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OUr5TlON5

Jamef

the Catiuiic Hoar





CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

by

REV. JAMES M. GILLIS, C. S. P.
Editor of The Catholic World

Five addresses delivered in the nationwide Catholic
Hour

(produced by the National Council of Catholic Men, in

cooperation with the National Broadcasting Company)

on Sundays from October 6, through November 3, 1940

Why Are Ye Fearful, 0 Ye Of Little Faith?

What Is It All About?

Why Must The Innocent Suffer? -

Where Now Is Thy God?

When the Son of Man Comes Will He Find Faith

on Earth?

Page

.. 3

.. 12

.. 21

.. 31

.. 42

National Council of Catholic Men

1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W.

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor

Huntington, Indiana



Imprimatur

Hh JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.
Bishop of Fort Wayne

Cover design by

A. de BETHUNE

Ds2c!g!f?2d



WHY ARE YE FEARFUL, O YE OF LITTLE
FAITH?

(Matthew 8 :26).

Address delivered on October 6, 1940

Everyone seems to be saying nowadays that

civilization has come to a sorry pass. It is true. Too

true. So obviously true as to be a platitude, or what

men used to call in the slang of yesterday a “bro-

mide”. Certain writers and speakers say that here

and now in this second quarter of the twentieth

century, we face a crisis more serious than any

known to our ancestors. Hamlet, the melancholy

Prince of Denmark, exclaimed, “The time is out

of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born

to set it right!” But our contemporary pessi-

mists say not that a joint is out of place here or

there in the organism of civilization but that the

whole framework is in a state of collapse; and in-

stead of complaining that they were born to set it

right, they declare that no one can set it right.

They are not merely pessimists but defeatists.

One of them, Hermann Rauschning, formerly

an associate of Hitler, has written a terrifying vol-

ume called The Revolution of Nihilism. There have

been revolutions before, he says, but never such a

revolution as this. Hitherto a revolution had for its

purpose the removal of one form of government and

the substitution of another. But the revolution now

in progress, he claims, the Nazi-Communist revo-

lution, aims at the obliteration of all government

and the substitution of nihilism. The purpose of

Hitler and Stalin, he insists, is not to change the

world but to destroy the world.



4 CKUCIAL QUESTIONS

In the city of Rome, “Immortal Rome,” there

are, it is said, the ruins of seven or eight civilizations

piled one upon another like geological strata, the

present Rome, the one now visible on the surface

of the earth, being perhaps the ninth. A new civili-
zation always rose on the ruins of the old. But Herr

Rauschning seems to say that this time there isn’t

going to be any new civilization. The one we have

is all there is, there isn’t any more. The world will

not rise again like Rome but will remain buried like

Babylon, Sodom, Gomorrah. “All our pomp of yes-

terday is one with Nineveh and Tyre,” says Kip-

ling. All our civilization of today, says Rauschning,

art, architecture, music, literature, manners, morals,

religion will be so thoroughly blotted out that the

next generation—a generation of savages—will see
no sign of it as we see no signs of Ur of the Chal-

dees, or of Zenobia’s Palmyra.

“Apres moi, le deluge,” said Louis XV, or who-

ever invented the phrase and put it in his mouth,

“After me, the deluge.” And sure enough, there was

a deluge, a deluge of blood. But the deluge sub-

sided and a new world emerged, as the mountains

and the plains, even the cities and towns, somewhat

damp no doubt but intact, emerged when the uni-

versal deluge subsided in the days of Noe. But

after this present deluge, if I understand Rausch-

ning, the world, at least the world we call civiliza-

tion, if not the world of land and sea and sky, trees

and rocks and hills and hollows, will never emerge

again. In Genesis we read that at the beginning

“the earth was void and empty and darkness was

upon the face of the deep.” Another word for the

void, empty, dark world is Chaos. Now when the

Hitler-Stalin combination has done its deadly work



WHY ARE YE FEARFUL, O YE OF LITTLE FAITH ? 5

Chaos will have come again. For this revolution is

the Revolution of Nihilism. I make no commentary

upon what Rauschning says the two dictators are

attempting. But I will venture the hesitant remark

that it will be quite a trick if they do it. As for me,

I don’t believe they can do it.

Another philosopher of history equally learned,

Christopher Dawson, in a very stimulating and ex-

citing volume, in spite of its title Enquiry Into Re-

ligion and Progress, says in more measured phrase-

ology, “Western civilization at the present is pass-

ing through a crisis which is essentially different

from anything that has been previously experienced.

Other societies in the past have changed their so-

cial institutions, or their religious beliefs under the

influence of external forces or the development of

internal growth. But none like our own has ever

faced the prospect of fundamental alterations of be-

liefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of

social life rests” (p. 259).

Now who was the simpleton who said that he

had tried again and again to be a philosopher, but

he couldn’t because “cheerfulness was always break-

ing through”? There seems to be an understanding

that you cannot be a deep thinker unless you are

lugubrious, and that if you can still smile or hope,

or so much as say “Cheer up, it may not be true,” it

proves you are no philosopher. But there was in

ancient days a very wise man, in fact they say he

was the wisest who ever lived. King Solomon, whom

Dawson seems for the moment to have forgotten.

“This crisis is essentially different from anything

that has been previously experienced,” says Daw-

son. But Solomon says “What is it that hath been?

The same thing that shall be. What is it that hath



6 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

been done? The same that shall be done. Nothing

under the sun is new, neither is any man able to

say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone

before in the ages that were before us.”

Now it does seem to me that a philosopher of
history should not forget history. Perhaps a little

more history and a little less philosophy would do no

harm. And it seems to me furthermore that the

greatest expert on history is the Catholic Church.

She doesn’t have to read history. She lives history.

She makes history. She doesn’t have to dig it out

of some crumbling tome in a musty library. She

digs it out of her memory. She has the tomes indeed,

and the library. The schoolboy who had a jumble of

history and of physics in his head, confounding

“Vatican” with “vacuum”, produced the boner: “A

vacuum is a great empty space where the pope

lives.” The Vatican is not empty and if it were,

the pope couldn’t fill it. It contains the greatest

library in existence, greatest at least in the records

of what has been going on in this ever changing

world for the last two thousand years. But if the

pope wishes to learn whether Dawson and Rausch-

ning are right when they say there never was a time

like this, he doesn’t have to go poking into those

folios, those incunabula, those parchment manu-

scripts. All he has to do is remember. What the

Church remembers he remembers. She remembers

because she has seen and heard. He remembers be-

cause he has inherited the traditions and memories

of the Church. Her experience has been passed on

to him like a castle or an estate or a family tradition

that is passed from father to son by inheritance for

hundreds of years.

Only two years ago when Spain was devastated



WHY ARE YE FEARFUL, O YE OF LITTLE FAITH ? 7

and unnatural atrocities were done that had not

been done in the memory of living men, the horri-

fied world said “such savagery is unprecedented.”

But the pope, and I may now say all who have in-

herited with him the Catholic tradition and the

Catholic memory, might well have replied : “Savage

indeed, but not hitherto unknown. Have you for-

gotten that more than a thousand years ago Spain

was overrun by the Moors and her children afflicted

with such tortures as only Moslems could de-

vise? Have you forgotten, or did you never know,

that before the Moors the Visigoths ravaged Spain

and France? Even today in such border towns as

Carcassonne and Arles and Avignon the inhabitants

will tell you of what happened to their Christian

ancestors in the Visigoth invasion, and show you

evidences of barbaric cruelties the like of which

cannot be surpassed today.”

As in Spain, so in Hungary, conquered and

occupied for centuries by the fanatical followers of

Mohammed. Across the Mediterranean in Egypt

and Algeria and Tunisia you may follow the march

of the terrible Turk who in the seventh century did

indeed destroy a civilization, devastate a continent,

and strike such a blow at the Church of North

Africa that it has never recovered.

But the high water mark of the Moslem in-

vasion is not Algiers or Tripoli, or Gibraltar or To-

ledo, but far north in France. During the World

War, while men were talking about the Battle of

the Marne and about Joffre and Foch, we Catholics

were saying “How curious ! A Battle at the Marne
once more. But the Battle of the Marne was that

in the seventh century when Charles Martel drove



8 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

back the Mohammedan hordes and saved the con-

tinent of Europe from a fate like that of Asia,

heathenism, paganism, Mohammedanism, stagna-

tion, decay, the death and burial of a civilization.”

Also in the World War when men spoke of

“The Huns”, we said Huns? Hum? These are not
the original genuine Huns. We remember the Huns
under Attila, the Scourge of God who boasted that

the grass never grew again where the hoofs of his

horse had trod—Attila, who came from the borders
of Tatary and cut a swath a thousand miles wide

and two thousand miles long, drenching all the con-

quered lands with the blood of uncountable victims.

That was a Hun, a “savage king of still more savage

men,” hundreds of thousands of them if not mil-

lions, as fiendishly cruel as the Iroquois or the Sioux,

but with a knowledge of organization and military

strategy such as the wild Indians never learned.

With Attila the Hun, Alaric the Goth who cap-

tured Rome and sacked it, giving over the metropolis

of Greco-Roman civilization for fourteen days to

his rapacious bloodthirsty lust-maddened followers.

“Sack of Rome”? Do I say Sack of Rome? I once

attempted to count the times Rome has been sacked,

beginning with the Gauls in the fourth century be-

fore Christ and ending with the sack in 1527. I

gave it up. I don’t know how often Rome has been

pillaged, battered, burned, destroyed. Ask the anti-

quarians. But this I know: Every one of those

catastrophes, those inundations of savages, those

carnivals of rape and pillage and slaughter, has left

its mark in the memory of the Church. She was

there. She saw it. She suffered it. She needs not

read a book. It is graven with a pen of iron on the

fleshly tablets of her heart. That and a hundred



WHY ARE YE FEARFUL, 0 YE OF LITTLE FAITH? 9

similar catastrophes that have happened to Church

and State, to religion and to society, she remembers.

Ours is the Universal Church. Her experiences are

not limited to Rome, to the Italian or the Iberian

peninsula, or to the coasts of the Mediterranean, or

to France or Hungary. She is the Mother of all

European peoples; she cannot forget the calamities

that overwhelmed the Austrians, the Armenians, the

Bulgarians, the Poles who have been at various

times slaughtered by millions, as men slaughter

rabbits in Australia, as if men were indeed vermin.

She remembers not alone the cruelty of heathen to

Christian, but of Christian to Christian; as in the

case of the Irish who had scarcely recovered from

the invasion of the heathen Danes when they were

afflicted by the invasion of the Anglo-Saxon Chris-

tians, and commenced their martyrdom of seven cen-

turies.

