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'

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:

P Joannes J. Glennon

Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici

Sti. Ludovici, die 20 Junii 1945

Second printing, June 1946

Any financial profit made by,

the Central Office of the Sodality

will be used for the advancement

of the Sodality Movement and the

cause of Catholic Action.

Copyright 1945

THE QUEEN’S WORK, Inc.

Deacfelfee#



A BQ 5?«

lObixiS.

FOREWORD

Father McMenamy, formerly president of

The Creighton University and provincial of

the Missouri Province of the Society of

Jesus, has been for the past years Jesuit

tertian master at Cleveland. His is the im-

portant responsibility of presiding over that

third-year novitiate that Jesuits make after

their ordination and prior to their entrance

into the active life of the Jesuit priesthood.

Through his wide experience with priests,

secular and religious, to whom he has given
* scores of retreats and through his contact

with women religious to whom he has given
wide direction and guidance, Father Mc-

Menamy is in a position from which he can
see closely the spiritual needs of men and
women who aspire to the holier life. It was
characteristic of him to include in this book-

let about those who are aspiring to a deeper
and a higher holiness men and women living
and working in the world.

“The Law of Charity,” a phrase borrowed
from Saint Paul, is the law which Father

McMenamy believes is the basis of great
spirituality. He feels that if there is a sim-
ple explanation of how saints become saints
it is to be found in the fact that they have

read this law, which is written on the

tablets of the human heart, and have lived
by the fullness of its meaning.

— 3 —



Now he presents “The Law of Charity”

as the working platform for that priest and

that religious or that man or woman in the

world who wants to come close to the Savior

and to grow in the Christlike life.

Quite naturally a booklet on so profound

and far-reaching a subject cannot be easy

reading; it. is meant on the contrary to be

read slowly, to be digested and pondered,

to be made almost the basis of prayerful

meditation* . ‘ l .

Yet for all the profundity of the subject

Father McMenamy has written with ex-

quisite clarity and a simplicity which is

always characteristic of an explanation that

is directed to all who have deep faith and

real courage of soul. The Law of Charity

can of course become as vast as the charity

of Christ itself. It can be as profound as

Saint PauPs thinking on it. Father Mc-

Menamy has made that law seem inevitable

not only in those who strive for sanctity but

in those who seek that way of peace, that

road to happiness which is meant for every

Christian. ,, .

We know that many a priest, realizing
that here is noble wisdom, will read and

reread these words of a great director of

priests.

We feel that hundreds of men and women
religious, who : have made the first initial

sacrifice of the three vows, will find in “The

Law of Charity” a new impetus to the

fulfillment of their complete vocation.



We sincerely hope that many a man and
woman who are living in the world and are

moving straight toward God will study “The

Law of Charity” and make it the rule of

their lives and the guide to their lasting joy.

; Daniel A. Lord, S. J.



THE LAW OF CHARITY

By F. X. McMENAMY, S. J.

1
IFE, we are assured, is never stationary

j but ever on the move, onward and up-

ward or backward and downward— the
body’s life, the mind’s life, the soul’s life.

As a point of individual experience we are

aware that body and mind reach after a

time a certain perfection in vital power

and then begin to decline. Not so the soul;

for the soul there is no inevitable law of

decay. Unto the very end of its days on

earth the soul can hold its course ever

onward and upward into richer and fuller

conquests of divine living. The divine germ

born in a man with baptism confers upon

him a new principle of life that is most real

and that is designed by God for uninter-

rupted growth ift vigor and beauty and

fruitfulness during all the years of his

earthly pilgrimage.

Still it is likewise a point of personal

experience with some of us that there is

such a thing as an unprogressive spiritual

life
;

that God’s plan somehow can be

frustrated
;
that, far from advancing, a man

can weaken in the exercise of his divine life

and thus can, as far as practice goes, slowly

decline into a state of spiritual decrepitude.

The explanation?

