sense.



36 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

“radical.” Particularly is this the fact when his

creed concerns matters theological, and his liberal-

ism or radicalism concerns matters sociological.

And so there is nothing paradoxical in the fact

that the Catholic Church, conservative in theology,

is liberal in economics.

However, we are not so “liberal” as to throw

away all that has been achieved through centuries

of civilization. When Socialists, Communists, Rad-

icals cry “Off with the old, on with the new,” we

Catholics refuse to be stampeded. We ask “Off
with the old what?” The old truths? No! The old

God? No! The old religion? No! Old traditions

of government? Perhaps. Old mistakes, old blun-

ders, old injustices, old tyranny? Yes! with all

our heart. Someone has said “a politician is a

man who doesn’t make the same mistake twice, but

a statesman is one who doesn’t make the same mis-

take once.” That would be a superhuman states-

man. But the Church feels that our statesmen,

economists, capitalists, industrialists, masters of

money and of men, should not keep making the

same mistakes again and again and a thousand

times.

And let it be understood that if there are—and
since there are—faults and injustices and tyran-
nies manifold in Capitalism, the Catholic Church

feels no obligation to uphold the system as it now

is. She suffered enough in earlier years because

some of Her misguided members and even mis-

guided prelates seemed to think that She was

pledged to uphold a political system that was be-

coming effete—monarchy. In consequence, during
the French Revolution, the assault upon the throne



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 37

was made the occasion of an attack upon the Altar.

Throne and Altar were supposed to stand or to

fall together. That was a mistake in history: the

throne and the Altar, kings and prelates have been

at swordspoints more often than arm in arm. At

any rate, the throne is gone, but the Altar remains.

In France today the Marseillaise, the battle cry of

the Revolution is often sung in Church.

The Catholic Church refused to believe that

Monarchy was a revealed dogma. It was not sacro-

sanct. Neither is Capitalism a revealed dogma, nor

sacrosanct. Many a Catholic scholar following the

Pope is crying aloud that Capitalism is largely

discredited. Many a Catholic sociologist is “ad-

vanced,” “liberal,” and as some say “radical.” For

this they are none the less good Catholics. For, to

repeat and conclude: the Church is at once con-

servative and liberal; conservative in theology,

liberal in political and social economics.



38 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

GENTILE AND JEW
(Address delivered on December 4, 1932.)

I set myself the task this evening of promoting

good feeling between Gentile and Jew, and to the

removal of unreasonable prejudice of either one

against the other. I feel that such a duty devolves

upon me as a preacher of the Gospel of our Lord

Jesus Christ the One Savior of all men.

The greatest enigma in history is the Jew, the

most inexplicable and paradoxical phenomenon in

the annals of man. Of an ancient race, he refuses

to follow the course of nature and perish. He is as

vital and aggressive today as he was in the days of

the Pharaohs or of the kings of Babylon. Babylon,

city and civilization, is a ruin, not only dead but

buried, buried so long and so deep that its houses

and palaces have to be dug up out of the sands of

a desert, like gold out of a mine.

As with Babylon, so with Egypt. The captains

and the kings have departed and ail their pomp of

yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre. But the Jew

who was a slave both in Babylon and in Egypt

survives to laugh at the departure of his ancient

oppressors from this planet.

Imperishable and inexplicable, he has by choice

or by force violated some of the primary laws of

nature, yet nature has not punished him. Inbreed-

ing, for example, is supposed to be suicidal to any

race, but the Jew has practiced inbreeding for cen-

turies, yes for millenniums, and yet his race thrives

and waxes ever vigorous.

His survival is embarrassing to his rivals and



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 39

infuriating to his enemies. The children of Israel

who plagued the Pharaohs who had enslaved

them, irritated the Assyrians who had led them

captive, and were a thorn in the side to Alexander

the Great, have in our day disturbed the peace and

aroused the wrath of kings and kaisers and czars

;

they still present a problem and a predicament to

congresses and parliaments; to Boards of Immi-

gration, to administrators of colleges who are at

their wits’ end devising by-laws to exclude them ; to

hospitals and medical staffs, to hotel managers,

commercial establishments; to secret societies; to

“native American” patriots and what not. Cen-

turies ago some one invented the legend of the

Wandering Jew. But there are, or have been tens

of millions of wandering Jews and they are no

legend. No legend but fact, tangible fact, a pro-

blem, a challenge, an anomaly, and—-according to
one’s point of view—^the Jew is a blessing or a
curse to the world, an asset or a menace, a boon

or a blight upon banking and finance; a destroyer

or a promoter of world commerce, a man without

a country and yet at home in every land, courted

and ostracized
;
exiled but ever returning to a home

that remains exile; he is poor, he is rich, desper-

ately poor, fabulously rich; he is a religious en-

thusiast and an agnostic, having no king but God,

and not believing in God, custodian of the highest

spiritual religion and a gross materialist; an

ascetic capable of the most rigid self-denial and

a worshipper of the flesh pots; a rebel and a syco-

phant
;

capitalist and communist, conservative

and iconoclast; war maker and pacifist: there is

no limit to the anomalies and paradoxes of the

Jewish nature. But since we lack time to complete



40 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

this catalogue of contradictions, let us say it again

in one word; the Jew is the outstanding enigma

of the human race.

Evidently it is impossible in one of these hur-

ried fifteen minute talks to discuss so bewildering

a phenomenon from every point of view. One can-

not compress the history of 8,000 years into one

paragraph and an ethnological encyclopedia into

another. I shall, therefore, limit my scope to a

frank defense of the Jew against what I consider

to be the prejudice and injustice meted out to him

by some of my Christian brethren. Not that I con-

sider the Jew in all things blameless; not that he

needs a Gentile champion (the Jew has courage

enough and talent enough to present his own case),

but it may be that certain Christians will listen to

a Christian whereas they would stop their ears

against a Jew.

But first let me explain that this gratuitous

defense of the Jew by a Catholic is not unnatural.

We are and have been fellow sufferers. The first
pagan edict against Christians—that of Nero—was
worded, with the brevity characteristic of Roman

law. Non Licet Esse Vos! “You have no right to

exist!” That laconic death warrant has, in effect,

been issued a hundred times against the Jews.

Jews and Christians, now one and now the other,

have been victims of the persecution of a pagan-

minded world. The Roman Pliny in his letter from

Bithynia to the Emperor Trajan called Christian-

ity a “deadly superstition,” but he intended the

phrase for Christianity and Judaism alike. Ter-

tullian, the early Christian writer, complains that

if the Tiber overflows its banks, or a conflagration



CONFLICTING STANDAEDS 41

occurs, or there is a defeat of the Roman arms in

the provinces, the cry goes up, “Throw the Chris-

tians to the lions!” And the Jews have been punish-

ed similarly in pagan times and—alas—in Chris-
tian times, because of calamities for which they

had no responsibility.

In our own times, Bismarck persecuted the

Jews, and then turned to fight the Catholics. He

might have worsted one or the other, but the two

together broke him and his journey to Canossa be-

came inevitable.