In the heart of Asia, also, the Church ventured

as early as the seventh century. She witnessed, and

in her own flesh and blood experienced, the devas-

tating westward sweep of Tamerlane and Genghis

Khan in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Those incredible Mongolians are called semi-civi-

lized, because they were masters of the art and craft

of war, as skillful perhaps as Alexander or Napo-

leon or Caesar; but they were as cruel as raw

savages. Legends have come down to us of their

erecting pyramids, high as those of Egypt, of the

skulls and bones of their victims.

All this, I say, the Church remembers, and

with the Church the pope and all Catholics who are,

as all should be, history-minded. All this and a

thousand other instances of what seemed irreparable

disaster. To mention but one more, there were the



10 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

wars of religion in the sixteenth century, when

fifteen millions died in Germany alone in battle or

of famine or pestilence.

So, when a man like Rauschning—and dozens
who copy him—talk about the imminence of Nihil-
ism, or when more sober-minded, less alarmist

scholars like Dawson, say: “this crisis is different,

essentially different,” we say “Different? Is any-

thing different?” When they say, “Unless this war

ends as we hope and pray, with victory for the side

we favor, civilization and religion will be set back

a thousand years, if not obliterated once and for all,”

we say “perhaps,” but we must be permitted a little

dose of doubt about the annihilation of our Church

and of the civilization that She created. The Church

has been here a long time, and she is due to remain

a longer time. “I am with you all days,” said Her

Divine Founder, “unto the end of the world”. We
often call the Church the Bark of Peter. When a

storm on the Lake of Genesareth threatened to

engulf the Bark of Peter and the disciples in alarm

cried “Lord save us, we perish”; the Master awoke

from sleep, or from seeming sleep, and asked with

divine calm, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little

faith?”

I dare say that Saint Peter never forgot

that mild rebuke. His faith did not waver again.

Neither does that of his successor, the present

Peter—the Pope. The Holy Father does not grow
hysterical. He does not pace up and down the cor-

ridors of the Vatican, crying “Woe! All is lost! this

is the most serious crisis ever known; there never

was a time like this!” Not that he is apathetic; not

that he blinds his eyes to the genuine gravity of

the situation. He is awake, and alert. He is mod-



WHY ARE YE FEARFUL, O YE OF LITTLE FAITH ? 11

erately alarmed. But if he does not minimize the

evil, neither does he magnify it. He is not only the

successor of Peter; he is vicegerent of Christ. As

such he has taken on some of the calm, the interior

peace, the mental balance, the emotional equilibrium

of his Master. I suggest that we profit by his ex-

ample.



WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Address delivered on October 13, 1940

“What’s It All About?” is one of those vague

indefinite expressions that may mean anything,

everything, nothing. At present it happens to be a

slang phrase, flung around indiscriminately, some-

times making sense, sometimes nonsense. I have

heard an impatient listener at a violin recital say of

an incompetent performer, who was floundering

around in a Beethoven Sonata, “He doesn’t know

what it’s all about.” A spectator at a newsreel of a
congressman attempting clumsily to defend some

dubious policy of his party said in a stage whisper,

“He doesn’t know what it is all about.” Listening

to three men of national reputation in a debate on

the Philippine question I felt that not any of them

knew what it was all about. There appeared in the

papers a picture of the great great great grandson of

Paul Revere pulling the string to unveil a statue of

his famous ancestor. The bashful fellow was caught

by the camera with such a timid little smile on his

face that he seemed about to cry. “The poor child

doesn’t know what it’s all about,” said a dear kind

lady. But perhaps, at that, the boy knew as much

about the purpose of the American Revolution as

some of the big wigs on the platform, who in the

interests of political partisanship were ready to

nullify the achievement of Paul Revere.

The best known and best liked playwright and

comedian of the American stage fifteen or twenty

years ago, after dancing and singing and waving a

flag all evening would answer a curtain call with a

monologue commencing “Life is a funny proposition



WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? 13

after all; we’re here today and away tomorrow,”

meaning not we’re on Broadway today and on the

road tomorrow, “but we’re alive today and dead to-

morrow.” It was a semi-serious piece, an attempt

to puzzle out an answer to the question “What’s It

All About?” a sort of Broadway version of Shakes-

peare’s Seven Ages of Man, from the infant, “mew-

ling in the nurse’s arms,” to the “lean and slippered

pantaloon” ending “this strange eventful history” of

human life in “second childishness and mere obliv-

ion.”

“Strange, eventful history” says Shakespeare.

The history of man on this planet puzzles, fascinates,

baffles dramatists, poets, philosophers, all manner

of thinkers, profound and superficial, religious and

irreligious; it thrills the idealists, angers the pessi-

mists, and seems to nauseate the cynics. Shakespeare

returns to it again and again both in his comedies

and his tragedies. Whether he writes of country

buskins like Bottom in “hempen homespun” upon

whom the fairies, that is to say the fates, play prac-

tical jokes, or of disgruntled amateur philosophers

like Hamlet, brooding over “the oppressor’s wrong,

the proud man’s contumely” and all the other griev-

ances listed in that familiar soliloquy; whether he

treats of a poltroon like Falstaff or of a real soldier

“seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s

mouth”; whether of the big blackamoor, honest,

stupid, tragic, pathetic Othello, or of some wily devil

like lago or Richard, masquerading in human form,

Shakespeare is forever occupied with nothing else

but that formidable question, “What’s It All

About?” Man is born, grows, matures, works, plays,

sins, suffers, marries, procreates, rejoices, grieves,

sickens, dies. Sometimes he seems like a god upon



14 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

the earth, or an angel; again, as King David says,

“he is compared with senseless beasts and made like

to them.” Sometimes he seems to be master of his

fate, dictator of his destiny, a lord of all creation,

but again he is heard complaining like Gloucester in

King Lear, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the

gods; they kill us for their sport.” Beast or angel,

man or devil, master or slave, victor or victim, he

struts his brief hour upon the stage of life, and

passes off
;
he has his entrance and his exit.

Looking upon human life as spectators at some

bewildering play, men ask “What does it mean?

What can it mean? What’s it all about?” All litera-

ture, art, music, poetry, drama and the better sort

of Action—fiction which is not fiction but truth—are
really nothing but an attempt to answer these ques-

tions. “What’s it all about?” asks Shakespeare, and

all that he writes—comedies, histories, tragedies

—

are his answer. Dramatists and philosophers, Sopho-

cles and Socrates, and Seneca and Epictetus, Marcus

Aurelius, and ten thousand thinkers in their tradi-

tion, aim to interpret human life, that is to say

“What’s It All About?” Hendrik Ibsen, Eugene

O’Neill, Thomas Hardy, Schopenhauer, Voltaire,

Mark Twain (the later Mark Twain, humorist

turned pessimist, the Mark Twain who wrote The

Mysterious Stranger), Aldous Huxley, Hector Bo-

litho, author of Twelve Against the Gods, Ernest

Haeckel, curious combination charlatan and scien-

tist, author of The Riddle of the Universe, Robert G.

Ingersoll, probably honest but bombastic and blas-

phemous—But why prolong the interminable cata-
logue? All literature in prose and verse, all art and

drama and the more ambitious kind of music, Bach,

Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, are all concerned with



WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? 16

that seemingly flippant question “What’s It All

About?” Aristotle said, twenty four hundred years

ago, that man is born with an insatiable desire to

know. What he wants to know is the meaning of

life, and what there is, if anything, after this life,

and what is the connection between this life and

the other. It’s a far cry from Aristotle to George M.

Cohan, but the Yankee Doodle Boy who would sud-

denly swing into the monologue “Life is a funny

proposition after all,” was, I suppose, trying to con-

vey to the rather blase Broadway audiences, some-

thing of what Aristotle tried to tell the Greeks on

the Areopagus in Athens.

All thinkers, great and small, since the birth

of thought have pondered the questions “What is

Man?” and “What is Life?” “Is this the Only Life?

If there is no other, what can be the purpose of

this? If life is, as some one has said, a flash of light

between two eternities of darkness, if we emerge out

of one black void and disappear into another, what’s

it all about?”

St. Paul, of course, like all profound thinkers

—

he indeed being the most profound of them all—says
that if this were all there is of life Christians should

be the “most miserable of men.” Undoubtedly : The

higher our hopes, the deeper our despair. But all

other men would be miserable too. No man can be

satisfied with this painful thing we call life. With

his hopes and desires and anticipations and expecta-

tions it would be infernal torture to man to be told

that what he suffers, he suffers to no purpose.

Anatole France, who concealed the deep cyni-

cism of a: Schopenhauer under the shallow flippancy

of a Voltaire, said “L’Univers est enrage,” “the uni-

verse is mad.” The word “enrage” carries, I believe.



16 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

the connotation of rabid. The French use it of a

mad dog. Apparently then, according to Anatole

France, the whole world and all men and women in

it are suffering like a dog with rabies. We are all
mad—not only with ambition, greed, lust, the lust of
the flesh or blood lust, but mad especially with hallu-

cinations of grandeur. We think there is something
else but there isn’t. “Man who elevated himself to

the skies,” says Ernest Haeckel, “is found to be only

a placental mammal, of no more importance in the

universe than the microscopic infusoria,” the bugs

that move blindly in the slime under the murky

waters of a stagnant pond. Haeckel was a Darwin-

ian extremist and I take his cynical utterance to be

the absolute ultimate of the animal theory of man.

But man will not accept any theory of mater-

ialism and animalism offered him in explanation of

himself and of his life in this world. Man knows

that he is man, no matter what the biologists say.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Hora-

tio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says

Hamlet. And there are more things in the heart

and soul of man than are named and numbered, de-

scribed, defined, analyzed and synthesized, in the

works of Darwin and Haeckel and Freud. The evo-

lutionists go to the animals to learn about man. Why

not go to man to learn about man? Scientists—of
the materialistic stripe—are so intent upon fossils,
fish, serpents, simians, alleged antecedents of man,

that they have no eyes for man himself. “I sought

Thee and I found Thee not because I sought Thee

without; again I sought Thee and found Thee be-

cause I sought Thee within,” says St. Augustine,

speaking of God. These modern materialists are so

sure there is no God that they don’t even look for



WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? 17

Him, without or within. But they do look for man,

and some one should convey to them the elementary

information that the place to look for man is in man,

not in rocks, or pools of slime, not in the depths of

the sea or the heart of the jungle; not in laboratories

or test tubes, not in vats of saline solution; not in

protoplasm, atoms, molecules, ions, electrons—but in
man.

They themselves insist that man has been in the

making for countless ages, and that all the forces

in the universe have been in labor to produce man.

Very well then, why not look at the finished pro-

duct? Don’t ask the rocks, don’t ask the amoeba,

don’t ask the tadpole, or the walrus, or the wolf, or

the orang outang. Ask the Man: What are you?

What do you make of yourself?

