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THE PRODIGAL, WORLD
Social reconstruction is conditioned upon

spiritual regeneration,

by

The Right Reverend Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D.,LL.D.,
Agrege en Philosophie, University of Louvain, Belgium;

the Catholic University of America.

Seventeen addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, produced
by the National Council of Catholic Men, through the

courtesy of the National Broadcasting Company
and associated stations.

PAGE
DECEMBER 29: The Rebirth of a World - - - - 5
JANUARY 5: Spiritual Bankruptcy ----- 13
JANUARY 12: The Last of the Enemies - - - 22
JANUARY 19: The Dignity of Man 31
JANUARY 26: The Bread of the Father’s House - 40
FEBRUARY 2: The Fundamental Liberty - - - 47
FEBRUARY 9: The Sense of Sin 54
FEBRUARY 16: The Return from Exile - - - - 62
FEBRUARY 23: Calvary and Sacrifice ----- 69
MARCH 1: The First Word 77
MARCH 8: The Second Word 83
MARCH 15: The Third Word 90
MARCH 22: The Fourth Word 98
MARCH 29: The Fifth Word 105
APRIL 5: The Sixth Word 112
APRIL 10: The Seventh Word 118
(Good Friday)
APRIL 12: The Finding of the Lost - - - - 126

National Council of Catholic Men
Producer of the Catholic Hour
1312 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



Nihil Obstat:

VERY REV. MSGR. T. E. DILLON
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur:

*^JOHN FRANCES NOLL, D.D.
Bishop of Fort Wayne

Fourth Edition, 22,500

November 1, 1952



Dedicated to Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, Mother of
Prodigal Children



Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2016

https://archive.org/details/prodigalworldOOshee



THE REBIRTH OF A WORLD
Address delivered on December 29, 1935

We are living in perilous times when the hearts
and souls of men are sorely tried. Never before has
the future been so utterly unpredictable

;
we are not

so much in a period of transition with belief in pro-
gress to push us on, rather we seem to be entering
the realm of the unknown, joylessly, disillusioned,
and without hope. The whole world seems to be in
a state of spiritual widowhood, possessed of the

harrowing devastation of one who set out on life’s
course joyously in intimate comradeship with an-

other, and then is bereft of that companion forever.

And in all this confusion and bewilderment our
modern prophets say that our economics have failed
us. No! It is not our economics which have failed;
it is man who has failed—man who has forgotten
God. Hence no manner of economic or political re-
adjustment can possibly save our civilization; we
can be saved only by a renovation of the inner man,

only by a purging of our hearts and souls ; for only

by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Justice
will all these other things be added unto us. That

is the way the world twenty centuries ago was saved
from paganism and selfishness. And that is the
way it will be saved again. In order to bring home
this truth, recall briefly how Our Lord saved the
world once before, and thus learn how it can be
saved once again.

Have you ever adverted to the striking fact that
the political, economic, and social conditions of the
world at the time Our Lord was born into it were
very much like they are today? Never before have



6 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

two periods of history been so alike. For ex-
ample, in those days there was an intense National-
ism in Israel, and a haughtly Militarism in Rome.
With Caesar there arose a kind of dictatorship
which absorbed individual rights. Economically,
there was exploitation of labor and the Servile
State. Taxation was excessive and overpowering;
Religion was on the decline; the Gentiles lost faith
in their gods, and Israel had no prophet since the
days of the Machabees. Wealth was in the hands of
the few; life was becoming more of a riddle, in
which solitary hearts lost nerve, begot no songs and
few children, became weary of old culture, afraid
of new gods, of fate, of the stars above and the
world beyond. As Virgil, who lived during those
times, described it

:

“Where wrong and right are blest,
A world that teems with war, a world that reeks
With countless crime, where evermore the plough
Lacks its due honor, and the hind is forced
Far from the desolate fields, and reaping hooks
Are straightened into swords.”

Into this world with its depression, its despair,

and its despondency, God came. And He came to
set men and their world right with God—not only
their hearts and their souls, but even their business,
their secular affairs, their governments, and their
all. How did He do it? God solved the social, poli-
tical, and economic problems of the world not by
enunciating a new economic system

;
nor by instruct-

ing man in the ways of supply and demand ; nor by
a great piece of research which revealed the many
aspects of their problem

;
nor even by giving to the

world a formula for finances, trade agreements,

armaments, slavery, imperialism, or war. He saved



THE REBIRTH OF A WORLD 7

it from its ills by being born as a babe in the insigni-

ficant village of Bethlehem. That seemingly trivial

incident which was so commonplace that the inn-
keeper refused a room to His Blessed Mother was
the revolution that upset the world and the solution

which gave it peace. Driven even off the face of the

earth He came to save, His Mother sought refuge in
a shepherd’s cave, and there under the floor of the
world was born Him who like Samson shook the
pillars of the world to its very foundations, pulled

down the already crumbling edifice, and built a new
Living Temple in its place, where men might once
more sing because they had found their God.

But you ask what has the birth of a God in the
form of a babe to do with the social, political, and
economic conditions of His day and our own? What
possible relation could exist between a child in a
manger of straw and Caesar on his throne of gold?
The answer is: The birth of the Son of God in the
flesh was the introduction into the historical world-
order of a new life; it was a proclamation to the
world that social reconstruction has something to do
with spiritual regeneration; that nations can be
saved only by the men in them being re-born to God
as God is now being born to man. Once God entered
the created order on the level of humanity and be-
came part of the stream of history. He gave man a
new strength from above; He gave Him a Divine
Power along with human power. In a word, God
became man in order that man might become God-
like. That is why Christ was born a babe—^to teach
us that deliverance from economic and social ills
can be obtained only by a birth.

Humanity was tired mentally and exhausted



8 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

spiritually; for four thousand years it had been
making the great experiment of Humanism, and
was now like a sick man who could not cure him-
self. It was in a state like unto our own world,
which since the days of the Renaissance, has tried
to build its civilization on the self-sufficiency of man
without God. Mankind left to itself slowly sinks
downward and reverts to the type of Adam. The
law of necessary progress is a myth. We have proof
enough that people advanced in culture may de-
generate into savages, as our boasted twentieth cen-

tury civilization degenerated into the butchery of

the World War; but no solitary example exists of a
race of savages rising to the civilized state by their

own development. Apart from an outside super-
natural assistance society goes from bad to worse
until deterioration is universal. Not evolution but
devolution is the law of man without God, just as it
is the law of the sunflower without the sun. With
all of our boasted mechanical civilization a day might

come when our modern towers of Babel would be as
forgotten as the first, when Americans would cease
to exist as a race as the Babylonians and Medes have

ceased to exist, when Washington would be a con-
tested locality like the capital of the Aztec civiliza-

tion, and when the constitution of the United
States would be the hopeless search of the world’s

archaeologists. Distant as it may seem, it is some-
thing which has happened a hundred times before

and which may very well happen again.

Humanity cannot lift itself by its own boot-
straps ; there is no such thing as spontaneous gener-

ation
;
life does not come from crystals ; poetry does

not come from donkeys ; international peace does not



THE REBIRTH OF A WORLD 9

come from wars; social justice does not come from
selfishness. With all our knowledge of chemistry we
cannot make a human life in our laboratories be-
cause we lack the unifying, vivifying principle of a
soul which comes only from God. Life is not a push
from below

;
it is a gift from above. It is not the re-

sult of the necessary ascent of man, but the loving
descent of God. It is not the term of Progress ; it is
the fruit of the Incarnation. Hence ; like that world
into which Christ was born, the world today needs
not a shuffling of old ideas, not a new economic, not
a new monetary system—it needs a New Birth. It
needs the intrusion into our order of a new life and a
new spirit, which God alone can give. We cannot
give ourselves this new Birth any more than we can
be born again naturally. If we are to be born again
into the newness of life the regenerating principle
must come from above, and that is precisely the
meaning of the Incarnation: The introduction into
the world on the level of human nature of the Life of
God, who came not to judge the world, but to save it.
And this is why I say He solved our problems by ap-
pearing as a Babe, because the regeneration of so-
ciety has something to do with Birth.

Immediately you say: This is but theory; the
Incarnation of the Son of God took place 1900 years
ago, and is just as past as the Battle of Waterloo.
No! The Incarnation is not past. How can God be-
long to the past? The Incarnation is taking place
right now. What God did to that individual human
nature which He took from Mary His Mother is
what He wills to do, in a lesser degree, to every hu-
man nature in the world; namely, to make us par-
takers of His Divine Life. He who from all eternity



10 THE PRODIGAL WORLL

was born of the Eternal Father was born in time in
Bethlehem. He wills that we who are born in time
of our earthly fathers, should be reborn in Eternity
of the Heavenly Father, made new creatures, be-
come possessed of new life, and members of the
Kingdom of God. Let me make this clear by an ex-
ample : When a government wishes to issue a coin, it
first of all makes the original die. This original
model requires the work of a consummate artist. But
once the die is cast, the model formed, millions and
millions of coins may be struck from it, each bearing
the resemblance of the original. Now, Bethlehem is
the city where the die was struck and Christ Him-
self is the Die. All the men v/ho have lived and will
ever live are the raw material awaiting the stamp
of the Divine Original. But in order to be like Him,
that is, a sharer of His Divine Life, we must be
struck off that die. And the Baptismal font is the new
Bethlehem where the copies are made, for there men
are re-born again to the Life of God. 0 think not
that Baptism means merely a sprinkling of water,
as if you had no other eyes than those which are
blinded by dust ! Do you say money is only a mech-
anical product of a steel die, or do you say it has a
value because backed by the power of government?

Why then should we not say that Baptism is ex-
ternally a cleansing, but internally it is a regenera-

tion, and a new life, because backed by the Divinity
of Christ? The incarnation is the Model and the Pat-
tern, the Baptismal Font is its prolongation and ex-
tension

;
for in both a birth takes place : the birth of

God in the flesh and the birth of the flesh in God.
Now do you understand why God solved the econom-

political, and social problems of His time by a



THE REBIRTH OF A WORLD 11

birth—because man could never be saved except
by being regenerated?

And that is the only way we can ever solve our
economic, political, and social problems; namely by
being re-born to that divine life; by being incor-

porated to Him who gives us a power above our will,
a wisdom above our reason, and a strength above
our arms. That same Divine Life that came into
the world-process 1900 years ago, must come back
into it again. Unless we are born again—we shall
perish. The barrier to our progress is our broken
hearts and only Christ can give us a new heart. Our
old hearts have hardened; our old minds are con-
fused

;
our old habits overpower us. We need a fresh

start, a new re-shaping, a new quickening spirit.
And the more there are of us who are struck off
the great Original Divine Die of Christ, the better

the world will be. It is not economics which have
failed us; it is man who has failed because he re-
fuses to be signed with the sign of Christ. Economic
reconstruction is therefore conditioned upon spirit-
ual regeneration; our ills today are not political

and economic, but moral and religious; we are not
going to be saved by finances or armaments, any

more than the chosen people of God were saved by
horsemen because they were many, or horses be-
cause they were strong. The Gospel of Spiritual Re-
generation which alone can save us will be present-

ed under the Parable of the Prodigal Son, with

which I shall begin next Sunday. It will not, I trust,

be just a vague appeal to follow Christ; it will be

an appeal to be re-born in Christ—to live spiritual
lives, to be infused with Divine Life. The idea of
re-birth is a happy one with which to begin the



12 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

New Year. My wish to you is that you will have a
Happy New Year—but by a new year I do not mean
new in the sense of another ; for if a new year were
just another year it would not be so happy—^there
is no happiness in adding year to year and growing
older. By a new year I mean new in the sense of re-
generated, rejuvenated, new-born; for there is hap-

piness in having life before you—especially the Eter-
nal Life of God. Now you know how deep and heart-
felt are my greetings when I say to you individually

:

T wish you a Happy New Year—God love you

!



SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY
Address delivered on January 5, 1936

As announced last Sunday the purpose of this

course is to suggest that social reconstruction is con-

ditioned upon spiritual regeneration, that our ills

today are not fundamentally economic and political,

but moral and religious. Hence if the world is ever

to recover its lost social peace, it must once more

find God.

This lesson—so important for our times—^will
be presented in the light of the parable of the

Prodigal Son. Our Lord, you will recall, began the
parable thus: “A certain man had two sons: And
the younger of them said to his father: Father,
give me the portion of substance that falleth to me.
And he divided unto them his substance. And not
many days after, the younger son, gathering all to-
gether, went abroad into a far country: and there
wasted his substance, living riotously.”

The interpretation we shall give of this parable
is not moral but historical. The younger son in the
parable is Western Civilization. After many long
centuries in union with the Father’s house. Western
Civilization finally asked the Spiritual Father for its
share of inheritance—not inheritance in the form of
gold and silver, but rather spiritual capital in the
form of eternal truths necessary for salvation.
Carried away by the new-found independence from
the Father’s House, Western Civilization began to
spend the spiritual capital which the Father’s
House had given to it. The history of the last four
centuries is very briefly the history of that wasted



14 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

capital—^the patrimony of Christ committed to His
Church. It was not all spent at once, nor was it all
spent in the same place, nor with the same friends.
Century by century the substance became smaller

and smaller, and now as we look back in history, we
can tell when each part of the capital was spent.
In the sixteenth century. Western civilization spent
its belief in the necessity of authority. In the seven-

teenth century, it spent its belief in Sacred Scripture

as the revealed word of God. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, it spent its belief in the Divinity of Christ, the

necessity of grace, and the whole supernatural struc-
ture. In the nineteenth century, it spent its belief

in the existence of God as the Lord and Master, and
the Supreme Judge of the living and the dead. And
in our own day, it has spent its last penny—a belief
in the necessity of religion and the obligation to a
Personal God. Truly, indeed, it has wasted its spiri-
tual capital living riotously.

The story of the last three hundred years is the
story of a spiritual declension and the squandering of

the substance of Divine Truth. Christ, who is God,
has been reduced to a mere man. Man, who is made
to the image and likeness of God, has been reduced
to a mere animal. And an animal, which is a living
thing, has been reduced to a mere atom. And this
is called “Progress’" ! Is it any wonder that thought-
ful men are beginning to write and speak of the De-
cline of the West? Spengler, Massis, and a host of
others, in making a retrospect of our Western World,
are right in saying that it is on the decline. Many
of them are wrong only in their explanation. It is
not machinery, nor finance, nor naval armaments,

nor the amassing of gold, nor rigorous iron laws



SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY IB

of determinism, which have effected this decline.

The two decisive factors in the breakdown of West-

ern Civilization have been the two causes just men-

tioned—mass-defection from Christ and mass-de-
fection from God.

Continuing the parable of the prodigal, Our Lord
tells us that ‘There came a mighty famine in that
country

;
and he began to be in want”. There is al-

ways a famine in a far-off land which means being
away from the Father’s House. Before the spirit
is quite quenched and the soul wholly carnalized,
there remains a craving for higher things ; but when
the spirit is quenched, and the soul is imbruted,
there is a famine of even that false bread which is
not bread, and a thirst for those stolen waters which
only makes the thirst more keen. The hunger is now
of such a kind that it can no longer taste the food of

virtue. It is that queer after-taste of all the world’s

feasts—a distaste for what we have, and an ab-
horrence of that which we have not. At one stroke
Our Lord set it before us, compressing into a single
sentence the history of all erring souls, the fate of

all sinful nations and all sinful men—“And he went
and cleaved to one of the citizens of that country.
And he sent him into his farm to feed swine. And
he would fain have filled his belly with the husks the
swine did eat; and no man gave unto him.” “He
would fain have filled his belly”—for it is no longer
a question of satisfying his appetite, but only of
satisfying the lower part of himself. Only God can
satisfy the real hunger, for no one can feed the
heart but God. The poor prodigal was now sitting
beside the ashes of a palace which his own hands had
burned. He was feeding on husks and he was still in



16 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

want. It is a passage from ten thousand biogra-
phies.

Now to resume the interpretation of the
prodigal son in the light of spiritual experience in

the modern world. Leaving the father’s house,
Western Civilization gradually squandered its
spiritual heritage, living well with the modern
world, becoming popular with it by sacrificing some
of the best of its spiritual possessions for the sake

of a momentary applause. Having wasted its sub-
stance riotously, a famine now arises in the land. A
famine not for bread of the body alone,

but a famine for the bread of the spirit.

Today, there is a famine for divine certainty

and guidance among those who spent the capital
of their belief in Sacred Scripture ; there is

a famine for a helping hand more kindly than the
human among those who spent belief in His Divin-
ity; there is a famine for perfect life, truth, and

love, among those who spent belief in the Trinity.
Everywhere there is a famine for faith among those
who doubt, a famine for God among those who sub-
stituted illusions for majestic faiths, and a famine

for love amongst those who war. Everywhere there
is a feeling of emptiness like that which follows a
fever or an unhappy love affair.

“And he went and cleaved to one of the citizens
of that country”. Like the prodigal who, in the days

of famine, cleaved to a citizen of the foreign coun-

try, so too does the religion of Western Civilization
in the days of its spiritual famine attach itself to

temporalities which are foreign to the service of
God ; it links itself up with things which are strange
to religion, alien to the Kingdom of Heaven. Having



SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY 17

lost divinity, modern religion now ties itself up to a
thousand worldly interests which are not of the

essence of religion, such as politics, social reform,

economics, drug control, and opposition to the

liquor traffic. It becomes in the language of a dis-

tinguished Professor of Yale, identified with nation-

all cultures, and hence devoid of all common refer-
ence to the Cross. I am notsayingthatreligion should
not be interested in the things of Caesar, nor that

it should be indifferent to politics, nor that it

should turn a cold shoulder to the opium problem;
but I do say that these are not the primary concern

of religion nor that to which religion owes first
allegiance, any more than it can be said that the
prodigal owed greater allegiance to the citizen of a
foreign country than to his own father. Religion is
indeed in a foreign land when it is more interested
in mental hygiene than in the forgiveness of sin

;
in

politics more than prayer; in the book of Darwin
rather than the book of Isaias; in the theory of
relativity rather than in the Absolute

;
in crime pre-

vention rather than morals; and in sex more than
God.

This sad and tragic dissipation of spiritual
capital by the Western World does not necessarily
mean the Decline of the West. There is still a pos-
sibility of recovery as there was for the Prodigal.
What saved the Prodigal was the fact that he never
became a citizen of the foreign country. He was al-
ways a stranger there. There would have been no
hope for him, however, if he had not felt himself an
alien, or if he had made himself a citizen in that land
of husks. And so too with Western Civilization.
Were it untroubled by heavenly homesickness, were



18 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

there no divine nostalgia, no remembrance of a
Father’s House, there would be no hope. But such
is not the case. There is a feeling of being a
stranger in this land which has forgotten the Di-
vine; there is a feeling of uneasiness, a discontent

with the husks it is given, and a yearning for the
food which nourishes unto life everlasting.

