A message from those killed in action


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Yale University Archives



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MESSAGE

FROM THOSE

KILLED IN ACTION

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NIHIL OBSTAT:

Fr. Albericus M. Wulf, O.G.S.0.
Fr. Maurice M. Malloy, O.C.S.O.

Censores

die 31a Julii

IMPRIMI POTEST:

F Fredericus M. Dunne, O.C.S.O.
Abbas B. M. de Gethsemani

die 20a Augu^ti

NIHIL OBSTAT:

Fintan Walker, Ph.D.
Censor Librorum

IMPRIMATUR:

F Josephus E. Ritter, D.D.
Episcopus Indianapolitanus

die 5a Septembris

Copyright 1944

by
Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc.

The Abbey Press,
St. Meinrad, Ind.



To

The Gold Star Parents

OF

America

Praying

That They Meet

Their Heroic Sons

In

Our Home

Beyond the Stars/



FOREWORD
THIS is not propaganda. I have no time for
that. For life is a wind, you see. Eternity
is tomorrow; so I have no second to spare on
mere propaganda. But I must pay my debts,
and I contracted a tremendous one the moment
the blue star in your flag of service turned to
gold. Let me pay some of it now.
I PAY it to you, for you are nearest of kin
to him who is my creditor—you, the Mother,
Father, Brother, Sister, Wife or Sweetheart
of the lad who was “killed in action.^’ He was
your lad, but he is my creditor; for thanks to
him and his all-out sacrifice, I can continue
to wear the black and white of a Trappist
monk and make my all-out effort to adore God.
I sing the praises of Jesus Christ this day and
hymn the glory of His Blessed Mother in the
peace of Gethsemani—America’s Hidden City
of God—only because your lad was courageous
enough to don the garb of a fighting man and
face the forces of antichrist thousands of miles
from home.

THIS is fact I speak, not fancy. I say there
are cloisters in America this moment pre-
cisely because there are American graves in
lands beyond the seas. And I know whereof
I speak. For behold! God was praised by
Trappist monks in Trappist monasteries in
Germany and France before the advent of
Hitler. For a time those praises ceased! But
now, once again praises will rise from Trap-
pist monks in Trappist monasteries in France
and Germany because ... I say it from a deep-
ly grateful heart . . . because the blue star in

your flag of service has turned to gold!

DO YOU see what I owe your lad? It is
something tremendous! Won’t you allow me
to pay some of that debt by giving you my
message, his message, then a command from
the dead? Please do!



MY MESSAGE

Feast of the Sacred Heart, 1944

FRIEND OF MINE:
Your heart is aching, isn’t it? This, then

is the most fitting day I could possibly choose
to address you; for it is the Feast day of Him
whose Heart broke. But just because His
Heart did break, yours can be healed. Never
forget that the moment the point of the lance
pierced the Heart of Christ there was a snap-
ping of bolts on the gates of Heaven, and
Paradise was regained for you, for me, and
for the lad who was ^‘killed in action.”

THAT is the truth we want to hear in this
black hour, isn’t it? We want to know that
life has a meaning, that human existence is
not madness, and that the highways and by-
ways of this war-wearied world lead some-
where. It is from the broken Heart of God
that we hear the one soul-sustaining truth.
With all the eloquence of His mangled Corpse
He tells us that Good Friday’s Blood and dark-
ness is but prelude to the Easter Dawn; that
suffering and sorrow purchase peace

;
that

death is promise of a radiant resurrection.
Believe Him! Believe that there is a Heaven;
that it is our Home; and that every heart-
beat is bringing us nearer it and Him. Be-
lieve that, and the world ceases to be black.

HAVING grasped that, go on and from the
depth of this Feast draw an even more con-
soling truth. Realize that if the Heart of
God craves anything Personal, if Jesus Christ
ever speaks for Himself, the one word He
uses is ‘‘Repay 1” That is the cry that broke
from His lips three hundred years ago when
He appeared to Margaret Mary at Paray-le-

- 5 -



Monial. That is the cry the world of man has
not heard, or hearing, has not heeded. And
it is that heedlessness which has brought on
this awful war. But your lad heard it! Yes,
he heard the cry of the wounded Christ, and
he answered that cry with the ^magnificent
answer of his own precious life! Your loved
one made a '‘beau geste'’ to God ! He repaid
Love with love!

THAT is the glory I write to you today, and
that is the glory I would have gladden your
aching heart. Twenty centuries ago God died
that men might live; today, in this mid-
twentieth century, American men have died,
and are still dying, precisely that God might
live. I mean it! With all the conviction of
my priested soul I say that your lad, and many
another like him, has turned the tables on Om-
nipotence—he has given wounds for Wounds,
blood for Blood, and life for Life.

IT MAY seem strange to hear one say that
your lad died for God. But that only proves
that to many people the phrase, “For God and
Country,” is only a catch-phrase—and they
have not caught its meaning! They do not
see that love for country not based on love for
God is at best a very shallow love; that pa-
triotism not sprung from devotedness to the
Eternal “Pater” in the eternal “Patria” is
but surface sentiment, not virtue that has
eternal value; that love for fellow man not
rooted in recognition of his kinship with Di-

vinity is superficial, unsubstantial and tragi-
cally hollow. I say your boy died for God

—

and there I place my period, because the awful
onslaught of war has beaten us to our knees
and we are recognizing more than ever before
that our Declaration of Independence opens

with a Declaration of Dependence; that Lin-

- 6 -



coin was speaking fact when he spoke of '‘this
nation under God*\- and that the motto on
the Great Seal of the United States, "In God
We Trust,” has got to be lived!

BUT THAT the phrase "For God and Coun-
try” has meaning that is sacred, that it em-
bodies the most thrilling truth of this heart-
sickening war, I leave to be told by your own
loved lad as he speaks to you from out the
beyond in the second part of this booklet. The
comfort I offer you is this: YouVe asked me
to pray for your lad, havenT you? I am glad
to tell you that your request was answered
before it was made. I am glad to tell you that
I prayed for him the day before he died and
the very day he died. I am even more delight-
ed to tell you that that prayer rose up
nomine Ecclesiae—in the name of the Holy,
Roman, Catholic Church”

;
in the name of

almost four hundred million souls who call
God their Father and Christ their King.

HAVE you ever thought of what it means to
pray "in the name of the Church”? For your
great comfort let me tell you a part of it. It
actually means that I gathered all the love of
the unnumbered and unknown "Little Flowers”
who this moment are unpetaling the roses of
their lives behind grate and grille and joyfully
strewing them at the feet of their Jesus; it
means that I gathered all the dauntless zeal
of countless modern Xaviers who this day are
squandering the rich, young energies of their
manhood in the unbroken stretches of arctic
snow and ice as well as in the tangled growth
of fever-breeding tropics, teaching these far-
away peoples the almost unbelievable truth
that God has fallen in love with them

;
it

means that I gathered up all the burning faith
of hundreds on hundreds of hidden Cures

- 7 -



d’Ars whose thirst for souls has burned their
very bodies to a state of emaciation; to this
I added the adoring love in the hearts of all
His anointed, from that of the youngster
whose “rose of priesthood has just slipped its
bud,’’ to that of the snow-white pastor bent
under the harvest of his heavy, fruit-filled
years; it means that I took all the fortitude
of our present day martyrs who no more
shrink from firing squads or the freezing .tor-
tures of Siberia than did our early martyrs
from the Arena’s lions and leopards or the
burning tortures of Nero’s gardens; it means
that I took the gratitude that throbs in the
hearts of hundreds of thousands of young par-
ents as they kneel beside the cradle of the
newly-born, as well as that deeper gratitude
that beats in the breast of the grey-haired

grieving as they kneel beside the coffin of one
who has loved much and died well. This
world of love, adoration, praise and thanks-
giving I took and poured out before God in
one unrestrained torrent. My voice rose “like
the voice of many waters,” as the Apocalypse
says; for it was as if I had gathered all the
waters of the world and placed them in one
sea, then let the wash of that full flood break
upon the ears of God. Still it was not only
“like the voice of many waters” but “like
a voice of thunder” and like the voice of
“harpers playing on their harps” that my
voice arose; for in very truth I had gathered
the music and melody of four hundred million
souls and sent that tremendous burst of song
into Heaven’s high halls through the lips of
the sweetest Singer Heaven or earth has ever
heard—the lips of Christ Jesus.
THAT IS something of what it means to pray
“in the name of the Church,” and that is the
way I prayed the day before your boy died

- 8 -



and the day he died. I took the lispings of
innocence who at Mother^s knees are just
learning to say, ‘‘Jesus” and blended them
with the broken “Aves” of the aged who slip
a Rosary through gnarled fingers as life’s sun
sets; I took the seraphic outpourings of mys-
tics who stand or kneel in transports of love
and merged them with the sobs of Magdalenes
awakened to the ecstacy of purity and the
rapture of mercy; I took the prayers of the
world’s countless Prodigals and joined them
to the praises of those whose souls have known
only the stain of Original sin; I went into
cloisters and convents, into homes and hos-
pitals, into highways and hedges and garnered
all the adoration, praise, thanksgiving and
generous reparation that stirs in the souls of
those who know Christ as Leader and Lover,
and cast it into one brazier that it might rise
as a cloud of incense before God. I took all

that and sent it as intoxicating perfume unto
the throne of the Father as if from a thurible
in- the hands of the Son.