And man will tell them. I don’t mean merely

man the philosopher, or man the theologian. I would

not send skeptical enquirers to Aristotle or Imman-

uel Kant or Spinoza or Thomas Aquinas. These were

professional philosophers; scientists are suspicious

of philosophers—suspicious and perhaps jealous. So
jealous that they are forever trespassing out of their

own field of science into the field of philosophy.

But if not to philosophers, why not to the

prophets, the seers, the poets ? These dig their

material out of the heart of man. There is David

and Solomon, and the writer of Job, and Isaias and

John the Divine, and Paul and Augustine and a

Kempis and Dante and Shakespeare (there is ten

thousand times more knowledge of man in Shakes-

peare than in Immanuel Kant) and Wordsworth and

Coleridge and Conrad and Masefield.

Above all, first of all, if the materialists could

overcome their prejudices, their narrow notion that



18 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

man is to be studied in the field and the laboratory

but not in his own heart, I would send them to our

Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. “He knew what was

in man and needed not that any man should tell

him.”

The poets and prophets know man because like

the pope in Browning’s The Ring and the Book (a

superb revelation, by the way, of human nature)

they “have studied many hearts beginning with their

own.” Ask them and they will answer: “We don’t

know all about man: the subject is vast, profound,

illimitable. Man is a world in himself
;
to study man

is to study the world : He is a- combination of all the

forces that have been at work in this mysterious uni-

verse since the dawn of time; to understand him

would be to know the universe. We don’t know man
thoroughly. But we do know enough about man to

laugh at the ridiculous and obscene idea that man is

only a highly organized intricately constructed ani-

mal. If that were all, man could be as content as a

cow; no more introspective than a hippopotamus

soaking at his ease in the tepid waters of a tropical

stream
;
if he were only an animal, he would experi-

ence no more remorse for his sins than a tiger that

has killed a gazelle. If he were only an animal, that

question
—

“What’s It All About?”—would not so
much as occur to him. The fact that he asks it and

cannot rest content until he answers it is the best

of evidence that there is something in his nature,

something in the depths of his being that goads him

like a gadfly, that makes him discontent with what

he has and what he sees, that tells him he was not

born to die
;
something that not only stings him and

tortures him but that lifts him up to ecstasy, that

enables him to fare forth—in the body or out of the



WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT ? 19

body, he knows not—^beyond the flammantia moenia
mundi, the flaming ramparts and bastions that mark

the edge of this world
;
something that tells him that

he does not belong to this world but to another, and

that his life on this planet is no more like the real

life he is to live than the life of the embryo in the

dark narrow confines of the womb is like life in the

sunshine under the wide sky, surrounded on all sides

by the wide horizon, surrounded but not confined

because that wide horizon expands forever and for-

ever as he approaches.

And so we come upon the answer to the question

with which we commenced, “What Is It All About?”

Why all these torturing thoughts at the roots of the
mind of man? Why all these longings and expecta-

tions of a life beyond life ? Why these “unsearchable

groanings of man’s heart” ? There must be meaning

in the incessant repetition of the drama of life, the

drama that neither Sophocles nor Shakespeare could

write, try as they would. And what is that mean-

ing? Why do we labor and strive and grieve and
struggle? Why are we so tempted? Why do we
sin? When we sin, why can we not be happy? Why
do we repent and suffer agonies of remorse? These

and a thousand more questions arising in the human

soul are the material of which all literature, poetry,

drama, fiction (fiction I have said which if it be

literature is not fiction), all art and music, are com-

posed. Religion deals with these questions and an-

swers them. All human experiences, sufferings,

joys, problems—^though not the essential substance
of religion—are taken into account by religion. The
answer given by religion corroborates the answer

given by literature and art and philosophy.

This life is not so much life as a prelude to life.



20 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

If there were no other life but this, this life would be

horrible, inexplicable, indefensible, inexcusable. The

only explanation and justification of this life is the

other life. This life without the other would be like

one hemisphere without the other. This hemisphere

is in the dark, the other in the light. To die is not

to go from darkness to deeper darkness, but from

darkness to light. “Out of the shadows and the

images into the light.”

“What then, finally, is this life all about?” It’s

about the other life, the true life, immortal life.



WHY MUST THE INNOCENT SUFFER?
Address delivered on October 20, 1940

In religion, as in all other departments of hu-

man life, complete intellectual honesty is indispen-

sable. There is scarcely any worse sin than refusal

to see and to confess the truth. So, in considering

the question which concerns us today, “Why Must

the Innocent Suffer?” we would best commence by

admitting that we do not know. That is to say, we

do not know, if to know means to comprehend. “We

know in part, and we prophesy in part” (I Cor. 13:

9), says St. Paul ; and he adds, “We see now through

a glass in a dark manner” (I Cor. 13:12). We see
not as one looking at a physical object in full sun-

light, but like one groping in gloom. If anyone tells

you that to him the mysteries of religion are as plain

as A.B.C. you may put him down as a charlatan.

Once in my life I heard a. man say “Predestination

is no mystery to me.” “Wonderful,” said I, “you are

more privileged than St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Aug-

ustine, or St. Paul. You must be a prophet

—

more than a prophet.”

In the Catholic religion, at least, mystery is rec-

ognized and emphasized. “What is a mystery?” asks

the Catechism, and the answer is given, “A mystery

is a truth that we cannot fully understand.” That

question and answer should appear in catechisms of

science as well as of religion. There is as much

mystery in a hen’s egg as in the Holy Trinity, said

Huxley. Whether he said it with malice or with

reverence, it is true. Mystery is mystery. One mys-

tery is no more a mystery than another. If you

don’t comprehend, you don’t comprehend. The poet

said that if he understood a flower in the crannied



22 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

wall, he would understand God. Religion has no

monopoly of mystery. The whole universe is cram-

med with mystery. One of the most highly reputed

scientists of our day wrote a volume which he en-

titled This Mysterious Universe. So, if a scientist

declares that he will not accept religion because he

refuses to recognize mystery, you may also put him

down as a, charlatan. There are as many scientific

charlatans as theological charlatans, if not more.

So much by way of warning to those who ex-

pect a too precise answer to the question, “Why must

the innocent suffer?” So much in defense of anyone

who attempts some sort of answer. The greatest

intellect of the last nineteen hundred years, St. Aug-

ustine, was held back from the Catholic Faith in his

early days because, for one reason, he demanded, as

one editor of the Confessions says, “a trenchant un-

compromising answer” to his questions
—

“such an

answer as young men love.” Young or old, we all like

to have unqualified answers to our questions, abso-

lutely clear solutions of our problems. We feel balk-
ed and frustrated if we don’t get them. But we have

no right to expect them. We live in a world of shad-
ows and images. Plato said so twenty three hundred

years ago, and another man of genius, not much

short of Plato, Cardinal Newman, said that leaving

this life for the next we pass “out of shadows and

images into the light.” Then and not until then

shall we see face to face and know as we are known.

To come to the question : Why must good peo-

ple who have never done any one harm suffer? Es-

pecially why must they suffer at the hands of the

wicked? “Christ,” we say, “is on the cross and

Herod on the throne.” There was blood on that

throne, as on the Cross, but the blood on Herod’s



WHY MUST THE INNOCENT SUFFER? 23

throne was other men’s blood
;
the blood on the Cross

of Christ was His own. Why does the man who spills
the blood of others sit in comfort and honor, sur-

rounded by fawning courtiers, while the Man who

pours out His blood for His brethren hangs in agony

and disgrace, surrounded by murderers and blas-

phemers? That’s the question that confronts us.

To answer it we should have to dig down deep to the

roots of reason, and mount to the heights of revela-

tion. Even then we shall not find the trenchant un-

compromising answer that St. Augustine sought.

But one thing we do know : The Crucifixion of

Our Lord is not only a fact but a symbol. From the

day of that supreme tragedy until now the word

“cross” has been used as a synonym for pain, phy-

sical and mental, for anguish of soul, for disappoint-

ment, shame, poverty, disgrace, dejection, despond-

ency, the endurance of injustice, and, in brief, for

suffering of every sort. Our Saviour said, “If any

man will come after me ... let him take up his

cross, and follow me” {Matt. 16:24). “Where I am,

there also shall my minister be” {John 12:26).
“Where I am,” He says. But He was nailed to the

Cross. “Come down,” said the scoffers, “Save Thy-

self.” “Save Thyself and us,” said the impenitent

thief. But He came not down. He died on the Cross.

His disciples, therefore, must be nailed to the cross,

perhaps remain upon it and die upon it. The dis-

ciple is not above the Master.

Christians are not alone in enduring the cross.

Suffering is ubiquitous, perpetual, inevitable. In

ancient days, as in our own, armies have swept

across the face of the earth, making a shambles of

one country after another and deliberately attempt-

ing to annihilate entire races and whole populations.



24 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

When a Persian or a Macedonian or a Roman con-

queror had won a victory, the vanquished were led

away to be enslaved or slaughtered. Some few of

them were guilty (if it be a guilty thing to defend

one’s own land), but for the most part they were

poor innocent peasants, serfs, workingmen, no more

responsible for the calamity that befell them than

the French farmer, the Czecho-Slovakian mill work-

er, the Norwegian fisherman, the Hollander who

grew tulips, milked the cows, made butter and

cheese, was responsible for Hitler. Peasants don’t

make wars. Politicians make wars. The politicians

live, the peasants die. The guilty survive, the inno-

cent perish.

Of old, victors in war led their victims captive,

chained them in dungeons, left them to starve, or

dragged them out to be devoured by beasts in the

amphitheatre, to make a holiday for the mob. Now-

adays, statesmen (save the mark!), “statesmen” at-

tempt to do away with vanquished peoples by econ-

omic strangulation. Then statesmen on the other

side turn the tables and wreak dire vengeance on the

conquerors. The leaders of both peoples. Fuehrers,

Duces, Generals, strut around, proudly laden with

medals, accept the idolatrous worship of the people,

deliver truculent speeches, live in palaces, feed on

the fat of the land. When they die, statues are erec-

ted to them. Around the statues crowds gather to

listen to panegyrics, to scatter flowers, to shout and

to sing, and to wish that another such conqueror

might arise to lead them again to the battlefield for

slaughter, as their fathers and grandfathers and

forebears back to the beginning of history were led

forth to slaughter.

For hundreds of years before William Wilber-



WHY MUST THE INNOCENT SUFFER? 25

force and Abraham Lincoln, the poor black man in

the jungles of Africa who hadn’t so much as known

the existence of the white man and the white man’s

civilization (what irony there can be in that phrase

“white man’s civilization”) were hunted down,

whipped in droves like cattle from the forests to the

sea, crowded into the stinking holds of slave ships,

transported to another continent, sold like cattle,

whipped as even cattle were not whipped. How

much blood was spilled, what rivers of tears flowed,

what poor simple hearts were broken, who can say,

except perhaps the angels who record such things?