In America the champions of a sacrosanct pa-

triotism hate and fear us no less than they hate

and fear the Jews; indeed rather more. Like the

Jews, we are accused of being imperium in imperio,

a state within the state, we are considered aliens

even though we are born citizens. Like the Jews,

we are accused of cherishing a foreign allegiance

or of fomenting universal discord for our own

purposes. Like the Jews we have been arraigned

on the evidence of fables and forgeries; the so-

called Knights of Columbus oath, the fictitious

Monita Secreta (secret instructions) of the Jesuits

and the trumped-up Protocols of the Elders of Sion

are all in the same vein and couched in much the

same phraseology. The Jews were expelled from

Spain, Portugal and other European countries; so

were the Jesuits; and not to prolong this catalogue

of similarities, just as the Jew has been accused

of ritual murder, the killing of a child in the syna-

gogue, we were for centuries accused of killing and

eating a baby at Mass in the catacombs.

Not, however, because Catholics and Jews have

been fellow-sufferers but for the sake of justice



42 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

and right, many of the more enlightened popes

and Catholic monarchs have protected and favor-

ed the Jev^s. Charlemagne in the ninth century,

founder of the Holy Roman Empire and close

friend of the pope, allowed Jews to hold public

office and sent one of them as an ambassador to the

court of the celebrated Haroun al Raschid. During

the Inquisition in Spain, Jews in great numbers

fled to Rome where they were protected by the

popes who opposed and reprobated the rigors of

the Spanish Inquisition. The popes Alexander VI,

Julius II, Leo X and Clement VII all had Jewish
physicians, a fact of special significance, for those

were the days when poisoning was a fine art, yet

the popes felt themselves quite secure in the hands

of Jews. Cardinals followed the example of the

popes and in consequence the Jews were in high

favor at the Papal court. Indeed Pope Paul III

was accused of being more kind to Jews than to

Christians. When certain bishops of France, at

Clermont, Marseilles, Arles and elsewhere com-

manded Jews to become Christians or leave, the

pope restrained the bishops and brought them back

to reason and moderation. A Jewish writer in a
Protestant encyclopedia of religion (Wetzer and

Welte) explains that what those bishops attempted

in a small way, kings tried on a grand scale, but

the popes intervened time and again to prevent

the kings from persecuting the Jews.

Innocent III in the twelfth century, and Greg-

ory IX and Innocent IV in the thirteenth issued

bulls in defense of the Jews, exculpating them of

the alleged crime of ritual murder. So also did

Martin V, though it must be confessed that a few

popes, like Eugenius IV and Nicholas V were less



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 4-3

friendly. One of the greatest and most forceful

of all the popes, Sixtus V, abolished all restrictive

laws against the Jews, gave them religious liberty,

the right to engage in commerce, and civil and

political equality with Christians.

When some of the Crusaders, going off to Pales-

tine to wrest the Holy Land from the Turk, feared

or pretended to fear to leave the Jews behind, and

suggested that they be killed, St. Bernard, who

was like an oracle for all Europe, even more than

any pope, declared “You shall not persecute the

Jews, you must not slay them, you should not even

exile them.”

It is therefore no rare or unheard-of thing that

a Catholic priest should demand that justice be

done the Jew.

So let us take up one or two of the chief accusa-

tions made against the Jew. It is alleged, for ex-

ample, that he is a bad citizen, that no matter

where he is born or where he lives, he remains a

foreigner everywhere, that his patriotism is ficti-

tious, that he has really no homeland, that he never

becomes assimilated in any population. Now if
there be any truth in this accusation (and perhaps

one or two counts in the indictment are correct),

the answer is that the Jew is homeless because for

some 2400 or 2500 years he was not allowed to

possess a homeland. As one of his own has writ-

ten, “One part of the world puts him out and an-

other part of the world refuses to take him in.”

If a tale of a man without a country elicits our

sympathy rather than our hatred, shall we refuse

all humane feelings to a whole nation without a

country? And if the Jew still retains something

of the psychology of an alien, it is because the



44 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

world has conspired to make him feel like an alien.

Take for example, Roumania, where after 1500

years residence the Jews were until recently still

classed as “vagabonds”
;
or Russia before the revo-

lution, where the Jew being only 4% of the popula-
tion was cruelly persecuted by the other 96% who

pretended to fear him
;
or France where the notor-

ious Dreyfus case gave evidence of deep-seated and

fanatical hostility against the Jew, or Germany

where a Kulturkampf was directed against the

Jew no less than against the Catholic; and where

at the present moment the Hitlerite movement is

violently anti-Semitic; or take indeed our own

United States to which the Jew came, like a good

many other races, to find peace in a land that ad-

vertised itself as a haven for the afflicted. Once

arrived on our shores, he has made himself useful,

if not indispensable, and yet how often and how

deeply it has been impressed upon him that he is

not wanted.

If he assimilates slowly it is not altogether his

own choice. And is there not a certain hypocrisy

in damning him as an alien when we have helped

so largely to make him an alien? It is like the Eng-

lish condemning the Irish for ignorance and pov-

erty, after the penal laws had been enacted and

enforced for seven centuries with the precise pur-

pose of making the Irish ignorant and poor.

Again it is said that the commercial and fi-

nancial customs of the Jews are a menace to our

pure American ethics. But I venture to say that

not one-tenth of our “malefactors of great wealth”

are Jews. The corsairs of Wall Street, the bandits

of big business, the murderous crew of exploiters,

who a generation ago cornered the vast natural re-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 45

sources of America and who followed the motto,

“The public be damned,” were not Jews: they came

of good old American stock.

Likewise, the charge is made that the Jew has

demoralized the theatrical business and is respon-

sible for the ever increasing obscenity of the mo-

tion pictures. But I remember that when some

fifteen years ago a new adventure in indecency was

tried on the New York stage with a show “Aphro-

dite” and some anti-Semitic critic pointed to the

fact that one of the producers was a Jew, the

obvious retort was made that the other partner

was a Christian.

At any rate, if a man’s business morals are bad,

have we no laws to deal with him as a man and

not as a Jew? If the theatre is becoming increas-

ingly vile, is there no way to cleanse it except by

having recourse to race hatred ?

Another accusation against the Jews is caused

by their apparently unprecedented growth in num-

bers amongst us. In 1800 there were only 500 Jews

in New York City. (Among them, by the way, was

Haym Solomon who had been coadjutor of Her-

bert Morris in financing the Revolution). As late

as 1880 there were only 75,000, now there are prob-

ably a million and a quarter. They have perhaps

increased more rapidly than the other elements in

the population, but that is not due entirely to im-

migration. It is .because they still follow the in-

junction of Genesis to “increase and multiply.” If

other nationalities deliberately and mechanically

limit their own numbers, must the Jews be com-

pelled to practice race-suicide?

Finally the argument goes that the Jew is a

Bolshevik, a communist, an ally of Moscow sworn



16 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

to the destruction of our form of government.

“The Jew!” “the Jew!” as if all the Jews voted the

communist ticket en bloc. But there is no Jewish

vote any more than there is a Catholic vote or a

Protestant vote. And I venture the estimate that

not one-hundredth part of the Jews in the United

States are communists. As for Moscow, the Bolshe-

vist leaders are by no means all Jews; Stalin,

Tchicherin, Lunacharsky are not Jews. And in-

cidentally, the Socialist candidate for the presidency

of the United States, Norman Thomas, is not a Jew

but an ex-Protestant minister.

To conclude, let us be fair, and true and just

to the Jew as to every man. It is fanatical to see

red, to froth at the mouth, to utter random reck-

less accusations when the name “Jew” is men-

tioned.

The Jew is not blameless or faultless, but let

the Christian that is without sin cast the first

stone at him.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 47

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE

ORGANIZATION
(Address delivered on December 11, 1932.)