Father Faber, the reader may recall, has

raised this question in his book “Growth in

— 6—



Holiness.” After examining and rejecting

several opinions advanced by others, he ex-

presses the conviction that the one and

common cause of arrested growth in the

spiritual life is a lack of abiding sorrow for

sin. Saint Francis de Sales, according to

Father Faber, had set this arrested growth

down to precipitation or hurry in spiritual

duties; De Ravignan attributes it to a lack

of perseverance in prayer; others give as

the cause a lack of bodily mortification.

It is not the purpose of the writer to

question the conclusions of these recognized

authorities or to offer a theory of his own

that will cover all cases. The writer wishes

rather to record the fact that, whatever be

the universal and root cause of spiritual

decline, in the experience of the average

Christian, priest, and religious, the obvious

and immediate explanation of his failures

and of his trend downward is a lack of

instinctive love of Christ. He has substituted

another law of life for the Law of Charity,

which God has willed should govern his life

and which the Holy Ghost has “written” in

his heart.

MEANING OF THE LAW OF CHARITY

I borrow the words from Saint Ignatius

Loyola. In the introduction to his “Consti-

tutions” he states that “the interior Law

of Charity and love, which the Holy Ghost

is wont to write and imprint in the hearts

of men,” will avail more for the preserva-

tion and advance of his order and of the

— 7—



individual members in God’s service than

will any external legislation. By Charity

he understands of course the love of God

or the love of Jesus Christ. The Law of

Charity involves two things : Charity as

motive and Charity as norm

.

As motive it

is the familiar rule of life proposed by Saint

Paul :
“
‘Therefore, whether you eat or drink,

or whatsoever else you do, do all to the

glory of God” (I Cor. x, 31). As norm it

is the universal directive given by the Holy

Spirit for the soul’s deliberate preferences,

desires, and choices. That is ever to be

preferred, desired, and embraced which, all

things considered, more perfectly accords

with the love of Jesus Christ or, as some

would state it, which is more worthy of the

Christ-life within us.

The Holy Ghost writes this Law of

Charity in the soul, for it is the Law of

divine adoption, the Law of grace. God

Our Father by His Holy Spirit gives it to

His children as the supreme motive and

directive in all the ways of that holiness

which makes men like to Jesus Christ.

Hence it is not a Law reserved for the

priest and the religious only, but it is

intended for every man who in baptism is

“born of God” and “predestined to be made

conformable to the image of His Son”

(Rom. viii
, 29). In practice this Law of

Charity is devotion to God or devotedness

to Jesus Christ, devotion to be understood

as Saint Francis de Sales understands it:

the activity of love—not however of any
quality of love, but of a love that has be-

— 8—



I

come instinctive in its activity, frequent,

facile, and masterful in self-giving.

In time of prayer and particularly in time

of retreat does the average priest, religious,

and layman realize with a certain sense of

shame that whatever may be the remote

cause of his lack of spiritual growth the

immediate explanation is a lack of divine

Charity in his soul. All his failures along

the way, he painfully notes, were just fail-

ures in love, failures in the instinctiveness

of his devotedness to Jesus Christ. And

of this realization there is born in his mind

an abiding conviction that the Law of Char-

ity is an essential requirement for him if
V '-jr VV , •

he is to live a priestly life, or a religious

life, or even a Christian life in the world

with deep sincerity and worthiness.

To collect and to state briefly the reasons

for this conviction is the purpose of the

present booklet. However in doing so, it is

not the writer’s aim to convince others,

since he rather supposes that others are

already convinced from personal experience.

But he proposes these reasons as motiva-

tion for sincere and efficacious desires to

advance in Christian, religious, priestly holi-

ness. Prayerful consideration of these

desires during times of meditation and at

other times will almost certainly beget

desires of this quality and will lift one’s life

to a higher level of supernatural living. In

the sequence the motives follow more or less

the order of importance and cogency.