White men too, guilty of no worse crime than

that of criticizing a corrupt government, or com-

plaining of a tyrant, were taken from their homes,

condemned with swift terrible injustice to the gal-

leys, chained to an oar, whipped, clubbed, bruised,

compelled to labor in blood and sweat, and perhaps,

in the midst of battle, left to drown like rats in the

sinking hulk.

Others, a whole race of them, guilty of no crime

except that of being born of a despised blood, were

driven under the lash to carry back-breaking bur-

dens, to impossible tasks, building prodigious monu-

ments to a king gone mad with vanity who feared

that if there were no pyramid over his bones some-

one a thousand or ten thousand years later might

forget that he was the illustrious Ptolemy or the

ineffable Pharaoh.

But why attempt a comprehensive catalogue of

the forms and varieties of torture inflicted upon the

innocent by the wicked? Let these few specimens

suffice in place of an encyclopedia of inhumanity.

But just one flnal word about man’s suffering

in our own day. We flatter ourselves that the world



26 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

has grown more humane since the days of Darius,

king of the Medes and Persians, or of Attila or of

Tamerlane and Ghengis Khan. But I am not so

certain of it. Modern war with its mechanical con-

trivances for inflicting death at wholesale, and not

only death—which might be a boon—^but disflgure-
ment, blinding, burning out the lungs with poison

gas, or leaving a victim to grope about maimed

for the rest of his days, or stretching him flat on his

back with paralysis; this modern war is perhaps

more cruel than the torture invented by fiendish

Oriental despots in ancient days, or than the medie-

val rack and thumbscrew. Joan of Arc and Savon-

arola, I think, would have preferred burning alive

rather than choking and agonizing with mustard

gas. Certaan authors of books with sadistic or

ghoulish intent have dug into ancient records and

have written histories of what our Federal Consti-

tution calls “cruel and unusual punishments,” but I

cannot help wondering what the future historians

will make of bombs dropped from the sky upon

dwelling houses, churches, hospitals, kindergartens

;

or flame throwers on the field of battle, of torpedoes

shot at merchant vessels, of mustard gas and per-

haps of some still more ghastly means of torture

newly invented to be inflicted upon people who had

no say about the war and who were no more respon-

sible for what England and France did to Germany,

or what Germany has done to England and France,

than they were responsible for the eruption of a

volcano on the moon.

But now, after this hurried and inadequate

resume of some of the sufferings of the innocent be-

cause of the sins of the guilty, comes the question

:

“Why does not the Infinite Almighty God intervene?



WHY MUST THE INNOCENT SUFFER? 27

Is God indifferent? Is He a sphinx? A sphinx that
hasn’t lifted an eyebrow or moved a muscle in three

thousand years, even though the white sands all

about him have been sprinkled, drenched, saturated

with human blood a hundred times over?

In the Old Testament we find the Psalmist

taunting the heathen with the helplessness of their

idols: “They have eyes and see not, ears and hear

not : they have mouths and speak not.” But it would

seem that the heathen retorted that the God of

David was equally impotent, and with some appar-

ent reason, for the prophet king cries out

:

God of vengeance, Lord,

0 God of vengeance, shine forth!
Arise, judge of the earth.

Render requital to the proud!

‘^How long, 0 Lord, shall the wicked

—

How long shall the wicked exult?
They babble, they speak haughtily.

All the workers of iniquity boast of themselves;

They trample, 0 Lord, on thy people
And afflict thine inheritance;
They slay the widow and the stranger.
And murder the fatherless.
And they say: ‘The Lord sees it not;
The God of Jacob regards it not’.”

But David has his answer to those who think

God blind and deaf and dumb and helpless:

“Ye fools; when will ye be wise?
He that fixed the ear, shall he not hear ?
He that formed the eye, shall he not see ?
He that gives sense to the nations,

shall he not reprove ?

He that teaches men knowledge—

?

The Lord knows the thoughts of men.
That they are but as a breath . . .

“They assail the life of the righteous

And condemn innocent blood.
But the Lord shall be my high tower.
And my God the rock of my refuge.
He will bring down on them their own iniquity
And by their own wickedness cut them off.
He shall cut them off, the Lord our God.”



28 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

Sometimes, as a matter of fact, God did punish

the tyrant swiftly and visibly. In Chapter seven of

the second book of Machabees we may read—if our
squeamish stomachs can stand it—the detailed ac-
count of the tortures inflicted upon the seven broth-

ers and their valiant mother by the incredible mon-

ster Antiochus. But if we go on to the second next

chapter, we And described in equal detail the even

more repulsive account of what happened to Anti-

ochus. But, as St. Paul says, “I spare you.”

Once again the question of unbelievers and of

impatient believers, is “Why doesn’t God always in-

tervene?” “I am willing,” said Adolf Hitler to Her-

mann Rauschning, “to send a million or two million

young Germans to their death for my purposes.” But

when the madman picks up a pen to sign the docu-

ment, why doesn’t God paralyze his hand or strike

him dead? When Pius VII excommunicated Napol-

eon Bonaparte, the great conquerer is alleged to

have said, “Does he think that excommunication will

make the muskets drop from the hands of my sol-

diers?” We used to be told when we were boys in
school that the muskets did drop. But if a docu-

ment from the pen of a pope stopped Napoleon,

would not a thought in the mind of God stop Hitler ?

So it goes: Why? And why? And why?

Remember, I have not promised a perfect ans-

wer. “Who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or

who hath been his counsellor?” {Rom. 11:34), ex-

claims the patriarch Job. Certainly this poor sin-

ner makes no such claim. But I can make a guess.

Take it for what it is worth. God does not strike

Hitler dead for the same reason I suppose that he

does not strike you or me dead if we sin or plan a

sin. Every mortal sin is outrage to God, but God



WHY MUST THE INNOCENT SUFFER? 29

does not punish the outrage with instant death and

hell. “Shall we call down fire from heaven?” said

James and John, the “Sons of Thunder.” “You

know not of what spirit you are,” was the reply of

the gentle Jesus. If all who displease God were

dealt with summarily, the earth would be depopulat-

ed. When the sinner opens his mouth to lie or to

slander or blaspheme, God does not strike him dumb.

When a tempter follows an innocent maiden with

lecherous eyes and more lecherous heart, God does

not strike him blind and slay him. When Judas

went out of the supper room to complete his treach-

erous plans with the murderers of Jesus, God did not

strike him dead at the threshold. It is not God’s way.

He is a long-suffering God, plenteous in mercy. He

wills not the death of the sinner. And He is Al-

mighty : He can produce good out of evil. No man

can say how much God can and will endure before

He strikes. If He were to strike at all, we should

probably think He strikes too often and with too

small provocation—especially if He should strike us.
God could indeed prevent even the thought of

sin, but only on condition that He take away our

free will. Then we should be irresponsible animals

or machines in human shape. God seems to think

it better that we be free even if freedom is danger-

ous, than that we should be beasts or mere automata.

Secondly, it is a, matter of faith that physical

evils are not always calamities. “Be not afraid of

them who kill the body,” says our Lord, “and after

that have no more that they can do” {Luke 12:4).

They that die innocently achieve happiness. They

achieve it all the more swiftly in proportion to the

agony they endure. If they are conscious of their

union with Christ as members of His Mystical Body,



30 CEUCIAL QUESTIONS

they may offer their sufferings in union with His;

become in effect martyrs and so help in the moral

and spiritual progress of the race.

Finally, be it said, this is not defeatism. Ours

is not a defeatist religion. We speak much of the
Cross. But the Cross is not all. The Divine Victim

slain on Calvary did not remain in the grave. His

death was not the end. There was the Resurrection.

It is our religion that if we suffer with Him we shall

be glorified with Him. If that be not sufficient

answer to the question, “Why do the innocent suf-

fer?”, I am afraid that those of us who see no fur-

ther will have to wait until the Eternal Light dawns.



"WHERE IS NOW THY GOD?"
Address delivered on October 27, 1940

That question “Where Is Now Thy God?” was

first asked of the Jews by idolatrous heathen. It in-

dicated an exceedingly primitive mentality. The

heathen said in effect: We have gods that can be
seen. The God of Israel cannot be seen. Where is

your God ? Again and again that taunt was flung at

the Hebrews by Philistines, Moabites, Assyrians,

Babylonians, and the dozen other idolatrous peoples

who surrounded them, hemmed them in, threatened

them, fought them, persecuted, exiled them, but most

of all, worst of all, tempted them to abandon the in-

visible Jehovah and accept Moloch or Baal, Isis,

Osiris, Merodach.

But the answer to the heathen came swift and

sure from the mouth of those who had learned the

Law. “God cannot be seen by mortal eyes. No man

hath seen God at any time. God is no stick or stone.

God is no image of baked clay. You cannot pick up

a handful of mud out of the bed of the Nile or the

Tigris or the Jordan, fashion it with your hands, put

it in a kiln like any piece of pottery and bring it out

a god. Your gods—^your heathen gods—are the
work of the hands of man; they are not God at all.

Man does not make God. God makes man.”

Those early Jews knew their Bible as modern

Christians know their Catechism. They had learned

in the synagogue what Moses had been taught on

Mount Sinai, and what the prophets had retold in

phrases ever varying but ever the same, sometimes

in solemn majestic utterance, sometimes in familiar

speech more adapted to the mental level and the



32 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

taste of simple people. In Isaias we find this mag-

nificent passage, “To whom then have you likened
God? or what image will you make for him? Hath

the workman cast a graven statue? or hath the

goldsmith formed it with gold, or the silversmith

with plates of silver ... Do you not know? hath it

not been heard? hath it not been told you from the

beginning? have you not understood the foundations

of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the globe of

the earth ... he that stretcheth out the heavens as

nothing, and spreadeth them as a tent to dwell in.

He that bringeth the searchers of secrets to noth-

ing, that hath made the judges of the earth as van-

ity .. . To whom have ye likened me, or made me

equal, saith the Holy One? Lift up your eyes on

high, and see who hath created these things . . .

Knowest thou not, or hast thou not heard ? the Lord

is the everlasting God, who hath created the ends

of the earth: he shall not faint, nor labour, neither

is there any searching out of his wisdom” (Isaias

41 :18-28 ).

There are a dozen passages like that in Isaias,

and the temptation is to continue with his superb

descriptions of the One True God. But Isaias was a

versatile and resourceful orator. He did not always

speak in stately measures. A master of many moods
he switches suddenly from the majestic dignity

of a Demosthenes or a Cicero to the caustic irony of

a Tertullian or a Savonarola, as he ridicules the

manufactured gods of the heathen

:

“The smith hath wrought with his file, with

coals, and with hammers he hath formed it ... .