Up until the World War one could not pick up a
book, or a magazine, or listen to a speech, without

hearing something about “Progress”. Everywhere
there was hope, prosperity—a certain onward, up-
ward march to the tune of evolution, to the Golden
Age of material prosperity and earthly happiness.

Then came the World War which turned the
world into a slaughterhouse. The so-called civilized
man, who was supposed to be a descendant of the
ape, now acted like one. The great Babels of earthly
happiness built without the great Cornerstone, came
tumbling down on our heads. Visions of grandeur
began to fade. And then came the Depression. The
machine which was to make us all rich and happy
made many poor and miserable. It produced more
than the men which it displaced could buy. The
world had hoped for peace, and it got wars and
rumors of wars

;
it was promised prosperity, and got

starvation in the midst of plenty; it had hoped to
make the world safe for democracy, and got a de-
mocracy which was hardly safe for the world; it
was promised a world free from authority and got
tyrannical dictatorship. The result is that today
instead of Progress, Evolution, Prosperity, and
World Peace, we have decay, unrest, uncertainty,
doubt, and above all else a feeling of not knowing
where we are going. Man now crouches in fear



SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY 19

from the very terrors he himself has created. He
has set fire to his own house and now it tumbles in-
volving him in its ruins. And that whole school of
false prophets who once talked Progress are now
resigned to a philosophy which is hardly distin-

guishable from despair. The map was thrown aside
and the world has lost its way.

But there is no reason for despair. However
much Western Civilization has been disillusioned, it
still feels itself in a foreign land. There is still some
remembrance of the Father’s House. Suffice it to
say here that some are coming back again to God,
not through the preservation of their baptismal

grace, but by a trial of the world. They are dis-
satisfied in this foreign land of husks. They have
leaned on the staff of the economic and secular and
found it pierced their hands. Like the Prodigal,

they are witnessing against the world, even though
they are children of it. It is a great mercy that
those having lost the free gift of God can regain it
by His compulsory remedies

;
and who after having

heard all the ramblings of sceptics and tasted the
fleeting pleasures of an hour, now are made to cry
out with Peter at Capharnaum, “Lord, to whom
shall we go?”

It may take a long time for Western Civiliza-
tion to realize that the good it is seeking is the good
that it left. Many heart-aches and long sad experi-
ences were necessary before the Prodigal realized
that the father’s house which he left was the only
place he could find freedom, peace, and contentment.
In like manner the world will not quickly realize that
the Church which it believed was so restraining to
liberty is really the only force that can make us free,



20 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

and that that which was so much behind the times is
the only institution which has survived the times.

However long the time it takes to learn the
lesson, there is always the consoling picture of the

father of the prodigal who daily would mount a hill
and look down all the roads to the foreign land
hoping almost against hope that he would catch/a
glimpse of his son. So too the spiritual Father of all
Christendom is daily mounting one of the seven hills
of Rome from which one can look down all the roads
that lead to Rome ; daily his eyes search the horizons
of the foreign land for Western Civilization that is
already dying of famine for the things of the Spirit
of God.

The Church has not been tried for three hun-
dred years; it has not even been considered; it has

only been ignored. The world knows less about her
than about the man in the moon. It has never
studied her claims, never searched out her secrets

;

and it dispenses itself from doing so for the same
reason the first hearers of Christ dispensed them-

selves from hearing His message: “Can anything
good come out of Nazareth?” Ignorance can be
accumulated just as well as wisdom, and during the
last 300 years the world has accumulated a tremen-

dous amount of ignorance concerning her. Through
long centuries she has been outlawed and ignored,
but she has never failed any more than Christ failed
when His fellow citizens cast Him out of His home
town of Nazareth. Her days of being ignored are
over. She is now returning from exile. The exile
has been good for her. It has permitted the world

to distinguish her from her imitators
;
it has been a

lesson to her not ever to become worldly again: it



SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY 21

has allowed the blood to run back again to her heart

to energize her for the reconversion of the world.

Even if there are some who hate, they must be ex-
cused for they do not really hate the Church, but

only what they mistakenly believe to be the Church.
The vision of the Church will come to them as one
awakened in the watches of the night ; they will see
the dead walking and the blaze of that living death
will make them forget everything else but the
glory of the Risen Christ.

Let us not be misled into believing that a new
religion, such as a pot-pourri of Eastern and West-
ern religion, will arise to satisfy the cry of the

world. The human heart that has had one great
love can never really have another. We have but
one heart and if we give it away, we give away our
deepest capacity for love. What is true of the in-
dividual is true of society. Society has used up a
life’s capacity for love in the great adventure of

Christianity. Its bones are too old to accustom
themselves to new postures of worship. We have
given our heart away once to the Divinity of the
Church—we cannot give it away again.

That is why the world will end as Christianity
began—with a great and mighty battle between the
world and the Church, between Baal and Christ,
between the forces who crucify and the Power which
is crucified.



THE LAST OF THE ENEMIES
Address delivered on January 12, 1936

Western Civilization may be likened to the
Prodigal Son in that it has left the Father’s house

and wasted its substance living riotously by spend-

ing its belief in the supernatural and even the

natural end of man.
A fragment, of course, of that spiritual capital

is still floating about the world, for, to change the

figure, our age is living in what might be called the
penumbra of Christianity—^that line where light
fades out and shadows begin. All that is still sub-
lime in philanthropy is but a splinter of the Cross of

Calvary which the Church holds erect above the
world; all that is noble and happy in marriage is a
reflection from the marriage feast of Cana and the
Church’s teaching of the sanctity of two hearts and
the honesty of a vow; all that is best in the justice
and equity of governments is a reflection of the
Church’s spiritual principle that we must render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto
God the things that are God’s

;
and all that is satis-

fying in democracy is the principle that all are equal
because redeemed by the precious blood of Our
Saviour, Jesus Christ.

But apart from this reflection of Christian
truth which is still dimly visible in the world, the
great spiritual patrimony of the ages is gone. The
Church with her finger on the pulse of contemporary
civilization realizes it more than our moribund
civilization itself realizes it. Humanism has failed.
The Church feels the shift of the opposition. West-
ern Civilization is not just suffering from a famine



THE LAST OF THE ENEMIES

of spiritual values ; it is not even caring about them.

It is now seeking to ‘‘fill its belly'’ ; namely, to stuff
itself with the husks of the secular, the economic,

the political, the worldly. And the name of this new
thing which no longer is concerned with the soul

but with the belly is Communism, the new enemy of
the Father's House and probably the last. Com-
munism is not merely an economic doctrine. It is
more properly a philosophy of life which mobilizes
souls for economic and secular ends ; a Caesarism or

adoration of the State
;
a glorification of the human

collective through the de-personalization of men; a
suffocation of human personality and its subsequent
absorption into the mass; a filtering of barbarism

through the sieve of the class, the race, or the state,

and calling it Civilization.

It is not peculiar to Russia alone. We see there
mobilization of souls under an economic disguise

where one hundred and sixty millions of God's
creatures destined for eternal life are dehumanized

and reduced to the state of ants whose sole business
in life is to build up the great ant-hill of the Class-
less Class; we see it in Mexico with a political dis-
guise where treason is synonymous with the worship
of the Crucified; we see it with a racial mask in
Germany where the State would crush the Religion
of Him who rose from the dead, and would return
to the barbarism of gods who are still rotting in
their graves. In all three instances men are blud-
geoned into living their lives without God ; they are
beaten and hammered into the new pattern where
the gods of economics are supreme.

How has this world movement of the mobiliza-
tion of souls for secular ends come upon us? One



24 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

reason is, the World War accustomed us to mobili-
zation, and as a consequence to the relative unimpor-
tance of man. When a world which boasts of its
progress reaches a point where it can send millions
of men en masse into a battlefield, to make rivers
run red, to turn poppy fields into Haceldamas of

blood, to tear great gaping wounds in Gothic cath-
edrals, it has indeed forgotten that every man has
an immortal soul, and in the eyes of God is just as
personal and as valuable as the King who declares a
war, or the General who directs it behind the lines,
and even more valuable if he loves God more. The
inalienable and sacred rights of human personality
are indeed regarded as trivial, when the bones of six
million men can be strewn across the fields for a
cause which is still unknown. Creatures of God
have lost their importance when they can be gener-
alized with the anonymous title: “The Unknown
Soldier”. That war spirit of mobilization which
resulted in mass suicide—for that is what the
World War was—^has left its imprint on the modern
mind. The world is still mobilizing, still ignoring
the human, still counting bodies instead of souls, still
thinking of poverty instead of the poor and of the

masses instead of man.

Communism is not new except in the sense
that a decaying corpse is a new state in relation to
a living man. It was not a revolution which began
a new epoch; it was a revolution which marks the
death of an old one; it is not a cry of birth, it is

the rattle of death
;
it is not a new blossom on a new

vine, it is the late season fruit of the tree of spiritual

bankruptcy. It takes a branch cut off from the vine
some time to die, but eventually it dies. Commun-



THE LAST OF THE ENEMIES 26

ism is that death—it is the logical development of
a civilization which for the last three hundred years

has lived its economic life without God.

It is therefore not a reaction against Capital-

ism but the glorification of its worst features, and
the ignoring of its better features. The old Capital-
ism made the economic the principal basis of civili-
zation. Communism makes it the unique basis of
civilization. The old Capitalism wanted no inter-
ference from the state but left God and religion
alone provided they did not interfere. The new
Capitalism, or Communism, says: If the supreme
business of life is to subjugate man to the economic
order, to mechanize human life, then why not make
the economic order not the end of the individual but

the very end of the State itself? Therefore no longer

entrust the mad pursuit of the secular and the eco-
nomic to a group of individuals, or to a few scattered
capitalists. Make the economic the end of everyone.
Force it down the throats of everyone; jam it into
their souls and suffocate the thought of God; cram
it into their hearts and extinguish the fires of Divine
Love. The State itself shall be Capitalist! The
State itself shall seek Wealth! The Economic shall
be the end of man

!

Why is Communism growing in popularity? It
is popular because the modern man is tired of selfish
individualism, is satiated with a democracy that fol-
lows the public will, instead of leading it. He feels
the need of a reaction

;
he wants something that will

help him return to the center of his being ; he wants
the spiritual or at any rate something over which he
can enthuse; he wants something different from
anything he has had in the last three hundred years

;



26 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

and since the only Christianity he knows is that
emasculated form of it which regards Christ only as
man, and which has identified itself with the social
order that is passing away, he feels that Christianity

has failed. And so the modern man turns to Com-
munism. He seeks it because it replaces the doubt
and scepticism of an irresponsible indifference by a
certitude of absolute authority embodied in a social

institution; he seeks it because he believes it will

save the world ; he seeks it because he wants a logi-

cal system that lays claim to his body and soul. In

a word he is a Communist because it satisfies his
need of religion.

Communism is a religion. This is its positive
side. But it is not just a religion in the sense that
Humanism is a religion, or even Confucianism is a
religion. Communism is not a heresy within the
body of Christendom, rather it is the ape of Christ-

ianity in its divine and historical form. It has not
taken one of the truths of Christianity and em-
phasized it, as most erroneous forms of Christianity

have done in the last three hundred years. Rather

it has taken the whole content of Christianity and
given it a new soul. It has changed Christianity in
the same way that man would be changed if you
robbed him of his immortal soul and gave him the
soul of a serpent. The man would see, taste, smell,
and in general carry on all the vegetative and animal

functions common to the body of every man. Ex-
ternally he would even appear as other men ; but on
the inside he would be different. And why? Be-
cause he would lack a rational soul which is capable

of lifting him above the fleeting phenomena of earth
to a knowledge and love of the living God.



THE LAST OF THE ENEMIES 27

Communism has its Bible, which is Das Kapital
of Karl Marx; it has its original sin which is
Capitalism; it has its chosen people which is the

Classless Class; it has its Messianic hope which is

the World Proletariat; it has its “Sermon on the
Mount” which is its false appeal to the poor and
oppressed; it has its monasticism which- is the in-

filtration of its doctrines through the “cells”
;
it has

its Gospel which is the Gospel of Class War; it has
its communion of saints which is the comradeship
of man

;
it has its Calvary which is an appeal to sac-

rifice oneself for the Communistic state; it has its
Kingdom of God but without God and of the earth
earthly; it lays claim to absolute truth which no
politics or economics can claim

;
it has its catechism

which is obligatory on everyone
;
it has its orthodoxy

and it persecutes its heretics; it lays claim to the
very depths of the soul, possessing the conscience

and the spirit of man—and only a religion can do
this. It persecutes all religions because it claims to

be the one true religion and hence can suffer no
other

;
it is the religion of the Kingdom of Earth, the

religion which renders to Caesar even the things that
are God’s

;
it is the body of the elect, the new Israel,

the ape of Christianity in all externals. It differs

only in its soul, for its spirit is the spirit of the ser-

pent
;
it is the Mystical Body of Anti-Christ.

Thus far we have emphasized the idea that
Communism is not just a system of economics but
a philosophy of life; and that it is the logical de-
velopment of a civilization which for 300 years has
built its political, economic, and social structure
without the solid foundation of the regnancy of God
in human affairs.



28 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

Now go on to inquire how it can be met. Be-
cause it is something social and communal it cannot
be met by any shouting for rugged individualism

; it

can be met only by something social, communal. Be-
cause it expresses a longing for a real community
of men, it can be met only by a community where
personality is not extinguished, where the soul is
not killed, but allowed to flower and blossom in that
higher realm of Life and Truth and Love which is
God.

Because Communism is a religion which makes
the State a god and the factory a place of pilgrim-
age, it can be met only by a religion which serves the
State by serving God. World peace can be recover-
ed only by a spiritual force which avoids the two
extremes of Individualism and Communism; a force
which asserts against Individualism that man can-
not live apart from society; and one which equally
asserts against Communism that a person has rights
to worship God which the State cannot take away;
a force that is not the technical organized force of

Communism, but the spiritual organic force which
mobilizes souls for eternal ends—and that it is the
historical form of Christianity which has been ex-
cluded from Civilization for the last 300 years and
which is now returning from exile, namely, the
Church. Communism has only one enemy: The
Eternal Galilean. The Mystical Body of the State
can be conquered only by the Mystical Body of
Christ.

Such is the method Our Lord chose to regener-

ate a world; namely through a spiritual community

in which He became, as it were, ‘‘incarnate’’. The
Church therefore is to save the world by being in it,



THE LAST OF THE ENEMIES 29

but not of it; it is to be a city set on a hill toward
which men may turn their eyes to know the secret of
their strength, but it is not the hill

;
it is to be a light

shining out through the darkness of a troubled

world, but it is not the darkness
;
it is to be a leaven

in the dead mass of sin-stained humanity, but it is
not the mass

;
it is to be the salt wherewith the earth

is to be salted, but it is not the earth. Above all
else, it is a fellowship, a spiritual Communism, based
not on the laws of society, nor the ties of blood nor
the necessities of economics, but on the re-ordering
of the whole field of human relations in a spirit of
charity, and a cohesion of shattered and despised
mankind under the leadership of Christ. The world
will be saved from Communism and the martyrdom
of man only by this society whose basic inspiration
is the primacy of spiritual values: “Seek ye first
the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these
things shall be added unto you’\ The Mystical
Body of Christ alone can oppose the Mystical Body
of Anti-Christ.

These are the only two complete philosophies of
life: The Church and Communism. The future
conflicts of the world will not be between Religion
and Science, or between “rugged individualism’^ and
Socialism, but between a society which is spiritual
and a society which is mechanical, between a so-
ciety which adores God and a society which claims
it is god. No more civil wars; from now on an in-
vasion. The world must make the choice. The
forces are already aligning themselves for the
battle. We must enlist on one side or the other

;
we

must battle either for brotherhood in Christ or
comradeship in anti-Christ. The prodigals will



30 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

either come back to Christ or they will go the way of
all flesh and fill their bellies with the economic and
the secular. The world of the future will have only
two capitals, Moscow and Rome; it will have only
two temples, the Red Square and St. Peter’s; only
two sanctuary lamps, the Red Flag and the red glow
of the Eucharistic lamp; only two tabernacles, the
Kremlin and Emmanuel ; only two hosts, the rotted
body of Lenin and the Body of the Living Christ;
only two hymns, the Internationale and the Panis
Angelicus—but only one victory, the victory of the
Captain Christ bearing five wounds in the forefront
of battle.



THE DIGNITY OF MAN
Address delivered on January 19, 1936

The interpretation of the parable of the prodigal

son in our broadcasts up to this point has been

this: The younger son may be likened to Western
Civilization which left the Father’s House and

squandered its spiritual capital of eternal religious

truth. It finally sank so low that it would fain have

filled its belly with husks ; and this philosophy which

fills bellies and mobilizes souls for secular ends is

Communism. The choice before the world is be-
tween a philosophy which makes society a god, and

a society which seeks God.

Today, we begin the inquiry into the first of the
four conditions which civilization must fulfill if it
is to recover peace and salvation. Returning to the

parable for our guide, it will be recalled that while

the prodigal was delighting in his new-found pleas-
ures and false liberty, there was very little thought
of his spiritual destiny. It is a very interesting

thing that he did not begin to reflect until he was
reduced to dire need and misery. Our Blessed Lord
speaks first of the return of the prodigal in these

expressive words : ‘‘He entered into himself”. This
implies that up to this time he was “outside him-
self”, or “beside himself”; i. e., all his enjoyments

were something external to himself: such as food,
pleasure, and dance, and in general what some men
call “life”. In this he was like the beasts of the
field, for they seek things outside of themselves. The
animal in quest of food and the flower lifting its
face to the sun, the bird dipping for the worm—all



32 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

of these have no other end or purpose in life than

some object outside themselves. They can nevei
enter into themselves, for the very simple reason

that they have no rational soul. Man is the only
being in the world who can reflect, and hence the
only one who can turn back upon himself, be angry
with himself, be pleased with himself, contemplate

his own thoughts, perceive the difference between
what he is and what he seems, between his own
worth and what others attribute to him. He is the
only creature in the universe who can look upon
himself as in a mirror, and see himself as others
see him, and even sit, as it were, on another planet

and let his feet hang over, contemplating off in the
distance another person which happens to be his
very self.

Now to continue the historical application of the
parable : Civilization will return to peace and order

when it ‘"enters into itself’^; i. e., reflects upon the
end and purpose of being a man. We cannot talk of
building a social or economic order for man, unless

we know the purpose of a man, any more than an
architect can build a house unless he knows the
nature of the one to dwell in it. If a dog is to live

in it, it will be a dog house ; if a criminal is to live

in it, it will be a penitentiary; if a Malthusianite is

to live in it, it will have no nursery. In like manner,

the kind of social order we will build will depend
upon the nature of the man for whom it is made. If
he is only an economic animal, then we will let
Communism give him a bed in a factory; but if he
is a rational creature, made to the image and like-
ness of God, then we will have to build something
else besides a factory for him; e. g., a house which



THE DIGNITY OF MAN 33

will be a home, a school which will be the arsenal of

truth for his children, and a church where his soul

can escape the servitude of the earthly and mount to
eternal union with God,

Hence, I say the fundamental problem facing

civilization today is not the problem of unemploy-

ment, nor finance, nor free trade, nor gold stand-

ards, nor even property rights. The problem of the
hour is the problem of man. Wh^t is a man? Is
he an economic animal, or is he a rational creature

composed of body and soul, and capable of entering

into communion with the triple environment which
surrounds him, namely, nature, fellowman, and

God? The way we answer the problem of man is
the way we will solve our social problem.