— 9—



1. TO MY FATHER IN HEAVEN I
owe a devoted life according to the LAW
OF CHARITY, for it is the fulfillment of
His first and greatest commandment. A
devoted life, but surely not a tepid life, is

to love “the Lord thy God with thy whole

heart, and with thy whole soul, and with

thy whole mind, and with thy whole

strength” (Mark xii, 30). In divine adop-

tion my Father in heaven reveals a father’s

love of me and a father’s solicitude for me.

Can I forget God’s sensitiveness to the affec-

tion of His children and to their coldness?

His delight is in their holiness, which is

their likeness to Him. Will He not then

expect me to fulfill my days on earth and

enter His eternal home with the record of

a devoted and filial love of Him? The

sovereign reason for my existence is that I

may glorify Him in this world and through-

out the eternal years of heaven by my filial

Charity.

2. TO JESUS CHIJIST I owe this same

Law of devotion. Gratitude for His costly

devotedness to me as well as the appeal of

His own personal goodness and beauty and

greatness have always inspired me to love

Him with a whole heart and not with a

half heart. Ever is He asking me for all I

have to give. Then too so closely have His

grace and love identified me with Himself

that what I am is a matter of greatest

concern to Him. My virtues are not mine

alone, nor are my faults hurtful to me alone.

Every advance of mine is an honor and a

joy to Him, more than a temple of marble

— 10—



and gold, and every fault of mine is an

imposition on Him and an ugly deformity in

His Mystical Body. This soul of mine is to

be my eternal gift to Him. Will He recog-

nize eternally there, not feebly, but fully

expressed, His own divinely beautiful fea-

tures formed progressively during my years

on earth by the daily devotedness of my

heart to Him?

3. TO THE HOLY SPIRIT I owe this
same Law of Charity. This is His Law, writ-

ten in my heart. By it He is ever laboring to
bring me to the perfection of Charity by

filling my heart with Christ’s own filial love

of God. Such love is transforming and will

fashion the likeness of Christ in my soul.

Here is the aim of all the activity and the

mission of the Holy Spirit within me. My
cooperation is essential for His success. By

making operative the gifts of the same Holy

Spirit, now my divine guest, the Law of

Charity renders my cooperation instinctive,
generous, uniform, and courageous. An

inferior law will mean half-hearted coopera-

tion and a “saddening” of the Holy Ghost.

4. I owe this Law of Charity TO THE
BLESSED VIRGIN. God has placed in her

heart a mother’s lov6 and solicitude for me.

With divine Charity reigning in my life, I

shall be rightly conditioned to receive every

grace from Mary and to hold it securely

and to ‘give back to her a mother’s joy in

seeing in my soul some of her own likeness

and loveliness wrought there by the gen-

erosity of my response to her maternal

care and love.

— 11 —



5. TO THE CHURCH I owe this Law
of Charity, for I am a member of her fam-

ily. She does not ask of me learning or

eloquence, or any other purely human

attainment—although she recognizes the

value of these
;
but she does expect me to

contribute to her holiness, for it is this

which makes her beautiful and dear to her

God and efficient in extending His kingdom.

Every spiritual gain of mine therefore is a

joy and a gain for her, -and every blemish

of mine is an infliction upon her and an

element of decay in her life and of failure

in her work.

6. TO MY BRETHREN I owe this Law
of Charity. The most significant work of

any man or woman in this world is the

silent influence of his or her personal life

on those with whom he or she lives and

toils. Nothing else is more inspiring and

heartening to the members of a Catholic

parish or a religious community than the

presence of priest, lay person, or religious

whose life is transparently dominated by

devotion to Our Lord and to His ideals of

holiness. On the other hand nothing else is

more damaging to the spiritual life of that

same parish or community than the care-

less disregard of the unobservant member.
m

Then as to works of charity and my

whole attitude toward my neighbor it is

the spirit of this very Law that disposes

me for a generous and self-sacrificing ful-

fillment of the second part of God's great-

est commandment: to love my neighbor as

myself. For devotion to God clears my

— 12—



vision and warms my heart to recognize

and treat my neighbor as Christ Himself

in need.