COULD such a prayer go unheard? Hardly!
It is the prayer of the Mystical Body of
Christ. It is the prayer of four hundred mil-
lion hearts throbbing in unison with the Sa-
cred Heart. It is the prayer of four hundred
million lips crying: “Abba—Father!” through
the lips of the Son. It is the pleading prayer
of the eyes of four hundred million people
become eloquent with the eyes of Christ; for
the prayer of the Mystical Body is the prayer
of four hundred million members breaking up-
on the ears of God from the mouth of the
God-Man, the Head of that Body.

THAT was the prayer I prayed for your loved
one. It was the gathered eloquence of four
hundred million pleading through the eyes, the

- 9 -



lips and the Heart of Christ. And I prayed
it just before and just after he died; for I
always sing my sunset song of Compline for
the dying of the day and the dead. For years
I have done the same. In the name of the
Church and through the lips of Christ I sing
the Canonical hour of Compline asking the
Father to look down upon those who before the
next sunset hour are to face the Judgment,
as well as those who in the last twenty-four
hours have faced the Judgment, and see them
through the red mists of Calvary's Blood, see
them in the clefts of the Heart that was brok-
en one Friday afternoon towards sundown,
see them as members of that marvelous Body
of which His Jesus is Head.

DOES IT not comfort you to know that such
a petition came from the lips of the Son of
God? My poor prayers, of themselves, would
hardly reach the ribbed roof of our Cistercian
Gothic glory. Of myself, what am I? In-
finitesimal is accurately descriptive. If Isai^s

could say: ‘T am a man of unclean lips" what
can I say? I have been God's enemy. But be
comforted. It was not from my weak lips
that the prayer arose. No, for in choir I
pray as the ^^anonymous anointed," a little
priest calling to God through the lips of the
great High Priest, Jesus, who ‘‘was heard for
His reverence." Now remember He promised
that whatsoever we asked in His name would
be granted us. What can you expect, then,
from what is asked hy His lips?

SOMETHING MORE CONSOLING

BUT EVEN more consoling than my Com-
pline hour is my Mass. On the very day
your lad died I prayed for him just after I
had brought the Son of God to birth in bread.

- 10 -



As Jesus Christ, Body and Blood, soul and
divinity, lay before me on the white of the
corporal and in the gold of the cup, I spoke
of him who had been ‘^killed in action.” More I
Three hundred thousand times that same day
the attention of God the Father was called to
the soul of your dead lad by God the Son.
Four times every second the Father heard the
plea: ^‘Be mindful, O Lord, of Thy servants
and handmaids who have gone before us with
the sign of faith ‘ and rest in the sleep of
peace. Unto these, 0 Lord, and to all that
rest in Christ, grant, we beseech Thee, a place
of refreshment, light and peace. Through the
same Christ, Our Lord, Amon.”

THINK of that ! Three hundred thousand
times the day he died the Godhead heard the
^Vhite Heart-break of a Host.” It was the
Heart of Jesus breaking in love for men—your
loved one among them. Three hundred thou-
sand times the day he died a golden cup was
lifted high and God the Father heard the
Blood of His Christ calling for mercy on men.
Three hundred thousand different times the
very day he died some ‘‘anonymous anointed,”
in the person of Christ, called out as did the
dying Jesus: “Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they do.” Yes, three hundred
thousand times that day, and three hundred
thousand times every day since, your loved
one^s eternal rest has been begged from God
“through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.”

OH, REALIZE what it means to be a Catholic
and you will know comfort. Realize what it
means to have the Sacrifice of the Mass of-
fered “from the rising of the sun to the going
down of the same,” and your soul will know
true consolation. It is not only the lips of
Christ moving in prayer, not only the hands

- 11 -



of Christ lifted in supplication, it is the Heart
of Christ breaking as only the Heart of God
can break—in a deathless love that men might
live forever. From the parched and blistered
lips of a God a prayer broke to God one Fri-
day afternoon as the sun hid its light. When-
ever you see a Host raised on high realize that
those same lips that were parched and blis-
tered are thirsting with a divine thirst today,
and are moving in the same earnest prayer

;

realize that the human Heart of Christ is
throbbing beneath the white of that round
wafer and is, as it were, fevering His Blood
with yearning for the souls of men; realize
that beneath the appearances of that tiny Host
a Body is hid, a Body that has five wounds
blazing like five tremendous suns as if they
would blind the Godhead to the madness of
sinful man; realize that Jesus is pleading
with all His infinite eloquence for you, for me,
and for your boy.

WITH THAT picture before you, you can un-
derstand my unwearying plea that you make
the Mass your life and your life a Mass. It
is the surest way of having the infinitesimal
become one with the Infinite, of having the
impotent merge with the Omnipotent, and the
creature who cringes in reverential awe pray
through the lips of the God who became man
that men might become like unto God.

ONE FURTHER word about the answer I
made before your request was received. To
the Canonical Office we chant in the name of
the Church, we Trappists always add the Lit-
tle Office of the Blessed Virgin, and it has
been my unvarying custom to make my Com-
pline hour of that Office a plea to Mother
Mary that she take care of those who have
died since last sundown and those who are to

- 12 -



die before the next. Now that may sound
like a very simple thing, but when you realize
that Mary has rightly been called **Omnipoten-
tia Supplex—The Suppliant Woman who can-
not fail to obtain her request,” you will see
how sublime that very simple thing is. You
parents know what it is to love your own flesh
and blood; you wives and sweethearts know
what it is to love a person so that you are
ready to surrender your whole being to him;
you brothers and sisters know what it is to
yearn and burn with love for your brother.
Well, let me tell you that Mary, the Mother of
God, knows what it is to love your lad with
all three loves! In her one Immaculate Heart
these three loves are united—for she is sister
through the flesh of Adam, Lady through the
Kingship of Christ, and Mother through Cal-
vary’s bequest. She has loved your boy as
brother, knight and son. When she pleads
with God the Father she is pleading for her
own! And her pleading is irresistible! For
when the Father looks into her eyes He sees
the light from which the Light of the World
was kindled; as He watches the fair blush
mantle her cheek He knows He is looking on
the source of the Blood that incarnadined
Gethsemani’s grass and stained the Cross of
Calvary; as His gaze rests on the face of the
most beautiful of mothers He recognizes the
features of the ‘‘most beautiful of the sons of
men.” Small wonder she is ^‘Omnipotentia
Supplex''—she mothered His Jesus and she
yet mothers Christ’s mystical members. It
was to her I prayed the day your loved one
died and the day before he died. Don’t you
think, then, that Heaven was very near as he
lost his life in war’s cruel hell?

- 13 -



YOU HAVE NOT LOST

NOW THAT he is gone, don’t think that you
have lost him. No. You have gained him so
that he can never be lost! He is yours this
moment more than he ever was while on earth,
and he will be yours unchangeably. While he
lived, the only certitude you could ever have
of his unchanging love was a moral certitude.
Man is mutable. The only thing we are ab-
solutely sure of in this world is change. But
the one word perfectly descriptive of Heaven
is permanence. There is tragedy in his un-
lived life, I know; but look at the romance in
his love—it is now unchangeable! So I say
again: You have not lost him. You have
gained him so that he can never be lost.

TO YOU mothers and fathers, who had legiti-
mate hopes that he would be your mainstay
and support in your down-going years, I say
be not saddened. Your hopes are not blighted!
He will not contribute directly to your ma-
terial needs

;
he will not make your old age

secure by swelling a bank account; but he
will help you in a more important way. He
will not now be your bread-winner; but let
us realize that it is ‘‘not by bread alone that
man lives.” Believe me when I say your son
will help you as never before. You have not
lost. You have gained tremendously. And
not the least part of that gain lies in what I
call “God’s motherliness.” Christ has added
another touch to the mansion you are to oc-
cupy in His Father’s house. He has made it
much more homelike by placing your loved one
there! He wants to make you homesick for
Heaven. He does it by transporting your own
there.

NOW LET me tell you of your greatest gain.
God has conferred on you a greater honor than

- 14 -



that of being the honored living of the coun-

try's honored dead. He has given you some-
thing much more thrilling than that of being
the survivor of the world's saviors. With
reverence and awe I whisper that in changing
your blue star to gold, God has given you the
opportunity of completing the work of His
Only Begotten Son!

DOES THAT make you start? Does it seem
utterly incredible? Well the truth comes from
St. Paul. He tells us something seemingly
contradictory. He tells us that Christ satis-
fied ‘‘superabundantly"

;
then he says that

something is “wanting" to the Passion of
Christ. That would be a flat contradiction if
if was not for the fact that, as St. Augustine
explains, the satisfaction is “superabundant"
in the Head of the Body, but there is some-
thing “wanting," something to be “filled up" in
the members. In a certain sense, then, the
Passion of Christ is not ended. No. There
is a sea of suffering that must be brought to
the flood. Jesus cannot swell that tide in His
Physical Body, so He depends on you—yes, on
Y O U-—to do it in His Mystical Body. It was
with exultation that St. Paul cried: “I fill up
those things that are wanting to the Passion
of Christ in my flesh, for His Body, which is
the Church." Do you see your sacred oppor-
tunity?—It is to take the awful ache of your
heart, the loneliness, the longing and yearning
that shakes your soul, the anguish that is
yours for the loved one who is gone, and offer
them jubilantly to God the Father. Offer
them to “fill up those things that are wanting
to the Passion of His Son." It is not resigna-
tion that I speak of, understand; it is obla-
tion! I am asking you to be the heroic sur-
vivor of the heroic dead. He died that God
might live; you live that men may not die

- 15 -



eternally. You do that by offering the agony
of your heart to swell that mystic sea of suf-
fering to the very flood. It is a divine work
that Divinity allows you to do. Do it through
the heart that served as scabbard for seven
swords and that other Heart that was broken
by the point of a soldier^s lance. Yours is an
opportunity to satisfy God and save men. You
won’t let it slip, will you? Jesus did not miss
His. Mary did not miss hers. Your boy meas-
ured up perfectly. Won’t you? God needs
YOU. Don’t fail GOD!