Ever since the beginning of the mechanical age,

the idea has been current that eventually man would

be dominated and destroyed by a machine of his own

making. The notion has given rise to at least one

literary masterpiece, Mary Shelley’s weird romance,

Frankenstein. There is also a suggestion of the same

theme in Eugene O’Neill’s equally morbid drama.

Dynamo. Frankenstein, it will be remembered,

succeeded in creating a soulless monster, a fiend

that pursued its maker implacably to his end. And

in Eugene O’Neill’s drama, the chief character

(one can hardly call him hero), having cast aside

God, prays to the Dynamo, worships it and finally

immolates himself to the mechanical deity by thrust-

ing his hands into the live wires.

The idea is as fascinating as it is gruesome. And

the time has come, I think, for some novelist or some

dramatist to tell of the conflict of man with the most

relentless machine of all, the political, industrial,

financial, social machine which I ask permission to

call broadly “Organization.”

I hope I need not waste precious radio moments

in explaining that I am not opposed to organization

as such. Only an anarchist, a nihilist or the most ex-

travagant individualist could think to dispense with

organization. Even savages have an embryonic

organization, the tribe. And as civilization becomes

complex, the need of organization becomes great-



48 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

er. In fact all society, industrial, mercantile, politi-

cal, is a vast network of organization.

However, there is a danger of our being hyper-

organized. The machine made by man’s hands may

destroy man’s soul. In a world pyramided with or-

ganization upon organization, a man needs the

strength of Atlas to prevent the crushing out of his

personality and individuality. Indeed, to drop the

metaphor of the pyramid and resume that of the

machine, if a person is to remain a person and not

occupy the place of a cog or a nut or a bolt or a gad-

get of some kind, he must constantly remind him-

self that he is flesh and blood, body and soul and

conscience, and not a piece of inanimate metal that

clicks back and forth when some one turns a switch

or pushes a lever.

Take for example, a man—an honorable man
—who goes into politics. Let us say he has talent,
force, independence, character. He is master of his

own soul and keeper of his own conscience. He is,

without affectation, a patriot. He could say—but he
doesn’t because he hates even the suspicion of cant

—that he enters his country’s service for his
country’s good. Being something of an idealist he

feels a sense of consecration when he takes his first

oath of office, almost like that of a priest vowing

himself to a sacred cause. Years ago Paul Leicester

Ford wrote an excellent novel. The Honorable Peter

Stirling, with such a hero. Peter passes unscathed

and untarnished through the lesser municipal

offices and becomes a “boss” with clean hands and

a clean conscience. The novel was written in 1896.

Today the mention of a clean-handed, clean-

hearted political “boss” sounds incredible, perhaps



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 40

ridiculous. We have seen too many bright young
fellows of good mental and moral character, plung-

ing into politics and coming out all covered with

muck and mire, or, more likely, not coming out at

all but remaining and floundering around in the

morass of corruption.

I remember years ago saying to a friend of mine

when a man of particularly high principle was

elected to a great oifice, “That’s the type. Thank

heaven, we now have a man worthy of the job.”

The answer was disquieting, “Don’t be so sure. I

know him better than you do. They will wear him

down. They will wear him down
!”

Too often the cynical prophecy is verified. The

clean-cut conscience becomes blunted
;

the fine

principles are abandoned one by one as Quixotic
;
the

ethical ideals which our hero and patriot used to

proclaim without blushing and with no reason to

blush, come to seem childish even to himself, like the

priggish maxims of an old-fashioned copy book. In

their place he has an entirely new philosophy, new on

his lips but in itself as old as politics. His new code

runs something like this : “It’s a hard game. When

you’re in the game you must play the game as the

game is played. In politics there is always a quid pro

quo, something for something, nothing for nothing,

give and take. You give a favor and you take your

comipensation—^not necessarily monetary compen-
sation. ‘Graft’? What do you mean? Emoluments?

Honorariums? Little friendly recognitions from

constituents for favors received? An occasional

voluntary offering, let us say a checking account or

a stock account (without responsibility) as a present

from a friend who wonders how you can meet your



50 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

obligations on an inadequate salary? Friend, call it

not ‘Graft,’ that is a rude word
;

call it

‘perquisites pertaining to the office.’ It is the

custom, and do not even professors of ethics in your

most reputable universities teach that customs make

morals and that morality consists of conformity with

custom ?”

However, to one principle even the most hard-

ened politician remains true : “Be loyal !” But loyal

to what? To conscience? To high principle? To the

ideals with which you began? Don’t be foolish. Be

loyal to the organization! What you hear and see

and know within the organization that wouldn’t

sound nice in public, keep to yourself. If you feel

like making accusations, make them against the

other party, never against your own. When a cam-

paign is on you may have to speak in behalf of a

man you know to be a rascal, but suppress the

ugly truth, sound his praises
;
tell the people that the

honorable gentleman whose name you are about to

mention has by his services and his character

merited the support of every forward-looking citi-

zen. Say it if it chokes you. In a word, be regular.

Never, never, as you value your political career,

never bolt the party. It may be rotten to the core.

You may know in your heart that a change of ad-

ministration would be good. But admit nothing.

Say—and say it without the flicker of a smile—that
all the patriots are of your party and all the incom-

petents in the other.

So in conformity with this demoralizing code,

our high-minded young fellow loses, somewhere be-

tween his entrance into politics and the achievement

of his goal, all the idealism he ever possessed. He



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 51

stupefies his conscience, stultifies his reason. He

falls to the level of the law of the jungle: “For the

law of the jungle is this; that the wolf must hunt

with the pack.”

In a word he is just one more victim of the organ-

ization. The organization has swallowed the in-

dividual, body, bones, hide, hair. His identity as an

independent, intelligent, responsible human being is

lost.

As with politics, so in a lesser degree (though I

know some who would say in a greater degree) with

business. John T. Flynn opens his book Graft in

Business with this pistol shot: “The average politi-

cian is a rank amateur in the gentle art of graft,

compared with his brother in the field of business.”

He admits that such a declaration seems like “pre-

posterous exaggeration,” but he goes on to quote the

Federal . Trade Commission and other reliable

sources in proof of his statement. The journal named

Commerce and Finance says, for example

:

“Federal investigations have shown the prevalence

of commercial bribery which has been allowed to

flourish unchecked because of a lack of adequate

laws to put a stop to it. The secret giving of com-

missions or other things to employees of customers

to induce them to buy or recommend the purchase of

certain supplies has become a nation-wide system.

It infests not only the ordinary lines of business but

also the professions, even the surgical profession

. . . Waiving the moral issues involved—a fact few
will dispute—a practice authoritatively estimated
to take a billion dollars a year out of the cash drawer

of business should be stamped out for strictly

business reasons,”



52 CONFLICTING STANDAKDS

And he adds: “The general manager of the New
York Better Business Bureau confirms this estimate

of a billion-dollar-a-year cost to business, and to

business in New York City alone at least a hundred

million.”

Now, face to face with such appalling facts as

these the individual realizes that business can be a

machine which grinds down his honor, his independ-

ence and his conscience. A young man, fresh from a
fine home, a college or a school, where he has learned

a noble ethic, finds himself confronted by prin-

ciples and practices which seem to him dishonest or

dubious, but which he gradually comes to accept as

inevitable. The business world, like the political

world, “wears him down, wears him down.”