7. THE GOSPEL requires of me this
spirit of love. As followers of Christ all

members of the Church are called to pro-

gressive holiness. This is the summation

of the Gospel as Our Lord delivers it in

teaching and in example. Study prayerfully

the Sermon on the Mount and in particular

the eight Beatitudes, which portray Our

Lord's concept of the true Christian.

Of His explicit charge, -‘Be you there-

fore perfect, as also your heavenly Father

is perfect,” Pius XI has written thus : “Let

no one think that this is directed to a few

select souls and that all others are per-

mitted to remain in an inferior degree of

virtue. No; all without exception, as is

evident, are bound by this law.” Just before

these words in the same apostolic document,

the Pontiff had written: “Since Christ has

made the Church the mother of sanctity,

all who accept her lead and teaching by

the will of God must strive for holiness of

life” (Rerum Omnium
, 1923, On the Third

Centenary of the Death of Saint Francis

de Sales)* i

How often when reading the Gospel, we

come upon high engagements which are

demanded by Christ of His followers but

which only a lover of God will fulfill con-

sistently? To those who try to reconcile a

certain measure of worldliness with the

practice of Catholicism, these engagements

— 13—



will seem repressive and just too hard. For

such Christ’s yoke is not sweet or His bur-

den light. The fulfillment of the Gospel

in whose soul the Law of Charity rules,

and its “delight” are reserved for the man

8, MY OPPORTUNITIES require that
Law of Charity. Devotedness to Christ con-

ditions my soul to make the most of my

spiritual opportunities. All of us have much

the same experience in life—success and
failure, praise and blame, sickness and

health, pain and pleasure, treatment that

is indulgent, treatment that is harsh,

optimistic moods and periods of depression.

These are the vicissitudes of life that come

and go with the earthly days of every man

and woman. They will come and go in my

life. What will matter is the kind of

person I am, the spirit that habitually rules

my soul. If that spirit be the Law of

Charity, all these vicissitudes become so

many opportunities of self-surrender to

Christ and of love of Him, opportunities

rich in supernatural gain for the Church,

for the neighbor, and for my own eternity.

With another law conditioning my life,

these very same vicissitudes easily become

occasions of flight from Christ, of resent-

ment, of disedification to the neighbor, and

of sin against God. “And we know that to

them that love God, all things work together

unto good” (Rom. viii
,
28).

Furthermore it is the spirit of this law

of love that disposes me to receive the great-

est divine enrichment of grace and merit

from the fulfillment of Christian, religious,

— 14—



or priestly duties and good works. Devoted-

ness opens wide the receptive powers of the

soul to receive in fullest measure the inflow

of divine life that comes from prayer, from

the Divine Office, and above all from the

Holy Mass, Holy Communion, confession,

and the other sacraments.

9. THE SUCCESS OF MY APOSTO-
LATE requires the interior Law of Love of

Christ, for it alone clothes me with Christ’s

efficiency and enables me to work with

Christ as well as for Him. To labor for

Christ is not a difficult thing, but to labor

with Christ requires the instinctive self-

renouncement of the devoted man whose

aim is to forget himself and to place all his

powers at the disposal of Christ for His

ends. Herein is the whole secret of true

apostolic success.

10. MY FREEDOM requires the interior
Law of Love of Christ. Love is the great

liberator—the love of God. “The lover is
free,” says a Kempis, “and can not be

restrained,” Love liberates from all those

tyrannies of self that enslave and enfeeble

the ungenerous man and constrain him to

serve God poorly.

11. MY HAPPINESS REQUIRES this
Law of Love. There is always zest and

joy in a forward life, whether it be life of

the body, life of the mind, or life of the

spirit. “A delightful life” is the phrase of

Saint Francis de Sales for devotion to God.

On the other hand an unprogressive and

backward life becomes dull and dispiriting.