NOW ONE little word of explanation before
I deliver the message from the dead. When I
wrote my ‘‘Letter to Mothers Whose Sons are
in the Service” I addressed only “Mother.”
That little pamphlet was hardly off the press
when the very mother who had inspired it
wrote: “Dad misses him as much as I do.”
That sentence has given me pause more than
once since. I see that a certain preoccupation
with Mothers has worked a real injustice to
Fathers. They DO miss the lads as much as
Mothers! Their love may not be as demon-
strative, but it is as deep and as undying. I
know. I had a father who loved! Those who
say that a father’s love is not to be compared
to a mother’s, have never seen a father’s
heart! With that conviction fully formed I
had determined to do justice to the fathers of
our American heroes in my next effort. I was
just about to address this to “Our Gold-Star
Parents” when a letter came in asking for
prayers for a lad who had just given his all
“somewhere in Italy,” leaving behind him his
bride of a year and a half and a baby-daugh-
ter of two months—a child he had never seen
and never will see. The next day or so I re-
ceived a note about a pilot who is “missing in
action” since the first day of the Invasion.

- 16 -



His heart-broken wife contemplates the fea-
tures of the man she loved in the face of a
six-months-old boy. With those facts before
you, you can understand why I address Moth-
er, Father, Sister, Brother, Wife and Sweet-
heart. It is you who are addressed in the title
‘"Beloved” in the pages that follow.

TO THOSE who need consolation—which
means everyone closely connected with the one
whose blue star has turned to gold—I have a
message to deliver. It is from the lad to whom
I owe so much, the boy who gave his all that
God niight live, your loved one! Listen to him
speak . .

.

- 17 -



PART II

HIS MESSAGE

BELOVED:

From out the beyond I speak. The Govern-
ment has informed you that I was ‘'killed in
action.^' In a general way it has told you
where my body lies. But what it has not told
you, because it is something it could not tell
you, is the one thing you want to hear. To
tell you that I speak from out the beyond.

AS LONG as I lived, you were uneasy, weren't
you? Your waking hours were filled with
worry and your troubled sleep broken with
fears. Now that I am dead one aching robs
your days of quiet and your nights of rest.
With all the suddenness of the burst of a bomb
it has broken on you that life on earth is
flung against a background of utter finality,
and that eternal issues are settled in the fleet-
ing moments called time. Now as never before
you see that one thing, and one thing alone, is
necessary, no matter how many thousand oth-
ers may be useful or pleasant. Now as never
before you see that the only thing that really
matters in life and in death is—GRACE. You
have always accepted this truth with your in-
tellect; now you feel its absolute truthfulness
in the very depths of your being. Your heart
aches to know what was the state of my soul
when I died. Your very vitals are gnawed
with anxiety about the issue of my years. Let
me ease that ache and end that gnawing by
saying softly and reverently: “Beloved, re-
joice! and thank God!”

THAT IS my message from out the beyond:
“Rejoice and thank God!” As you love me, I

- 18 -



adjure you to thank God unceasingly for let-
ting me die when I did, where I did, and as I
did. Thank Him night and day for allowing
me to be ‘‘killed in action.^’ It was His great-
est gift to me ! I know you will thank Him
for all He did for me during life, but what I
am especially begging of you is that you thank
Him for what He did to me at death!

AS YOU change my blue star to gold, weep!
I know well that tears will fall from your eyes
in loneliness and love. I garner them as heart-
pearls offered to me. I accept them with eter-
nal humility and eternal gratitude. But, Be-
loved, I want you to weep for joy! I want
sparkling diamonds to spill from those lashes
of yours, and I Want them to drop in brilliant-
ly grateful tribute to God. His mercies I will
sing forever. Be not behind me in paying Him
your thanks. And for what?—For taking me
just as my youth opened into full flower,
thrusting me into the service of my country,
and there hardening my body, steadying my
nerves, and by those months of relentless dis-
cipline fibering my whole being for the awful
shock of battle. Thank Him for all that was
done to my mind and will during those days
of training. It was the tempering of my young
soul; and that soul needed tempering. Be-
loved, believe me when I tell you it was all
part of His kind Providence, part of His in-
finitely wise and merciful plan. He was slow-
ly working up the crescendo to the climax that
came when my young life was snuffed out “in
action.”

FOR THAT climax I want you to thank Him
with all the warm, enthusiastic love of your
great heart. For that was the changing of
my star of service into a star of sacrifice ! Do
you hear. Beloved? I say thank God for stop-

- 19 -



ping the beat of my heart in the heat of bat-
tle, for that has meant the setting of my soul
athrob with the throb of triumph! As you
love me, let every pulsation of your being be
an act of thanksgiving to the God who was
merciful enough to see that I was listed
amongst those “killed in action,” for that has
meant my enrollment amongst those who live
and love, and shall so live forever!

THAT IS what youVe been longing to hear,
isn^t it? Well, hear it with a grateful heart
and from it learn that God still loves paradox.
For me He changed war's curse into a bless-
ing; by robbing me of life “in action” He
gave me life's greatest gift; and now, after
almost breaking your heart with sorrow He
will almost break it again with joy. Yes, He
still loves paradox. The truth I tell from out
the beyond is this: With wildly prodigal hand
God's enemy scattered the seeds of hate the
world over; from that mad sowing, the Divine
Reaper gathers, and yet more joyfully gathers
fat, full harvests of love. I am one of those
fortunate and highly favored sheaves. Thank
Him for that. I say it again: Thank Him
for taking me when He did, where He did, and
as He did. For in losing my life I have
found it! In dying I live! In giving all I
have received everything!

DOES THAT PUZZLE you? Does it seem
strange. Beloved, that I would have you, who
feel crushed under sorrow, rejoice? Do I
sound harsh and unfeeling when I beg you to
thank God for taking me from you? If so, I
can but ask you to listen acutely. You love
me. You know now, perhaps as never before,
that life is not meaningless, that there is a

pattern to the seeming formlessness of our

days, and that time is only for eternity. It is

- 20 -



just because you love me so well that I tell
you to rejoice, for I tell you that my time has
not been wasted, my days have not gone up in
smoke, my young years have not been without
eternal issue! But, Beloved, realize that had
I not been killed in action^’ the issue might
have been different! That is the basis of your
gratitude

!

IT WAS De Ranee, the great reformer of La
Trappe, whence^ the Trappists received their
name, who listed fourteen occasions on which,
if God had called him to Judgment, he would
have been condemned to hell. He kept that
list ever before him. Its fourteen points

stirred him to gratitude for the Divine pa-
tience so prodigally shown him. Beloved, if
we who are dead had made out our list, you
can be sure that for most of us it would have
been longer! Yes, for most of us there were
many more than fourteen occasions on which,
if our hearts had stopped beating, our souls
would have been damned eternally.

YOU KNOW something of the world of men.
You know full well that those in the service
were not exactly angelic ! Their language was
not always pure, their lives were not always
clean. No. Bad whisky and bad women were
too often too near the camps. Many a mother,
many a wife, many a . sweetheart was dis-
turbed by this knowledge so long as their
loved one lived. It has frightened them some-
what since he is dead. They knew the loyalty
and love of their boy, but they also knew that
he was human. Beloved, that is precisely why
I say thank God that He took me when He did,
where He did, and as He did. The Divine
Alchemist is working incessantly in this war.
He is ending lives that could hardly be called
'^good” with deaths that are truly glorious!

- 21 -



He is giving boys who had not the moral
stamina sufficient to withstand the allurements
of the devil the courage to sacrifice not only
momentary pleasure but their whole lifetimes
of possible legitimate joys.

THE EXPLANATION

YOUR SOUL cries for explanation, I know.
I give it by saying that the President was
right, Sherman was wrong, and God is to be
taken at His word.

IT WAS Roosevelt who said: ‘Tt is not so
much a duty as a privilege to serve. Beloved,
in saying that, he said more than he knew!
He meant that it was a privilege to be allowed
to fight for homes, for hearths, for fellow-
men; and he was right. But the deeper truth
is that we became more than warriors for our
country when we donned the uniform of Uncle
Sam; we became crusaders for Christ! We
were battling not so much that men might be
free to call their souls their own, as that God
might be free to live in the world He had
created.