As an employee he finds advancement delayed if

he shows himself squeamish and scrupulous about the

methods that prevail in his organization. Young men

in business, like young men in politics, are supposed

not to be hoity-toity, and not to assume a holier-

than-thou attitude. “Business is business” is the

slogan in many a house, and the slogan covers a mul-

titude of methods that would shock a pristine-pure

conscience. He is taken aside and given what

purports to be friendly advice: “See here, young

fellow, buckle down to work and forget the maxims

you read in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Ben Franklin

is dead. Not only dead but debunked, like a lot of

other Pharisaical business men who, having made

their pile, turned in their old age to writing

hypocritical mottoes for schoolboys.” And before

long his conscience is bent, if not broken.

I hope I do not seem unsympathetic with the fine

young fellows who go forth into the world of

affairs and find themselves face to face with organ-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 53

ized dishonesty. I realize full well how hard it is to

“hew to the line” in business and in politics under

contemporary conditions. Nor is my Church un-
sympathetic. She is an old Church, a wise and

kindly Church. She does not lack understanding. But

She is relentless in Her insistence that the individual

conscience must not be sacrificed to machine-made

custom. With that in mind She oifers expert and dis-

interested advice in matters of business and political

ethics to all who make use of the confessional. In

Catholic moral theology the Treatise on Justice and

Right is held to be perhaps the most important and

incidentally the most difficult of all. Furthermore

the popes have in recent years again and again laid

down the principles of social justice which Catholics

are supposed to observe; and very lately in the

Archdiocese of New York as elsewhere there has

been formed a Catholic League for Social Justice,

every member of which makes this pledge:

“I resolve to inform myself on Catholic doctrine

on Social Justice^ to conform my life to its require-

ments and to do everything in my power, in my

home and religious life, in my social and business

contacts to promote its principles.”

Finally, the Church appeals ever to the religious

motive: She preaches that the ready-made maxims

of the worldly-wise who attempt to justify what is

essentially dishonest will not avail before God, and

that if one were to attempt to speak them in the

Judgment his tongue would cleave to the roof of his

mouth. And as all the Catholic people can testify,

there is no text more familiar in our Church than

this : “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole

world but suffer the loss of his own soul ?”



54 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

CHRISTIANITY, CHALLENGE OR

COMPROMISE?
(Address delivered on December 18, 1932.)

Somehow the impression has come to prevail,

especially in recent times that Christianity is a

complacent sort of religion, of an almost eifeminate

softness, pliant, non-resistant, a religion that ac-

commodates itself readily to all varieties of belief

and practice, and that is much more apt for compro-

mise than for conflict.

It cannot be denied that there are ostensible

reasons for this view of our Faith. We are accus-
tomed to salute our Saviour as “Dear Jesus,” “Sweet

Jesus”; we sing to Him, “Gentle Jesus, meek and

mild.” We refer to Him as the “Humble Nazarene,”
“The Prince of Peace,” “The Good Shepherd”; we

call ourselves His flock, that is to say, His sheep and

reversing the metaphor, we salute Him as the

“Lamb of God,” who was “led to the slaughter, not

opening His mouth.” We preach His gospel of non-
resistance, using for text that difficult counsel, “If

one strike thee on the right cheek, turn to him the

other also.” Indeed it is possible that we over-em-

phasize the element of gentleness and sweetness in

Christianity.

It is not strange therefore that certain aggressive

critics have assailed the religion of Jesus as non-

virile and bloodless. Nietzsche, for example,

constantly jibes at us as “sheep.” Even friendly ob-

servers have been scandalized at what seems to them

the enervating, devitalizing, one might almost say



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 55

fatalistic, Buddhistic element in the Gospel, or at

least in that part of the Gospel which we call the

Sermon on the Mount. Francis G. Peabody, late

professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, in the

course of a famous series of lectures at Yale, quotes

many such criticisms, among them one from a

certain F. H. Bradley who wrote in the

International Journal of Ethics: “We have lived a

long time now the professors of a creed which no

one can consistently practice and which if prac-

tised would be as immoral as it is unreal.”

I therefore take it upon myself today to demon-

strate—of necessity very briefly—that the Chris-
tian religion is not all milk and honey, not all “hearts

and flowers,” and most decidely not a sleeping po-

tion or a drug. To simplify the argument I assume

that the authentic pristine-pure Christianity is that

which reflects the character of Christ. “Christianus

alter Christus”
—

“the Christian is another Christ”

—

and therefore I present the Founder of our religion

as its best interpretation.

I remember that when some time ago in a bit of

writing, I praised William Lyon Phelps of Yale as a

good Christian, some one sent me the report of a

speech in which the professor had said, “Jesus was

a trouble-maker, a challenging and a provocative

nuisance,” and demanded to know how the doctor

could be a good Christian and say that. For answer

I referred the lady to the Gospels and asked her to

observe that Jesus was exactly that in the eyes of a

world that desired no rousing from its moral and

spiritual apathy. There are terrible texts in that

sweet Gospel: “Do not think that I came to send

peace upon earth. I came not to send peace, but the



56 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

sword. . “I am come to cast fire on the earth.”
“If the world hate you, know ye that it hath hated

Me before you.” “Blessed are you when they shall

revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is

evil against you.” “Yes, the hour cometh, that

whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a

service to God.” The real Gospel is not pap. It is red

meat. The lamb of God was also the Lion of the

Tribe of Juda.

In one chapter of Sir John Seeley’s incomparable

Ecce Homo—a chapter significantly entitled
“Christ’s Winnowing Fan”—he says: “To listen to
Christ was no amusement for an idle hour. His

preaching formed no convenient resort for light-

minded people. . . His words spread around Him a

perpetual ferment, an everseething effervescence.”

As it was in His day, so should it be in ours. The

Gospel is not really a soporific but a stimulant.

Persons who sleep in their pews during the sermon

or, as is more likely nowadays, doze in an armchair

at home while a radio sermon floats softly into their

ears like a lullaby, must not imagine that they are

undergoing a religious experience. Good preaching

sounds reveille, not taps.

On this matter of the misunderstanding of Christ

and His religion I admit I feel strongly. I reject

with indignation the idea common among a certain

type of pious persons that Jesus Christ was namby-

pamby. It is a part of our Catholic faith that He is

not only true God but true Man, not a languishing,

characterless neutral, neither God nor man. There

are sentimental dilettanti who tell us in soft accents

with pious rolling of the eyes to heaven, and with

languid gestures, how much they love II poverello,



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 67

St. Francis of Assisi. If by a miracle St. Francis

could appear to them as he really was they would

think him a fanatic or a mad man, as the more

fastidious Assisians did. Likewise, there are, it is to

be feared, multitudes of “pious” people who would

not recognize Christ Himself if He suddenly stood

before them. They have in their mind’s eye a

Botticelli, if not a Bouguereau Christ, perhaps a

pre-Raphaelite Christ, pale and wan and languish-

ing. They don’t care for the Michelangelo Christ of

The Last Judgment. But Michelangelo makes Him

what He was—a man.
But to return to the question of Christ as a

“trouble-maker, a challenge and provocative

nuisance.” It is the simple truth that no one ever

irritated more people and more different kinds of

people than He. There is a saying, familiar to

students of ancient Christian controversy, Athana-

sius contra mundum. Even more justly we say

Christus contra mundum: Christ alone against the

whole world. And the world that opposed Him was

a gigantic power. He was caught between the upper

and the nether millstone, the Romans and the Jews,

and between them He knew He would be ground to

powder.