Two powerful influences in our civilization have
done much to degrade, mechanize, and depersonalize
man, and keep him from entering into himself. The
first is false economics, which says that the primary

end of business is not consumption, but production.

Start with this principle and it follows then that the
purpose of a machine is not to supply human needs,
but to make profit for its owner. The price then be-
comes more important than the man who pays the
price. It is then only a step to say that the produce

of God's bountiful land may be destroyed in the
midst of starvation for the sake of an economic
price. Man becomes subordinate to economics,
instead of economics to man, and this means a
degradation and impoverishment of human dignity.

Secondly, a false education is to be blamed for
destroying the true nature of man. A bad psychol-
ogy told man he had no soul, then no mind, and
finally no consciousness, but that he was only a com-



34 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

plex machine made up of actions and reactions,
ganglia and glandoozings. Biology told him he was
evolving to the state of a god, then Physics contra-

dicted this and told him that in view of the greatness
of the universe he was only a “crustal phenomenon
floating on an insignificant planet”. Robbed of God
by the error that God was only a symbol for “the
ideal tendency in things”; robbed of will by the
behaviorist and gland psychology; robbed of his
intellect by theories of knowledge which doubted his
capacity to know

;
robbed of his soul by the subcon-

scious, the subliminal, and sex—he became only an
atom dissolved in the mass of a two-dimensional
universe of space and time, with no other purpose
than like an ant to pile his contribution of economic

wealth on the great ant-hill of the State and then to
die and to be seen no more. Such is the end of the
Renaissance which began by exalting man without
God and ended by slaying both.

These are the two forces which destroyed tra-

ditional man, and sought to break the mould in

which God poured him. They have created for our
times the problem stated so clearly in the parable,

namely, whether man is to seek niaterial things
wholly outside himself, like husks, or to enter into

himself and recognize his eternal destiny. This

problem must be solved before any economic prob-

lem can be solved, for what is the use of construct-
ing an economics for man unless we know the nature
of man? The problem of man must be solved first
because it is on his account that the social problem

must be solved. When the world was living on the
spiritual capital given to it by the Church, systems

of economics and government and finance ack-



THE DIGNITY OF MAN 35

nowledged the true nature of man. But now that
the nature of man is challenged, and human person-
ality is absorbed by the state as in Russia, Mexico,

and Germany, and when economic rights precede
human rights, the problem of man must be settled
first. And if it is not settled, then all our solutions
will fail, for souls are being born into the world

every minute, presenting the riddle all over again.

Our problem today then is the problem of the For-
gotten Man—not the forgotten man in the sense of
the man who is unemployed, or hungry

;
not

the forgotten man who is economically dispos-
sessed, or socially disinherited; not the forgotten

man of the bread lines, but forgotten man in the
sense of forgotten human dignity, forgotten human
worth, forgotten divine destiny, forgotten person-

ality, forgotten power to rise above the state and
the collective to commune with the Life and Truth
and Love which is God. This is the real Forgotten
man of our day—the man who can enter into him-
self and find down in the depths of his soul that he
was made for God and only God can make him re-
membered—even for eternity.

Now, we ask, how can a prodigal civilization re-
discover its last harmony? Only in the same way
the prodigal son discovered his, namely by entering
into itself; i. e., by recognizing the simple but for-
gotten principle that man has a final end. One of
the first questions in the penny catechism is : “Why
did God make you? God made me to know Him, to
love Him, to serve Him in this world and to be happy
with Him forever in the next."’ These words which
sum up the wisdom of Aristotle and St. Thomas and
the best thought of the world, both pre-Christian and



36 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

Christian, are worth more than all our modern
prophets who have not yet discovered why they are
men. They reveal that this world is a stage of
character-making wherein all our actions have tre-
mendous consequences; where happiness like art
must be won by effort, by struggle and practice;
where a soul is at stake in the living of a human
life, for we are not only creatures but creatures of
our eternal destiny. This fundamental concept of
rational and moral relations between God and man
involving the eternal happiness of man with God,
must penetrate the whole of life. At every moment
from birth to death man is envisaged as seeking the
realization of the ‘'ought to be’\ For this end he
has been placed here. Hence none of his actions
is insignificant; nothing is indifferent, nothing is

trivial
;
everything he does, thinks, or chooses brings

him nearer his goal or away from it. According to
this philosophy every economic, political act of man
is in a certain sense a religious and moral act. Man^s

final end is God and all proximate ends must keep
this in mind. But once God as the goal or purpose
of life is lost there is nothing left but scepticism and

pessimism and a complete conversion to the earthly
things which is the sign of mortal sin. It was just
such a blindness to the final end of man which pro-
duced our modern cry that “business is business^’,
implying that ethics and morality and religion have

nothing to do with business. Business is not busi-

ness-—business is either good business or had busi-
ness, and it is good or bad because it helps or does

not help man to attain his final destiny which is
God. Forget the ultimate destiny of man and a new
god will be created for him—a cruel god, which is



THE DIGNITY OF MAN 37

the tyrannical State, as modern history is so well
proving. When Rome forgot its religion it deified
its emperors; when Western Civilization forgets its
Christianity it begins to deify the State. This is

Communism, the Moloch devouring men who forgot
they had an immortal eternal tryst with undying

Love who is God.

But once start with the true dignity of man,
namely, by recognizing that he has a final end

;
that

he is a personality living his complete life in so-

ciety with obligations to his neighbor and to God;
and finally that this world is only a prelude to the

next—^then we shall have the basis of true social re-
construction. Then “production is on account of
man and not man on account of production, then
the object of profit is that a man may provide for
himself and for others according to their state, then

the object of providing for himself and others is

that they may be enabled to live virtuously. The
object of the virtuous life is the attainment of ever-

lasting glory with God.’’ Then the world instead of
being the storehouse of our mounded dust, becomes
the scene of our greatest victory

;
then wealth is not

something to acquire, but something to be used to

increase virtue
;
then man becomes primary and eco-

nomics secondary; then the material is the channel

of the spiritual, and the universe becomes one great
scaffolding up which souls climb to the Kingdom of
God—and when the last soul shall have climbed up
through that scaffolding then it shall be torn down
and burnt with fervent fire, not because it is bare,
but because it has done its work—it has brought us
back to where we started—the very heart of God.

In conclusion, if we doubt that the problem of



38 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

man is primary, then let it be recalled that never
before in the history of the world has there been so

much power and never before have men been so pre-
pared to use that power for the destruction of human
life

;
never before has there been so much gold, and

never before has there been so much poverty
;
never

beforehas there been somuchwealth, and never before
has there been such an economic crisis

; never before

has there been so much food, and never before has
there been so much starvation; never before have
there been so many facts and never before have there
been so many unsolved problems; never before has
there been so much education, and never before has
there been so little coming to the knowledge of
truth. It is therefore not the material and the

economic which has failed us, but the moral and re-

ligious inspiration to direct our material resources

for the common good and the glory of God. This
does not mean that there must not be political and
economic and financial solutions; but it does mean
these are secondary, and that they cannot be ulti-

mately attained until we have “entered into our-
selves'' and discovered the end and purpose of being

a man. This does not mean that anyone who in-
terests himself in political and economic matters

has played false to the Kingdom of God ; but it does
mean that while due weight must be given to mass
legislation as an instrument of reform, these things

can be accomplished only by bringing God's breath

upon the face of the earth. As Leo XIII stated in his
Rerum Novarum: . . The things of earth cannot
be understood or valued aright without taking into

consideration the life to come, the life that will

know no death."



THE DIGNITY OF MAN 39

The note of this encyclical is : Spiritual and
moral regeneration is the condition of political and

economic reconstruction. Both economics and poli-

tics are doomed to unreality and failure unless
grounded on the recognition that man is a spiritual
being with ideals beyond this world. To recommend
only political and economic panaceas for the world

problem of dehumanized forgotten man, is like
recommending face powder for someone suffering
from jaundice, or an alcohol rub for someone suffer-
ing frpm cancer. It is not our bodies that are ill;
the soul of civilization is sick. The world is in a
state of mortal sin and it needs absolution. Vain
platitudes about ‘Regeneration”, “the Constitution”,

and “progress”, are not going to save us even though
we do go on shouting them louder and louder. We
need a new word in our vocabulary—and that word
is God. We need a new standard of judging men
than by the wealth they acquire, and that is the vir-
tues they practice. We need less emphasis on the
Five Year Plan and more on the Eternal Plan, for
what doth it profit a man if he fill the world with
tractors and lose his immortal soul ?



THE BREAD OF THE FATHER’S HOUSE
Address delivered on January 26, 1936

The first condition of the prodigal's return to
the Father's house was self-examination. The
prodigal “entered into himself", that is, he began

to do the pre-eminently human thing which differ-
entiates him from the beast, namely, to reflect. The
second condition revealed by the parable, was a
recognition of a “sense of need". “How many
hired servants in my father’s house abound with
bread, and I here perish with hunger". The misery,
want, and spiritual desolation he felt in a foreign

land made the prodigal yearn once again to break
and eat the bread of the father’s house.

If Western Civilization is to recover it must
fulfill both these conditions. The first condition has
already been discussed: It must enter into itself,

i. e., respect the true nature of man. Now we pass
on to the second condition which is a feeling of need

;

for unless it feels its own inadequacy, its own in-
sufficiency, its own hunger, how can it aspire or
even yearn for the Bread of the Father's house?

There is no hope for any civilization which is hungry

and does not wish for bread; but there is hope for

one that is hungry and feels the need of it. There

is very apt to be in the minds of my hearers a
general feeling that the Bread of the Father's

House or the Eucharist is too spiritual a concept and
can therefore have no application to the ills of our

day. If we have any such suspicion it is only be-
cause we have lost hold of the fundamental truth
that there is no salvation apart from God. In order



THE BREAD OF THE FATHER’S HOUSE 41

to show how vital the Eucharist is to our problems,
let us begin by contrasting the Capitalistic, the Com-
munistic, and the Eucharistic or Catholic, philos-

ophies of life.

The problem of social reconstruction revolves
about the three words which have rung around the

world since the French Revolution : “Liberty”,

“Equality”, and “Fraternity”. With which shall we
begin? Which shall be first in rebuilding the social
order? Capitalism said, Start with Liberty: Let a

man be free, and let freedom mean the power to
amass wealth without any interference either from
the State, or the Church. Well, they had their
liberty, which was only another word for selfishness,
and it brought neither Equality nor Fraternity.

Communism believes in starting with Equality, or
the development of a homogeneous jelly-like state in
which all men are equal because all are servants of
the New Capitalism or Communism. They have had
their “Equality”, which was another name for
tyranny, and it destroyed both Liberty and Frater-
nity. The Church says both are wrong. She says
you cannot start with either Liberty or Equality;
you must start with Fraternity or Brotherhood.
Brothers may share, but sharing does not make
them brothers—that is the mistake of Communism.
Thieves may share their loot, but such equality is
only the equality of gangdom and not a brotherhood.
In Russia, where there are no classes, the workers
in a tractor factory and the 0. G. P. U. are equal
in the eyes of the State, but it is ridiculous to say

they are brotherly.

There is only one way to build up a social order
where men are free and equal and that is by starting



42 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

with Brotherhood. There is only one way in the
world to make men brothers, and that is by giving
them a common body and a common blood. And
there is only one Father in the universe who is good
enough and powerful enough to make us all His
adopted sons, and that is the Heavenly Father who
so loved the world that He sent His Beloved Son into
the world to give us His Body and His Blood.

Thanks to the Eucharist, the age-long symbol
of the common meal becomes the basis of the
brotherhood of men and the Fatherhood of God.
Just as many grains of wheat make one bread, and
many grapes of the vine make one wine, so we
who are many are all made one in that Bread which
is the Body and that Wine which is the Blood, Once
men are made brothers of Christ and sons of the
Heavenly Father at the Communion rail, then Equal-
ity and Liberty follow. Then men are both equal
and free: Equal because God loves each infinitely,
and because each has a common need which God
alone can supply

; free because each soul is one with

Christ who can do all things that are good—and
what greater freedom is there than this?

The Communion rail is for that reason the most
democratic institution on the face of the earth ; it is

even a greater leveller than death, for there the

distinction between the rich and poor, the learned

and unlearned disappears
;
there the millionaire must

take the paten from the common laborer, the em-
ployer must kneel at the same board as the employee,
the university professor must eat the same Bread as
the simple Irishwoman who know^s only how to tell
her beads. There the dividing wall between nation-

alities is broken down and rebuilt into that spiritual



THE BREAD OF THE FATHER’S HOUSE 43

Kingdom where all are one, because of One Lord,
One Faith, One Baptism, One Bread. There every
prayer is said in the great context of a brotherhood

where every selfish act of the rich, and every en-
vious deed of the poor, is envisaged as a hindrance

to the unity of that Body. Hence, the real way to be
a Communist is to be a Communionist or Communi-
cant, i. e., to bring our hearts to the anvil of Divine

Life and have them under the Flames and Fires of
the Eucharist forged into that unity where we call
one another not the atomic name of ‘Comrade^ but
the spiritual name of ‘Brother\

The beautiful superiority of the Eucharistic
Life over the Capitalistic and Communistic views,
thus emerges because of the value it sets upon a
man. Capitalism considered every man a ‘‘hand'",
and hence employers were wont to speak of having
ten thousand “hands'" in the factory; the newer
Capitalism, or Communism, considers every man a
“stomach" to be fed like the beast of the field, as
long as he works to amass wealth for the great
Capitalistic State. The Church, on the contrary,
says man is neither a hand nor a stomach, but a
creature composed of body and soul, made unto the
image and likeness of God, and destined one day
like the planets to complete his orbit and return
unto that same God of Love who made him. The
Church has ever insisted that mobilization must not
minimize the value of a soul; and that collectivity
does not make even a single soul less precious. Mil-
lions may go to war wearing only a tag, hundreds of
thousands may go into factories with only a number,
or may swell the breadlines under the generic title
of “the unemployed", but for the Church each of



44 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

these souls is just as precious in the sight of God as
the soul of a Shakespeare or a Washington. And
why is each man precious? Because God has paid
an infinite price for him, namely the Blood of the
Lamb slain from the beginning of the World.

However low he may sink, man is still in the
eyes of the Church an exile from the royal household
of God

;
for the King has issued the command : “Go

out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and
bring in hither the poor, and feeble, and the blind,
and the lame.’' Or to paraphrase it: Call in the
hungry tramps, the beggars sleeping under papers
on park benches, the sandwich-men placarding on

their broken frames the latest luxuries, the sidewalk

artists awaiting the drop of a penny, the half-nour-

ished bodies crowding the out-patient wards of hos-

pitals, the off-scouring of the earth, the broken

earthenware of humanity—call them in, all of
them ! And these same souls who a moment before
would have thought a bread line a Paradise and

who would have picked a crust of bread from the
gutter, call them in, tell them they have an immortal
soul, sit them down at the Banquet of the King and
nourish their souls with the Bread of Life and the

Wine that germinates virgins. Judge them not by
the clothes they wear, their accent or their knowl-

edge of world affairs. Give them Divine Life, for
their souls have need of life as well as their bodies.

Tell them they are not just men, but children of
God; infuse their peasant blood with the Blood of

Royalty; rejuvenate their hungry bodies with the

Meat which nourishes unto life everlasting; lift
them up from the slavery and serfdom of the world
to the aristocracy of the family of the Trinity; let



THE BREAD OF IHE FATHER’S HOUSE 45

them forget for the moment their relations to the
State, to the family, to society. Let each soul stand

naked, face to face with God in a private audience

with Divinity, where spirit meets Spirit, so that

each may rise from the tryst as a new creature con-
scious that he must be worth something since God
loves him so

!

The real way then to establish the Classless Class
is not by hatred and class-struggle, but by love and

communion. Men are not called to be pessimists
shouting and shrieking that life is too short, because

it does not give man a chance to finish his Five Year
Plan; they are called to be optimists rejoicing that

Life is long enough to complete their part of the

Eternal Plan. Souls are not so many sticks to be
thrown into the great cosmic bonfire to keep it
blazing for the next generation—each one is cut
from the great quarry of humanity, and then
squared and fitted as a Living Statue into the
Temple of God by the Hand of the Heavenly Archi-
tect whose name is Love. This is the goal of life

—

union with God.

Does the Bread of the Father’s House seem too
idealistic? Do you condemn it because it is imprac-
tical? Certainly it is impractical, but that is pre-

cisely why it will succeed. When a machine is half
out of order any tiiaker can fix it, but when it has
gone radically wrong you need something more than
a practical man. And so it is.with the world today.
It is too far gone for practical solutions. Its soul is
sick!

Did not Our Lord Himself choose a very imprac-
tical way to redeem and transform the world? Ex-
tremely impractical it was to put down economic and



46 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

political injustices by dying on a cross! Imprac-
tical indeed it was to win a victory over the hard-
ened hearts of men by going down to defeat! Im-
practical indeed it was to save a selfish world by the
Love which lost a day! No wonder the practical-
minded men and women of His day when He was
unfurled as a wounded eagle on the gibbet of the
Cross, came beneath it and challenged Him to come
down. “Come down from your Cross of imprac-
ticality. Come down and shake dice for the gar-
ments of a God

;
come down from your Cross of Love

to our class struggle and our hate
;
come down from

your love of God to a love of Caesar. The only man
who will ever save us is the practical man who in
the language of the commercially-minded has

‘both feet on the ground\ But you have not both

feet on the ground! You are suspended between
heaven and earth, rejected by the one and aban-
doned by the other. Come down and we will be-
lieve”. But He did not come down. And why? Be-
cause it is practical to come down; because it is
human to come down ; because if He came down He
never would have saved us! But it is Divine to be
impractical ; it is Divine to hang there

!



THE FUNDMENTAL LIBERTY
Address delivered on February 2, 1936

Thus far we have considered the two conditions
of the prodigal’s return

;
namely, entering into him-

self or recognizing the primacy of the spiritual, and

secondly, admitting a sense of need for the Bread of

the Father’s House. We now come to the third con-
dition: the recognition of Authority. In the words

of Our Lord, the prodigal then said: ‘T will arise,
and will go to my father”.