LOOK, BELOVED! A cross marks my grave.
A cross marks the grave of every brave man
who has been buried. Over the waters that
have swallowed hundreds, crosses have been

traced. Had we not died, my dearest, most
likely the world would know no crosses ! Think
what that would mean. As is all too evident,
the swastika is no sign of salvation. No God-
become-man ever flung Himself with out-
stretched arms on that twisted thing, there to
die that men might live. Never! That mean-
ingless zigzag can speak of no love because

over it no drops of Divine Blood have ever

dropped from the wounds of a dying God. Be-

- 22 -



lieve me, Beloved, it was a privilege to die
that God might live!

SHERMAN SAID: “War is hell.” He was
wrong—at least as far as I was concerned.
For me, and millions like me, war was not
hell; it was Purgatory! We suffered more
than we knew as we were transformed from
little more than growing boys at play into
grim fighters for the U.S.A. It cost us much
to obey. We sweated and strained mentally
as well as physically while learning to execute

commands with all the promptness and per-
fection of an automaton. Almost unknown to
ourselves we were paying the price for our
sins; we were doing penance for our way-
wardness as we lived under the rigid discipline
of the service. Not all of us were as Christ-
conscious as was Joyce Kilmer, but the merci-
ful God, who reads the hearts better than the
hearts’ owners’ interpreted our deeds kindly.
In His great love for us, God says that as we
did our duty because it was duty we virtually
prayed what Kilmer prayed actually. His In-
finite Mercy heard our deeds saying:

“My shoulders ache beneath my pack.
(Lie easier. Cross, upon His back.)

I march with feet that burn and smart.
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart.)
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb.
(From Thy pierced palms red rivers
come.)

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land or sea.

So, let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.”

- 23 -



BELOVED, you know that love is not blind.
No. The warmth of the heart burns all scales

from the eyes, and love sees more clearly than

the eagle. Every blemish in the Beloved is

sharply noted. Love, which can forgive all,

seemingly can condone nothing. It is jealous,

exacting, inexorable. You know that. You

also know that while it wants everything, it

is pleased beyond measure with whatever little

is given. That is love. AVith that as premise,

let me tell you that God loves! He is love!
“This millionth of His gift'' seems to have

opened the very flood-gates of His mercy!

I DON'T understand it all. I cannot explain
it fully. I know that love can forbear and

that love can forgive. But I also know that

love can never be reconciled to an unlovely

object. And a sinner is unlovely! Perhaps
there is deeper truth in the saying that “God

hates the sin but loves the sinner" than most

people realize. We mortals often find diffi-
culty in separating the act from the actor. The

act we see as final, once placed it can never be

removed. But what we don't see clearly enough

is that the actor can be changed! He can

show remorse for the irremovable act he has

placed and thus show himself a different per-

son from the one who placed the deed. In

that case we can love the actor but hate his

act. I think that is the way God looked on

the ‘‘millionth part" of His gift that we gave

back. It was not that His love made Him
blind, but that it sharpened His vision and

enabled Him to see more in the last few days
of our lives than we ourselves saw. What we

offered as service. He accepted as sacrifice! He

still hates sin with an infinite hate; but I

can tell you that He loves one who was a sin-

ner.

- 24 -



AND THAT is why I say God can be taken
at His word. Do you remember Christ saying:
^^Greater love than this no man hath, that he
lay down his life for his friend?’^ (Jno. 15:13)
Do you remember St. Paul saying: ^^Love is
the fulfilling of the law?^’ (Rom. 8:10) Do
you remember how Jesus summed up the whole
Law and the Prophets in the two Command-
ments of love? Do you remember how He
said: ^‘As long as you did it to one of these,
the least of my brethren, you did it unto Me?^^
(Mt. 25:40) Well, Beloved, if you remember
all those sayings, I have little more to say;
for I^m sure you believe that God can be taken
at His word. In truth, nothing more need be
said. The whole puzzling, almost miraculous
affair is solved. If you would but understand
me rightly I would sum it all up by saying
that I am ‘^the man who got even with God.”

I DON'T say it; for it would sound too much
like a boast, and all I want to do is sing the
mercies of God. But, Beloved, that is His mer-
cy! After showing infinite patience with my
weakness, my waywardness, my wickedness.
He crowns His work with an act of Paternal
prodigality. He allows me to die in circum-
stances that He can interpret as my act of
perfect love. His omnipotent generosity says
that my being “killed in action” was the “lay-
ing down of my life for my friend.” He says
it was “the fulfilling of the law.” More! He
claims I got even with His Christ; for I car-
ried my cross unto my Golgotha and gave up
the ghost ’that there might be room in the
world for His Holy Ghost. In short, He says
I actually died that He might live!

I KNOW that sounds like the language of a
mystic, so I let you hear the same thing from
the lips of a man—a great man! Back in

- 25 -



World War I Cardinal Mercier, Christ's Bel-
gian giant, was asked if soldiers, falling in
a righteous cause, could be called ^‘martyrs.”
He answered that they could not, in the strict
theological sense of the word; for martyrs
give themselves to their persecutors undefend-
ed and unarmed, whereas soldiers die fighting.
“But," he continued, “if you ask me what I
think concerning the eternal salvation of a
brave man who voluntarily lays down his life
in defense of his country's honor and in vin-
dication of violated justice, I do not hesitate
to reply that one cannot doubt in the least
that Christ will crown his military valor, and
that death, accepted in this Christian spirit,

will assure the salvation of that man’s soul.”

I KNOW you will see the pivot on which the
whole issue swings; and I know you will won-
der if we “voluntarily laid down our lives"
and “accepted death in a Christian spirit."
Beloved, let me tell you that danger of death
developed in us a God-consciousness that was
almost equal to our self-consciousness! There
were no atheists in fox-holes! Men who bat-
tled in the Solomons knew that they fought
not so much under the blazing sun of the trop-
ics as under the blinding light of eternity.
Major Kenneth G. Stack, chaplain of the
U.S.A., has told much about God on Guadal-
canal. He has told of a little Jewish lad, tail-
gimner on a B-17, who squeezed a miraculous
medal he had received from the chaplain of
the Cook County Hospital in Chicago, as the
badly battered ship limped home and the Irish
waist-gunner said the Eosary with the chap-
lain. That was God-consciousness, wasn't it?
It was the same Major Stack who answered
the question: “What does the war do to men
spiritually?" by saying: “As I see it, it brings
some men very close to being canonized saints

- 26 -



and martyrs, who are offering up their lives
in the spirit of resignation to God’s will for

the salvation of such a%you and me—^who, I
sometimes feel, deserve it very little.”

THE ATLANTIC Charter did much to make
it clear that we were fighting for God. Facts
from Poland and Prussia made it even clearer.

^ But, Beloved, the men who made it clearest
are the men on whom you must pray God’s
unending blessings—the Catholic Chaplains!
The Government did many wonderful things
for us in the service. While in training, op-
portunities for wholesome recreation were af-
forded almost without number. Even to the
combat area they sent Jills in Jeeps,” the best
of our stage and screen comedians, and celeb-
rities from many walks in life. That was con-
siderate. Even more considerate was the un-
surpassed efficiency of the medical corps. The
Government was prodigal in its outlay for
equipment. The medical profession of the land
was spendthrift with men and women and sur-
gical skill. Into the stinking jungles of the

South Pacific, over the burning sands of Af-
rica’s desert, across poor desolate France went
doctors and nurses with blood for the almost
bloodless and life for the almost dead. Yes,
we had much to be grateful for; but for noth-
ing more than for our Catholic Chaplains

!

SCIENCE DID all it could to bring us bodily
well-being. Entertainers lifted our morale and
took care of our mental health. But only
Catholic Chaplains could take care of our soul-
sicknesses and prepare us for eternal life.
They were the men who would never let us
forget for what we were fighting. They were
the ones who kept us mindful of God. And
thank God they were everywhere! Believe
me. Beloved, we may have listened with our

- 27 -



tongues in our cheeks as they told us how to
live. We were so stupidly sophisticated! But
we listened with both^ears, with all our minds,
and all our hearts as they told us how to die.

FATHER JAMES J. Galvin, C.SS.R., wrote*
most truthfully of them when he wrote:

In the olive groves of Sicily we lift the
Sacred Host.

In the jungle swamps of Papua where
strong Marines grow thin

And the scarlet parrots chatter and the
yellow snipers grin;

With fox-hole for confessional, we kneel
and pardon sin!

And on palm and orchid islands naked
natives gape in awe

To see strong men in brown and green
from New York and Arkansas

Gather round our altar-jeeps with beads
and bended head

And stack their guns to kneel and pay
mute homage to the dead.

And they wear Our Lady’s medal and
they bless themselves and rise

And a sense of pride steals o’er us and
gathers in our eyes.

For, for this it is we follow them on keel
and wheel and wing . .

.

By the chrism on our hands we’ve sworn
this oath to Christ the King:

To sleep and creep and climb with them to
keep their spirits bright,

To keep them in the Grace of God—hil-
arious

,

delight !

—

To stand abreast of each of them and
school their hearts to ring

With three eternal cheers for Christ!
(For death has lost its sting!)

Vivat Ecclesia! Domino gloria!
Mori pro Patria! We fight for Christ

the King!''