The carpenter hath stretched out his rule, he hath

formed it with a plane: he hath made it with cor-

ners, and hath fashioned it round with the compass

:



“WHERE NOW IS THY GOD' 33

and he hath made the image of a man as it were a

beautiful man dwelling in a house. He hath cut

down cedars, taken the holm, and the oak that stood

among the trees of the forest: he hath planted the

pine tree, which the rain hath, nourished. And it

hath served men for fuel: he took thereof, and

warmed himself : and he kindled it, and baked

bread : but of the rest he made a god, and adored it

:

he made a graven thing, and bowed down before it.

Part of it he burnt with fire, and with part of it he

dressed his meat .... But the residue thereof he

made a god, and a graven thing for himself: he

boweth down before it, and adoreth it, and prayeth

unto it, saying: Deliver me, for thou art my God”

asams 44:12-17).

It is a curious fact—curious and pathetic

—

that seven hundred years later the apostle Paul

was obliged to tell the highly cultured sophisticated

Athenians what Isaias had told the primitive bar-

baric heathen: “God, who made the world, and all

things therein
;
he, being Lord of heaven and earth,

dwelleth not in temples made with hands ; Neither is

he served with men’s hands, as though he needed

any thing
;
seeing it is he who giveth to all life, and

breath, and all things ; . . . For in him we live, and

move and are . . . Being therefore the offspring of

God, we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto

gold, or silver, or stone, the graving of art, and de-

vice of man” {Acts 17:24-29).

Stranger still, some four hundred years after

St. Paul we find St. Augustine, who in his youth had

fallen under the influence of the Manichees who had

brought to Italy and North Africa the superstitions

of Persia, confessing bitterly that for a time he did

not know how to conceive of God

:



34 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

“Knowing not the true Being, I was so shaken

by quips and quiddities that I had no answer for

these silly deceivers when they asked me whether

God is limited by a bodily form? . . . My eye could
see nothing but bodies, and my mind nothing but
materialized ideas. I did not understand that God

is a spirit, who has no parts that can be measured,

whose being is not a bulk, because bulk . . . cannot be

wholly everywhere like God, who is spirit. And I

had not the least conception in what we are like

God, or whether Scripture was right in saying that

we are in the image of God.”

And again: “I marshalled before the sight of

my spirit all creation, all that we see, earth, and sea,

and air, and stars, and trees, and animals; all that

we do not see, the firmament of the sky above, and

all angels, and all spiritual things, for these also, as

if they were bodies, did my imagination arrange in

this place or in that. I pictured to myself Thy crea-

tion as one vast mass, composed of various kinds of

bodies, some real bodies, some those which I imag-

ined in place of spirits. . . . And Thee, O Lord, I con-

ceived as lapping it round and interpenetrating it

everywhere, but as infinite in every direction; as if

there were sea everywhere, and everywhere through

measureless space nothing but illimitable sea, and

within this sea a sponge, huge but yet finite; the

sponge would be pervaded through all its particles

by the infinite sea .... And I said to myself, ‘Be-

hold God, behold God’s creation’.”

Now it may be a fancy of mine, but I seem to

find in that passage “Not knowing the True Being,

I was shaken by quips and quiddities,” a prophecy

of some very highly educated heathen of our own

day. Fifteen hundred years after St. Augustine,



=WHEEE NOW IS THY GOD’ 35

certain doctors of science, having rejected the True

God, substitute in His place “quips and quiddities.”

They have invented a hundred gods: Gods of the

laboratory, gods of the test tube, gods of chemical

combinations; gods of physical force; the dynamo

god of Eugene O’Neill’s strange terrible play, fan-

tastic imaginative things that do not exist, the Life

Force god of Bernard Shaw, the elan-vital god, the

Creative Evolution god of Bergson, Time-Space, the

hyphenated god (most unintelligible of all). Men

even make god of an abstraction like Auguste

Comte’s Humanity (with a capital H) and I don’t

know whether that be not a cruder superstition than

the gods of the heathen fashioned of wood or stone

or brass. After all wood and stone and brass are

something, and an abstraction is nothing.

A generation ago laboratory workers were
breaking up the molecule; today they are smashing

the atom, looking—whether they know it or not—for
God. “I have examined many systems purporting

to be atheistic,” said James Clerk Maxwell, premier

physicist of a generation ago, “but I have always

found in them a God concealed somewhere.”

Yes, there is a God hidden away in the labora-

tory amongst the Bunsen burners and the test tubes,

out of sight beneath the atoms, the ions, the elect-

rons. “Raise the stone and thou shalt find Me.

Cleave the wood and there am I,” says God, the same

God who said “Seek and ye shall find” (In the Ox-

yrhynchus Logia, Fifth Logion). But the pathetic

fact about science is that so many scientists, with

God under their eyes do not see Him, with God at

the tips of their fingers do not touch Him. “0

Father,” said our Lord, “Thou hast hidden these

things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed



36 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

them to the little ones . . . Blessed are the eyes that

see what you see.” “God,” says the mystic Eckhart,

“is nearer to me than I am to myself: He is just

as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”

“They do not know it”—the saddest words of tongue
or pen. “He was in the world, and the world was

made by him, and the world knew him not” {John

1:10). If you ask these pitiable scientific folk

“Where is now thy God?”, they say, sometimes with

scorn but again with wistfulness, “we do not know

;

we do not even know if there be a God.” If a man

without a country is an object of commiseration, if a

Melchisedech “without father, without mother, with-

out descent” be a lonely figure in the world of the

sons of men and women, what shall we say of the

man who in answer to the question “Where is thy

God?” says, “I know not.” “Great God, I’d rather

be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn” than that

most forlorn object in all creation, the man who

knows not whence he came or whither he goes, be-

cause he has caught no glimpse of God, the Alpha

and Omega, the Beginning and the End.

But there are those who after much mental

labor, spiritual anguish, moral struggle, have won

their way through “like the Catholic man who hath

mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of

pain, sight out of blindness and purity out of stain,”

as Sidney Lanier says so beautifully. And perhaps

of all men in any generation who have mightily

won God out of knowledge and good out of pain, the

most conspicuous and the most articulate was St.

Augustine. This most learned of the Fathers of the

Church, east or west, was no stranger to books. He

spent his life with books and he wrote a whole

library of books. But seeking God he did not confine



‘WHERE NOW IS THY GOI)‘ 37

himself to pages of print; unlike the alchemists of

his day (sometimes I wonder if they were really

more foolish or superstitious than materialists of our

day) he did not lock himself in a laboratory with

fire and bellows and copper retorts to wrest from

the chemical elements and physical forces the secret

of being and of motion. Hundreds of years before

our American poet, he had followed the injunction,

“Go forth under the open sky and list to Nature’s,

teachings.” He interrogated Nature and Nature re-

plied to him. Nature does speak if we ask reverent-

ly and await her answer in silence. “I asked the

earth and it said ‘I am not He.’ I asked the sea and

the depths and the creeping things that have life and

they answered, ‘We are not thy God, look above us.’

I asked the breezes and the gales, and the whole air

with its inhabitants said to me ‘Anaximenes is in

error, I am not God.’ I asked the heaven, the sun,

the moon and the stars. ‘We too,’ said they, ‘are not

the God Whom thou seekest.’ And I said to all the
creatures that surrounded the doors of my fleshy

senses, ‘Ye have said to me of my God that ye are
not He: tell me somewhat of Him.’ And with a

great voice they exclaimed ‘It is He that hath made

us’.”

But why is it that if nature speaks to St.

Augustine she does not give an answer, that same

answer, to all who ask her? Some people look upon

the sun and moon and stars and see no sign of God.

Others, poets, saints, mystics, lose themselves in an

ecstasy because they see God in a landscape, a cloud,

a lightning flash, a wave breaking upon the shore.

A sunset to them is a glimpse of the heavenly Jeru-
salem; a path of light from the moon upon the

waters shows the way into another and lovelier



38 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

world. Even philosophers, an unimpressionable

breed, have confessed that the sight of the starry

heavens filled them with awe. But to some—^to not a
few in our own skeptical generation—^the sea and
the sun and the stars speak, if they speak at all, in

vain. Why?

St. Paul, who perhaps is somewhat more abrupt

in his speech than St. Augustine, seems to say that

all men should know God from His creation. “The

invisible things of him, from the creation of the

world, are clearly seen, being understood by the

things that are made; his eternal power also, and

divinity
;

so that they are inexcusable .... Pro-

fessing themselves to be wise, they became fools”

{Romans 1:20-22).

“Inexcusable” is a strong word. “Fools” is a

stronger word. St. Augustine is, in regard to those

who cannot see God in creation, a little more lenient.

He says that religious belief is not capable of proof,

at least to all men. But perhaps we have a solution

of the apparent contradiction of two great saints in

the words of our Saviour Himself. “Blessed are the

clean of heart : for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:S).

A clean heart is one in which there is no impurity of
any sort. Unchastity is not the only impurity. We
often speak of the sin of the flesh as if it were only

one kind of sin. But St. Paul has a long catalogue

of sins of the flesh. “The works of the flesh,” he

says, “are manifest, which are fornication, unclean-

ness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts, en-

mities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels,

dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, re-

vellings, and such like. Of the which I foretell you,

as I have foretold to you, that they who do such



‘WHERE NOW IS THY GOD 39

things shall not obtain the kingdom of God” {Gal.

5 :19-21 ).

They shall not obtain the kingdom of God. They

shall not so much as see God. We see objects in
nature with the eyes in our head. A murderer, a
lecher, an ambitious, selfish, cruel or covetous person

can, I dare say, see a sunrise or a mountain or a

waterfall quite as well as the pure in heart. But

there are eyes of the mind and soul as well as eyes

of flesh. We see God not with eyes fixed in a
socket in the skull, but with the eyes of the spirit.

These eyes of the spirit are dimmed or blinded not

only by adulteries, but by contentions, emulations,

wraths, quarrels, envies, revellings, and the rest. The

pure of heart are those who have driven not some

but all of these vices out of their heart.

And there, my friends, is, I believe, the answer

to the question that has been, during all this talk, in

the minds of many of you, the question which per-

haps you feared would not be answered or perhaps

even so much as asked. I seem to hear you say, “I

have no difficulty in seeing God in Beauty. But

Nature is not only beauty; nature is in some of its

aspects ugly, vile, horrible. Speak not to me of sun-

sets but of earthquakes, not of the glittering stars

in heaven but of cyclones, hurricanes, mass slaughter

by those calamities which the civil law calls ‘An

act of God’. How can I see God in pestilence, fam-

ine, drouth, in a conffagration started by lightning;

how can I see God in tuberculosis, in carcinoma, in

such a plague as syphilis which afflicts the innocent

no less than the guilty? If wars, with all their at-

tendant and consequent horrors, are to be laid at

the door of willful man, is God responsible for pes-

tilence and plague and all the other hideous mani-



40 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

festations of pitiless nature? When my friends,
heathen perhaps as you call them, modern heathen,

ask me after an earthquake or a tidal wave, ‘Where

is now your God T I confess that I know not what to

say.”