These words of the prodigal revealed two as-
tounding admissions born of the ashes of a sad and

disillusioned life. The first was that there is no
escaping authority. The prodigal saw now that the
choice before him was not whether he would accept
or reject the authority of his father, but whether he

would accept the authority of the father or the au-

thority of his passions and his vicious habits.
Secondly, the prodigal had finally to admit that the
authority of the Father’s house which he once
thought so enslaving was the only authority which
could ever make him free.

Now, to apply this to Western Civilization. It,
too, like the prodigal, is finding out to its own chag-
rin that in rejecting the authority of the Father’s

House, it did not escape authority, but it only sub-

stituted one authority for another, and an authority
of a tyrannical kind, like the passions of the prodi-

gal. Following the example of the prodigal, our
civilization threw off all authority: First the au-
thority of the Church, then the authority of the

Bible, and finally the authority of religion and mor-



48 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

als in the political, economic, and social order. This
break with authority created a false sense of liberty

such as the prodigal felt in the first wild moments of
dissipation. Liberty was bound to be distorted once
it was torn away from Truth and Divine Responsi-
bility. Freedom became synonymous with doing
whatever you pleased, whether it was good or evil,
or believing whatever you pleased whether it was
true or false. The result was that freedom degen-
erated into a form of ‘‘selfishness”, expressed itself
in such slogans as “be yourself”, frowned upon all
forms of restraint and sacrifice as contrary to the
individual libido, and ended in what might be called
the exaltation and glorification of the ego.

But the modern man soon discovered that he
is the slave of that which overcomes him, and that
he really had not escaped authority. He had only
substituted one kind of authority for another—^in re-
jecting the authority of God, he became subject to
the authority of Caesar. This came about because
our civilization having lost the religious sanctions

of authority, sought some obligatory organization as
the sole means of escaping absolute chaos and de-
generation. Like camels who run together when
frightened, so these prophets of false liberty, when
fightened by the collapse of every ideal they believed

to be true, sought refuge in the human collective, in
the mass, or in the State. It was a way of trying to
get collective control over that which should have

been controlled by a social religion informing the

individual conscience. The abuses resulting from a
liberty which was only selfishness reached such enor-
mous proportions that political authority had to step
in and re-establish itself over economic forces which



THE FUNDAMENTAL LIBERTY 49

had long escaped from it and were now mocking it.
That is why the reaction against false liberty tended
to dictatorship. In some nations it did not stop with
the State attempting to enforce the legally just as a

substitute for the morally righteous! It reached a

point where the State assumed complete control over
the temporal and spiritual life of man. A social
conscience took the place of a personal conscience.

Dictatorship overflowed into the spiritual order ; or-

ganization became an obsession; social planning be-
came a mania. A unity of ideas and beliefs was im-
posed upon the submerged personalities by the
State, which felt the need of creating an economic
unity to replace the spiritual unity whose basis is
Christ.

The general effect of the reaction was the sub-
stitution of the authority of Caesar for the authority

of God; or the mobilization of individual egotists
into a collective selfishness, which is Communism.
We are witnessing therefore the queer spectacle of a
world that began by hating authority, now falling
down before an authority more absolute than history
has seen since the advent of Christianity. The au-
thority of the Father's House was rejected because
it was said to stand in the way of liberty; and now
the Prodigal World finds itself the slave of those
forces it once thought would make it free. It would
not have God with His law of love, now it must have
Caesar with his iron law

;
it would not be subject to

the Father, now it must be subject to the citizen of
the foreign country.

There is no escaping authority; the prodigal
found that out, and the modern world is now finding
it out again. Its three hundred year old experiment



50 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

with liberty has taught it that liberty does not mean
the right to violate either the laws of God or man
It wanted an order in which every man was free
and found out too late that in such an order only the
strong are free; it wanted a religion in which each
man could think out his own beliefs and found it
just as absurd as thinking out his own astronomy.
Hence the problem is not whether we shall or shall
not accept authority

; the problem is which authority
will we accept, the authority of Christ, or the au-
thority of anti-Christ. Our age is now answering
that question.

This brings us to the second admission of the

prodigal, namely, that the authority of the father

which he rejected as the obstacle to freedom was the
only authority which could ever make him free. Our
civilization too must eventually come to realize that
the Church which for the last three hundred years

has been attacked as the enemy of liberty and free-
dom now stands alone as the bulwark and guarantee
of liberty, and that every v/ord she utters is a pro-

test against the new slavery of the modern man.

The new slavery is different from the old. The
old slavery was physical. A man under that regime
was not permitted either the fruits of the labor of
his hands or the rev/ards of the sweat of his brow;

his work, his talents, his body, his wife and his chil-

dren, belonged to the man who ov/ned him. The
new slavery is not physical but spiritual and moral.
It affects sometimes the body as in Russia, but prin-

cipally it affects the soul, the conscience, the will,

and the personality of man; it takes its roots into

the more human and divine part of him, asserts the
primacy of the economic order over the human, and



THE FUNDAMENTAL LIBERTY 61

subjects him to the race, the class, the Proletariat,
the State which owns him and whose dominant pas-
sion is the Passion for Power.

Against this new slavery whose venom strikes
deeper roots than the old, the Church has risen in

protest. Why has she condemned Birth Control,
Sterilization? Why has she anathematized Commu-
nism? Why has she condemned employers who
would deny workmen the right to organize? Why
has she frowned upon workmen who would abolish
all private property? Simply because each of these

things is a violation of the Rights of Man
;
because a

human personality has certain inalienable rights
which no one can take away from him; in a word,
because a man is to be measured and judged not by
what he produces for the State but by what he is
destined to be by God.

This is a new role for the Church. Yes, she has
had to defend liberties before, but they were liberties
of the supernatural order. Up until the close of the
19th century she had to assert the freedom of man
to accept grace, against Calvinistic Determinism;

but now she is called upon, not to defend liberty in
the order of grace, but liberty in the order of nature.

Before she had to go forth to battle for the freedom
of a man to be a saint

;
now she has to fight for the

freedom of a man to be a man. This is a sad state
of affairs when Christ in His Mystical Body has to
remind the world of those truths which even the
pagans believed, namely, the right of a man to be
free, to be captain of his own fate and destiny, and
the right to pray, *'Our Father, Who art in heaven”,
instead of “Soviet Union which art in Russia”.

If the world continues to get so far away from



62 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

fundamentals, a day may yet come when the Church
will go out to battle in defense of the truth that two
and two make four, that grass is green in summer,
and that snow is white. Her excommunications of
the future will not be against those who deny that
there are three persons in one God, but against those

who deny that every citizen in a State is a person.
She has been the defender of the revealed liberties

of the world; now, she is to be the defender of the

last liberty of all, the freedom of man.

Rob man of the freedom of serving and loving
God and you have robbed him of his manhood. Men
with minds that can fly cannot be kept in cages ; men
with divine home-sickness cannot And homes under
roofs ; men destined to be filled with Life and Truth
and Love cannot be satisfied with only their bellies
filled. Rob them of their God, which is the root of
all the liberties of man, and they will build a false

god as they are doing now. When Moses was absent
for forty days on the mountain-top communing with
the Living God, the children of Israel made for them-
selves a, golden calf. And today when the people in
Russia and Germany and Mexico are deprived of
God, they make the iron calf of the State and the
Race; if they are not permitted to walk in proces-

sions to the Mother of God, they will dance about

tractors; if they are forbidden to adore God in a
tabernacle they will bow down before an embalmed
corpse and a paraffined cheek in the Kremlin of the

Red Square. That is why the religion of Russia is
the opium of the People—it does not deny God who
was the root of all their liberties; it falsifies His
image and makes them slaves. But this will not
satisfy them long. Communism may build Babels, a



THE FUNDAMENTAL LIBERTY 53

thousand factories, schools and hospitals, but their
Babels will crumble without the Cornerstone; the

products of their factories will be without excellence,

the dying in their hospitals will not be healed, the

scholars in their schools will not learn wisdom be-
cause they have forgotten that a cow is satisfied
when its stomach is full, but not a man. He is not
satisfied until he is free, and he is not free until he
can love when he pleases, and he cannot love when he
pleases until he loves the One for Whom he was
made—^the God whose name is Love

!



THE SENSE OF SIN
Address delivered on February 9, 1936

The final condition of the return to the Father’s
House was a recognition, on the part of the prodi-
gal, of the sense of sin. This condition is revealed

by the following words of the parable : ‘T will arise

and will go to my father, and will say to him: I
have sinned against heaven and before thee; I am
not worthy to be called thy son ; make me as one of
thy hired servants.” Herein is combined the double

element of true redemption : an admission of sin

;

‘T have sinned”, and the need of penance, “make me
as one of thy hired servants”.

Our Blessed Lord never once hints in the parable,
when the young man returned with a face furrowed
with the hard lines of sin, that he ever offered any

excuse for his sinfulness. There is no record, there

is not even a hint, that he attempted to excuse him-

self or to extenuate his prodigality. He offered no
theory about sin; he did not say it was a fall in the
evolutionary process; he did not blame his environ-

ment or his wicked companions; he did not tell his
father that he had inherited a queer Freudian com-
plex from him

;
he did not say that moral decline is

only a myth and that sin is just an illusion; he asked
no Lippmann to write a Preface to Morals saying
men could no longer live according to traditional
morality, and must therefore have a new moral to
suit unmoral ways of living. He did not excuse him-
self by saying that a man was justified in sowing his
wild oats and then forgetting, living for the present

and having no responsibility for the past. There



THE SENSE OF SIN 55

was none of these things in the mouth of the prodi-
gal, and much less was there any such thought in his
heart. Out of its torn and bleeding self there came
only tear-drippings, a deep recognition of the horror

of sin and the need of pardon and redemption.

have sinned against heaven and before thee.”

But sin is the one thing modern civilization will
not admit. Instead it believes itself incapable of

sinning, and places the blame not in man who vio-
lates the moral law, but in the moral law which it
says is behind the times. The result is, we are
living in a time when old forms of sensationalism of
a generation ago are now regarded as banal

;
when

words such as "‘obedience” and “purity” which once
stood for the sacred, now, in our era of carnality,

stand either for weakness or restraint of liberty. If
there is any way of describing our civilization it is to
say we are at the penumbra, i. e., at that point where
light fades and shadows begin. We have not yet
crossed the line, because whether the world admits
it or not, it is still living on the spiritual capital
which the Church divided unto it four centuries ago.
Everything that is good, everything that is chari-
table, everything that is noble in our civilization, is
a reflection of abiding Christian principles and a
splinter from the Cross of Christ. But the vision of
the Cross is fading; the borderland between light
and darkness is growing dimmer and the world is
about to pass over into the hinterland of darkness
and ruin.

The Church has felt this moral decline. She
notes the complete absence of rational objections

against her. Never before has she been so im-
poverished for good strong intellectual opposition as



56 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

at the present time. There are no foemen worthy of
her steel. The opposition today is not intellectual,
but moral. Men are no longer objecting to the
Church because of the way they think, but because
of the way they live. They no longer have difficulty
with her Creed, but with her commandments. They
remain outside her saving waters, not because they
cannot accept the doctrine of Three Persons in t)ne

God but because they cannot accept the moral of
two persons in one flesh; not because Infallibility is
too complex, but because avoidance of Birth Control

is too hard; not because the Eucharist is too sub-

lime, but because Penance is too exacting. Briefly,

the heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought

—

it is the heresy of action.

Our whole civilization is pervaded by a general
atrophy of the vital conviction that there is a right-

eous purpose sovereign in history. Men today model
their lives solely in relation to economic interests

rather than the common good and the glory of God.
What adds to the seriousness of it is that the world’s
fallen state is accompanied, not by an increased,

but by a decreased sense of sin. It is sinning more,

but is less mindful of its gravity. It offends God
more, but it is worried less about its offense. How
rarely do we find anyone outside of the Father’s
House doing penance for his sins? How often does
a writer of immoral books, when he comes to the
consciousness of the souls he has polluted, end his

days in prayer and sacrifice ? How often do we hear
of an industrialist coming forward and saying : *‘My

violation of the virtue of Justice is the cause of the

depression and I must make amends for my sins be-
fore God ?” Rarely indeed is it recorded of a modern



THE SENSE OF SIN 57

sinner, that he seeks to enter the Kingdom of God
by doing penance. And why? Because the modern
ideal is not goodness, but success. Such an ideal

makes penance impossible. Paganism sinned too,
but the sin of modern paganism has the added
seriousness of having betrayed an ideal which the

older pagans had not—namely the ideal of Christ.
By this I do not mean to say that when the world

accepted the faith and morals of the Church that

the world was free of sinners. As a matter of fact
there were men just as wicked in the 13th century as
there are in the 20th; there were Christians just as
immoral in the age of martyrs as there are today

—

though there were not so many. But there is this
great difference between the sinners of a Christian-

ized civilization and the sinners of our day—the sin-
ners of the Christian civilization knew they were
sinners; the sinners of modern civilization thinh
they are saints. The sinners of the Christian
civilization broke the law, but admitted the law was
right; the sinners of modern civilization break the
law and say that the law is wrong. The sinners of
Christian ages knew they were wrong, but they
wished to be right. The sinners of our day on the
contrary do wrong, and do not want to be right.
There is hope for any civilization which breaks a
law but never calls into question the truth of the
law; but there is no hope for a civilization that
breaks a law and then denies it. Man is powerless to
resist evil if he does not recognize it as such, just as

he is hopeless if he is wounded and does not wish to
be healed.

It may take a long time before the modern world
is willing to cry out with the prodigal: ‘T have



58 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

sinned''; but until that day arrives it can expect no
healing ointment for its broken wings. There is no
redemption except from sin; there is no hope for
betterment until there has been an admission of
failure. Our social structure must one day admit
the fallacy of ‘‘business is business"; it must judge
its economic policies, not by their feasibility, but by
their morality; and it must confess that economics
and politics are but branches of moral theology and
philosophy, i. e., that they can be sinful if they are in

violation of the ultimate end of man. It must admit
that the moral necessity of attaining the full per-

fection of man's personality circumscribes human
action in the domestic, political, economic, and re-
ligious spheres ; that every act is a moral act, even a

religious act; that nothing is excluded, whether it

be the selling of a can of milk or of a great corpora-

tion. Hence economic policy can save a man's soul
as well as damn it. Morality is involved in the
realities of industry, finance, and government, and
the assumption that these things are governed by

non-ethical forces is false. Business can crucify

Christ just as well as Pride, and therefore it has just

as much need of Redemption.

And what is to be done about it? Weil, what
would we do if we found a live whale on top of the
Alps—that is, if we wanted to save it? We would try
to restore it as quickly as possible to its environment.

And that is the only thing to be done with the world.
Put it back in its environment of religion and moral-

ity. And all the discussion about politics and eco-
nomics divorced from the moral order is just as
stupid as to legislate for v/hales on mountain tops.

It is a change of heart, of mind, of soul, and not a



THE SENSE OF SIN 59

new economics which is needed, and this new
heart can be found only at the foot of the Cross

where things are measured according to their true

worth. Once men see that Cross elevated before
their eyes at the elevation of the Host, they begin to

see that three score and ten years of life is a time

for testing—a moment taken out of eternal life in
which to say “yea” or “nay” to Divine Love.

Once the world is restored to the environment of

Calvary it will see that it need not step down to ruin
and despair, for the important thing about sin is not
its sinfulness, but the fact that it can be redeemed.

Once the Cross is set up again before the eyes of men
and placarded at the cross-roads of civilization, as it
was centuries ago, men will realize that redemption
is social, and that we are our brothers^ keepers, in
helping one another to a fresh start even though it is

a late start. Economics can still provide men with
the means of existence, but only the Cross can offer
the object of existence, which determines the moral-
ity of the means.

But take away the vision of that Cross which
leads to the crown beyond the grave, and what an-
swer can we make to the poor who would steal from
the rich out of envy, and the rich who would crush
the poor out of lust ? Take away the Cross and what
hope shall we give the sinner who wishes to be clean,
the sick who have borne their pain with patience, the
just who have suffered unjustly? Take away the
Cross which stands suspended between heaven and
earth and you take away the bridge by which God
descends to man and man ascends to God.

The Cross will not relieve the world of suffering,
for its kingdom of happiness is not here; it



60 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

has not saved modern civilization, because modern
civilization has not tried it, but only its substitutes

and imitations. However, it does secure a recogni-
tion of a supernatural criterion and a normal pattern
of life, which, if accepted, would enable “the mass of
men to fulfill their destiny on earth without being
obliged to heroism”

;
it does provide an eternal end

rather than a temporal end as the basis of social ac-

tion, and that means everything; if does make life
reasonable by assuring man that he lives in a world
of good and evil opportunity, where his choice must
be a matter of significance for himself and his fel-
lowmen; it does influence the economic order by
denouncing the immorality of slave wages for work-
ingmen in industry, of calling men “superfluous” in
a universe where every man has an immortal soul,
and of suppressing man for the sake of the State
when a man is a citizen of the Kingdom of God as
well as the Kingdom of Caesar.

In comparison to it, all subsequent revolutions

are but trivial upstarts, for they failed to affect the

soul of society
;
even the Communistic revolution was

incomplete for it still leaves hate, and does not say,

“Forgive”; it still leaves earthliness and does not

say : “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise”

;

it still leaves despair, and does not say: “Father,

into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Communism
is not revolutionary enough—it still leaves man
where he falls.

Be not fooled by those who would save us without
the Cross. There is no escaping the Cross, for the

simple reason that there is no goal gained without

the effort and no victory won without the battle. To
keep whispering to ourselves sweet but false consola-



THE SENSE OF SIN 61

tions, to look for the end when we are only at the
beginning, to go round the Cross instead of taking it

up, these are but the materials out of which a cross
is made—and a cross where one bar is at variance
and contradiction with another, the most insoluble
mystery of all.

But to enter into that higher plane of making
earth a stepping stone to heaven, where nobility

stands the test, where love spells sacrifice, where the
horizontal bar of death meets the vertical bar of life

in the Person of Christ on the Cross reconciling both

—this is the Crucifix, wherein we confess not the
mysterious ways of Job, but enter into them for our
eternal joy and consolation. Once united with the
Crucified as we are in the Mass, then we begin to
understand that everywhere else others promise us
sin excused, sin discounted, sin denied, sin explained

away, but only at the foot of the Cross do we ever
experience the beautiful divine contradiction of

sin forgiven.



THE RETURN FROM EXILE
Address delivered on February 16, 1936

The conclusion of the parable of the prodigal
son pictures the father meeting the prodigal. The
•father met the prodigal on the road, according to
the Scriptures, when he was ''yet a great way off’’.
These words have a meaning for us in the modern
parallel of the story which we are considering in this
course of radio lectures. They imply two things:
On the part of the prodigal a recognition that the
Father’s House, or the Church, is the only place the

prodigal children of Western Civilization can find

the Freedom and the Peace they crave; on the part
of the Father’s House, or the Church, a recognition

of the necessity of hopefulness, and the need of

going out into the roads and thoroughfares of the

world to meet the prodigal children in an embrace

of love, the ring of fidelity, and the cloak of charity.