Now what does a weak man do when he finds him-

self all alone against the powers that be? He com-

promises, he keeps silent; he bides his time; he

finds excuses for not beginning his work; he fills

his mouth with maxims about prudence
;
he soothes

his soul by reflections on the hopelessness of the

situation; he eases his conscience with the con-

sideration that God cannot command impossible

things, that no man need court certain death.



58 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

But Christ was no weakling, He could not com-

promise. He had work to do and He would do it. He

had something to say, and He would say it. He

would not desist till His voice was smothered in His

own Blood. He beheld His people misguided by a set

of narrow, fanatical, casuistical bigots, and He

would warn the people and scourge the bigots. He

saw a nation being led into error by a jabbering

crowd of blind theological guides. He saw an organ-

ization of hypocrites devouring the houses of

widows, praying long prayers with bogus piety. In

His eyes that hypocrisy and fraud cried to heaven

for punishment. He saw the money-grabbers making

the house of prayer a den of thieves, and He would

put them to rout single-handed; He saw the lordly

Pharisees wearing their phylacteries broad upon

their foreheads, receiving salaams and salutations

in the market-place, and He would bring down their

pride by telling them that they were worse than the

publicans and the harlots. They considered them-

selves the salt of the earth, the elect among mankind,

the cream of the people of God, and He would tell

them to their teeth that they were whited sepulchers

full of dead men’s bones and all rottenness. He saw

the conscience of the people misdirected by a group

of charlatans, and He would tear off the veil and ex-

pose the impostors before the eyes of the people who

had almost worshipped them. They thought they had

the keys of the kingdom of heaven, that when they

opened no man could shut and when they shut no

man could open. But He told them that they were

closing the kingdom of heaven against men and that

they would never themselves enter in. And not

to attempt to mention each one of the articles of the

stinging indictment of Christ against the Pharisees,



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 59

he called them “Blind guides, fools and blind, chil-

dren of hell, serpents, a generation of vipers full of

rapine and uncleanness, murderers of the prophets,

upon whose hands was the blood of every messenger

of God from Abel to Zacharias,” and He predicted

that they should not escape the “judgment of hell.”

Christ was a prophet in the old tradition. Yes,

more than a prophet. Sometimes I like to indulge

the imagination as to what might have happened if

Pontius Pilate had had a stiffer backbone. He knew

that Jesus had done nothing worthy of death under

the Roman law, but he could not deny the accusa-

tions of the Pharisees, “This man stirreth up the

people.” Suppose Pilate had safd to Jesus what a

certain administrator whom I used to know said to

one who quite legitimately brought him a tale of

trouble, “Go home. Sir, and do not disturb my peace

of mind.” It would doubtless have been phrased

differently: “Go home, Galilean, to your native

hills. Till your field, or mend your nets, or busy

yourself in your carpenter’s shop. Cease preach-

ing—at least in this our province of Judaea. Keep
away from the streets of Jerusalem. With these

thousands who follow after you and thousands of

others who oppose you there is bound to be conflict.

Let the tumult die down and see that thou stir it not

up again.”

But in fact Jesus had forestalled this imaginary

speech of Pilate’s. He had said, “For this was I born

and for this I am come into the world that I should

give testimony to the Truth.” One of His apostles,

Paul, was to say later, “Woe is me if I preach not the

Gospel.” Jesus would no more have gone back to the

carpenter’s shop and kept His peace than Paul would



60 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

have gone back to his tent-making. What though

there was turmoil wherever He went? He had ob-

served that fact. He deplored it, but it could not

compel Him to subside. Also He foresaw the tragic

outcome. With prophetic vision He also dipped into

the future and saw that continents would be immer-

sed in a bloody baptism for centuries as a result of

His teaching. Jesus knew that there was to be no

peace between the Church and the world, the Gospel

and pagan philosophy.

Yet He wavered not. He disdained compromise.

He went on relentlessly and without fear to the

inevitable end. Be it remembered furthermore that

Christ had no position, no throne, no army, no body-

guard: He enjoyed no immunity from personal dan-

ger. Yet He hurled His thunderbolts into the face of

sacrosanct individuals and divine-right potentates,

backed by an army and a government that was the

mightiest machine of coercion that has ever been or-

ganized. For His temerity He was put to death by

the most barbarous means of capital punishment

that has ever been devised.

Now the world, as the world, has not changed.

Hypocrites and charlatans and whited sepulchers

still hold high office. A true evangelist cannot write,
nor a true apostle speak without irritating them.

Christ could not do it, and the disciple is not more

skillful than his Master. Jesus Himself said to the

Jews, “You killed all the prophets from Abel to

Zacharias.” After the prophets, all the apostles

were killed, all save one and if he was not killed, it

was not due to any particular kindness on the part

of his enemies—^they threw him into a vat of boiling
oil ! The thirteenth apostle, St. Paul, declared plainly



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 61

enough, “If I were the friend of men I should not

be the servant of God.” So he too suffered the in-

evitable fate of those who tell the truth.

It is necessary I think to remind ourselves of these

familiar facts—familiar though forgotten—in our
soft times when numbers of timorous Christians de-

mand that their clergymen preach an inoffensive

gospel. There is no inoffensive gospel. If the Gospel

were lived as it is, unqualified, unadapted, unexpur-

gated, it would turn civilization upside down as it

did once before.

I shall not close without admitting that the ele-

ment of vigor does not comprise the entire character

of Christ, or of Christianity. Our religion, I have

said, is not all roses and lilies. But neither is it all

blood and iron. Paradoxically it is both gentle and

stern, sweet and severe. Just as a man can be at once

kind and strong, just as Jesus was both Lion and

Lamb, true religion can be and is a sweet consola-

tion and a fiery stimulus. To forget or to minimize

either of these characteristics is to have an incom-

plete comprehension of Christianity.



62 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

CHRISTMAS

(Address delivered on December 25, 1932.)

“For a child is born to us, and a son is given to

us, and the government is upon his shoulder: and

his name shall he called, Wonderful, Counsellor, God

the Mighty, the Father of the World to come, the

Prince of Peace.”—Isaias ix. 6.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of

the Holy Ghost.

The prophet Isaias, with his unfailing exuber-

ance of thought and expression, presents to us in

that one sentence enough material and enough in-

spiration for half a dozen Christmas sermons. But

from his largesse I shall select only one idea, the last

one in his litany of salutations to the new-born Babe

:

“The Prince of Peace.” I know you will pardon my

not dilating upon the historical phase of the great

event of Christmas Day. For with that history we

are all familiar. The expectation of a Messias among

the Jewish people; the annunciation to the village

maiden Mary of Nazareth that she was to bring the

Saviour into the world; her journey with Joseph to

Bethlehem; their desperate and unsuccessful search

for lodging at the inn ; the final recourse to a stable

;

the marvel that happened there—the Virgin Birth;
the angelic chorus, Gloria in Excelsis Deo et in terra

pax hominibus, “Glory to God on high and on earth

Peace to men of good will” ; the coming of the kings

from a far land : all these sacred happenings are as

well known to us as the events that take place day

after day under our own domestic rooftree.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 63

But I am not so sure that the significance of that

salutation “Prince of Peace” and of the angel’s cry,

“Peace to men” is so well understood. In fact I fear

its importance has never been realized, even by us

who make bold to call ourselves Christians.