In reply to such a heart-rending protestation

as that what can any one say? I have explained in

the talk that preceded this in the present series that

I myself do not feel that I can solve the everlasting

problem of evil. But perhaps I may make bold to ask

if you have entirely purified your heart of all those

obstacles to spiritual sight. Ask of God a clean

heart and you will see God.

Perhaps, furthermore, I may send you to the

book of Job, that incomparable masterpiece, that un-

equalled blending of profound philosophy and lofty

poetry. The author of that book, like a composer of

sublime music, takes as his theme that very question,

“Where is now thy God?” and plays upon it like

Beethoven or Brahms in a superb symphony. I hesi-

tated to introduce Job earlier because I feared I

should quote him and do no more. It is the most

poignant, penetrating, eloquent drama of the prob-

lem that tortures you, and I pray that reading Job

you may conclude with that ancient sufferer, “Al-

though [God] should kill me, I will trust in him“

{Job 13:15).

One thing more I feel that I can do. I bid you

look upon the Cross of Christ. He surely had done

no harm. If no other man was innocent, Jesus was

innocent. He was the loveliest of all the children of

men. Yet there He hangs in agony, a supreme ex-

ample to all the innocent who suffer. Look upon

that Cross. Read it. And learn this lesson ! All who

love God are on that Cross with Christ. “With



“WHEKE NOW IS THY GOD' 41

Christ I am nailed to the cross” (Gal. 2 :19), says St.

Paul. The innocent, like the innocent Christ, ago-

nize upon the Cross that those who are not innocent

may be saved. If you need not expiation for your

own sins, you may offer your sufferings to God in

union with Him who surely needed not expiation for

sin because there was no sin in Him. “Suffering,”

says one writer on the Mystic Life, “plunges like a

sword through creation, leaving on the one side

cringing and degraded animals and on the other

side heroes and saints.” If you look upon the Cross

and learn the Gospel of the Cross you will be not a

cringing and degraded animal, not even a, plaintive

human, but a hero and a saint. Those who have

absorbed the lesson of the Cross, when asked

“Where is now thy God?”, point to Jesus bleeding,

agonizing, about to give up the ghost, and they say,

“There is my God.”

Those who can see God on the cross can see God

in any tragedy, even though it attain to the propor-

tions of a catastrophe. But those who see God on

the Cross have a Grace that enables them to see

God beyond the Cross. The Cross was not the end,

but a means to the end. The end is triumph and

glory. And here in a word is the solution of the

problem of evil. Our answer, therefore, to the ques-

tion, “Where is now thy God?”, is that our God is in

glory, and that the Incarnate God came to glory

through tribulation and death. If we suffer with

Him we shall also reign with Him.



"WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES WILL
HE FIND FAITH ON EARTH?"

Address delivered on November 3, 1940

When our Saviour’s enemies asked Him a ques-

tion, He sometimes asked them another, and if they

made no answer, neither did He answer them. Even

when friends—not enemies—asked Him a question.
He sometimes put them oif, saying, “It is not for you

to know” {Acts 1 :7). At least on one occasion when

the Lord had first questioned the disciples and they

were silent. He left them to discover the answer.

That is the instance we have for consideration

today: “The Son of man, when he cometh, shall he

find, think you, faith on earth?” {Luke 18:8). That

was all. Those who heard Him, and we, many cen-

turies later, are left to surmise what the answer

should be.

I think, however, that He didn’t propose that

question as a puzzle, upon the solving of which men

should expend their ingenuity for the rest of time.

Our Saviour was not concerned with intellectual

riddles. He left that sort of thing to the peripatetic

philosophers of His day who walked up and down,

back and forth on the Areopagus at Athens, propos-

ing questions, suggesting answers, as if philosophy

were a game—a kind of mental and verbal battle-
dore and shuttlecock. That sort of game is still

played in many an American university by men who

call themselves agnostics. “Of course,” they say,

“there isn’t any solution to the great problems of hu-

man existence, but we keep on puzzling, as a kind of

intellectual gymnastic.”

Jesus was no such trifler. If He asked a ques-



WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES 43

tion there is an answer. But, like a wise master, He

doesn’t tell us all the answers. He leaves us to

figure out something for ourselves. In the present

instance the answer is not too recondite. We don’t
have to search for it very far. The reply to that

question, “Will the Son of man find faith upon the

earth?” is, I think, rather obvious. Obvious but

tremendous. It’s a startling shocking answer. It

will shake us out of our apathy and complacency. It

will send a shiver of fear through us. Unless our

mind and will are paralyzed, unless we are in a

mental and physical stupor, it will whip us up to

action. The answer to the question, “Will the Son

of man find faith upon the earth?”, is that it depends

upon us! “Without me you can do nothing” (John

15:6), says the Lord. But conversely, without us He

can or at least will do nothing. He did not stay on

earth to build His own kingdom. He left it in the

hands of men. The greatest compliment ever paid

to the human race, and at the same time the most

awful responsibility placed upon man, was when

our Savior said, “As the Father hath sent me, I also

send you” {John 20:21). “As I have done ... so

you do also” (John 13:15). “The Father worketh . . .

and I work” {John 5:17), but now henceforth you

too shall work. The salvation of the world, the pro-

pagation and preservation of faith upon the earth is,

under God, by the Divine Dispensation, in our

hands. And let me hasten to add that when I say

“in our hands” I do not mean in the hands of the

clergy alone, but in the hands of all, clergy and laity

alike. We have had, especially in recent years, a
great deal of discussion and exhortation around and

about the subject of “Catholic Action.” I have heard

people say, “We don’t know what ‘Catholic Action’



44 CEUCIAL QUESTIONS

means;” and I have heard even priests ask, “Now

precisely what does it mean?” I cannot see why

any one should be puzzled. It means that if the

faith is not to die out on this earth, if there is to

be faith on earth at the second coming of Christ,

we must bestir ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln in the ever memorable Get-

tysburg Address expressed hope that government

by the people should not perish from the earth; and

in that brief discussion he found space to say, no less

than three times, that whether it was to survive or

perish depended upon the measure of devotion, of

self-dedication and self-consecration, of American

citizens.

We may say the same of the Faith of Jesus
Christ. Our Lord indeed remains with His Church

all days; He has promised that the gates of hell

shall not prevail against it. But He has not said

He will work the miracle of perpetuating the

Church and the Faith without human help. The

fact remains, a fact that may seem to some stupe-

fying, but that is really stimulating, exhilirating,

highly exciting, the fact that the survival of the

Christian Religion is, by God’s Providence, in our

hands.

But the Faith cannot survive if it aims only to

survive. A nation may wisely be content with
its boundaries, for a political organization which

extends its sway to the ends of the earth, may by

that extension bring about its own doom. A far-
flung battle line may be too far flung. A battle on
two fronts or on a dozen fronts scattered over all

the continents and all the seas may be easily lost. A
compact little nation may hold together, while a

worldwide empire falls to pieces.



WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES 45

But the Church of Christ is no political organ-

ization. We call it Catholic, and so it is. Catholic
is the word for Universal. We are not national, nor
are we international. We do not talk of continents

or hemispheres. Our sphere is the wide world. “The

earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof” (Psalms

23 :1). Our God is not a tribal God or a national God.

Neither is His religion a tribal matter or racial, or

national, or imperial. Worldly conquerors have

great ambitions, excessive ambitions that will be

their ruin, but no matter how far and wide they

aim to conquer, they place limits to their desires.

The one who at the moment fancies himself world-

conqueror has declared that he wants no Jews or

Negroes in the empire he aims to build, and perhaps

he will say, by and by, that he will tolerate no Slavs.

If they wish it that way, let them have it that

way: include some in and, as the malaprop Holly-

wood producer says, include others out. But Christ

recognizes no such limitations . “Going . . . teach

ye all nations” (Matt. 28:19), said He. “Preach

the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). In

prophecy David says of the preachers of the Gospel,

“Their sound hath gone forth into all the earth : and

their words unto the ends of the world” (Psalm

18:5).

For this reason I feel resentful when certain

orators, thinking to do honor to the Church and the

Faith, speak of the Church as a fortress, a citadel,

and of the Catholic religion as a bulwark against

this or that destructive revolutionary force. A cita-
del is something fixed and static. A bulwark sits
heavy on the earth. It is even possible to overwork

the simile of the rock. How many times have we
heard preachers and platform lecturers describe



46 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

the Church—sometimes indeed with thrilling elo-
quence—as the rock that stands forever firm even
though buffeted by a thousand storms? Doubtless

that is all true. The Church is a rock and a bulwark.

But too much emphasis of that fact may lead to a

neglect of something equally true. The Church and

the Faith have an organic life, a life that must

abound more and more, a supernatural life, an

exuberant life. Whatever is good tends to diffuse

itself. The Church and the Faith move on over all

the seas to the ends of the earth.

Similarly it is all very well for priests, preach-

ers, lecturers in the pulpit or upon the platform, to

recite in grandiloquent tones the magnificent story

of how the Apostles, after the coming of the Holy

Ghost in tongues of fire upon their heads, stepped

across the threshold of the cenacle at Jerusalem,

went forth, carrying the banner of the Cross over

all the Empire and beyond, to lands that had never

seen the eagles of the conquering Romans.

But what if some scoffer, skeptic, cynic or even

some realistic friend should say, “Very well, but

what now? How stands the Church today? Did

she not lose North Africa in the Moslem invasion

of thirteen centuries ago? Has not the faith of

Christ been largely extinguished in the very land

where He was born, where He lived and wrought

miracles, and died?” He died and rose again. Must

the Church and the Faith die and not rise

again? He raised dead men to life. Can the

Church repeat the miracle upon nations dead to the

Faith? If not, what comes of His saying, “The

works that I do, [you] also shall do; and greater

than these shall [you] do” {John 14:12)?

What, for example, of Russia? Has it not



WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES 47

been in schism for a thousand years, and is it not

now engulfed in atheism? And India with its three

hundred and fifty millions; and China with its four

hundred and fifty millions? What incursions have

we made upon these enormous strongholds of heath-

enism? In India we have wrested from Buddha or

from Mohammed or from the Hindu gods some four

millions; in China we have three millions. But

what are seven millions among eight hundred mil-

lions? In Japan we have one hundred and ten thous-

and among seventy million; in Korea one hundred

and twenty thousand out of twenty three millions.