Firstly, the prodigal children must return to the
Father’s House not only and uniquely because it
will make them prosperous, but because it will give
them Peace and Freedom, which are the conditions
of temporal prosperity. The prodigal son did not
return because he wanted the banquet of the fatted
calf. He returned because he wanted the love, the
forgiveness, and the authority of the father’s house.
The fatted calf was the by-product of his return:
not the goal that was sought. In like manner West-
ern Civilization must seek first the Kingdom of God
and His Justice, and all these other things will be
added unto it. The fatted calf of earthly prosperity
is only secondary : it may or may not follow. What



THE RETURN FROM EXILE 63

is important is the right relation of lives to God.

This was the characteristic note of the teaching of

Our Lord and therefore of His Church; namely,
what might be called political and economic rela-
tivity, namely, social amelioration as a by-product of

Christianity. Systems of politics and economics are

of secondary importance, but not primary; not ab-

solute, but relative. Civilization can be great under

a monarchy or a parliament, under a democracy or
under imperialism; civilization can be good under

free trade or tariff, gold standards or silver stand-

ards
;
but no civilization can be good unless it serves

and loves God. Hence to Satan who would have
given Him all the political and economic kingdoms
of earth Our Lord flung one word “begone”

;
to those

who would trap Him into a dispute about conquered
and conquering peoples he said : “Render therefore

to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s
;
and to God,

the things that are God’s;” and to those who would
make Him intervene in matters of money He asks:
“who hath appointed me judge, or divider, over
you?”

In like manner. Western civilization must not
measure the value of Christ’s Church in terms of
the fatted calf, increased profits, and favorable bal-
ance of trade.

The same false notion about the Church pro-
ducing prosperity prevailed in Rome at the time of
its decline. Alaric came to Rome about the begin-
ning of the fifth century, forced open the Salarian

gate and sacked the Capitol, The whole world was
stirred by the fall of this mighty Cedar of Libanus.
Not since the invasion of Rome by the Gauls 800
years before had the capitol been so threatened, in-



64 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

vaded, and outraged. Rome felt she was invul-
nerable because eternal, little realizing that she was
eternal not because of the force of her arms, but be-

cause a fisherman came to dwell there. Immediately
the cry went up: ‘‘We have perished because we
have become Christians. Christianity has failed
us ! We are not as powerful, we are not as mighty,
we are not as great as we were with the old gods
Aeneas brought from Troy. We are weak with the
weakness of the God on a Cross Peter brought back
from Calvary. Christianity has brought us bad
luck”!

St. Augustine in-far-oif Africa heard the cry and
answered its challenge in his mighty work “The City
of God”. He reminded the fallen empire that it had
fallen, not because it was Christian, but because it
had failed to be Christian. He admitted Rome had
done great things for the world; that it had been

prosperous and had given man a common law and a
common language. Yet these benefits had been pur-
chased by war, slavery, and oppression of the weak,

and in the end served only senseless luxury and the

mobs of the amphitheatre. He told them in no un-
certain terms that Christianity, although possess-

ing a social philosophy and character, never prom-

ised to be a social panacea for all the ills of human-
kind; that the world was only a road and not a
house to live in, that life is a pilgrimage to another

city, and not the art of making a heaven on earth,
that the benefits of Christianity are not restricted

to the material. Rather they are like the blood of

Christ which regenerates us unto life everlasting.

The world would not listen to Augustine. The
world then believed as it believes now, that civiliza-



THE RETURN FROM EXILE 65

tion is identical with prosperity, and that Christian-

ity fails when it fails to make the world prosperous.
Within the Church as well as outside, Augustine was
begged to be quiet about Christianity bringing su-

pernatural benefits. Everywhere men pleaded: “Si
taceat de Roma”. “If he would only shut up about
Rome”. But he did not shut up. He preached and
cried down the error that the sole business of
Christianity is business. And in this day and age
when the Father of Christendom reminds the world
that its economics and politics can not be divorced
from Christian standards of morality, that its
social structure can not be made right until men
make their peace with God, and that society can not
be improved except by reforming the individuals who
make it up, the cry of Augustine’s day is hurled in
his face : 0 si taceat de Roma ! Oh if he would only
shut up about Rome, about the Sanctity of Marraige,
about Education built upon Christ, about Grace,
about the Sacraments and eternal life. But in these
days as in the days of Augustine there must be no
silence. Spiritual regeneration must condition social
reconstruction. There is no other way than the way
of the Lord. He, the living Bread, came on earth
when there was a famine and was born in a little
city called Bethlehem, the House of Bread. He came
on earth when crimes were great and powerful and
said that he who took the sword would perish by the
sword; He came at a time when slaves were ill
treated and yet preached, “servants, obey your mas-
ter”; He came on earth when men would have pro-
claimed HimKing of their economics and politics and
said : “My kingdom is not of this world”

;
He came

on earth to a people who hated Caesar, and paid



66 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

tribute to Caesar; He came on earth when men
judged Him by His earthly power and said: “Take
up your cross and follow Me”.

This is the doctrine the Church is preaching

today. No other truth than the spiritual can save
our civilization. Talking about the Stars and

Stripes will not save a country that has been blessed

abundantly by God and then forgets God. There are
other stars and other stripes than those in our flag

and they are the only ones that will ever save us

—

the stars and stripes of Christ, by whose stars we are
illumined and by whose stripes we are healed.

On the other hand, the Father’s House has its
obligation to prodigal Western civilization, and that

is to go out on the road even though it is yet a long

way off, and make the return easy. The Father’s
House is inoperative except by and through those
who are in it.

The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. Each
Catholic therefore is Christ in his little world. Our
Lord has no other feet with which to go about doing

good than ours; He has no other cheeks to turn to
those who preach class warfare than our own; He
has no other lips to teach those who sit in the super-
stition of the Gentiles than our own. Christ fails in

the measure we fail to be Christ-like. No one is un-
important

; no action is a-moral or a-Catholic ; every

thought and every deed has spiritual significance.

Out to the roads therefore to meet the prodigal!

Never before in 400 years has the world been so will-

ing to return
;
seldom since the Incarnation have the

average man and woman, oppressed with a sense of
false values and ambiguous standards, been so dis-

posed, as they are today, to receive spiritual guid-



THE RETURN FROM EXILE 67

ance. And the way they are to be infused is through
Catholic Action, or the working of the Pentecostal

spirit through every influential cell of the Mystical

Body. One thing however we must recognize is
that the influence which will make for the civiliza-
tion of the future will come not from above but from
below. During the last century, when Liberalism
flourished, practically all the influences of social life

came from above; i. e., from the university, the
modern prophet, the high-tone, literary magazines,
retired business men turned philanthropists, and in
general, from the comfortable strata of society. But
the influences which are moulding society today are
from below, from the proletariat, the working man,
the father without a job, the hungry women and
children, the people whose wants are too many and
whose rights are too few, the great mass who follow
bad leaders because they have no good ones, the so-
cially disinherited and the economically dispossessed.
The leadership today has shifted to the masses; the
makers of the world today are not the men who lead
and inspire the masses

; they are the men who reflect
the masses; the collectivity creates them, but they
do not create it.

The proletariat then has an historical mission
for the future; the disinherited laborers have a
messianic role for generations yet unborn. The
proletarian, and not the university professor, is the
raw material of future civilization. The question
then is: Who will possess the proletariat first,
Christ or anti-Christ? The Church or Communism?
If the Truth does not get to them, error will. The
duty of Catholics at the present time is to go down to
the disinherited group and form a Catholic pro-



68 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

letarian culture, just as vigorous and just as zealous
as any Communist proletariat. The common man
may not be socially proper, he may not have a college
education, he may not know how to act in our draw-
ing rooms, but he holds the future in his hands. Both

the Church and civilization wilieraw their strength
from such a man. Hence down to the masses, or in
the words of Frederick Ozanam : Passons aux bar-
bares. PASS on to the proletariat

;
shift them from

the circumference to the center, from emptiness to
a vision of spiritual realities. Pass on to the

masses, teach them not to spend all their energies
in finding solutions for transitory problems, but to

lay the foundations of a new order. If they are re-
bellious against law and order, justice and morality,

country, and God, it is a reminder of our own unful-
filled duty. They are not altogether to blame if they
hate the Church

;
we would hate it too, if we believed

the same lies about it that they do. But whatever be
their mentality, they are the raw material of the
future; they are the stuff which will compose the
Mystical Body of the next generation. It was from
the same type of man the Church in the first few
centuries recruited her martyrs. Because they are

Communists, they are not to be despised; because

they are pagans, they are not to be hated. The
Church has no fear of paganism. We were born in
paganism; we saw it die, and by the grace of God,
we will see it die again. The first time we killed it
was during a persecution. And that is when we shall
kill it again ! The Catacombs may once more house
martyrs

!



CALVARY AND SACRIFICE
Address delivered on February 23, 1936

There are certain things in life which are too

beautiful to be forgotten, such as the love of one’s

mother. Hence we treasure her picture. The love
of soldiers who sacrificed themselves for their coun-
try is likewise too beautiful to be forgotten, hence we
revere that memory on Memorial Day. But the
greatest blessing which ever came to this earth was

the visitation of the Son of God in the form and
habit of man. That Life is above all lives too beau-

tiful to be forgotten, hence we treasure the Divinity
of His Words in Sacred Scripture, and the Charity
of His Deeds in our daily actions. Unfortunately

this is all some souls remember, namely His Words
and His Deeds; important as these are, they are

not the greatest characteristic of the Divine Savior.

The most sublime act in the history of Christ was
His Death. Death is always important for it seals a

destiny. Any dying man is a scene. Any dying
scene is a sacred place. That is why the great liter-
ature of the past which has touched on the emotions

surrounding death has never passed out of date. But
of all deaths in the record of man, none was more
important than the Death of Christ. Everyone else

who was ever born into the world, came into it to
live: Our Lord came into it to die. Death was a
stumbling block to the life of Socrates, but it was
the crown to the life of Christ. He Himself told us
that He came *To give his life a redemption for
many”

;
that no one could take away His Life ; that

He would lay it down of Himself.



70 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

If then Death was the supreme moment for
which Christ lived it was therefore the one thing
He wished to have remembered above all others. He
did not ask that men should write down His words
into a Scripture

;
He did not ask that His kindness to

the poor, the lame, and the blind should be recorded
in history; but He did ask that men remember His
Death. And in order that its memory might not be
any haphazard narrative on the part of men, He
Himself instituted the precise way it should be re-
called. Man has instituted Memorial Day to recall
the death of soldiers in the field of battle, but Christ

instituted His own Memorial to re-enact His death
on the gibbet of the Cross.

The memorial was instituted the night before He
died, at what has since been called “The Last Sup-
per.” Taking bread into His hands. He said : “This
is my body, which shall be delivered for you”, i. e.,
delivered unto death. Then over the chalice of wine,
He said, “This is my blood of the new testament,
which shall be shed for many unto remission of
sins”. Thus in an unbloody symbolic manner of the
parting of the Blood from the Body, did Christ
pledge Himself to death in the sight of God and men,
and represent His death which was to come the next
afternoon at three.* He was offering Himself as a

* “Death is put before us in a symbol, by means of that
sacramental parting of the Blood from the Body; but death
at the same time already pledged to God for all its worth, as
well as all its awful reality, by the expressive language of the
Sacred Symbol. The price of our sins shall be paid down on
Calvary; but here the liability is incurred by our Redeemer,
and subscribed in His very Blood”—Maurice de la Taille, S. J.,
Catholic Faith in the Holy Eucharist, p. 115. “There were
not two distinct and complete sacrifices offered by Christ,, one
in the Cenacle, the other on Calvary. There was a sacrifice at
the Last Supper, but it was the sacrifice of Redemption; and



CALVARY AND SACRIFICE 71

Victim to be immolated, and that men might never
forget that ''greater love than this no man hath,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”, He
gave the Divine Command: "Do this for a com-
memoration of me.”

The following day what He had prefigured and
foreshadowed He realized in its completeness, as He
was crucified between two thieves and His Blood

drained from His Body for ,the redemption of the

world.

The Church which Christ founded has not only

preserved the Words He spoke, and the Wonders He
wrought; it has also taken Him seriously when He
said : "Do this for a commemoration of me.” And
that action whereby we re-enact His Death on the
Cross is the Sacrifice of the Mass, in which we do as
a memorial what He did at the Last Supper as the
prefiguration of HisPassion.**

Hence the Mass is to us the crowning act of
Christian worship. A pulpit in which the words of

there was a sacrifice on the Cross, but it was the self-same
sacrifice continued and completed. The Supper and the Cross
made up one complete sacrifice.”—Maurice de la Taille, S. J.,
The Mystery of Faith and Human Opinion, p. 232.

* “He offered the Victim to be immolated; we offer it as
immolated of old. We offer the eternal Victim of the Cross,
once made and forever enduring. . . The Mass is a sacrifice
because it is our oblation of the Victim once immolated, even
as the Supper was the oblation of the Victim to be immo-
lated.” ibid. p. 239-240. The Mass is not only a commemora-
tion, it is a living representation of the sacrifice of the cross.
“In this Divine Sacrifice which takes place at the Mass is con-
tained and immolated in an unbloody manner, the same
Christ that was offered once for all in blood upon the Cross
... It is one and the same Victim, one and the same High
Priest, Who made the offering through the ministry of His
priests today, after having offered Himself upon the cross
yesterday; only the manner of the oblation is different”
(Council of Trent. Sess. 22).



72 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

Our Lord are repeated does not unite us to Him; a
choir in which sweet sentiments are sung brings us
no closer to His Cross than to His Ascension. A
temple without an altar of sacrifice is non-existent

among primitive peoples, and is meaningless among
Christians. And so in the Catholic Church the altar
and not the pulpit or the choir is the center of wor-
ship, for there is re-enacted the Memorial of His

Passion. Its value does not depend on him who says
it, or on him who hears it

;
it depends on Him Who is

the One High Priest and Victim, Jesus Christ Our
Lord. With Him we are united, in spite of our
nothingness

;
in a certain sense, we lose our individ-

uality for the time being
; we unite our intellect and

our will, our heart and our soul, our body and our
blood, so intimately with Christ, that the Heavenly

Father sees not so much us with our imperfection,
but rather sees us in Him, the Beloved Son in whom
He is well pleased. The Mass is for that reason the
greatest event in the history of mankind; the only

Holy Act which keeps the wrath of God from a sin-
ful world, because it holds the Cross between, and

renews that decisive moment when our sad and
tragic humanity journeyed suddenly forth to the
fullness of supernatural life.

What is important at this point is that we take
the proper mental attitude toward the Mass, and re-

member this important fact, that the Sacrifice of the
Cross is not something which happened nineteen

hundred years ago. It is still happening. It is not

something past like the signing of the Declaration

of Independence; it is an abiding drama on which
the curtain has not yet rung down. Let it not be

believed that it happened a long time ago, and there-



CALVARY AND SACRIFICE 73

fore no more concerns us than anything else in the
past. Calvary belongs to all times and to all places.

That is why, when Our Blessed Lord ascended the
heights of Calvary, He was fittingly stripped of His
garments: He would save the world without the
trappings of the world. Adam lost his innocence
and hence sought to clothe himself to hide the foul-

ness of the temple of his body. Our Lord kept His
innocence, hence He had no need of clothing that
covers shame. His garments belonged to time, for

they localized Him, and fixed Him as a dweller in
Galilee. Now that He was shorn of them to be
utterly dispossessed of earthly things. He belonged
not to Galilee, not to a Roman province, but to the
world. He became the universal poor man of the
world. Henceforth He would belong to no one peo-
ple, but to all men.

To express further the universality of the Re-
demption, the cross was erected at the crossroads of
civilization, at a central point between the three

great cultures of Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens, in
whose names He was crucified. This fact was pla-
carded before the eyes of men, to arrest the careless,

to appeal to the thoughtless, to arouse the worldly.

It was the one inescapable fact the cultures and civi-
lizations of His day could not resist. It is also the
one inescapable fact of our day which we cannot
resist.

The figures at the Cross were symbols of all who
crucify. We were there in our representatives.
What we are doing now to the Mystical Christ, they
were doing in our names to the Historical Christ. If
we are envious of the good, for example—^for good-
ness is a reproach to the evil—^we were there in the



THE PRODIGAL WORLD

Scribes and Pharisees. If we are fearful of losing
some temporal advantage by embracing Divine
Truth and Love, we were there in Pilate. If we trust
in material forces and seek to conquer through the
world instead of through the spirit, we were there
in Herod. And so the story goes on for the typical
sins of the world. They all blind us to the fact that
He is God. There was therefore a kind of inevi-
tability about the Crucifixion. Men who were free
to sin, were also free to crucify.

As long as there is sin in the world the Cruci-
fixion is a reality. As the poet has put it

:

“I saw the son of man go by
Crowned with a crown of thorns.
Was it not finished Lord, said I,
And all the anguish borne ?

He turned on me His awful eyes;
Hast thou not understood?
So every soul is a Calvary
And every sin a rood”.

We were there during that Crucifixion. The
drama was already completed as far as the Vision of

Christ was concerned, but it had not yet been un-

folded to all men and all places and all times. If a
motion picture reel, for example, were conscious of

itself, it would know the drama from beginning to
end, but the spectators in the theater would not know
it until they had seen it unrolled upon the screen.

In like manner. Our Lord on the Cross saw in His

Eternal Mind, the whole drama of history, the story

of each individual soul, and how later on it would
react to His Crucifixion ; but though He saw all, we
could not know how we would react to the Cross
until we were unrolled upon the screen of time.



CALVARY AND SACRIFICE 76

were not conscious of being present there on Calvary

that day, but He was conscious of our presence.
Today we know the role we played in the theatre of
Calvary, by the way we live and act now in the
theatre of the twentieth century.

That is why Calvary is actual, why the Cross is
the Crisis, why in a certain sense the scars are still
open, why Pain still stands deified, and why blood
like falling stars is still dropping upon our souls.

There is no escape from the fact, not even by deny-
ing it as the Pharisees did, not even by selling Christ

as Judas did, not even by crucifying Him as the
executioners did, for the Cross is still set up in the

world.

But how is it visible? Where shall we find Cal-
vary perpetuated? We shall find Calvary renewed,
re-enacted, represented, as we have seen, in the
Mass. Calvary is one with the Mass, and the Mass
is one with Calvary, for in both there is the same
Priest and Victim. The Seven Last Words are like
the seven parts of the Mass. And just as there are
seven notes in music admitting an infinite variety of
harmonies and combinations, so too on the Cross
there are seven'divine notes, which the dying Christ
has sent down the centuries, all of which combine in
the beautiful harmony of the Drama of the World^s
Redemption.