— 15—



We take mind and heart away and bestow

them on other things. This explains why in

periods of tepidity we instinctively become

naturalistic and turn to interests and

pleasures that are purely human. The joy

of living always postulates a certain per-

fection or fullness of life, whether it be

animal, rational, or the divine living of a

soul in grace. The joy in our divine living

is called by Saint Paul “the fruit of the

Spirit” (Gal. v, 22). Every supernatural

virtue, when it has reached a fine perfec-

tion in its exercise, yields to its possessor a

divine delight that is a taste of God
;
“Fruits

of the Holy Ghost,” they are called. Now

it is from the fullness of Charity, above

every other virtue, that the soul experiences

the sweetness of God. My religion should

make me very happy. I must have joy in

it if I am to go far in its practice. This

means that I must love it and all its ways,

Which further means that I must love God

“with my whole heart” and in all the ways
of His loving providence over me.

12. MY GOOD SENSE requires this
Law of Love. It is always good sense to

save a costly investment. Our Blessed

Lord, the Church, and I with others have

made a great expenditure—Christ in divine
grace and the Church and I with others in

labor, time, solicitude, and money—to form
me into a devoted Catholic* or into a de-

voted priest, or into a devoted religious.

Surely it would be bad sense and stupid

waste as well as cold ingratitude to allow

— 16—



all this expenditure to eventuate in a dull

and ineffective spiritual mediocrity.

THE DECISIVE HABIT

DAILY MENTAL PRAYER is essential
in order to establish one’s life on the Law

of Charity and to maintain it there. This

habit decides whether or not one’s desire of

a devoted life is deeply sincere and there-

fore efficacious. The average priest and

religious have learned this from personal

experience, an experience confirmed by

ascetical tradition as well as by the present

mind of the Church . in that she requires

daily mental prayer of all priests and reli-

gious. The Holy Pontiff Pius X, whose

authority is paramount, in his exhortation

to the clergy of the world on the occasion

of his Sacerdotal Golden Jubilee assures

us that “it is of capital importance that a

certain time should be set aside every day

to meditate on things eternal. No priest can

omit this without being guilty of grave

carelessness and without grave loss to his

soul,” for “it is not only most salutary but

is very necessary.” (Haerent Animo, 1908)

The fundamental reason that the habit

of daily mental prayer is decisively impor-

tant lies in the fact that for the average

person it is the normal way to keep motiva-

tion alive and dynamic. It thus provides

the soul with the stimulating supernatural

atmosphere essential to sustain uniform and

devoted love of Christ. The average person,

I say; because no doubt there are some who

— 17—



can secure spiritual atmosphere for their

days from vocal prayer, especially if it be

united with suffering. Still I fear that

among priests and religious such persons

are rare. The average priest or religious

soon learns that his vocal prayer becomes

vital and sustaining as a matter of habit

only when it grows out of good habits of

mental prayer. The Church does not pre-

scribe mental prayer for her lay members

as a necessary means for their sanctifica-

tion. However it is claimed that lay persons

in growing numbers are practicing mental

prayer, since they find it most helpful to

this end. The form of mental prayer used

should be adapted to the state of life and

other conditions of the individual. It may

be very simple, perhaps mostly affective,

but in every case such that it keeps alive

motivation and desires.

But is not successful daily mental prayer

just too difficult for men and women of

today with their distracting activities and

the pressure of contemporary life? Cer-

tainly not if a man sincerely desires suc-

cess. His desire must possess however that

quality of sincerity which always guaran-

tees success in every endeavor for the ad-

vance of his soul. Such sincerity takes out

of a person’s life the enemies that impede

or destroy success.