How do these facts comport with the command,

“Going . . . teach ye all nations” {Matt. 28:19)?

“Preach ... to every creature” (Mark 16:15).

For that matter, what of the Latins in Europe

and America? Is the Faith alive in Mexico and

Cuba and Puerto Rico; in the tropic and subtropic

lands of South America?

And the much vaunted English-speaking peo-

ples—are they really custodians of civilization and
Defenders of the Faith?

And this Pan-Germanic empire now in process

of construction: Is it, even in the most attenuated

meaning of the term, Christian? Who dominates

Central Europe? Adolf Hitler or Jesus Christ?

Nazism, like Communism, they say, is a living force

because it is a religion. Isn’t our religion also a

living force? A thousand volumes have been writ-
ten on the portentous phenomena of Nazism and

Communism. One of the books is entitled We or

They? “We” are the Democracies. “They” are the

Dictatorships. We and they are now committed to a
life and death struggle. One or the other will possess

the earth. But if “we” are the Church and the



48 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

Faith, and “they” are anti-Christ, which of us shall

possess the earth?

The greatest scandal of all, said the late Holy

Father Pius XI, is that the Church has “lost the

workingman.” That is a calamity. Before we ever

had a king or an emperor under the banner of the

Cross, we had the working men. We started out and
we were well on our way in the first three centuries

to get the working men of the world. After sixteen

more centuries what has happened? Under the

Soviet hammer and sickle there are one hundred

and seventy million people, most of them poor

—

peasants and industrial workers—who should be
ours. In other lands like Spain and France and South

America other millions of workers have not only

turned their backs upon Christ, but to borrow a

phrase of His own, they have “lift[ed] up [their]

heel against [Him]” {John 13:18). Here in the

United States there appeared a generation ago an

organization which arrogated to itself the title “In-

ternational Workers of the World.” It appeared

and disappeared. But its place has been taken by

a dozen slightly less radical groups which have won

to themselves, by hook or by crook, by facts or by

lies, many thousands of workers who belong by right

to Christ the Workingman.

This hurriedly painted picture, I admit, is not

reassuring. But what we should have in mind is

to be honest, to see clearly where we stand, to esti-

mate how far we have come in nineteen centuries;

what we have lost, what we have gained; and in a

word provide the basis for a rational reply to the

question, “The Son of man, when he cometh, shall

he find, think you, faith on earth?” {Luke 18:8).

Speaking for myself, I have no doubts. The



WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES 49

Church has inexhaustible vitality. Divine Grace is

not like a supply of oil or water, which being tapped

and drained, becomes exhausted. We can no more
exhaust the Grace of God than we can use up the

atmosphere. Rather let us say, the Grace of God

is like the sun which sends out light and heat and

power but has some miraculous way of renewing

itself, spending but never being spent. So is it

with the Life and Warmth and Power at the dispos-

al of the Church. Grace is not a material some-

thing that lives and dies, grows and declines. It is

energy. The sum total of energy, say the scientists,

remains constant in spite of all that is expended. So

of the Grace of God. Yet more : The Grace of God,

like God Himself, is infinite. We cannot use it up.

We have as much at our disposal as had St. Peter
and St. Paul, as much as St. Patrick, St. Boniface,

SS. Cyril and Methodius, St. Remy, St. Francis

Xavier. Those men converted continents. We can
re-convert those continents and go forth to others

that they did not know, or could not reach. St.

Francis Xavier as he lay dying on Sancian Island,

looking towards China, lamented, not like Alexander,

that there were no more worlds to conquer, but that

there was a world before his eyes which he was not

to live to convert. What he did not do we can do.

We must do. The Son of man may come more

quickly than we expect. When He comes He must

not be disappointed. When He comes and asks the

question, ‘Ts there faith left on the earth ?” we must

be able to say, “Behold, Lord, the miracle of Pente-

cost ten thousand times magnified : ‘devout men, out

of every nation under heaven . . . Parthians, and

Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopo-

tamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,



50 CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

Phrygia and Pamphilia, Egypt, and the parts of

Libya about Gyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews

also, and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians’ {Acts

2:5-11), these and a hundred other nations and

peoples of whom they had no knowledge. Lord, as

Thou knowest, new continents have been discovered

and evangelized, and from them all, new and old,

we have brought together to meet Thee at Thy com-

ing, multitudes that outnumber the stars of heaven,

the sands upon the shore of the sea, the drops of

water in the ocean. How then sayest Thou, ‘Shall

there be faith on earth?’ {Luke 18:8). ‘The earth

is [Thine] and the fulness thereof’ {Psalm 23:1).”

Friends, brethren, if this is not to be empty

oratory but substantial fact, we must hear and heed

the words of the prophet, “Rise, thou that sleepest”

{Ephesians 5:14)

!



CARDINAL HAYES STATES PURPOSE

OF 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 the

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 sympa-

thy 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.



107 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS

In 40

Alabama

Arisona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

D. of C.

Florida

Georgria

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa
Kansas

Kentucky
Louisiana

Maryland
Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska
Nevada
New Mexico
New York

North Carolina

North Dakota

States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii

Birmingham WBRC,
Mobile WALA,
Phoenix KTAR,
Safford KGLU
THicson KVOA,
Yuma KYUM
Little Rock KAR’K,

Bakersfield KERN,
Fresno KMJ,
Los Angeles KECA,
Sacramento KFBK,
San Francisco KPO,
Stockton KW G,
Denver KOA ,
Hartford WTIC,
Washington WRC,
Jacksonville WJAX,
Lakeland WLAK,
Miami WIOD,
Pensacola WCOA,
Tampa WFLA-WSUN,
Atlanta WSB,
Savannah WSAV
Boise KIDO,
Pocatello KSEI,
Twin Falls KTFI
Chicago WMAQ-WCFL,
Evanswille WGBF,
Fort Wayne WGL,
Indianapolis WIRE,
Terre Haute WBOW,
Des Moines WHO
Pittsburg KOAM
Wichita KANS,
Louisville WAVE,
New Orleans WSMB,
Shreveport KTBS,
Baltimore WFBR,
Boston WBZ,
Springfield WBZA,
Detroit WWJ,
Duluth-Superior WEBC,
Mankato KYSM,
Minneapolis-St. Paul KSTP,
Rochester KROC
St. Cloud KFAM,
Jackson WJDX,
Kansas City WDAF,
Springfield KGBX,

Billings TTHTTr.'

Bozeman KRBM
Butte Knm
Helena TiTPFA,

Omaha wnw
Reno KOH,

Buffalo WBEN,
New York WEAF,
Schenectady WGY,
Asheville WISE,
Charlotte WSOC’,
Raleigh WPTF.
Winston-Salem WSJS
Bismarck KFYR,
Fargo

;;; WDAY^

980 kc

1380 kc

620 kc

1420 kc

1260 kc

1420 kc

890 kc

1370 kc

580 kc

1430 kc

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1340 kc

620 kc

740 kc

1310 kc

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900 kc

1240 kc

670 kc

630 kc

1370 kc

1400 kc

1310 kc

1000 kc

790 kc

1210 kc

940 kc

1320 kc

1450 kc

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990 kc

990 kc

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1290 kc

1500 kc

1460 kc

1310 kc

1420 kc

1270 kc

610 kc

1230 kc

550 kc

780 kc

1420 kc

1340 kc

1210 kc

590 kc

1380 kc

1180 kc

900 kc

660 kc

790 kc

1870 kc

1210 kc

680 kc

1310 kc

550 kc

940 kc



107 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 40 States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island
South Carolina

South Dakota
Tennessee

Texas

Virginia

Washington

Wisconsin

HAWAII
SHORT WAVE

Cincinnati

Cleveland

Columbus
Dayton
Lima
Toledo

Zanesville

Oklahoma City
Tulsa

Medford
Portland

Allentown

Altoona

Erie

Johnstown
Philadelphia

Pittsburgh

Wilkes-Barre

Providence

Charleston

Columbia

Florence

Greenville

Sioux Falls-

Chattanooga

Nashville

KingS’port

Knoxville

Amarillo

Beaumont
El Paso

Fort Worth
Houston

San Antonio
Norfolk

Richmond
Seattle

Spokane
Madison

Honolulu

Schenectady, N. Y

WSAI, 1330 kc
WTAM, 1070 kc
WOOL, 1210 kc
WING 1380 kc
WLOK 1210 kc
WSPD 1340 kc
WHIZ 1210 kc
WKY, 900 kc
KVOO, 1140 kc
KMED. 1410 kc
KEX. 1180 kc

- WSAN, 1440 kc
WFBG, 1310 kc
WLEU, 1420 kc
WJAC, 1310 kc
KYW, 1020 kc
WCAE, 1220 kc
WBRE 1310 kc
WJAR, 890 kc
WTMA. 1210 kc

WIS, 660 kc
WOLS, 1200 kc
WFBC, 1300 kc

.. KSOO-KELO, 1110-1200 kc
WAPO, 1420 kc
WSM, 650 kc
WKPT 1370 kc
WROL 1310 kc
KGNC, 1410 kc
KFDM, 660 kc
KTSM, 1310 kc
KGKO, 570 kc
KPRC, 920 kc
WOAI, 1190 kc
WTAR, 780 kc
WMBG. 1350 kc
KOMO, 920 kc
KHQ, 690 kc

WIBA, 1280 kc
KGU, 760 kc

WGEO, 9.63 meg

(Revised as of November 5, 1940)



CATHOLIC HOUR RADIO ADDRESSES IN
PAMPHLET FORM

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

delivered.

Quantity Prices De Not Include Carriage Charge

“The Divine Romance,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 80 pages

and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 more, 10c each. In quantities,

$8.00 per 100.

“The Moral Order” and “Mary, the Mother of Jesus,” by Rev. Dr. Geo.

Johnson, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each.

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 ; 6 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$5.00 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 ; 6 or

more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“Christianity and the Modern Mind,” by Rev. John A. McClorey, S.J.,
64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Moral Law,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 88 pages and
cover. Single copy, 20c ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities, $9.50 per 100.

“Christ and His Church,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corrigan, 88
pages and cover. Single copy. 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In
quantities, $9.50 per 100.

“The Marks of the Church,” by Rev. Dr. John K. Cartwright, 48 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, lOc each. In quantities,
$5.50 per 100.

“The Organization and Government of the Church,” by Rev. Dr. Fran-
cis J. Connell, C.SS.R., 48 pages' and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 6
or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Moral Factors in Economic Life,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Haas
and Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A. Ryan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c
postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“Divine Helps for Man,” by Rev. Dr. Edward J. Wals'h, C.M., 104
pages and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In
quantities, $11.00 per 100.