Picture then the High Priest Christ leaving the
sacristy of heaven for the altar of Calvary. He has
already put on the vestment of our human nature,
the maniple of our suffering, the stole of priesthood,
the chasuble of the Cross. Calvary is His Cathe-
dral ; the rock of Calvary is the altar stone ; the sun
turning to red is the sanctuary lamp; Mary and



76 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

John are the living side altars; the host is His Body;
the wine is His Blood. He is upright as Priest, yet
He is prostrate as Victim. Christ is going to His
altar. We shall assist at His First Mass.



THE FIRST WORD
Address delivered on March 1, 1936

'‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they

do”—Luke xxiii:SU*
The Mass begins with the Confiteor. The Con-

fiteor is a prayer in which we confess our sins and
ask the Blessed Mother and the Saints to intercede

to God for our forgiveness, for only the clean of
heart can see God. Our Blessed Lord too begins His

Mass with the Confiteor. But His Confiteor differs

from ours in this. He has no sins to confess. He is
God and therefore sinless. “Which of you shall
convince me of sin?” His Confiteor then can not be
a prayer for the forgiveness of Ris sins; but it can

be a prayer for the forgiveness of our sins.

Others would have screamed, cursed, writhed, as

the nails pierced their hands and feet. But no vin-

dictiveness finds place in the Savior’s breast; no ap-

peal comes from His lips for vengeance on His mur-
derers; He breathes no prayer for strength to bear
His pain. Incarnate Love forgets injury, forgets
pain, and in that moment of concentrated agony re-
veals something of the height, the depth, and the
breadth of the wonderful love of God, as He says
His Confiteor: “Father, forgive them, for they

know not what they do.”
He did not say “Forgive Me”, but “Forgive

them”. The moment of death was certainly the one
most likely to produce confession of sin, for consci-
ence in the last solemn hours does assert its author-
ity; and yet not a single sigh of penitence escaped
His lips. He was associated with sinners, but never



78 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

associated with sin. In death as well as life, He was
unconscious of a single unfulfilled duty to His

Heavenly Father. And why? Because a sinless
man is not just a man; He is more than mere man.
He is sinless, because He is God—and there is the
difference. We draw our prayers from the depths
of our consciousness of sin: He drew His silence
from His own intrinsic sinlessness. That one word
“Forgive’^ proves Him to be the Son of God.

Notice the grounds on which He asked His
Heavenly Father to forgive us

—
“Because they know

not what they do”. When anyone injures us, or
blames us wrongly, we say: “They should have
known better”. But when we sin against God, He
finds a reason for forgiveness—our ignorance.

There is no redemption for the fallen angels.

The blood drops that fell from the cross on Good
Friday in that Mass of Christ, did not touch the
spirits of the fallen angels. Why? Because they
knew what they were doing? They saw all the con-
sequences of their acts, just as clearly as we see that
two and two make four, or that a thing cannot exist
and not exist at the same time. Truths of this kind
when understood cannot be taken back ; they are ir-
revocable and eternal. Hence when they decided
to rebel against Almighty God, there was no taking
back the decision. They knew what they were
doing

!

But with us it is different. We do not see the
consequences of our acts as clearly as the angels ; we
are of weaker stuff

;
we are ignorant. But if we did

know that every sin of pride wove a crown of
thorns for the Head of Christ; if we knew that
every contradiction of His Divine command made



THE FIRST WORD 79

for Him the sign of contradiction, the Cross; if we
knew that every grasping avaricious act nailed His
hands, and every jVurney into the byways of sin dug

His feet ; if we knew how good God is and still went
on sinnii/g, we would never be saved. Why we
would be damned. It is only our ignorance of the

infinite love of the Sacred Heart that brings us with-

in the hearing of His Confiteor from the Cross:
'‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do”.

These words, let it be deeply graven on our souls,

do not constitute an excuse for continued sin, but a

motive for contrition and penance. Forgiveness is

not a denial of sin. Our LfOrd does not deny the hor-
rible fact of sin, and that is where the modern world
is wrong. It explains sin away: it ascribes it to
a fall in the evolutionary process, to a survival of

ancient taboos ; it identifies it with psychological ver-

biage. In a word, the modern world denies sin. Our
Lord reminds us that it is the most terrible of all
realities. Otherwise why does it give Sinlessness a
cross? Why does it shed innocent blood? Why does
it have such awful associations: blindness, compro-

mise, cowardice, hatred, and cruelty? Why does it
now lift itself out of the realm of the impersonal and
assert itself as personal by nailing Innocence to a
gibbet? An abstraction cannot do that. But sinful
man can. Hence He, who loved men unto death,
allowed sin to wreak its vengeance upon Him, in
order that they might forever understand its horror
as the crucifixion of Him who loved them most.

There is no denial of sin here—and yet, with all
its horror, the Victim forgives. In that one and the
same event, there is the sign of sin’s utter deprav-



80 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

ity and the seal of Divine Forgiveness. From that
point on, no man can look upon a Crucifix and say
that sin is not serious, nor can he ever say that it

cannot be forgiven. By the way He suffered, He re-
vealed the reality of sin

; by the way He bore it. He
shows His mercy toward the sinner. It is the Victim
who has suffered that forgives : and in that combina-
tion of a Victim so humanly beautiful, so divinely
loving, so wholly innocent, does one find a Great

Crime and a Greater Forgiveness. Under the shel-
ter of the Blood of Christ the worst sinners may take
their stand; for there is a power in that Blood to
turn back the tides of vengeance which threaten to

drown the world. The world will give you sin ex-
plained away, but only on Calvary do you experience'

the divine contradiction of sin forgiven. On the
Cross Supreme Self-giving and Divine Love trans-
form sin's worst act in the noblest deed and sweet-
est prayer the world has even seen or heard, the Con-

fiteor of Christ: ^‘Father, forgive them, for they

know not what they do".

That word ‘‘Forgive", which rang out from the
Cross that day when Sin rose to its full strength and
then fell defeated by Love, did not die with its echo.
A little more than a year before that same Merciful
Savior had taken means to prolong forgiveness
through space and time, even to the consummation
of the world. Gathering the nucleus of His Church
round about Him, He said to His Apostles: “Whose
sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven". Some-
where in the world today then, the successors of the
Apostles have the power to forgive. It is not to the
point to ask: But how can man forgive sins?—for
man cannot forgive sins. But God can forgive sins



THE FIRST WORD 81

through man, for is not that the way God forgave
His executioners on the cross; namely through the

instrumentality of His human nature? Why then
is it not reasonable to expect Him still to forgive
sins through other human natures to whom He gave
that power? And where find those human natures?
You know the story of the box which was long ig-
nored and even ridiculed as worthless

;
and one day it

was opened and found to contain the great heart of a
giant. In every Catholic Church that box exists.

We call it the confessional box. It is ignored and
ridiculed by many, but in it is to be found the Sacred

Heart of the Forgiving Christ forgiving sinners

through the uplifted hand of His priest as He once
forgave through His own uplifted hands on the
Cross. There is only one forgiveness—^the Forgive-
ness of God. There is only one ‘‘Forgive”—the
“Forgive” of an Eternal Divine Act in which we
come in contact at various moments of time. As
the air is always filled with symphony and speech,
but we do not hear it unless we tune it in on our
radios; so neither do souls feel the joy of that Eter-

nal and Divine “Forgive” unless they are attuned to
it in time; and the confessional box is the place
where we switch in to that cry from the Cross.

Would to God that our modern mind instead of
denying the guilt, would look to the Cross, admit
its guilt, and seek forgiveness

;
would that those who

have uneasy consciences that worry them in the
light, and haunt them in darkness, would seek relief,
not on the plane of medicine but on the plane of Di-
vine Justice; would that they who tell the dark sec-
rets of their minds, would do so not for the sake of
'sublimation, but for the sake of purgation; would



82 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

that those poor mortals who shed tears in silence
would find an absolving hand to wipe them away.
Must it be forever true that the greatest tragedy of
life is not what happens to souls, but rather what
souls miss—and what greater tragedy is there than
to miss the peace of sin forgiven? The Confiteor is
at the foot of the altar our cry of unworthiness : the

Confiteor from the Cross is our hope of pardon and
absolution. The wounds of the Savior were terrible,
but the worst wound of all would be to be unmindful
that we caused it all. The Confiteor can save us
from that, for it is an admission that there is some-
thing to be forgiven—and more than we shall ever
know.

There is a story told of a nun who was one day
dusting a small image of Our Blessed Lord in the
chapel. In the course of her duty, she let it slip to

the floor. She picked it up undamaged, she kissed it,
and put it back again in its place, saying, “If you had
never fallen, you never would have received that.”

I wonder if Our Blessed Lord does not feel the same
way about us, for if we had never sinned, we never
could call Him “Savior”.



THE SECOND WORD
Address delivered on March 8, 1936

'‘Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt he with

me in paradise”—Luke xxiii: U3.
This is now the offertory of the Mass, for Our

Lord is offering Himself to His Heavenly Father.

But in order to remind us that He is not offered
alone, but in union with us. He unites with His
offertory the soul of the thief at the right. To make
His ignominy more complete, in a master stroke of
malice, they crucified Him between two thieves. He
walked among sinners during His life, so now they
let Him hang among them at death. But He
changed the picture, and made the two thieves the
symbols of the sheep and the goats, which will
stand at His right and left hand when He comes in
the clouds of heaven, with His then triumphant

Cross, to judge both the living and the dead.

Both thieves at first reviled and blasphemed, but
one of them, whom tradition calls Dismas, turned his
head to read the meekness and dignity on the face
of the Crucified Savior. As a piece of coal thrown
into the fire is transformed into a bright and glow-
ing thing, so the black soul of this thief thrown into
the fires of the Crucifixion glowed with love for the
Sacred Heart. While the thief on the left was say-
ing: “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us'*, the
repentant thief rebuked him saying : “Neither dost
thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same con-
demnation. And we indeed justly, for we receive
the due reward of our deeds ; but this man hath done
no evil". That same thief then emitted a plea, not



84 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

for a place in the seats of the mighty, but only for

a remembrance not to be forgotten.

Such sorrow and faith must not go unrewarded.
At a moment when the power of Rome could not
make Him speak, when His friends thought all was
lost and His enemies believed alj was won. Our Lord
broke the silence. He who was the accused, became
thfe Judge; He who was the crucified, became the
Divine Assessor of souls, as to the penitent thief He
trumpeted the words : “This day thou shalt be with

me in paradise”. This day—^when you said your
first prayer and your last; this day—thou shalt be
with Me—and where I am, there is Paradise.

With these words Our Lord who was offering
Himself to His Heavenly Father on the paten of His

Cross as the great host, now unites with Him on the
paten of the cross the first small host ever offered in

the Mass—^the host of a repentant thief, a brand
plucked from the burning, a sheaf torn from the
earthly reapers, the wheat ground in the mill of the
crucifixion and made bread for the Eucharist.

Our Lord then does not suffer alone on the
Cross : He suffers with us. That is why He united
the sacrifice of the thief with His own. It is just

this St. Paul means when he says that we should
fill up those things that are wanting to the suffer-
ings of Christ. This does not mean Our Lord on the
cross did not suffer all He could. It means rather
that the physical historical Christ suffered all He
could in His own human nature, but that the Mys-
tical Christ, which is Christ and us, has not suffered
to OUT fullness. All the other good thieves in the
history of the world have not yet admitted their
wrong and pleaded for remembrance. Our Lord is



THE SECOND WORD 85

now in heaven. He therefore can suffer no more in
His human nature but He can suffer more in our
human natures. And so He reaches out to other
human natures, to yours and mine, and asks us to
do as the thief did, namely to incorporate ourselves

to Him on the Cross, that sharing in His Crucifixion
we might also share in His Resurrection, and that
made partakers of His cross we might also be made
partakers of His glory in heaven.

As our Blessed Lord on that day chose the thief
as the small Host of Sacrifice, he chooses us today as

the other small hosts united with Him on the Paten
of the altar. Go back in your mind's eye to a Mass,
to any Mass which was celebrated in the first cen-
turies of the Church, before civilization became com-
pletely financial and economic. If we went to the
Holy Sacrifice in the early Church, we would have
brought to the altar each morning some bread and
some wine. The priest would have used one piece of
that unleavened bread and some of that wine for the
sacrifice of the Mass. The rest would have been put
aside, blessed, and distributed to the poor. Today
we do not bring bread and wine. We bring its
equivalent; we bring that which buys bread and
wine. Hence the offertory collection.

Now, why do we bring bread and wine or its
equivalent to the Mass? We bring bread and wine
because these two things, of all things in nature,
most represent the substance of life. Wheat is as
the very marrow of the ground, and the grapes its
very blood, both of which give us the marrow and
blood of life. In bringing those two things, which
give us life, nourish us, we are equivalently bringing
ourselves to the Sacrifice of the Mass. We are there-



86 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

fore present at each and every Mass under the
appearance of bread and wine, which stand as sym-

bols of our body and blood. We are not passive
spectators as we might be watching a spectacle in a
theatre, but we are co-offering our Mass with Christ.
If any picture adequately describes our role in this

drama it is this : There is a great cross before us on
which is stretched the great Host, Christ. Round
about the hill of Calvary are our small crosses on

which we, the small hosts, are to be offered. When
Our Lord goes to His Cross we go to our little cross-
es, and offer ourselves in union with Him, as a clean
oblation to the Heavenly Father.

At that moment we literally fulfill to the
smallest detail the Savior’s command: Take up
your cross daily and follow Me. And in doing so. He
is not asking us to do anything He has not already
done Himself. Nor is it any excuse to say: “I am
a poor unworthy host”. So was the thief.

Note that there were two attitudes in the soul of
that thief, both of which made him acceptable to Our
Lord. The first was the recognition of the fact that
He deserved what He was suffering, but that the
sinless Christ did not deserve His Cross; in other

words, he was penitent. The second was faith, faith
in Him whom men rejected, but whom the thief
recognized as the very King of Kings.

Upon what conditions do we become small hosts
in the Mass? How does our sacrifice become one
with Christ’s and as acceptable as the thief’s ? Only

by reproducing in our souls the two attitudes in the

soul of the Thief
:

penitence and faith.

First of all we must be penitent with the thief *

and say: ‘T deserve punishment for my sins. I



THE SECOND WORD 87

stand in need of sacrifice.” Some of us do not know
how wicked or how ungrateful to God we are. If
we did, we would not complain so about the shocks
and pains of life. Our consciences are like darkened

rooms from which light has been long excluded. We
draw the curtain, and lo! everywhere before we
thought was cleanliness, we find dust. Only a con-
science that has been filmed over with excuses prays

the prayer of the Pharisee : “I thank Thee, 0 God,
that I am not as the rest of men”. They blaspheme
the God of heaven for their pain and sins and they
repent not. The World War was meant to be a
purgation of evil

;
it was meant to teach us that we

can not get along without God, but the world re-

fused to learn the lesson. Like the thief on the left,

it refuses to be penitent : it refuses to see any rela-
tion of justice between sin and sacrifice, between
rebellion and a cross. But the more penitent we are,
the less anxious we are to escape our cross. The
more we see ourselves as we are, the more we say
with the good thief: ‘T deserved this cross”. He
did not want to be excused

;
he did not want to have

his sin explained away; he did not want to be let
off; He did not ask to be taken down. He wanted
only to be forgiven. He was willing even to be a
small host on his own little cross—but that was
because he was penitent. Nor is there given to us
any other way to become little hosts with Christ in
the Mass, than breaking our hearts with sorrow;
for unless we admit we are wounded how can we
feel the need of healing? Unless we are sorry for
our part in the Crucifixion, how could we ever ask
to be forgiven its sin?

The second condition of becoming a host in the



88 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

offertory of the Mass is faith. The thief looked upon
our Blessed Lord and he saw a sign above His head
which read: ''KING”. Queer king that! For a
crown : thorns. For royal purple : His own blood.
For a throne: a cross. For courtiers: execution-
ers. For a coronation: a crucifixion. And yet be-
neath all that dross the thief saw the gold; amidst
all those blasphemies he prayed.

And his faith was so strong he was content to
remain on his cross. The thief on the left asked to
be taken down, but not the thief on the right. Why?
Because he knew there were greater evils than cru-
cifixions, and another life beyond the cross. He had
faith in the Man on the central cross who could have
turned thorns into garlands and nails into rosebuds
if He willed

;
he had faith in a Kingdom beyond the

Cross, knowing that the sufferings of this world are
not worthy to be compared with the joys that are to
come. With the Psalmist his soul cried : "Though I
should walk in the midst of the shadow of death I
will fear no evils, for thou art with me”.

Such faith was like that of the three youths in
the fiery furnace who were commanded by the king,
Nebuchadnezzar, to adore the golden statue. Their

answer was : "For behold our God, whom we wor-
ship, is able to save us from the furnace of burning
fire, and to deliver us out of thy hands, 0 king. But
if He will not, be it known to thee, 0 king, that we
will not worship thy gods, nor adore the golden

statue which thou hast set up”—note that they did
not ask God to deliver them from the fiery furnace,
though they knew God could do it—^for He "is able
to save us from the furnace of burning fire”. They
left themselves wholly in God's hands, and like Job



THE SECOND WORD 89

trusted Him though they were slain. So likewise with
the good thief: He knew Our Lord could deliver
Him. But He did not ask to he taken down from the
cross, for Our Lord did not come down Himself even
though the mob challenged Him. The thief would be
a small host, if need be, unto the very end of the
Mass. This did not mean the thief did not love life

:

He loved life as much as we love it. He wanted life,
and a long life, and he found it, for what life is
longer than Life Eternal? To each and every one of
us in like manner it is given to discover that Eternal
Life. But there is no other way to enter it than by
penance and by faith which unite us to that Great
Host—^the Priest and Victim Christ. . . Thus do we
become Spiritual Thieves, and steal heaven once
again.



THE THIRD WORD
Address delivered on March 15, 1936

*'Woman, behold thy son. . . Behold thy moth-

er.”—John XIX : 26-27.
Five days ago our Blessed Lord made a tri-

umphal entry into the City of Jerusalem: Trium-

phant cries rang about His ears and palms dropped

beneath His feet, as the air resounded with Hosan-

nas to the Son of David and praises to the Holy One
of Israel. And to those who would have silenced the
demonstration in His honor, Our Lord reminds them
that if their voices were silent, even the very stones

would have cried out. That was the birthday of
Gothic Cathedrals.

They did not know the real reason they were
calling Him Holy

;
they did not even understand why

He accepted the tribute of their praise. They
thought that they were proclaiming Him a kind of
earthly king. But He accepted their demonstration
because He was going to be the King of a Spiritual
Empire. He accepted their tributes, their hosannas,
their paeans of praise, because He was going to His
cross as a Victim. And every Victim must be holy

—

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Five days later came
the Sanctus of the Mass of Calvary. They could say
Sanctus to Him, for He was Holy with the Holiness
of God. But at the Sanctus of His Mass, He does
not say ‘Holy’—He spoke to the Holy ones; He does
not whisper ‘Sanctus’—He addresses Himself to
saints, to His Sweet Mother Mary, and His beloved
disciple, John.