- 28 -



BELOVED, THAT oath has been, and is yet
being, kept! Hearts are ringing ^Vith three
eternal cheers for Christ^’ because these men
took all the sting from Death by showing us
that we fought ‘‘for Christ the King/’

IS THE pivotal sentence in Cardinal Herder’s
statement proved? Listen then to how this
man of God and lover of God’s people went on

:

“
‘Greater love than this no man hath,”’ said

Our Savior, ‘that a man lay down his life for
his friends.’ The soldier who dies to save his
brethren, and to defend the hearths and altars
of his country, reaches this highest degree of
charity. He may not have made a close analy-
sis of the value of his sacrifice; but must we
suppose that God requires of the plain soldier
in the exitement of the battle the methodical

precision of the moralist and theologian? Can
we, who revere his heroism, doubt that God
looks upon it with love?”

I KNOW how you will answer those two ques-
tions; but bear with me while I point out a
difference between the two wars. The first
World War was bitter. The invasion of Bel-
gium was unjust. The Allies did fight in self-
defense. But this second World War is differ-
ent in kind as well as degree! Twenty-five
years ago we were defending the rights God
had given to man; today our role is somewhat
reversed and in very truth it can be said that
we are defending the rights some men will not
give to God.. I mean it. This war is a crusade
or it is a crime. If we who are dead did not
battle that God might live in the minds of the
men He has created and be loved by the hearts
He has set beating, then we were merely mur-
dering. If we were not actually shielding
Jesus Christ from the blitzkrieg of antichrist,
if we did not actually give our all that Christ’s

- 29 -



Cross might shine from steeple and spire, and
that the love of His Sacred Heart might be
known and had by the love-hungry hearts of
men, then we were simply slaughtering; and
we were slaughtered!

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON once said: “The
only defensible war is a war for defense.” He
was right; and because he was so right, I
am not wrong when I say the most defensible
of all wars is the war in defense of God. And,
Beloved, that is this war! Oh, we fought for
homes and hearths; we battled for temples
and altars; but we Catholics knew that there
were homes with hearths and temples with
altars only because there is a God. Back in
1917-1918 thousands fell in Flanders fields and
Belleau Wood. As the Cardinal said, they
deserved to be crowned by Christ; for they
were avenging the outraged rights of small
nations, and fighting that men might live amid
justice. But today, in the Far East and in
the far West, amid the chill snows of the
North as well as in the tangled growths of
the tropics, thousands and hundreds of thou-
sands have died precisely that God might live.
DonT you see, then, how doubly applicable the
CardinaFs words are to us whose blue stars
have already turned to gold? We had the
honor to die for Him at whose birth a golden
star of exceptional brilliance burst into the

midnight blue and was seen by Wise Men in
the East! What a blessing has been ours!

THE CARDINAL IS NOT GUILTY

I KNOW that there some who have called this
“wishful thinking.” But, Beloved, if any
should again call it such, be not affected.
Realize that more correctly it can be called
thought-filled wishing!” By that I mean that

- 30 -



this consoling doctrine is based on solid truth.
Wasn’t it you who told me about the Catholic
belief concerning women who die in child-
birth? Didn’t you say that it was commonly
held by careful theologians that God would
reward with eternal life those who had given
their temporal life that another babe might
be born? That stands to reason; and it is
backed by revelation. For the text “Greater
love than this no man hath, that he lay down
his life for his friends,” certainly applies to

such a mother. Don’t you see, then, how con-
sonant with Catholic belief is the truth I tell
about men who have been “killed in action”?

CAEDINAL MERCIER could never be ac-
cused of “wishful thinking.” Not that pene-
trating genius! And it was he who said:
“Christian mothers, be proud of your sons.
Of all griefs, of all human sorrows, yours is
perhaps the most worthy of veneration. I
seem to see you in mourning, but erect never-
theless! standing beside the Mother of Sor-
rows at the foot of the Cross. Allow us to
offer you not only our condolences, but also our
congratulations. Not all heroes obtain temporal
honors, but we have the right to hope that to
all will be given the immortal crown of the
elect

r

WHAT A statement ! It does sound like “wish-
ful thinking,” doesn’t it? When one thinks of
the conduct of some of the service men “on
leave”; when one considers the almost bru-
talizing effects of barrack-life in time of war;
when one reflects on the proneness of man to
evil and the awful purity of God, then one is
tempted to say that the Cardinal is guilty of
“wishful thinking.” But, Beloved, before any-
one condemns this princely prelate, insist that
they read the reason His Eminence assigned.

- 31 -



Cardinal Mercier knew life! He was aware
of the animal in man! He saw soldiers from
many lands, and he saw them in many varied
actions. He well knew that they were men,
not angels; and not many of them angelic
men! Yes, he knew all this, and yet he said:
‘^We have the right to hope^’ that those who
^‘voluntarily lay down their lives in defense
of their country’s honor and in vindication of
violated justice,” that those who “accepted
death in the Christian spirit,” would “be given
the immortal crown of the elect.” His next
sentence is the sentence that proves that he
was expressing “thought-filled wishing” and
not “wishful thinking.” It runs: “For such
is the virtue of a perfect act of charity that
it cancels a whole life of sin!”

HE WAS not thinking that we warriors were
sinless. No indeed. He was only too well
aware of the shameful fact that too often we
were sin-filled. But, just as he knew men, so
did he know the mercy of God! That is why
his next line was: “In the twinkling of an
eye it (the act of perfect charity) transforms
a sinful man into a saint!”

THOSE WHO call that “wishful thinking”
should stop and think ! They should read again
the parable of the Prodigal Son. It will teach

them a thrilling truth ! That boy was no
saint! Far from it. He ended up with swine
after squandering his patrimony on harlots.
But how did his father receive him on his
return? Why, the, old man could not wait for
the boy to reach home. Love gave life to aged
limbs. Out onto the road he ran to meet his
son! Then he would not even allow the lad
to make his confession. No. He kissed him.
Called servants. Commanded the fatted calf
killed. Demanded the best robe, and placed

- 32 -



the ring on the finger of a wastrel who had
fiung away a fortune in riotous living. Re-
flection on that parable will rob every cynic
of his cynicism and every skeptic of his doubt.
It tells us the humbling, hope-filled, intoxicat-

truth that we limping Prodigals have for
our Father God

!

A LATE President of Notre Dame University,
the Rev. Charles L. O’Donnell, knew Christ
and Christians. That is why he wrote

:

He talked with sinners, ate with them,
and died
With two for company on a sorry hill.

And when grey dawns have brought us
to His side.
We know, heart-brokenly, that He

loves us still!

He wrote that about Confession. If he had
written about the Judgment, I think he would
have changed but one word. He would have
said:

‘‘We know, soul-startlingly, that He
loves us still!”

BELOVED, YOU hear what I am saying and
what Cardinal Mercier has said. Not that
we who were “killed in action” were holy, but
that we were humble; not that we led sinless
lives, but that God granted us saintly deaths;
not that by our own unaided bravery we have
scaled the “hid battlements of eternity,” but
that by the strong arms of Christ we have
been snatched from the jaws of hell.

SHOULD ANYONE still smile at the message
I send, I recommend to them a sober recollec-
tion of what happened as the God-man died.
On His right was an individual who revelation
says was a robber and who tradition gives us
reason to believe was a murderer. His life had
been so criminal that he himself openly ad-

- 33 -



mitted that his crucifixion was just. And yet,
Jesus Christ, Unerring Truth, He who nei-
ther deceives nor can be deceived, canonized
that man before that man was dead! And for
what?—For a single act of Faith and a hum-
ble petition for remembrance. ‘‘Lord, remem-
ber me . . he said, and from the Cross of
Christ came the canonizing words: “This day
thou shalt be with Me in Paradise!”

LET THOSE who call this “wishful thinking”
think on that! Let them contrast the life and
death of any ordinary service man with the
life and death of Saint Dismas. Since he re-
ceived Paradise for a single act of Faith and
a simple humble petition, isnT it thought-filled
wishing” rather than “wishful thinking” to
believe that lads “killed in action” will receive

Heaven for their act of Perfect Love?

ONE DEEPER TRUTH

I HAVE called this war a “crusade,” Beloved.
And I was right. For in all truth it is being
waged that God might live on the earth He
has made. But one deeper truth was expressed
by a young English girl, Caryll Houselander
by name. She said: “TH/S WAR IS THE
PASSION '' By that she meant that Christ in
Christians is living over again His Agony of
Bloody Sweat and His three hours of awful
anguish. She is theologically exact. But, Be-
loved, do you see the wondrous implication in
her words? Since this war is the Passion,
since Christ in Christians is again sweating
Blood and dying between thieves, it follows
that Christians in Christ are on their way to
their Resurrection!

THAT IS A TRUTH too little recognized.
The Passion is not the close of the Christ

- 34 -



drama, Beloved, it is only its turning point!
The curtain does not fall on Christ’s life as
the gloom of Golgotha blots out the sun. Nev-
er! That were to make of His life a tragedy,
\yhen in reality it was a triumph ! It is against
the background of Easter’s golden dawn that
we must see Christ if we would see Him
rightly. For it is Sunday morning, and only
Sunday morning, that makes Friday after-
noon “Good.” It is the splitting of the Roman
sealed tomb and not the rending of the rocks
or the sundering of the Jewish veil that ulti-
mately makes Christianity a religion and the
Crucifixion a redemption. That is why Caryll
Houselander was actually prophesying the sal-
vation and resurrection of man in Christ Jesus
when she penetrated the blood haze that hangs
over this war and saw it as the Passion of the
Mystical Jesus.