For one brief moment when Christ our Lord

was born, there was no war in all the known world

;

the gates of the Temple of Janus were closed—

a

symbol of peace—for the first time in 700 years.
But the pity is that those gates were so soon opened

again, and that they have remained open ever since.

There can be no doubt that if the will of God were

done on earth as it is in heaven, warfare would

have been instantaneously and forever abolished,

from the moment that the Word was made fiesh

and dwelt among us. But the annals of mankind,

since Christ as before Christ, have been written

upon pages wet with tears and blotted with blood.

The continuation of conflict between man and man,

nation and nation in Christian times is, I think, the

greatest scandal in the history of our race. It is a

monstrous incongruity that men who kneel one mo-

ment in all humility to kiss the tiny hand of the

Prince of Peace should leap so quickly to their feet,

unsheathe their swords and have at one another

with murderous intent, one might almost say before

they had so much as left the Presence of the new-

born Babe. With one breath men have prayed

piously, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona

nobis pacem: “Lamb of God Who takest away the
sins of the world, grant us peace!” and with the

next breath they have cried, “To Arms ! To Arms
!”

The clash of sword upon sword has been heard even

in the Holy Land, yes in Bethlehem. Blood has been

spilled within the very church of the Holy Sepul-



64 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

chre, not the blood of martyrs slain by heathen, but

the blood of Christians cut down by Christians. And

the wide world over, the sacred name of Christ has

been used as a battle cry, armies have clashed under

the aegis of the Gentle Nazarene; hilts of swords

have been fashioned in the form of the cross

of Christ, the crucifix has been carried aloft into

battle and even on occasion used as a weapon. Chris-

tians mad with blood-lust have thrust one another

through with daggers, sabres, bayonets, at the same

moment crying the Holy Name of Jesus, not as a

prayer but as a curse or a blasphemy. Explain it

as you will, defend it and apologize for it as you

will, the bloodthirstiness of Christians remains an

outrage to Christ, a stumbling block to those who

would like to believe in Him, and an occasion for

mockery upon the lips of those who reject His

Church and His religion.

Looking at the all-but-everlasting warfare

among Christians, one would imagine that we were

ignorant that Jesus had come, and that we fancied

the old bloody gods of paganism, Baal, Moloch, Zeus,

Jupiter, Castor and Pollux, Mars, cruel deities all,

were still dominant in heaven and on earth. In

Milton’s splendid Ode on the Morning of Christ's

Nativity it is said most eloquently

:

Peor and Baalim

Forsake their temples dim.

The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn:
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thamnuz mourn.

And sullen Moloch, fled

Hath left in shadows dread

His burning idol all of blackest hue;

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 06

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian grove, or green,

He feels from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

Nor all the gods beside

Longer dare abide,

Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine:

Our Babe, to show His Godhead true.

Can in His swaddling bands control the damned crew.

But alas if the cruel heathen deities were indeed

driven back into hell by the appearance of the true

Son of God upon the earth, Moloch the pitiless, Zeus,

the hurler of thunderbolts, and Mars, the god of

blood and battles, seem most unaccountably resur-

rected from Hades. According to the ancient myth-

ologies, the gods fought amongst themselves on

Olympus and then transferred the celestial warfare

to this earth, involving men in their prodigious bat-

tles. But this curious and savage idea was both

abhorred and ridiculed by the early Christians. If

you read Clement and Justin and Tertullian and Cyp-

rian and Augustine, you will find that they inveigh

with the high and holy wrath of prophets against the

pagan superstition that men must fight with gods

against other men and other gods. But now in our

day, opponents of Christianity fling in our face the

taunt that we Christians are a sanguinary and a

superstitious race because we bless the banners of

war with holy water and sacred incense and the

name of Jesus, and go into battle praying God to

give us power to kill our brethren in Christ. At the

Last Supper, Jesus said, “He that dippeth his hand

with Me in the dish, he shall betray Me,” and

He evidently considered that to be the lowest

depth of treachery. But are we not guilty of a



66 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

similar crime, we who pray to the same God,

kiss the hand of the same Jesus, partake of

the same Holy Communion, and presently turn and

rend one another, slaughter one another? Mark

you, I am not alleging that we consciously commit

mortal sin, if we go to war. We are victims of an
inveterate tradition, and we have reflex principles

upon which we form our conscience, enabling us to

act in good faith. But I am trying to set in high

relief the essential anomaly, the horrible incongruity

of warfare between armies of men who adore the

Son of God the Prince of Peace and other armies

of men who equally adore the Son of God the Prince

of Peace.

I think I know all the alleged justiflcations for

warfare, but looking at them in the light that eman-

ates from the Manger, I find them all inconsequen-

tial, irrelevant and essentially worthless. Pardon

me for seeming to speak over-vigorously my personal

conviction. But if at this moment some hearer

inwardly challenges the statement, “the alleged jus-

tifications for warfare are inconsequential, irrelevant

and worthless,” I shall take refuge behind a name

far greater than my own, that of Franziskus Strat-

mann, of the Dominican Order, who has written a

most excellent little volume entitled The Church and

War with the subtitle A Catholic Study. Note the

wording, “The Church and War,” not “Father Strat-

mann and War”; also “A Catholic Study,” not a Pa-

cifist study. The volume was published with the im-

primatur of the Cardinal Archbishop ofWestminster.

In that little treatise—little but weighty—Father
Stratmann lays down conditions for a just war,

taken from the highest Catholic theological author!-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 67

ties, and though he offers to leave final judgment to

the reader, he demonstrates sufficiently that war as

waged nowadays is beyond ail justification. He

pays his regards in passing to those who remark

that Jesus could not have condemned war because

He worked a miracle for the benefit of the centurion

at Capharnaum. Dr. Stratmann says:

“It is absurd to compare the horrors of the great

war with the military service of the Captain of Ca-

pharnaum, and to argue from our Lord’s goodness

to him that the infamy of the world war would

have His Blessing. It is blasphemous to try and

reconcile the Spirit of Christ with the swamp of sin

such a war is from its beginning to its end. If we

want to keep in Christ’s or St. Paul’s opinion we

must not think of the humble soldier of Capharnaum,

or of that other who stood by the Cross, startled and

amazed by that great sacrifice; or of Cornelius the

Centurion; but of those politicians and military

leaders, industrial speculators and Stock Exchange

speculators who play with men’s bodies as if they

were dice. There is a mighty difference between

war and war, and as we have seen, it is almost im-

possible, without God’s special help, for any war to

be so conducted that the requirements of justice and

morality are satisfied.”

He brings up the question of a “holy war.” But

was there ever a “holy war”? The Crusades were

fought in an ostensibly holy cause but they were not

free from injustice and cruelty. “Even in the first

Crusade,” says Father Stratmann, “on the way to

Palestine, when the ideals were still pure, the mur-

dering of Jews and the conflagrations were hideous.

When the Holy City was at last reached, the Chris-



68 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

tian sword was lifted against everybody, even wo-

men and children, and the murder and plundering

were endless. This was followed by going in pro-

cession in deep devotion to the Tomb of the Re-

deemer. Ruville (an illustrious convert to Catho-

licism) says: ‘We ask in horror how the two can

be combined—blind, indiscriminate murder and the
undoubtedly real devotion and thanksgiving at the

Holy Places.’
”

I could wish to quote more from this little classic

on war and peace, but I think I have given enough

to show my hearers that my opinion on the matter

does not rest on my own fallible judgment. There is
important and powerful Catholic authority behind

the denunciation of so-called “Christian warfare.”