THE ENEMIES OF MENTAL
PRAYER are for the most part reduced to
two, and they are, not activity and distrac-

tion, but rather some habit of pride or

some habit of self-indulgence. Activity,

— 18—



absorption in work, distraction may divert

attention from God for periods of time

;

they do not bar the approach to Him, But

any form of pride that is a habit, as well

as any form of self-indulgence that is a

habit quite effectually bar the way to God

in time of prayer. The form of pride which

is perhaps most common in a Catholic's life

is that which manifests itself in habits of

deliberate disobedience to the requirements

of his religious, priestly, or lay Catholic

code of observance: habits against obliga-

tions great or small that are prescribed by

the Church for one's state of life. Self-

indulgence on the other hand in habits of

sense pleasure, even when those habits are

not sinful in themselves, tends to give the

body dominion over the spirit and quite

easily destroys relish for the things of God

and true sincerity of desire to be intimate

with Him in prayer. Other and lesser

enemies, such as preoccupation in work,

physical weakness, discouragement, bad

example, human respect, lack of leadership

on the part of elders, are not greatly to

be feared unless some habit of pride or

sense gratification has weakened sincerity

of desire.

HELPS

HELPS TO THE LAW OF CHARITY
are the devotions of the Church, especially

these four: devotion to THE PASSION, to
THE HOLY EUCHARIST, to THE
SACRED.HEART, and to THE BLESSED
VIRGIN.

— 19—



THE SACRED PASSION of Our Lord
and the two great gifts that have come to

us from the Passion, the Holy Eucharist

and the Sacred Heart, have beyond question

done most and are doing most today to

establish and perfect the reign of divine

Charity in the hearts of God’s children on

earth. The Passion itself is the most im-

pressive revelation of devotedness that God

has ever given to mankind, the devotedness

of Jesus Christ unto death. Then on the

night before He died, that same devoted-

ness of Christ’s, human and divine and

omnipotent, bequeathed to us the Holy

Eucharist as the memorial and perpetuation

of the devotedness of Calvary. Then again

long years afterward when because of

worldliness and the influence of Jansenism

men forgot the revelation of Calvary and

the Eucharist and began to talk and act as

though God had no heart, Christ revealed

His own great Sacred Heart in order to

convince a doubting world that God has a

heart and in order to bring the world’s

memory back to the devotedness of Calvary

and the Eucharist. Today perhaps nothing

else is doing more to engender devotion to

God and to promote the Law of Charity in

the souls of men and women than is the

appeal of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ

—the symbol of His love of men, a love
human and divine revealed in the Passion

and in the Holy Eucharist, a love that asks

of men reparation for the injuries done Him

in these the two greatest works of His

devotedness.

— 20—



THE BLESSED VIRGIN, “Singular
Vessel of Devotion ,

1

9

possesses a unique

power to draw mind and heart to Our

Blessed Lord. She is the Mother of Divine

Grace, and history has demonstrated what

devotion to her has meant for devotion to

Jesus Christ in the hearts of her children.

No other grace is she so eager to obtain

for every one of them as the grace of a

deep and devoted love of Him. Such love

is transforming, as we have seen, and in

her eyes glorifies every child of hers into

the likeness of Jesus.

FORTUNATE is the Catholic, fortunate
the priest, fortunate the religious, whose

sincerity of life and living faith permits

him to realize the significance and splendor

of his call and to surrender his soul to the

grace of that call. His surrender, the

blessed master lets him know, will be like

His own surrender to His heavenly Father

—by way of obedience, by an instinctive
and wholehearted obedience to the detailed

obligations of his state of life, obligations

great and small and many but unified and

exalted by the self-giving in every one of

them. And according to the generosity of

his self-giving will the Blessed Mother of

God pour into his soul a purer and ever-

growing love of Jesus Christ, a love that is

devotion to Him, a love that is the solution

of his difficulties, the secret of his power,

the joy and peace of his life, and the ful-

fillment of his call to toil with Christ for

the glory of God and the perfecting of His

Mystical Body, which is the Church.

-_2l—



God calls me, as He calls all His chil-

dren, to a life of progressive holiness. The

way to that holiness is by the LAW OF
CHARITY, which the Holy Spirit wrote in

my heart at the moment of my baptism.



5



THE QUEEN’S WORK

3742 West Pine Boulevard

ST. LOUIS 8, MO.

f*"T«0