THAT IS the truth that explains all that I
have been trying to say: Christ is in Chris-
tians and Christians are in Christ! The Mys-
tical Body is the world’s greatest fact! It
explains not only my salvation, but it tells its
means! For what had I ever done to merit
such a glory from God that I should be num-
bered amongst those whose death can be called
an act of Perfect Charity? Nothing! And
yet, that glory was merited! By whom?—By
YOU! Yes, you and millions like you who
live in Christ Jesus! Let me clarify

BELOVED, the day I received your last letter
I sat in the sands and mused on how many
hands were needed before that manifestation
of your heart could reach me. I saw woods-
men in the virginal forests of the Northwest
cut down trees and work them into the waters
that carried them to the sea. I saw bargemen
lash the giant logs together and tow them to

- 35 -



a mill. As I watched them being reduced to
pulp, then saw the pulp being moulded, pressed
and dried, my mind called up the chemists
behind that process, the iron and steel work-
ers behind the machines and the miners still
further back behind the ore for those ma-
chines. Then I lost count. I next fell to re-
constructing the experiences of the letter since

you sealed it with your kiss. A man collected
it from a box; a girl sorted it and put it in
a sack; after a ride in the truck it had a
ride in the train. Before it reached my side
of the world it got both sea-sick and air-sick.
There it was sorted again, resorted and re-
sacked. By this time it knew every different
kind of hand possessed by man—^the hard,
rough, calloused, soft, gentle, careless, kind.
Men, women and girls had fingered it. But
now it came in possession of the Army. Those
boys sent it along the regular route until my
Captain gave it to my Sergeant, and my Ser-
geant gave it to me. What an immense amount
of co-operation was necessary before I could
read what your loving heart had dictated to
your hand!

I HAD ARRIVED at this point in my mus-
ings when a plane passed overhead. I re-
flected that for one man in the air there had
to be eleven dr twelve on the ground beneath.
To keep these twelve or thirteen in fighting
trim a veritable army of scholars and work-
ers had to contribute their share. Farmers,
scientists, millhands, packers, shippers, steve-

dores, munition workers! The mere problem
of fuel to keep that ship in the air staggered
me. My imagination pictured for me the mo-
notonous rise and fall of a pump in a Cali-
fornia oil-field. I saw the crude oil pour into
a refinery. I saw the finished product put
aboard tankers. With anxious eye I watched

- 36 -



these bury their noses in the billows of a
submarine-infested ocean. I cheered as I saw
them make port, then marvelled at the effi-
i^ency and despatch with which they were
unloaded. I was having a moment of enlight-
enment on the intimate relations shared by
the most distant of men.

THE THOUGHT that all this massing of ef-
fort was only for destruction depressed me.
But then, clearer than any bugle call across
a quiet lake, came the question the Chaplain
had fired at us just a week before: ^^What
does the doctrine of the Mystical Body mean
to you?'’ None of us had a ready answer, so
he told us in unmistakable terms just how
near you and all at home were to us mystically
and how the prayers of millions were keeping
us going spiritually. I forgot the war then
and thought of the thousands of nuns and
monks cloistered away from the madness of
the world with only one work to do—to praise
God and ask His mercy on the madness of
men. I thought of the hundreds of thousands
of priests who daily lift up a round white
Host and a ruby red cup, not for themselves
alone, but for me and for every other human
to whom God has given the breath of life.
Then it was that I caught my breath as I
thought of how often you and I had asked the
Blessed Mother of God to ‘‘pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.” Instinc-
tively my hand went to my pocket. My Rosary
was there. I started to say a “Hail Mary.”
I got as far as “blessed is the fruit of thy
womb, Jesus,” when all that I had ever heard
or read about the Mystical Body of Christ
rushed upon me like a bursting sea. I was no
longer a lone service man sitting in the sand
reading your letter, I was a member of the
Body that numbers almost four hundred mil-

- 37 -



lions as members, I was as intimately connect-
ed with Christ, the Son of the Living God, as
was my hand to my wrist, my wrist to my
arm, the beat of my heart to my heart!

ALL FEAR of death left me. But, Beloved,
believe me when I say that it is not death that
any mortal fears; it is the Judgment. Fear
of the Judgment left me. With Christ as Ad-
vocate and the Mother of Christ as Suppliant;
with you calling on her daily to ‘‘pray for me
now and at the hour of my death”; with Him
praying at the hour of His death “that all
may be one,” as He and the Father are one;
with three hundred thousand priests renewing
Calvary three hundred thousand time a day;
with four hundred million Catholics as fellow
members of a Mystical Body all co-operating
for my soul's salvation, why should I fear?

I KISSED your letter. I knelt there on the
sands and actually sobbed: “Thank You, God,
for being my Father! Thank You, Jesus, for
being my Jesus! Thank yo-u, Mary, for being
Mother of God and my mother! Thank you.
Beloved, and you my fellow members!” Next
day I was dead.

IF ANYONE whispers that I have sent you
some “wishful thinking,” tell them the soul- •

shaking truth that Christ and Christians are
one, and that the most amazing thing in all
creation is not that Christians should be saved
but that any Christian should be so stubbornly
determined as to be lost!

THAT IS the consolation that I give you from
out the beyond. But now. Beloved, I must
give you a command. It is:

LET NO ONE MOCK YOUR DEAD!

- 38 -



PART III

THE COMMAND

LET NO ONE mock your dead! Does that
strike you as an idea that is fantastic? Does
it stir your indignation somewhat? Do you
think the command uncalled for and unneces-
sary? If so, just pause, look around you and
realize that there can be mockery in magnifi-
cence !

GLISTENING WHITE in the National Ceme-
tery at Arlington is an imposing and impres-
sive mausoleum holding the bones of an un-
known soldier. At the side of that mute ele-
glance paces a stalwart sentry paying homage
to the dead. Thus in the shadow of the Na-
tion's Capitol the people of the nation would
honor those unknown heroes who gave their
all in World War I. Beloved, that bit of mag-
nificence is a gigantic mockery! If that Un-
known Soldier were given tongue today he
would shout: ‘‘Have done with this sham!
You shame us! We died that the world might
be safe for democracy; you allowed it to lapse
into demagogy. Twenty-five years have not
fled and you who live have played truant to
the trust we who were true unto death left
you. Recklessly we spilled out our lifers blood
and won the brutal battle; but you, in care-
lessness and callousness, have lost the very
things we battled for. This tomb is not to
our honor but to our undying disgrace. It tells
the world that we flung away our lives like
fools!'’

YES, INDEED, there can be mockery in mag-
nificence. Can you imagine what the Unknown
Soldier of France, who lies, I believe, in tragic

- 39 -



irony near the Arc de Triomphe, would say to
his survivors? Think what he would say for
the thousands and hundreds of thousands who
battled and bled under Foch at the Marne!
Think what he would say for the French Poilu
and the four years agony he endured. Can
you not hear him indignantly cry: ‘‘Was it
for this that we died? Was it to have our
Nation collapse within twenty-two years that
we flung away our youth? Did we give our
all only to have the enemy we so doggedly
battled and finally subdued walk into our loved
land almost unopposed? Did we make the
supreme sacrifice of our unlived lives only to
have the Prussian pagan goose-step past Notre
Dame de Paris? Destroy this magnificence.
It is mockery! It perdures to our disgrace!”

BELOVED, LET not the dead of World War
II be mocked as were the dead of World War
I. We want no memorials. We demand mem-
ories! We want to live; not to be entombed!
So give us no mausoleums of marble, statues
of bronze or shafts of grim granite. Such
things may be impressive; they are utterly
inadequate; for while they tell the world that
we are dead, they say nothing about the things
for which we died. That is why we demand
memories. Unless we live in the warm, puls-
ing memories of men, every memorial, no mat-
ter how magnificent, will be hollow mockery!

SUPPOSE THAT after they had defeated the
British, Washington and his associates ordered
a statue of the Minute-Man for Concordes
Common, monuments of stone to be erected at
Saratoga, Yorktown and Valley Forge, and
the Declaration of Independence to be framed
in gold and hung in Philadelphia, but at the
same time allowed England to continue her
rule of the Colonies, impose taxation without

- 40 -



representation, and Parliament to be supreme,
'"^ould they have honored or dishonored their
dead? Would the Revolution have been won
or lost? Stupid question, isn’t it? Beloved,

if the things these men bled and died for had
not been kept alive in the ^nemories of those
who did not die, independence would never
have been obtained, and every memorial erect-
ed to the honor of the dead would have stood
to their undying disgrace! You see the point,
and you see the parallel, but bear with me
while I adduce another argument.

SUPPOSE THAT after Appomattox the North
had allowed the Confederacy to keep its own
government, its own army, its slaves, and its
own concept of State’s Rights, while here,
there and everywhere it set up shafts, statues,
tablets and crosses to mark the places where
bloody battles had been fought and where hun-
dreds of brave men had lost their lives; sup-
pose that the survivors ignored the fact that
these men died precisely that ‘‘the UNION
might be preserved,” would not every mem-
orial be a mockery? Well, that is the danger
that looms for us who have died in World War
II; and that is why we demand memories!