Striking words they are: “Woman, behold thy



THE THIRD WORD 91

son. . . (Son) behold thy mother.’’ He was speak-
ing now to Saints. He had no need of saintly inter -

cession, for he was the Holy One of God. But we
have need of holiness, for every victim of the Mass

must be holy, undefiled, and unpolluted. But how
can we be holy participants in the Sacrifice of the
Mass ? He gave the answer ; namely, by putting our-
selves under the protection of His Blessed Mother.

He addresses the Church and all its members in the
person of John, and says to each of us : ^‘Behold thy

mother”. That is why He addressed Her not as
‘Mother’ but as ‘Woman’. She had a universal mis-
sion, to be not only His Mother, but to be the Mother
of all Christians. She had been His mother; now
she was to be the Mother of His Mystical Body, the
Church. And we are to be her children.

There is a tremendous mystery hidden in that
one word ‘Woman’. It was really the last lesson in
detachment which Jesus had been teaching her these
many years, and the first lesson of the new attach-
ment. Our Lord had been gradually alienating,
as it were. His affections from His Mother; not in
the, sense that she was to love Him less, or that He
was to love her less, but only in the sense that she
was to love us more. She was to be detached from
motherhood in the flesh, only to be more attached to
that greater motherhood in the spirit—Whence the
word ‘Woman’. She was to make us other Christs,
for as Mary had raised the Holy One of God, so only
she could raise us as holy ones for God, worthy to
say Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus in the Mass of that
prolonged Calvary.

The story of the preparation for her role as
Mother of the Mystical Body of Christ is unfolded in



92 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

three scenes in the Life of Her Divine Son, each one
suggesting the lesson which Calvary itself was to
reveal; namely, that she was called to be not only
the Mother of God, but also the Mother of men ; not
only the Mother of Holiness, but the Mother of those

who ask to be holy.

The first scene took place in the Temple where
Mary and Joseph found Jesus after a three day
search. The Blessed Mother reminds Him that their
hearts were broken with sorrow during the long

search, and He answers: “Did you not know that I
must be about my Father's business?” Here He
was equivalently saying: T have another business.
Mother, than the business of the Carpenter Shop.

My Father has sent me into this world on the su-
preme business of Redemption, to make all men
adopted sons of My Heavenly Father in the greater
Kingdom of the Brotherhood of Christ, Thy Son.'
How far the full vision of these words dawned upon
Mary, we know not; whether she then understood
that the Fatherhood of God meant that she was to
be the Mother of men, we know not. But certainly,
eighteen years later, in the second scene, the car-
riage feast of Cana, she came to a fuller under-
standing of that mission.

Let me throw in parenthetically: What a con-
soling thought it is, to think that our Blessed Lord,
who talked penance,who preached mortification, who
insisted upon taking up the cross daily and following
Him, should have begun public life by assisting at a
wedding festival! What a beautiful understanding
of our hearts I

But to return to the point—when in the course of
the banquet the wine was exhausted, Mary, always



THE THIRD WORD 93

interested in others, was the first to notice and the

first to seek relief from the embarrassment. She

simply said to our Blessed Lord: “They have no

wine.’’ And our Blessed Lord said to her : “Woman,
what is that to me and to thee? my hour is not yet
come.'' “Woman, what is that to me?" He did not
call her ‘Mother', but ‘Woman'—the same title she
was to receive three years later. He was equivalent-
ly saying to her: ‘You are asking Me to do some-
thing which belongs to Me as the Son of God. You
are asking me to work a miracle which only God can
work; you are asking Me to exercise My Divinity
which has relationship to all mankind, namely as
its Redeemer. But once that Divinity operates for
the salvation of the world, you become not only My
Mother, but the Mother of redeemed humanity.
Your physical motherhood passes into the wider
world of spiritual motherhood, and for that reason
I call you Woman'. And in order to prove that
her intercession is powerful in that role of universal

motherhood. He ordered the pots filled with water,
and in the language of Crashaw the first miracle
was worked : “the conscious waters saw their
God and blushed".

The third scene happens two years later.
One day as Our Lord was preaching someone inter-
rupted His discourse to say, . . . “thy mother. . .

stands without, seeking thee." Our Blessed Lord
said, “Who is my mother?" and stretching forth His
hands toward His Disciples He said: “Behold my
mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do
the will of my Father, that is in heaven, he is my
brother, and my sister, and mother." The meaning
was unmistakable: There is such a thing as spiri-



94 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

tual maternity; there are other bonds than those of

the flesh
;
there are other ties than the ties of blood,

namely spiritual ties which bind together those of
the Kingdom where reign the Fatherhood of God
and the Brotherhood of Christ.

These three scenes have their climax at the Cross

where Mary is called ‘‘Woman”.' It was the second
Annunciation. The angel said to her in the first:
“Hail, Mary”. Her Son speaks to her in the second

:

“Woman”. This did not mean she ceased to be His
Mother

;
she is always the Mother of God ; but her

Motherhood enlarged and expanded
;
it became spiri-

tual, it became universal, for at that moment she
became Our Mother. Our Lord created the bond
where it did not exist by nature, as only He could do.

And how did she become the mother of men? By
becoming not only the mother, but also the spouse of

Christ. He was the new Adam, she is the new Eve.
And as Adam and Eve brought forth their natural
progeny, which we are; so Christ and His Mother
brought forth at the cross their spiritual progeny,

which we are: children of Mary, or members of
the Mystical Body of Christ. She brought forth her
First-born at Bethlehem. Note that St. Luke calls
our Lord the First-horn—not that our Blessed
Mother was to have other children according to the
flesh, but only because she was to have other chil-
dren according to the spirit. That second when our
Blessed Lord said to her, “Woman”, she became in
a certain sense the spouse of Christ and she brought
forth in sorrow her first-born in the spirit, in the

pains of childbirth, and his name was John. Who
the second-born was we know not. It might have
been Peter. It might have been Andrew. But we at



THE THIRD WORD 95

any rate are the millionth-and-millionth-born of that

woman at the foot of the cross. It was a poor ex-
change indeed, receiving the son of Zebedee in place

of the Son of God. But surely our gain was greater,
for while she acquired but undutiful and often rebel-

lious children, we obtained the most loving Mother
in the world—the Mother of Jesus.

We are children of Mary—literally, children. She
is our Mother, not by title of fiction, not by title of

courtesy; she is our mother because she endured at

that particular moment the pains of childbirth for
all of us. And why did Our Lord give her to us as
Mother? Because He knew we could never he holy
without her. He came to us through her purity, and
only through her purity can we go back to Him.
There is no Sanctus apart from Mary. Every victim
that mounts that altar under the species of bread
and wine, must have said the Confiteor, and become
a holy victim—but there is no holiness without
Mary.

Note that when that word was spoken to our
Blessed Mother, there was another woman there
who was prostrated. Have you ever remarked that
practically every traditional representation of the

Crucifixion always pictures Magdalene on her knees
at the foot of the crucifix? But you have never yet
seen an image of the Blessed Mother prostrate? No.
Why? Because John was there and he tells in his
Gospel that she stood. He saw her stand. But why
did she stand? She stood to be of service to us.
She stood to be our minister, our mother.

If Mary could have prostrated herself at that
moment as Magdalene did, if she could only have
wept, her sorrow would have had an outlet. The



96 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

sorrow that cries is never the sorrow that breaks the

heart. It is the heart that can find no outlet in the

fountain of tears which cracks
;
it is the heart that

cannot have an emotional break-down that breaks.
And all that sorrow was part of our purchase price
paid by our Co-Redemptrix, Mary the Mother of
God!

Because Our Lord willed her to us as our Mother,
He left her on this earth after he ascended into
Heaven, in order that she might mother the infant
Church. The infant Church had need of a mother,
just as the infant Christ. She had to remain on
earth until her family had grown. That is why we
find her on Pentecost abiding in prayer with the

Apostles, awaiting the descent of the Holy Ghost.
She was mothering the Mystical Body of Christ.

Now she is crowned in heaven as Queen of An-
gels and Saints, turning heaven into another Mar-
riage Feast of Cana when she intercedes with her
Divine Savior in behalf of us, her other children,

brothers of Christ and sons of the Heavenly Father.

Virgin Mother! What a beautiful conjunction of
Virginity and Motherhood, one supplying the defect

of the other. Virginity alone lacks something:

there is an incompleteness about it; something un-

fulfilled; a faculty unused. Motherhood alone loses

something: there is a surrender, an unflowering, a

plucking of a blossom. Oh! for a rapprochement in

which there would be a Virginity that never lacked

anything, and a Motherhood that never lost any-

thing! We have both in Mary, the Virgin Mother:
Virgin by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit in

Bethlehem and Pentecost ; Mother by the millions of

her progeny from Jesus unto you and me.



THE THIKD WORD 97

There is no question here of confusing Our Lady
and Our Lord ; we venerate Our Mother, we worship
Oifr Lord. We ask of Jesus those things which only
God can give: Mercy, Grace, Forgiveness. We ask
that Mary should intercede for us with Him, and
especially at the hour of our death. Because of her

nearness to Jesus which her vocation involves, we
know Our Lord listens especially to her appeal. To
no other saint can we speak as a child to its mother

:

no other Virgin, or Martyr, or Mother, or Confes-

sor, has ever suffered as much for us as she; no one
has ever established better claim to our love and
patronage than she. As the Mediatrix of all graces,
all favors come to us from Jesus through her, as
Jesus himself came to us through her. We wish to
be holy, but we know there is no holiness without
her, for she was the gift of Jesus to us at the Sanctus
of His Cross. No woman can ever forget the child
of her womb

;
then certainly Mary can never forget

us. That is why we feel way down deep in our
hearts, that every time she sees another innocent

child at the First Communion rail, or another peni-
tent sinner making his way to the Cross, or another
broken heart pleading that the water of a wasted
life be changed into the wine of God’s love, that she
hears once again that Word: ^‘Woman, behold thy



THE FOURTH WORD
Address delivered on March 22, 1936

*'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,'*
—Matt, xxvii: Jf6,

The Fourth word is the Consecration of the

Mass of Calvary. The first three Words were
spoken to men, but the last four were spoken to

God. We are now in the final stage of the Passion.
In the fourth word, in all the universe, there is but

God and Himself. This is the hour of darkness.
Suddenly out of its blackness, the silence is broken

by a cry—so terrible, so unforgettable, that even
those who did not understand the dialect remember-
ed the strange tones: ‘*Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabactha-
ni**. They recorded it so, a rough rendering of the
Hebrew, because they could never get the sound of
those tones out of their ears all the days of their

life.

The darkness which was covering the earth at
that moment was only the external symbol of the
dark night of the soul within. Well indeed might
the sun hide its face, at the terrible crime of deicide.

The only reason the earth was ever made was to
have a cross erected upon it. And now that the
cross was erected, creation felt the pain and went
into darkness.

But why the cry of darkness? Why the cry of
abandonment: ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?'^ It was the cry of atonement for
sin. What is sin? Sin is the abandonment of God
by man; it is the creature forsaking the Creator,
as a flower might abandon the sunlight which gave



THE FOURTH WORD 99

it strength and beauty. Sin is a separation, a
divorce—^the original divorce from unity with God,
whence all other divorces are derived.

Since He came on earth to redeem man from
sin, it was therefore fitting He feel that abandon-
ment, that separation, that divorce. He felt it first
internally, in His soul, as the base of a mountain, if

conscious, might feel abandoned by the sun when a
cloud drifted about it, even though its great heights

were radiant with light. There was no sin in His
soul, but since He willed to feel the effect of sin, an
awful sense of isolation and loneliness crept over
Him—the loneliness of being without God.

Surrendering the divine consolation which might

have been His, He sank into an awful human alone-
ness, to atone for the solitariness of a soul that has

lost God by sin, for the loneliness of the atheist who
says there is no God, for the isolation of the man
who gives up his faith for things, and for the brok-
en-heartedness of all sinners that are homesick

without God. He even went so far as to redeem all
those who will not trust, who in sorrow and misery
curse and abandon God, crying out: ‘‘Why this
death? Why should I lose my mother? Why should
I suffer? Why should I lose my property?'^ And
He atoned for all these things by asking a ‘Why’
of God.

But in order better to reveal the intensity of
that feeling of abandonment. He revealed it by an
external sign. Because man had separated himself
from God, He, in atonement, permitted His Blood
to be separated from His Body. Sin had entered
into the blood of man; and as if the sins of the
world were upon Him, He drains the chalice of His



100 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

Body of His Sacred Blood. We can almost hear Him
say: “Father, This is My Body; This is My Blood.
They are being separated from one another as hu-
manity has been separated from Thee. This is the
consecration of My Mass.''

What happened there on the Cross that day is
happening now in the Mass, with this difference:
On the Cross the Savior was alone; in the Mass He
is with us. Our Lord is now in heaven at the right
hand of the Father, making intercession for us. He
therefore can never suffer again in His human na-
ture. How then can the Mass be the re-enactment
of Calvary? How can Christ renew the Cross? He
cannot suffer again in His own human nature
which is in heaven enjoying beatitude, but He can
suffer again in our human natures. He cannot re-
new Calvary in His physical body, but He can renew
it in His Mystical Body, the Church. The Sacrifice
of the Cross can be re-enacted provided we give
Him our body and our blood, and give it to Him so
completely that as His own. He can offer Himself
anew to His Heavenly Father for the redemption of
His Mystical Body, the Church.

And so the Christ goes out into the world
gathering up other human natures who are willing
to be Christs. In order that our sacrifices, our sor-

rows, our Golgothas, our Crucifixions, may not be
isolated, disjointed, and unconnected, the Church

collects them, harvests them, unifies them, coalesces

them, masses them, and this massing of all our sacri-

fices of our individual human natures united with
the Great Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is the

Mass.

When we assist at the Mass we are not just in-



THE FOURTH WORD lOJ

dividuals of the earth or solitary units, but living

parts of a great spiritual order in which the Infinite

penetrates and enfolds the finite, the Eternal breaks

into the temporal, and the Spiritual clothes itself in

the garments of materiality. Nothing more solemn
exists on the face of God's earth than the awe-in-

spiring moment of Consecration
;
for the Mass is not

a prayer, nor a hymn, nor something said—it is a
Divine Act with which we come in contact at a given
moment of time. An imperfect illustration may be
drawn from the radio. The air is filled with sym-
phonies and speech. We do not put the words or
music there; but, if we choose, we may establish
contact with them by tuning in our radio. And so
with the Mass. It is a singular, unique. Divine Act

with which we come in contact each time it is re-pre-
sented and re-enacted in the Mass.

When the dye of a medal or coin is struck, the
medal is the material, visible representation of a

spiritual idea existing in the mind of the artist.
Countless reproductions may be made from that
original as each new piece of metal is brought in
contact with it, and impressed by it. Despite the
multiplicity of coins made, the pattern is always the

same. In like manner in the Mass, the Pattern

—

Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary—is renewed on our
altars as each human being is brought in contact
with it at the moment of consecration; but the
Sacrifice is one and the same despite the mul-
tiplicity of Masses. The Mass then is the communi-
cation of the Sacrifice of Calvary to us under the

species of bread and wine.

We are on the altar under the appearance of
bread and wine, for both are the sustenance of life

;



102 THE PEODIGAL WORLD

therefore in giving that which gives us life we are
symbolically giving ourselves. Furthermore, wheat
must be ground to become bread; grapes must pass
through the wine-press to become wine. Hence
both are representative of Christians who are called
to suffer with Christ, that they may also reign with
Him.

As the consecration of the Mass draws near Our
Lord is equivalently saying to us : “You, Mary

; you,

John; you, Peter; and you, Andrew—you, all of you
—give Me your body

;
give Me your blood. Give Me

your whole self! I can suffer no more. I have

passed through My cross, I have filled up the suffer-
ings of my physical body, but I have not filled up the
sufferings wanting to My Mystical Body, in which
you are. The Mass is the moment when each one of
you may literally fulfill My injunction: Take up
your cross and follow Me.' "

On the cross our Blessed Lord was looking for-
ward to you, hoping that one day you would be
giving yourself to Him at the moment of consecra-
tion. Today, in the Mass, that hope our Blessed

Lord entertained for you is fulfilled. When you
assist at the Mass He expects you now actually to
give Him yourself.

Then as the moment of consecration arrives, the
priest in obedience to the words of Our Lord, “Do
this for a commemoration of me”, takes Bread in

his hands and says “This is my body”; and then
over the chalice of wine says, “This is the chalice,

the new testament in my blood”. He does not con-
secrate the Bread and wine together, but separately.

The separate consecration of the bread and wine is a

symbolic representation of the separation of body



THE FOURTH WORD .03

and blood, and since the Crucifixion entailed that

very mystery, Calvary is thus renewed on our altar.

But Christ, as has been said, is not alone on our

altar; we are vnth Him. Hence the words of con-
secration have a double sense; the primary signifi-

cation of the words is: 'This is the Body of
Christ; this is the Blood of Christ”; but the secon-

dary signification is : "This is my body ; This is my
blood”.

Such is the purpose of life! To redeem our-
selves in union with Christ; to apply His merits to

our souls by being like Him in all things, even to
His Death on the Cross. He passed through His
consecration on the Cross, that we might now pass
through ours in the Mass. There is nothing more
tragic in all the world than wasted pain. Think of

how much suffering there is in hospitals, among the
poor, and the bereaved. Think also of how much
of that suffering goes to waste I How many of those
lonesome, suffering, abandoned, crucified souls are

saying with our Lord at the moment of consecra-
tion : "This is my body, take it” ? And yet that is
what we all should be saying at that second : "Here
is my body, take it. Here is my blood, take it. Here
is my soul, my will, my energy, my strength, my
property, my wealth—all that I have. It is Yours.
Take it! Consecrate it! Offer it! Offer it with
Thyself to the Heavenly Father in order that He,

looking down on this great Sacrifice, may see only
Thee, His Beloved Son in whom He is well pleased.
Transmute the poor bread of my life into Thy Di-
vine Life ; thrill the wine of my wasted life into Thy
Divine Spirit; unite my broken heart with Thy
Heart; change my cross into a Crucifix. Let not



104 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

my abandonment and my sorrow and my bereave-
ment go to waste. Gather up the fragments, and as
the drop of water is absorbed by the wine at the
offertory of the Mass, let my life be absorbed in
Thine; let my little cross be entwined with Thy
Great Cross so that I may purchase the Joys of
everlasting Happiness in union with Thee.