“The Parables,” by R’ev. John A. McClorey, S.J., 128 pages and cover.
Single copy, 30c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. 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, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c
each. In quantities, $10.00 per 100.

“Manifestations of Christ,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 123
pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid; 5 or more, 20c each. In
quantities, $12.00 per 100.

“The Way of the Cross,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 32 pages
and cover (prayer book size). Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or more, 5c
each. In quantities, $3.00 per 100.

“Christ Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius- Smith, O.P., 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50
per 100.

“The Christian Family,” by Rev. Dr. Edward Lodge Curran, 68 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid

;
5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$7.00 per 100.

“The Dublin Eucharistic Congress,” by His Eminence William Car-
dinal O’Connell. An address rebroadcast from Dublin, 12 pages and cover.
Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 5c each. In quantities, $3.75 per 100.

“Rural Catholic Action,” by R’ev. Dr. Edgar Schmiedeler, O.S.B., 24
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid

; 5 or more, 5c each. In quan-
tities, $3.50 per 100.

“Religion and Human Nature,” by Rev. Dr. Joseph A. Daly, 40 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. 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, 15c postpaid;
5 or more, 10c each. In quantities. $8.00 per 100.

“Conflicting Standards,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 80 pages



and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$8.00 per 100.

“The Hymn of the Conquered,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen,
128 pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In

quantities, $12.00 per 100.

“The Seven Last Words,” by Rt. Rev. M&gr. Fulton J. Sheen, (prayer

book size) 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 5c

each. 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 ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$5.50 per 100.

“Love’s Veiled Victory and Love’s Laws,” by Rev. Dr. George F.

Strohaver, S. J., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more

8c each. 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 ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities*,

$5.00 per 100.

“The Lord’s Prayer Today,” by Very Rev. Dr. Ignatius Smith, O.P., 64

pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-

tities, $6.00 per 100.

“God, Man and Redemption,” by Rev. Dr. Ignatius W. Cox, S.J., 64
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-

tities, $6.00 per 100.

“This Mysterious Human Nature,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.
48 pages and cover. Single Copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Eternal Galilean,” by Rt. R’ev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 160 pages
and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid ; 5 or more, 25c each. In quantities,

$16.00 per 100.

“The Queen of Seven Swords,” by Rt. Rev. Ms-gr. Fulton J. Sheen
(prayer-book size), 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid; 5 or
more, 5c each. 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; 5 or more,
8c each. In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“The Happiness uf Faith,” by Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S.J., 80 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid

;
5 or more, 10c. In quantities, $8.00 per 100.

“The Salvation of Human Society,” by Rev. Peter J. Bergen, C.S.P., 48
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities, $5.50 per 100.

“Catholic Education,” by Rev. Dr. George Johnson, 40 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50
per 100.

“The Church and Her Missions,” by Rt. R*ev. Msgr. William Quinn, 82
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“The Church and the Depression,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.,
80 pages and cover. Single copy. 15c postpaid

;
5 or more, 10c each. In

quantities, $8,00 per 100,

“The Fullness of Christ,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 176
pages and cover. Single copy, 45c postpaid ; 5 or more, 30c each. In
quantities, $16.50 per 100.

“The Church and Modern Thought,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.,
80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In
quantities. $8.00 per 100.

“Misunderstood Truths,” by Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,
$5.50 per 100.

“The Judgment of God and The Sense of Duty,” by Rt, Rev. Ms*gr.
William J. Kerby, 16 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid

; 5 or
more, 5c each. In quantities, $3.50 per 100.

“Christian Education,” by Rev. Dr, James A. Reeves, 32 pages and
cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities $3.50
per 100.

“What Civilization Owes to the Church,” by R*t. Rev. Msgr. William
Quinn, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid

; 5 or more, 8c each.
In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“If Not Christianity: What?” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96
pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid; 5 or more, 15c each. In
quantities. $10.00 per 100.

“The Prodigal World,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 140 pages
and cover. Single copy, 85c postpaid; 5 or more, 25c each. In anantities,
$16.00 per 100.



“The Coin of Our Tribute,” by Very Rev. Thomas F. Conlon, O.P.,

40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In

quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Pope Pius XI,” by His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes. An address
in honor of the 79th birthday of His Holiness, 16 pages and 4 color cover.

Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Misunderstanding the Church,” by Most Rev. Duane G. Hunt, 48
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-

tities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Poetry of Duty,” by Rev. Alfred Duffy, C.P., 48 pages and cover.

Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Characteristic Christian Ideals,” by Rev. Bonaventure McIntyre, O.

F.M., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“The Catholic Church and Youth,” by Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C.,

48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Spirit of the Missions,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Thomas J. McDonnell,
32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“The Life of the Soul,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and
cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities, $10.00

per 100.

“Our Wounded World,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 112 pages,
and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities,

$11.50 per 100.

The first six addresses in this series published separately under
the title “Freedom and Democracy: a Study of Their Enemies,”

56 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each.
In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Banquet of Triumph,” by Very Rev. J. J. McLarney, O.P., 32
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities, $5.00 per 100.

“Society and the Social Encyclicals—America’s Road Out,” by Rev.
R. A. McGowan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more,
8c each. In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“Pius XI, Father and Teacher of the Nations” (On His Eightieth
Birthday) by His Excellency, Most Reverend Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,

16 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 5c each. In

quantities, $3.00 per 100.

“The Eastern Catholic Church,” by Rev. John Kallok, 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50

per 100.

“Joy In Religion,” by Rev. John B. Delauney, C.S.C., 40 pages and

cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50

per 100.

“The *Lost’ Radiance of the Religion of Jesus,” by Rev. Thomas A.
Carney, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each.
In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Some Spiritual Problems of College Students,” by Rev. Dr. Maurice
S. Sheehy, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c
each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“God and Governments,” by Rev. Wilfrid Parsons-, S.J., 48 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50

per 100.

“Saints vs. Kings,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and
cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities, $10.00

per 100.

“Justice and Charity,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen.

Part I
—
“The Social Problem and the Church.” 96 pages and cover.

Single copy, 20c pos-tpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quan-
tities, $11,00 per 100.

Part II
—
“The Individual Problem and the Cross,” 80 pages and

cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each.

In quantities. $8.00 per 100.

“In Defense of Chastity,” by R-ev. Felix M. Kirsch, O.M.Cap., 72 pages

and cover, including study aids and bibliography. Single copy 15c postpaid

;

5 or more, 10c each. In quantities, $8.00 per 100.

“The Appeal To Reason,” by Mos-t Rev. Duane G. Hunt, D.D., LL.D.,
72 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c pos-tpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In
quantities, $8.00 per 100.



“Practical Aspects of Catholic Education,” by Very Rev. Edward V.
Stanford, O.S.A., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 6 or more,

8c each ; in quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Mission of Youth in Contemporary Society,” by Rev. Dr. George

Johnson, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c

each ; in quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Holy Eucharist,” by Most Rev. Joseph F. Rummel, S.T.D., LLi.
D., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or mpore, 8c each.

In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“Cardinal Hayes—A Eulogy,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 16
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c, postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quan-

tities, $3.00 per 100.

“The Rosary and the Rights of Man,” by Very Rev. J. J. McLamey,
O.P., 56 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c pos’tpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each.

In quantities, $6.00 per 100.

“Human Life,” by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., 96 pages and cover.
Single copy, 20c postf)aid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities, $10 per 100.

“Pius XI—A Eulogy,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 24 pages
and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 15c each. In quantities,

$6.00 per hundred.

“Freedom,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen.

Part I
—

“Social Freedom.” 80 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c
postpaid

; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities, $8.00 per

100 .

Part II
—

“Personal Freedom.” 96 pages and cover. Single copy,

20c postpaid ; 5 or more, 16c each. In quantities, $11.00

per 100.

“The Holy Ghost,” by Very Rev. J. J. McLarney, O.P., 56 pages and
cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$6.00 per 100.

“Towards the Reconstruction of a Christian Social Order,” by Rev.
Dr. John P. Monaghan, 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid

;

5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Marian Vignettes,” by Rev. J. R. Keane, O.S.M., 32 pages and cover.
Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“The Peace of Christ,” by Very Rev. Martin J. O’Malley, C.M. 32
pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities, $5.00 per 100.

“God’s World of Tomorrow,” by Rev. Dr. John J. Russell, 40 pages
and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities,

$5.60 per 100.

“The Catholic Tradition In Literature,” by Brother Leo, F.S.C., 40
pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8e each. In quan-
tities, $5.50 per 100.

“What Catholics Do At Mass,” by Rev. Dr. William H. Russell, 72
pages and cover, including study club questions and suggestions, and brief
bibliography. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 10c each. In quantities,

$8.00 per 100.

“Prophets and Kings: Great Scenes, Great Lines,” by Rev. James M.
Gillis', C.S.P., 96 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid ; 6 or more,

15c each. In quantities, $10.00 per 100.

“Peace, the Fruit of Justice,” by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, 64

pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quan-
tities, $6.00 per 100.

“The Seven Last Words and The Seven Virtues” by Rt. Rev. Msgr.
Fulton J. Sheen, 80 pages and cover. Single copies 15c postpaid ; 5 or more,

10c each. In quantities, $8.00 per 100.

“1930—Memories—1940”—The addresses delivered in the Tenth Anni-
versary Broadcast of the Catholic Hour on March 3, 1940, together with
congratulatory messages and editorials. 80 pages and cover. Single copy,

25c postpaid ; 5 or more, 20c each. In quantities, $10.00 per hundred.

“What Kind of a World Do You Want,” by Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J.,
40 pages and cover. Single copies 15c pos>tpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In
quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Law,” by Rev. Dr. Howard W. Smith, 40 pages and cover. Single
copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“In the Beginning,” by Rev. Arthur J. Sawkins’. 40 pages and cover.
Single copy 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“The Life and Personality of Christ,” by Rev. Herbert F. Gallagher,
O.F.M., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c
each. In quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“America and the Catholic Church,” by Rev- John J. Walde, 48 pages



and cover. Sinerle copy, 15c postpaid; 6 or more, 8c each; in quantities,

$5.50 per 100.

“The Social Crisis and Christian Patriotism,” by Rev. Dr. John F.
Cronin, S.S., 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c
each ; in quantities, $5.50 per 100.

“Missionary Responsibility,” by the Most Rev. Richard J. Cushing, D.D.,
LL.D., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each.
In quantities, $5.00 per 100.

“Crucial Questions,” by Rev. James' M. Gillis, C.S.P., 64 pages and

cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid ; 5 or more, 8c each. In quantities, $6.00

per. 100.

Complete list of 96 pamphlets to one address in U. S., $11.25 postpaid.

Price to Canada and Foreign Countries, $14.00

Address: OUR SUNDAY VISITOR, Huntington, Indiana