AS HE STOOD dedicating the ground at
Gettysburg, Lincoln sensed this truth. He
knew that memories counted, not memorials.
That is why he said: “7t is for us the living
to he dedicated, ,

,

That’s the point, the

essential point. It is for the living to be dedi-
cated! And to what?—To what Lincoln said:

. . to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is for us to be dedicated to the great task
remaining before us—^that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full measure of

- 41 -



devotion—that we here highly resolve that the
dead shall not have died in vain.”

THAT IS the proper way to honor the dead.
Enshrine them in living memories. Entomb
them not in mute memorials. Be mindful of
why they died and not only of the fact that
they are dead. Lincoln was a practical man.
He would have the living honor the heroes
who fell by entering practical testament with
them, and not by erecting impractical testi-
monials to them. And that is what we, the
dead of World War II, demand!

WE DID not die to rid the world of Hitler.
We did not die to wreak vengeance on Japan.
We did not die to avenge Poland, Hungary or
Czechoslovakia. If a country must be named,
name our own loved land, the glorious United
States. But, Beloved, the truer truth is that

we died for God. We died that God might live
in the hearts and minds of the peoples of the
world, first among them the people of the
United States. And mocked, hideously mocked,
we shall be if you, the living, do not dedicate
yourselves to the unfinished work we ad-
vanced ! If you do not consecrate yourselves
to the task of seeing that God goes back into
the schools^ that Religion returns to Education,

then the world’s Western Hemisphere was
turned into an Haceldama in vain! And what
is more, you prove us mad! You prove that
in a dementia unparalleled we dunged much
of six whole continents and countless islands
in the seven seas with rotten death—the corps-
es of our own strong, young, full-flowered
American youth! Unless God goes back into
the schools a barren holocaust has been made,
and you, the living, have turned the sacrifice
of the dead into sacrilege

!

- 42 -



BISMARCK ONCE said: ‘‘If you want a
thing in the nation, put it into the schools.”
That he was right has been proved by Commu-
nistic Russia and Nazi Germany. The child
of today is the citizen of tommorrow. What
he learns in the class-room as a lad he will
preach on the street as a youth and practice
in business as a man. But why talk? We our-
selves have proved the Iron Chancellor right.
We have godlessness in our Nation this mo-
ment because we have had godlessness in
our schools for over half a century ! It is high
time for us to take a page from another book.
Christ told us to learn from the children of
the world who “are wiser in their generation
than are the children of light.” Learn from
Bismarck, from Russia, from Germany, from
our own awful mistake of the past. Make the
United States the nation we died that it might
be; make it the nation Lincoln claimed it to
be; make it the nation our Founding Fathers
hoped and planned it would be. Make it a
“nation under God,” by putting God back into
the schools

!

THAT IS our demand. But by that we do
not mean the “Sunday Schools.” No. That
is the fatal error we made decades ago. We
divorced religion from real life. We relegated
it to the realms of the unimportant. Five and
even six days a week we insisted that our
children worship at the altar of Science; on
the seventh we hoped, more or less, that they
might go unto the altar of God. Then we
wring our hands and lament our juvenile de-
linquency, our crime waves, our immoral, un-
moral and amoral adults! Where is our logic?
Where, our common sense? We sow the wind
and marvel that we reap the whirlwind! No
great intelligence is required to see that with-
out God there is no real authority; without

- 43 -



real authority there is no real law and order;
without real law and order there is and ever
will be social suicide! Now is the time to
prove that America did not suffer an intellec-
tual black-out. Do it by putting God back not
only in the Sunday School, but in every school
from ‘^the little red schoolhouse” up to and
inclusive of the majestic halls of our great
Universities. Get God back in every class
from kindergarten to collegiate post-graduate,
and you will be keeping us in mind and not
putting us in memorials!

BELOVED, THE three “R’s” have not pro-
duced good citizens. Reading, ’Kiting and
’Rithmetic have not inculcated the reverence,
respect and proper regard for the rights of
others without which there can be no truly
civilized state. And they never will ! For
without recognition of duties toward God why
should anyone admit duties toward man? If
God is not sovereign, why should men not be
utterly, ruthlessly and recklessly selfish?
Without religion there is no morality, and
without morality you may develop manners in
men but you will never develop manhood; you
may produce people who will submit, but never
people who will obey. You are preparing the
Servile State! That is the barbarism we bat-
tled! We died that America might be civil-
ized; that her people might be free. Prove
that we haven’t died in vain by putting Re-
ligion back in Education, for that is the only
way to get morality back into the nation and
law and order into everyday life.

YOU MAY wonder why we who demand mem-
ories instead of memorials do not, in specify-
ing the particular memory, say something
about those hideous blotches that have broken
out on our National countenance and rob it

- 44 -



of all beauty. You may wonder why we say
nothing about divorce, birth-control and ab-
ortion, nothing about the rankling injustice
that has set Capital and Labor standing like
two angry bulls with locked horns, nothing
about that corruption in politics which has
produced hordes of men for the political par-
ties but not a statesman for the people.

IT IS true that we did not die that our coun-
try might outdo pagan Japan in its mockery
of marriage. It is true that we did not leave
the women we almost worshipped—our moth-
ers and sisters—and the ‘‘one woman in all
the world’^—^the woman we almost adored

—

our wife or wife-to-be—that womanhood might
be degraded by that accursed thing some legis-
lators have stupidly written into the statutes
of their States. No, we did not die for that.
We died that God might live, and that women
might attain their God-given destiny, which is
to become very like the Mother of God by
bringing into the world other syllables of the
Word Divine, other little redeemers of a world
that needs redemption, other children to be
adopted by God the Father and made heirs of
Heaven. That is why we died—that God
might live and that men and women might
live under God! But neither can ever be done
as long as men dare to put asunder what God
has joined together. Neither can ever be done
as long as our Nation countenances divorce.

WE KNOW that. Beloved. We also know that
statistics show that out of every six American
marriages one ends in the divorce courts. And
yet our people remain complacent! What a
proof of national paganism! If one out of
every six banks in America failed; if one out
of every six American business houses dropped
out of existence

;
if one out of every six

- 45 -



American buildings crumbled into dust, you
can be sure that the people of America would
lose their complacency. A further proof of
their accursed materialism. Beloved, stability
in marriage is of much more import to the
nation as a nation than the stability of her
banks, her business houses or her buildings.
The family is the nation's very foundation.
How can you have a nation if you have no
families? How can you have families if you
permit divorce? Fogs can rest on strong
mountains but strong mountains cannot rest
on fogs ! And yet some of our legislators plan
to build a strong nation on such shifty, va-
porous, unstable stuff as marriages that allow
for divorce! If the foundation is not solid
how can the building be safe? If marriage is
not sacred what is? If husband and wife can
look upon this holy contract as a ^^scrap of
paper" why should anyone view the State or
Federal Constitution in any other light?

IT IS not that we are unmindful of the hide-
ousness of this blotch on the face of our na-
tion, it is only that we are very mindful of
its cause. A blotch on the face does not say
that the skin is poor but that the blood is
bad! So instead of pinching the pimple or
putting salve on the blemish, we aim to purge
the blood! Men and women have no respect
for marriage because they have no respect for
the God who instituted marriage and the
Christ who raised it to the dignity of a Sac-
rament. Speaking in Cleveland on March 12,
1944, Chief Justice Silbert, after stating that

69%of the cases filed in the courts of the coun-
try were for divorce, said: ^Tf the whole
Country were Catholic, I'd be out of a job."
There is our whole case in a sentence! Unless
he does lose that kind of a job, we the dead
have died in vain! In his facetiousness, the

- 46 -



Chief Justice has pointed to the infallible rem-
edy. To put an end to our shameful divorces
we don’t need law, we need love! Not love
for one another so much as love for God! To
prevent divorces between men and women, we
say give the boys and girls Eeligion I Put the
fourth ‘‘R” back into Education and you have
drained the pond whose waters have turned
the wheels of the country’s divorce mills!

THE SAME holds true for birth-control and
abortion. Of course you know I mean birth-
prevention! We the dead had no comrades-in-
arms sprung from the wombs of birth-
preventers. If we succeeded in keeping Wash-
ington and New York from being bombed, if
we succeeded in keeping the Japanese from
streaming into Seattle or sweeping through
the Golden Gate, we owe no thanks to the
Margaret Sangers, the Marie Stopes, or the
organizers and abettors of the League for the
Dissemination of Literature on Birth-Control.
We the dead ask you the living if you are
going to allow all that to live?

YOU MARVEL that we do not demand the
extirpation of these enemies of our loved
America—these people who have perverted the
holiest of human relations and changed mar-
riage into concubinage; these people who, as
Victor C. Pedersen, a non-Catholic doctor,
wrote, have ^^taught our mothers and daugh-
ters, our sweethearts and wives the common
practices of the brothel.” The Reverend Igna-
tius Cox, S.J., well named them when he called
them “the executioners of our American civili-
zation and the grave-diggers of our nation.”
You marvel that we who are in the grave do
not demand that you level all such organiza-
tions more completely than we leveled Berlin.
Beloved, we do! But instead of bombing from

- 47 -



above, we demand that you blast from be-
neath ! To keep contraceptives out of th-e mar-
riage chamber, we tell you to put Christ in
the classrooms!