The sooner we Christians (and I hasten to in-

clude all men of good will who love and admire

Christ, whether they call themselves by His Name

or not), the sooner we stop making excuse for blood-

shed, the sooner we recognize and proclaim the

fact that war, especially as it is now conducted, is a

mad contradiction of the spirit and the letter of the

Gospel, the sooner shall we put an end to this hideous

anomaly, “Christian warfare.” They tell us that

we religious-minded people have nothing to say in

the matter. They call us “idealists,” “visionaries,”

“dreamers,” and tell us that the affairs of the world

must remain in the hands of realists. But if we,

the “terrible meek” rise in our might and declare

that the religious and moral motive shall prevail

over the utilitarian, the political and the militaristic,

we can abolish warfare and change the face of the

earth.

Enough! It shames me to broadcast the convic-



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 69

tion that we Christians have not yet, after nineteen

centuries, caught the import of the prophet’s phrase,

“Prince of Peace,’’ or the angel’s song, “Peace on

Earth!” But open confession is good for the soul,

and without confession there can be no absolution.

Let us return to Bethlehem and to the new-born

Babe. Venite odoremus: odoremus et consideremtis.

Let us adore and let us reflect.

As we look upon that tiny figure helpless in a

cradle of straw, poor, unwelcomed—except by a few
shepherds—unrecognized (He was in the world
and the world was made by Him, and the world

knew Him not. He came unto His own and His

own received Him not), one fact strikes us with the

force of a revelation. He was to be no conqueror

in the military sense. He had no intention of emu-

lating Philip of Macedon or Alexander. He was to

be no Caesar, no Hannibal, no Bonaparte. His

method was not that of Attila the Hun who blas-

phemously called himself, “The Scourge of God,” or

of Mohammed under whose crescent banner a horde

of fanatics made a trail of blood from Mecca to

Gibraltar, and from those Pillars of Hercules to the

Pyrenees and even to Chalons on the Marne.

Jesus was not that kind of conqueror. True,

there were kings at His cradle; we will call them

kings but they were more properly philosophers.

Magi. If they were kings they came without their

armies. They were not prepared to make a mili-

tary stand against Herod; they left no regiment to

prevent the slaughter of the innocents. Jesus Him-

self is called king. But He was the strangest king

the world has ever seen—no sword, no armed reti-
nue, no mansion, no wealth, no pomp. On one oc-



70 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

casion a handful of enthusiasts planned to make

Him king, but He vanished out of their sight.

Again some one offered Him a sw.ord but He said,

“put up thy sword into the scabbard.” The last time

He entered Jerusalem the populace gathered to shout

Hosannah and to strew palms, the emblem of victory

in His path. But when the excitement was over He

slipped away on foot and took refuge from the

throng in a cottage v/ith a few friends. When those

who were looking for the deliverance of the people

from the Roman yoke demanded to know “Wilt

Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”

He put them off with a cryptic answer. A
king without a palace, with no body-guard, a mon-

arch without an army, a conqueror with no ambi-

tion: let us not forget these simple facts when we

sing Venite adoremus Regem Angelorum. King of

angels! Yes, angels and shepherds. King of a few

fishermen. Crown prince and heir apparent to a

carpenter’s shop. Lord of a stable for a day or two

before His mother picked Him up and fled with

Him to escape the wrath of a real king. King with

a court of stable-hands, hostlers, cow-herds and per-

haps a few poverty-stricken wayfarers who, like

His mother and His foster-father, had come in out

of the cold to be warmed by the breath and the

body-heat of the cattle.

And yet who dare say that He is not a conqueror ?

Is there any Bonaparte or Charlemagne or Alexan-

der, any Caesar, Czar, Kaiser, any Hohenzollern, or

Hohenstaufen, any Bourbon or Guelph or Stuart, or

all of them together who can boast of a kingdom like

the kingdom of Jesus Christ? I speak not of a king-

dom of angels but of men, of women—and by all
means today let us hasten to add—a kingdom of



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 71

children. When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “Art

Thou a king?” Jesus answered, “I am a king but

My kingdom is not of this world.” And Pilate, who

after all had some lingering sense of decency and

of pity, must have suppressed a laugh. A sorry
king, standing there with the insignia of kingship

cruelly caricatured; a blood-spattered robe, a reed

for a sceptre and a crown not of gold and jewels but

of thorns. None the less on this blessed Christmas

day so many centuries after Bethlehem, there are

more devout followers of Jesus, and what is

more to the point, more worshippers of Jesus than

Pontius Pilate or the great Caesar in Rome could

have imagined possible in one empire and under

one sceptre. There are in this generation—^to say
nothing of the other generations since the birth of

the Babe of Bethlehem—some 500 or 600 million
who love Him and adore Him, and doubtless some

hundreds of millions more who call themselves skep-

tics or agnostics, but none the less accord Him such

affectionate veneration as they give to no one else

living or dead.

I have spoken of the most scandalous fact in his-

tory. It is only fair that I should now emphasize

this most consoling fact. in history. There has al-

ways been and there still remains enough idealism

and spiritual insight in the multitude to recognize

the one great glory of the human race. Nobody

really bends the knee to a world-conqueror of the

Napoleonic type. Crowds of curiosity seekers pass

in and out of the great mausoleum where the sarco-

phagus of Bonaparte is exhibited. But does any

one pray to him, or kneel and salute him, “Our

God and King !” ?



72 CONFLICTING STANDARDS

But here in this teeming metropolis on a conti-

nent undreamed of when Jesus was born, some two

or three millions have arisen early, or indeed have

assembled in the dead of the night to worship

Jesus, to sing His praises : their hearts have leaped

within them at the sound of the ever familiar

Venite Adoremm Dominum, and they have com-

municated with Him mystically, really, with tears

of joy in their eyes. And what has taken place on

this eastern shore where the sun first breaks upon

the North American continent, is repeated at the

Golden Gate where they bid the sun farewell as he

makes his swift way back again to the Asiatic con-

tinent whereon Jesus was born. And there is no

land, no state, city, village, hamlet, one may say in

truth no desert, no mountain, no deep forest in all

the path of the sun on Christmas Day that does not

hear the prayer, “Jesus Babe of Bethlehem, I love

Thee, I adore Thee!”

Now why, I implore you in the name of Jesus
Christ, why shall we not learn from this stupendous

and soul-satisfying fact, the one great lesson
:
peace,

not war is the means of universal and permanent

dominion. They that take the sword perish with

the sword. Kingdoms and empires built by force,

sustained for a moment by force, succumb to force

and their ruins crumble away. But a kingdom

built upon peace and love and faith shall not pass.

Thrones and palaces totter and fall, armies fight,

die and lie buried, where they fall; navies grapple

on the sea and in the air, crash to the earth, sink to

the bottom of the sea. As the poet sings

:

“Far-called our navies melt away.

On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”



CONFLICTING STANDARDS 73

Kings, soldiers, conquerors are forgotten, for-

gotten or perfunctorily remembered, thanks to a

persistent galvanization of their fame, but the love

of the peoples of the world rises spontaneously and

overflows perennially in a universal flood of prayer

and song and celebration of the birth of Jesus in a

stable at Bethlehem.



CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS

OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New

York City, March 2, 1930).

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to tho'

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all

who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. . . .

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am

sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our

countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sym-

pathy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.