TEACH BOYS and girls their dignity and
their destiny

;
teach them that they are breaths

of God in vessels of clay; teach them that
they are destined for mystical union in Christ
on earth and eternal union with God in glory;
teach them that their bodies are in all truth
temples of the Holy Ghost and that God de-
pends on married couples and the proper use
of their bodies to bring the human race to the
gigantic stature of the God-Man; teach them
these truths thoroughly and they themselves
will indignantly repel every advance of the
Birth-Preventers; they will resent every sug-
gestion of contraception as an outrageous in-
sult to their mutual love, loyalty and inviolable
respect; they will recognize these people for
what they actually are—emissaries of the Dev-
il who offer a barbarous affront to the man-
hood and womanhood of the married pair and
cast an unforgivable aspersion on their dignity
as collaborators with God Almighty in the
work of creation.

TO MAKE Americans human, teach young
Americans that they are partly divine! To
make marriage sacred you do not have to out-
lobby the Birth-Preventers at Washington,

you only have to put the Author of marriage
back into the schools. Vanishing cream has
never yet cured cancer; it calls for the knife.

Give the teachers of the nation the two-edged

sword of the truth of Christ, and they will
cut away the cancer of godlessness that allows
the existence of Sangerites in our nation.

Beloved, take the word of the dead: The hus-
bands and wives of the nation will never be

- 48 -



forced into fidelity to one another and to God
by human legislation; they must be led into
it by the lofty truths of their human dignity
and their human-divine destiny. That is why
we concentrate on Education. If America is
to have God-conscious husbands and wives, she
must develop God-conscious school-boys and
school-girls. As you train the twig so grows
the tree.

THE IDENTICAL argument holds true for
Economics and Politics. We are not asking
you to honor us by purging politics or legis-
lating for Social Justice. We know that if
the rulers are wrong-minded, no matter what
you label their rule, the people will suffer.
Ever since World War I a continual lamenta-
tion has been wailed from one end of the land
to the other about our lack of leaders both
political and economic. Some have explained
the dearth by the deaths of our best in Flan-
ders fields. That explanation is partial, not
total. No. Cal Coolidge, with his habitual
Yankee shrewdness, gave the better and fuller
explanation when he said: ‘^Unless our people
are thoroughly instructed in the great truths
of Religion, they are not fitted to understand
our institutions.^' Since we are a government
‘'of the people and by the people,” he was im-
plicitly saying that we are governed by men
who do not understand our institutions. And
he was right! The blind leading the blind
never end up well. There is always the ditch!
And we have seen the ditch of Depression, the
deeper ditch of national drunkenness, and the
still deeper ditch of nation-wide materialistic
paganism

!

WILLIAM PENN once said: ‘^Men will be
ruled by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.”
We believe him to have been right. We base

- 49 -



our belief on the actual experience of Russia
and Germany. More. We base our belief on
the words of Jesus Christ: “He who is not
with Me, is against Me!”

AS WE the dead see it, you the living have a
choice between Religion with a Cross and anti-
religion with a criss-cross; between the Reli-
gion that is God-given and the antireligion
that is man-made; between Religion from the
Savior and antireligion from the State. We
died that you would choose the first. Keep
that in mind, and don’t put us in memorials!

WHAT YOU CAN DO

BELOVED, I hope I have not bewildered you.
I suppose you wonder what I expect you to
do to get God back in the schools. You marvel
that I should even ask you to do something
about it, you who have never mixed in public

‘affairs. Darling, remember that “more things
are wrought by prayer than this world dreams
of.” You can pray! Pray importunately I
Pester God! Allow Him no rest from your
reverent insistence until He enlighten the lead-
ers of the land to the darkness into which the
nation is plunged because of godlessness in
our schools. Pray that He raise up fearless
Catholics, public servants whose every word
and work will show them first to be Servants
of God ! Pray that He give us Catholic writ-
ers and Catholic speakers who will be as forth-
right as was St. Paul!

YES, YOU can pray, you can also protest!
Protest by word and action. Politicians are
always looking for votes; threaten them with
the loss of yours unless they campaign to put
Christ back into the classroom. Newspapers
and magazines are always watching their cir-

- 50 -



culation; threaten them with the discontinua-
tion of your subscription unless they, too,
honor your dead by printing only the news
that is in accord with Christ’s Good News!
School-boards are jealous of their position and
their pay; threaten both by making an issue
out of Religion in the school’s curriculum.

Three ^^R’s,” and only three have been taught
in our grade schools for half a century; make
them see that the fourth is needed! Our high
schools have been teaching all the sciences
with never a word about Him who is Omnis-
cience ! For years pedagogues have been ‘‘cru-
cifying Christ in our colleges.” And ever
since Eliot of Harvard introduced harakiri
into our halls of learning by insisting on elec-
tivism and specialization, men have specialized
in everything but the one thing that calls for
human specialization—the knowledge of God!
Bring these truths home to your school-boards,
your school-superintendents, your boards of
directors, your College Deans and your Uni-
versity Presidents. Protest with pen and pa-
per. Protest by radio and the editorial page.
Protest by your ballots and your boycotts

!

TAKE WINSTON Churchill’s slogan and
Archbishop Spellman’s title of “Action This
Day” and see that it is Catholic action. You
belong to the Church Militant; then militate
for the honor of your military men who died
that America might be what Lincoln called it—“a nation under GodT
SAINT BENEDICT’S watch words were “Ora
et labora—pray and work.” St. Ignatius ex-
plained them more practically by saying:
**Pray as if it all depended on God; work as
if it all depended on you.” We the dead try
to make them even more pointed and practical
by saying: “Pray and Protest!” Pray and

- 51 -



protest until Keligion dominates Education.
Pray and protest until God rules the land I

THERE IS much that you can do, Beloved.
You can always pray; yes, and you can al-
ways protest—at least with that loudest of
all protests—a perfect Catholic life!

PICTURE THIS

THIS IS the age of the tabloid and the graph-
ic, so we the dead give you a picture. We died
that little tots might kneel beside their moth-
er's knee and learn of the God who loved them
enough to become a little Tot who toddled to
His Mother's knee. We died that little tots
might learn from mother's lips that God made
them! that He made them to know Him! to
love Him! to serve Him in this world! and to
be happy with Him forever in the next! Pic-
ture that

!

YES, PICTURE that, then plaster it on your
billboards. Placard it in your street-cars and
busses. Feature it in your Sunday Supple-
ments. Put it on the mast-heads of your
dailies. Do that and we will have some hope
that we have not died in vain. Do that and
you will have some comfort in the fact that
you have not allowed the living to mock your
dead. But before that picture will represent
reality there must be legitimate children to
real American mothers in real American
homes, which necessarily means no birth-pre-
vention! and no divorce!

BEFORE YOU will ever reach that blessed
goal, Americans will have to rid themselves of
their horrible superficiality and their sickening
sophistication and live up not only to the
Declaration of Independence but to the nation's

Declaration of Dependence! Washington and

- 52 -



his fellow-workers drew up the first at Phila-
delphia. You will find it in the Preamble to
our Constitution. Lincoln published the sec-

ond when at Gettysburg he claimed that we
were a ‘‘nation under God.” The first will
never be lived up to unless the second is ob-
served; and the second will not even be ad-
mitted, much less accomplished, unless you
put God back into the schools!

AMERICA NEEDS sanctity in marriage,
stability to the home, justice in economics and
honesty in politics. She can have all if she
will but honor the dead of World War II by
putting the “Ducator” back in the Educator!
Education means to lead out; but no one can
be led out unless there is a Leader. You have
your choice to be led by the One who said:
“Suffer the little children to come unto Me;
for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven,” (Mt.
19:14) or the one who says: “Force the little
children to come unto me; for of such is the
supremacy of the State.” The first, as you
know, is the voice of Christ. The second I
unqualifiedly label “the voice of antichrist.”
It has been heard and heeded in Russia. It
has been heard and heeded in Germany.
“When the battlers fought and won” it will be
heard in America. From the Great Beyond we
the dead ask : “Are you going to mock us who
died that Christ might live by heeding the
voice of antichrist?”

YOURS IS the choice. But let us prophesy
that unless you spurn it, there will be a World
War III that will far surpass this present one
in the horror of its barbaric devastation. It
will be fought by the children you send to
those schools!

GIVE US only memorials and not memories
and you are piling up the waters for a cata-

- 53 -



clysm that will leave in its wake no trace of
the actual civilization you know, and no pos-
sibility of the civilization we hoped for.

BELOVED, IF you are not going to pray
and protest and get others to pray and pro-
test, don’t change our blue stars to gold

—

black us out!

- 54 -





i



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cloth ... 1.00
Louise Tessier, Trappistine Nun v... 1,00
Descriptive Booklet of Gethaemani Abbey .......... JS6
Holy Abandonment, Dom Lehodey ................ 4,00
Spiritual Directory (Cistercian) 2 vols., each .... 1.76
Cistercian Spirit of SimpUdty ,40
Lieutenant Michael CarUer, Monk . ..Zv^.

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Are You?
Fiat and Remake Your World
Life is a Divine Romance
The God-Man*8 Double
Whata Wrong?
Set the World on Fire I B
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For your own Defense V SA Startling Thing for you /

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I ^Fa^ about Reason, Revelation, and Religion ^ -A Message from Those Killed In Action . «
Eventually : Why not Now? 1 ^
Apostolate of the Contemplativce
Master Magnet (St Bernard)
24 Hours a Catholic
An Hour with Christ
Let’s Build a Home

Abbay of Our Lady of Gethsemani
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