So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there-

fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,

to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make

better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ: pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only

justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques-

tioning hearts.



Hear and Help the Catholic Hour
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Tulsa, Okla. KVOO
Washington, D. C. WRC
Worcester, Mass. WTAG

(Most of these stations present the Catholic Hour every
Sunday at six o’clock. New York Time [D. S. T. dtiring
summer], though some of them suspend it periodi-

cally because of local commitments, etc.)

YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONTINUANCE OF
THESE WEEKLY BROADCASTS OF CATHOLIC

TRUTH IS NEEDED AND SOLICITED.



IN PAMPHLET FORM
CATHOLIC HOUR RADIO ADDRESSES

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR is the authorized publisher of aU
CATHOLIC HOUR addresses in pamphlet form. The addresses
published to date, all of which are still available, are listed below.
Others will be published as they are delivered.

“The Divine Romance,” by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen, 80 pa'ges
and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quantities, $9.00 per 100.

“The Moral Order” and “Mary, the Mother of Jesus,” by Rev.
Dr. George Johnson, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid.
In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“A Trilogy on Prayer,” by Rev. Thomas F. Burke, C. S. P.,
32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quantities, $5.00
per 100.

“The Story of the Bible,” by Rev. Dr. Francis L. Keenan, 64
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quantities, $6.00
per 100.

“Four Religious Founders,” by Rev. Dr. Francis J. Connell,
C. SS. R., Rev. Benedict Bradley, O. S. B., Rev. Thomas M.
Schwertner, O. P., Rev. Sigmund Cratz, O. M. Cap., and Rev. M.
J. Ahern, S. J., 56 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In
quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Philosophy of Catholic Education,” by Rev. Dr. Charles L.
O’Donnell, C. S. C., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid.
In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“Christianity and the Modern Mind,” by Rev. John A. Mc-
Clorey, S. J., 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In
quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Moral Law,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., 88 pages
and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid. In quantities, $9.60 per 100.

“Christ and His Church,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corri-
gan, 88 pages and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid. In quantities,
$y.50 per 100.

“The Marks of the Church,” by Rev. Dr. John K. Cartwright.
48 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In quantities, $5.60
per 100.

“The Organization and Government of the Church,” by Rev.
Dr. Francis J. Connell, C. SS. R., 48 pages and cover. Single copy,
15c postpaid. In quantities, $5.60 per 100.

“Moral Factors in Economic Life,” by Rev. Dr. Francis J. Haas
and Rev. Dr. John A. Ryan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c
postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“Divine Helps for Man,” by Rev. Dr. Edward J. Walsh, C. M.,
104 pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid. In quantities,
$11.00 per 100.

“The Parables,” by Rev. John A. McClorey, S. J., 128 pages
and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid. In quantities, $12.00 per 100.

“Christianity's Contribution to Civilization,” by Rev. James
M. Gillis, C. S. P., 96 pages and cover. Single copy, 26c postpaid.
In quantities, $10.00 per 100.

“Manifestations of Christ,” by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen, 128
pages and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid. In quantities, $18.00
per 100.

“The Way of the Cross,” by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen, 32 pages
and cover (prayer book size). Single copy, 16c postpaid. In
quantities, $4.00 per 100.

“Christ Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius Smith, O. P., 48
pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In quantities, $6.60 per
100 .

“The Christian Family,” by Rev. Dr. Edward Lodge Curran, 68
pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quantities, $7.00
per 100.



•*The Dublin Eucharistic Congress,^' by His Eminence William

Cardinal O’Connell. An address rebroadcast from Dublin, 12 pasres
and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quantities, $3.75 per 100.

“Rural Catholic Action,“ by Rev. Dr. Edgar Schmiedeler, O.

S. B., 24 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quantities,

$4.50 per 100.

“Religion and Human Nature," by Rev. Dr. Joseph A. Daly,
40 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In quantities,

$5.50 per 100.

“The Church and Some Outstanding Problems of the Day*"
by Rev. Jones I. Corrigan, S. J., 72 pages and cover. Single copy,

20c postpaid. In quantities. $8.00 per 100.

“Conflicting Standards," by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., 80
pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quantities, $9.00
per 100.

“The Hymn of the Conquered," by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen,
128 pages and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid. In quantities, $12.00
per 100.

“The Seven Last Words," by Rev. Dr. Pulton J. Sheen (pray-
er-book size), 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In
quantities, $3.00 per 100.

“The Church and the Child," by Rev. Dr. Paul H. Furfey, 48
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quantities, $5.60
per 100.

“Love’s Veiled Victory and Love’s Laws," by Rev. Dr. George
P. Strohaver, S. J., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid.
In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Religion and Liturgy," by Rev. Dr. Francis A. Walsh, O.S.B.,
32 pages and cover. Single copy*, 10c postpaid. In quantities, $6.0(^
per 100.

“The Lord’s Prayer Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius Smith,
O. P., 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quantities,
$6.00 per 100.

“God, Man and Redemption," by Rev. Dr. Ignatius W. Cox,
S. J., 64 pages and cover. Single copies, 15c postpaid. In quanti-
ties, $6.00 per hundred.

“This Mysterious Human Nature," by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.
S. P., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In quantities,
$5.50 per 100.

“The Eternal Galilean," by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen, 160 pages
and cover. Single copy*, 50c postpaid. In quantities, $16.00 per 100.

“The Queen of Seven Swords,” by Rev. Dr. Fulton J. Sheen
(prayer-book size), 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid.
In quantities, $3.00 per 100.

“The Catholic Teaching on Our Industrial System," by Rt.
Rev. Msgr. John A. Ryan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c
postpaid. In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Happiness of Faith," by Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S. J., 80
pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quantities, $9.oa
per 100.

“The Salvation of Human Society," by* Rev. Peter J. Bergen,
C. S. P., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In
quantities, $5.50 per hundred.

“Faith," by Rev. Vincent F. Kienberger, O.P., 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15cf postpaid. In quantities, $5.50 per hundred.

“Catholic Education," by Rev. Dr. George Johnson 40
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quantities, $5.60
per hundred.

“The Church and Her Missions," by Rt. Rev. Msgr. William
Quinn, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quanti-
ties, $5.50 per 100.

“The Church and the Depression,” by Rt. Rev. James M. Gillis,
C.S.P., 80 pages and cover, 20c postpaid. In quantities, $9.00 per
hundred.



‘‘The Fulness of Christ,” by Very Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen,
172 pages and cover, 60c postpaid. In quantities 16.50 per 100.

‘‘The Church and Modern Thought,” by Rev. James M. Gillis,
C.S.P., 80 pages and cover, 20c postpaid. In quantities $9.00 per 100.

‘‘Misunderstood Truths,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Duane G. Hunt,
48 pages and cover, 15c postpaid. In quantities $5.50 per 100.

‘‘The Judgment of God” and ‘‘The Sense of Duty,” by Rt. Rev.
Msgr. William J. Kerby. 16 pages and cover, 10c postpaid. In
quantities, $4.00 per 100.

‘‘Christian Education,” by Rev. Dr. James A. Reeves. 32
pages and cover, 10c postpaid. In quantities, $5.0o per 100.

‘‘What Civilization Owes to the Church,” by Rt. Rev. William
Quinn, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quantities,
$6.00 per 100.

Complete Lot of 47 Pamphlets to one address for $5.45 postpaid.

Address: OUR SUNDAY VISITOR, HuntinEton. Indiana.



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