‘"Consecrate these trials of my life which would
go unrewarded unless united with Thee; transub-
stantiate me so that like bread which is now Thy
Body, and wine which is now Thy Blood, I too may
be wholly Thine. I care not if the species remain,

or that like the bread and wine I seem to all earthly

eyes the same as before. My station in life, my
routine duties, my work, my family—all these are
but the species of my life which may remain un-
changed

;
but the substance of my life, my soul, my

mind, my will, my heart, transubstantiate them,
transform them wholly into Thy service, so that
through me all may know how sweet is the Love of
Christ’\



THE FIFTH WORD
Address delivered on March 29, 1936

'7 thirst”—John xix: 28.
Our Blessed Lord reaches the communion of His

Mass when out from the depths of the Sacred Heart
there wells the cry: “I thirst”. This was cer-
tainly not a thirst for water, for the earth is His and
the fullness thereof

;
it was not a thirst for any of the

refreshing draughts of earth for He shut up the
seas with doors when they burst forth as issuing
out of a womb. And when they offered Him a drink,
He took it not. It was another kind of thirst which
tortured Him. He was thirsty for the souls and
hearts of men. The cry was a cry for communion

—

the last in a long series of shepherding calls in the

Quest of God for men. The very fact that it was
expressed in the most poignant of all human suffer-
ings, namely, thirst, was the measure of its depth
and intensity.

Men may hunger for God, but God thirsts for
men. He thirsted for man in Creation as He called
Him to fellowship with Divinity in the Garden of
Paradise; He thirsted for man in Revelation, as He
tried to win back his erring heart by telling the
secrets of His love; He thirsted for man in the In-
carnation, when He became like the one He loved, in
all things save sin. Now He was thirsting for man
in Redemption, for greater love than this no man
hath, that he lay down his life for his friends. It
was the final appeal for communion before the cur-
tain rang down on the Great Drama of His earthly



106 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

life. All the myriad loves of parents for children,
of spouse for spouse, if compacted into one great
love, would have been the smallest fraction of God's
love for man in that cry of thirst. It signified at
once, not only how much He thirsted for the little
ones, for hungry hearts and empty souls, but also
His desire to satisfy our deepest longing. Really,
there should be nothing mysterious in our hunger
for God, for does not the hart pant after the foun-

tain, and the sunflower turn to the sun, and the
rivers run into the sea? But that He should love
us, considering our own unworthiness, and how
little our love is worth—that is the mystery! And
yet such is the meaning of God's thirst for commun-
ion with us. He had already expressed it in the
Parable of the Lost Sheep, when He said He was
not satisfied with the ninety-nine; only the lost

sheep could give Him perfect joy. Now the truth
was expressed again from the cross : Nothing could
adequately satisfy His thirst but the heart of every

man, woman, and child, who were made for Him,
and therefore could never be happy until they found
their rest in Him.

The basis of this plea for communion is love,
for love by its very nature tends to unity. Love of

citizens one for another begets the unity of the

state. Love of man and woman begets the unity of
two in one flesh. The love of God for man therefore
calls for a unity based upon the Incarnation, name-

ly, the unity of all men in the Body and Blood of
Christ. In order therefore that God might seal His
love for us. He gave Himself to us in Holy Com-
munion, so that as He and His human nature taken

the womb of the Blessed Mother were one in



THE FIFTH WORD 107

the unity of His Person, so He and we taken from
the womb of humanity might be one in the unity
of the Mystical Body of Christ, Hence, we use the
word “receive”, when speaking of communion with
Our Lord in the Eucharist, for literally we do “re-
ceive” Divine Life, just as really and truly as a
babe receives the life of its mother. All life is sus-

tained by communion with a higher life. If the
plants could speak they would say to the moisture

and sunlight: “Unless you enter into communion
with me, become possessed of my higher laws and
powers, you shall not have life in you.” If the

animals could speak, they would say, to the plants

:

“Unless you enter into communion with me, you
shall not have my higher life in you.” We say to all
lower creation: “Unless you enter into communion
with me, you shall not share in my human life”.
Why then should not Our Lord say to us : “Unless
you enter into communion with Me, you shall not
have life in you”? The lower is transformed into
the higher, plants into animals, animals into man,
and man, in a more exalted way, becomes “divi-
nized” through and through by the life of Christ.

Communion then is first of all the receiving of
Divine Life, a life to which we are no more entitled
than marble is entitled to bloom. It is a pure gift

of an All-Merciful God who so loved us that He
willed to be united with us not in the bonds of fiesh,

but in the ineffable bonds of the Spirit where love
knows no satiety, but only rapture and joy. And
Oh! how quickly we should have forgotten Him
could we not, like Bethlehem and Nazareth, receive
Him into our souls! Neither gifts nor portraits
take the place of the beloved one. And Our Lord



108 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

knew it well. We needed Him, and so He gave us
Himself.

But there is another aspect of Communion of
which we but rarely think; namely, communion im-
plies not only receiving Divine Life, it means also
giving God human life ! All love is reciprocal. There
is no one-sided love, for love by its nature demands
mutuality. God thirsts for us, but that means that
man must also thirst for God. But do we ever think
of Him receiving communion from us ? Every time
we go to the communion rail we say we “receive”
communion, and that is all I suppose many of us
do—^just “receive communion”. There is another
aspect to communion than receiving Divine Life, of
which St. John speaks. St. Paul gives us the com-
plementary truth in his Epistle to the Corinthians.

Communion is not only an incorporation to the
Life of Christ; it is also an incoporation to His

Death, “As often as you sTiall eat this bread, and
drink the chalice, you shall shew the death of the
Lord, until He come”.

Natural life has two sides; the anabolic and the

katabolic. The supernatural also has two sides:
the building up of the Christ-pattern and the tear-

ing down of the old-Adam. Communion therefore
implies not only a “receiving” but also a “giving”.

There can be no ascent to a higher life without death

to a lower one. Does not an Easter Sunday pre-
suppose a Good Friday? Does not all love imply
mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery?

This being so, should not the Communion Rail be a
place of exchange, instead of a place of exclusive

receiving? Is all the Lt/e to pass from Christ to us

and nothing to go back in return ? Are we to drain



THE FIFTH WORD 109

the chalice and contribute nothing to its filling? Are

we to receive the bread without giving wheat to be
ground, to receive the wine and give no grapes to be

crushed? If all we did during our lives was to go
to Communion to receive Divine Life, to take it
away and leave nothing behind, we would be para-
sites on the Mystical Body of Christ.

The Pauline injunction bids us fill up in our body
the sufferings wanting to the Passion of Christ. We
must therefore bring a spirit of sacrifice to the
Eucharistic table; we must bring the mortification
of our lower self, the crosses patiently borne, the

crucifixion of our egotisms, the death of our con-

cupiscence, and even the very difficulty of our
coming to Communion. Then does Communion be-
come what it was always intended to become, name-
ly a Commerce between Christ and the soul, in which
we give His Death shown forth in our lives, and He
gives His Life shown forth in our adopted sonship.
We give Him our time; He gives us His eternity.
We give Him our humanity; He gives us His di-
vinity. We give Him our nothingness; He gives us
His all.

Do we really understand the nature of love?
Have we not sometimes in great moments of affec-
tion for a little child, said in language which might
vary from this, but which expresses the idea, ‘T
love that child so much, I should just like to possess

it within myself.'' Why? Because all love craves
for unity. In the natural order, God has given great
pleasures to the unity of the flesh. But those are
nothing compared to the pleasure of the unity of the
spirit, when divinity passes out to humanity, and
humanity to divinity—when our will goes to Him,



ilo THE PRODIGAL WORLD

and He comes to us, so that we cease to be men and
begin to be children of God.

Why, if there has ever been a moment in your
life when a fine, noble affection made you feel as if
you had been lifted into the third or the seventh
heaven; if there has ever been a time in your life

when a noble love of a fine human heart cast you
into an ecstasy; if there has ever been a time when
you have really loved a human heart—^then, 1 ask
you, think of what it must be to be united with the
great Heart of Love ! If the human heart in all of
its fine, noble, Christian riches can so thrill, can so

exalt, can make us so ecstatic, then what must be
the great heart of Christ? Oh, if the spark is so

bright, what must be the flame

!

I wonder if we ever think how much Communion
is bound up with Sacrifice, both on the part of Our
Lord and on the part of us. His poor weak creatures.
The Mass makes the two inseparable: there is no
Communion without a Consecration. There is no
receiving the bread and wine we offer, until they
have been transubstantiated into the Body and
Blood of Christ. Communion is the consequence of
the Calvary ; namely, we live by what we slay. All
nature witnesses this truth; our bodies live by the

slaying of the beasts of the fields and the plants of

the gardens. We draw life from their crucifixion.
We slay them not to destroy, but to fulfill; we
immolate them for the sake of communion. And
now by a beautiful paradox of Divine Love, God
makes His Cross the very means of our salvation.

We have slain Him; we nailed Him there; we cru-
cified Him. But Love in its eternal Heart willed

not to be defeated. He willed to give us the very



THE FIFTH WORD 111

Life we slew; to give us the very Food we destroy-^
ed; to nourish us with the very Bread we buried,
and the very Blood we poured forth. He made our
very crime a felix culpa. He turned a Crucifixion
into a Redemption; a Consecration into a Commun-
ion; a death into Life everlasting. And it is just
that which makes man all the more mysterious ! Why
should he be loved is one mystery. But why should
he not love in return? Why should Our Lord be
the Great Unloved; why should Love not be loved?
Why then, whenever He says : thirst”, do we
reach Him vinegar and gall?



THE SIXTH WORD
Address delivered on April 5, 1936

'‘It is finished”—John xix: 30.
Our Blessed Savior now comes to the Ite Missa

est of His Mass, as He utters the cry of triumph : “It
is finished'\

The work of salvation is finished. But when did
it begin? It began back in the agelessness of eter-

nity, when God willed to make man. Ever since the
beginning of the world there was a Divine Im-
patience to restore man to the arms of God. The
Word was impatient in heaven, as the “Lamb slain
from the beginning of the world’'. He was im-
patient in prophetic types and symbols, as His

dying face was refiected in a hundred mirrors
stretching through all Old Testament history. He
was impatient to be the real Isaac carrying the
wood of His sacrifice in obedience to the commands
of His Heavenly Abraham. He was impatient to
fulfill the mystic symbol of the Lamb of the Jewish
Pasch, which was slain without a single bone of its
body being broken

;
He was impatient to be the new

Abel, slain by his jealous brethren of the race of

Cain, that His Blood might cry to Heaven for for-
giveness. He was impatient in His mother’s womb,
as He saluted His precursor John; He was impa-
tient in the Circumcision, as He anticipated His
blood-shedding and received the name of “Savior”;
He was impatient at the age of twelve, as He re-
minded His Mother that He had to be about His
Father’s business; He was impatient in His public
life, as He said He had a baptism wherewith He was



THE SIXTH WORD 113

to be baptized and He was ''straitened until it be
accomplished''. He was impatient in the Garden, as
He turned His back to the consoling twelve legions
of angels to crimson olive roots with His Redemp-
tive Blood

;
He was impatient at His Last Supper as

He anticipated, under the appearance of bread and
wine, the separation of His Body and Blood. And
then, impatience closed as the hour of dark-

ness drew near at the end of that Last Supper—He
sang. It was the only time He ever sang, the mo-
ment He went to His death.

It was a trivial matter for the world if the
stars burned brightly, or the mountains stood as

symbols of perplexity, or the hills made their tribute
to valleys which gave them birth. What was im-
portant was that every single word predicted of Him
should be true. Heaven and earth would not pass
away until every jot and tittle had been fulfilled.
There was only a little iota remaining, one tiny little
jot; it was a word of David's about every predic-
tion being fulfilled. Now that all else was fulfilled.
He fulfilled that iota; He the true David quoted the
prophetic David: "It is finished."

What is finished? The Redemption of man is
finished. Love had completed its mission, for Love
had done all that it could. There are two things
Love can do. Love by its very nature tends to an
incarnation, and every incarnation tends to a cru-
cifixion. Does not all true love tend toward an in-
carnation? In the order of human love, does not the
affection of husband and wife create from their mu-
tual loves the incarnation of their confluent love in

the form of a child? Once they have begotten their
child do not they make sacrifices for it, even to the



114 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

point of death? And thus their love tends to a
crucifixion.

But this is just a refiection of the Divine Order,
where the Love of God for man is so deep and in-
tense that it led to an Incarnation, which found
God in the form and habit of man, whom He loved.
But Our Lord’s love for man did not stop with the
Incarnation. Unlike everyone else who was ever
born, Our Lord came into this world not to live but
to die. Death was the supreme goal He was seek-
ing. Death interrupted the careers of great men,

but it was no interruption to Our Lord’s
;
it was His

crowning glory
;
it was the unique goal He was seek-

ing. His Incarnation thus tended to the Crucifixion,

sur "greater love than this no man hath, that he lay
down his life for his friends”. Now that Love had
run its course in the Redemption of man, Divine

Love could say: "'I have done all for my vineyard
that I can do”. Love can do no more than die. It
is finished : “Ite missa est”.

His work is finished, but is ours? When He
said ‘fit is finished”, He did not mean that the oppor-
tunities of His Life had ended; He meant that His
work was done so perfectly that nothing could be
added to it to make it more perfect—but with us,
how seldom that is true. Too many of us end our
lives but few of us see them finished. 0, sinful life

may end, but a sinful life is never a finished life.

If our lives just “end”, our friends will ask:

“How much did he leave?” But if our life is
“finished” our friends will ask: “How much did
he take with him?” A finished life is not measured
by years but by deeds ; not by the time spent in the

vineyard, but by the work done. In a short time



THE SIXTH WORD 115

a man may fulfill many years ; even those who come
at the eleventh hour may finish their lives; even
those who come to God like the thief at the last
breath, may finish their lives in the Kingdom of
God. Not for them the sad word of regret: “Too
late, 0 ancient Beauty, have I loved Thee.”

Our Lord finished His work, but we have not
finished ours. He pointed the Way, we must follow.
He laid down the Cross at the finish, but we must
take it up. He finished Redemption in His Physical
Body, but we have not finished it in His Mystical
Body. He has finished Salvation, we have not yet
applied it to our souls. He has finished the Temple,
but we must live in it. He has finished the model
Cross, we must fashion ours to its pattern. He has
finished sowing the seed, we must reap the harvest.
He has finished filling the chalice, but we have not
finished drinking its refreshing draughts. He has
planted the wheat fields

;
we must gather it into our

barns. He has finished the Sacrifice of Calvary;
we must finish the Mass. The Crucifixion was not
meant to be an inspirational drama, but a pattern
act on which we model our lives. We are not
meant to sit and watch the Cross as something done
and ended like the life of Socrates

—

what was done
on Calvary avails for us only in the degree that we
repeat it in our own lives. The Mass makes this
possible, for at the renewal of Calvary on our altars

we are not on-lookers but sharers in the Drama of
Redemption, and there it is that we ‘finish” our
work. He has told us: “And I, if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all things to myself”. He
finished His work when He was lifted up on the
Cross

; we finish ours when we permit Him to draw



116 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

US unto Himself in the Mass. The Mass is that
which makes the Cross visible to every eye; it pla-
cards the Cross at all the cross-roads of civilization

;

it brings Calvary so close that even tired feet can

make the journey to its sweet embrace; every hand
may now reach out to touch its Sacred Burden, and
every ear may hear its sweet appeal, for the Mass
and the Cross are the same. In both, the same
offering of a perfectly surrendered Will of the be-

loved Son, the same Body broken, the same Blood
flowed forth, the same Divine Forgiveness. All that
has been said and done and acted during Holy Mass
is to be taken away with us, lived, practiced, and
woven into all the circumstances and conditions of
our daily lives. His Sacrifice is made our sacrifice
by making it the oblation of ourselves in union with
Him; His Life given for us becomes our life given
for Him. Thus do we go from Mass as those who
have made their choice, turned their backs upon the
world, and become for the generation in which we
live other Christs—living, potent witnesses to the
Love that died that we might live with Love.

This world of ours is full of half completed

Gothic Cathedrals, of half-finished lives and half-

crucified souls. Some carry the Cross to Calvary
and then abandon it; others are nailed to it and

detach themselves before the elevation; others are

crucified, but in answer to the challenge of the

world, “Come down'', they come down after one
hour. . . two hours. . . after two hours and fifty-

nine minutes. Real Christians are they who per-
severe unto the end. Our Lord stayed until He had
finished. The priest must likewise stay at the

altar until the Mass is finished. He may not come



THE SIXTH WORD 117

down. So we must stay with the Cross until our
lives are finished. Christ on the Cross is the Pattern

and Model of a finished life. Our human nature is
the raw material

;
our will is the chisel ; God's grace

is the Energy and the Inspiration. Touching the
chisel to our unfinished nature we first cut off huge
chunks of selfishness, then by more delicate chisel-
ings we dig away smaller bits of egotism until
finally only a brush of the hand is needed to bring
out the completed masterpiece—a finished man made
to the image and likeness of the Pattern on the
Cross. We are at the altar under the symbol of
bread and wine; we have offered ourselves to Our
Lord ; He has consecrated us ; we must therefore not
take ourselves back, but remain there unto the end,
praying unceasingly, that when the lease of our life
has ended the echo of the sixth word as we look
back upon a life lived in intimacy with the Cross
may ring out on our lips : ‘Tt is finished”. And as
the sweet accents of that ite missa est reach beyond

the corridors of Time and pierce the “hid battle-
ments of eternity”, the angel choirs and the white-
robed army of the Church Triumphant will answer
back: “Deo gratias”.



THE SEVENTH WORD
Address delivered on April 10, 1936

^'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit'*

—

Luke xxiii:^6.

It is a beautiful paradox that the Last Gospel of
the Mass takes us back to the beginning, for it opens
with the words '-In the beginning'’. And such is
life: the last of this life is the beginning of the

next. Fittingly indeed, then, that the Last Word
of Our Lord was on His Last Gospel : “Father, into
thy hands I commend my spirit”. Like the Last
Gospel of the Mass, it too takes Him back to the be-
ginning, for He now goes back to the Father whence
He came. He has completed His work. He began
His Mass with the word : “Father”. And He ends
it with the same word.

Everything perfect, the Greeks used to say,

travels in circles. Just as the great planets only

after a long period of time complete their orbits,

going back again to their starting points as

if to salute Him who sent them on their way, so the
Word Incarnate who came down to say His Mass
now completes His earthly career, and goes back
again to His Heavenly Father who sent Him on the
journey of the world’s redemption. The Prodigal
Son is about to return to His Father’s House ; for is
He not the Prodigal Son? Thirty-three years ago
He left the Father’s House and the blessedness of
Heaven, and came down to this earth of ours, which
is a foreign country—for every country is foreign
which is away from the Father’s House. For
thirty-three years He had been spending His sub-



THE SEVENTH WORD 119

stance. He spent the substance of His Truth in the
Infallibility of His Church; He spent the substance
of His Power in the Authority He gave to His apos-
tles and their successors. He spent the substance
of His Life in the Redemption and the Sacraments.

Now every drop of it was gone, and He looks long-
ingly back again to the Father^s House, and with a

loud cry throws His Spirit into His Father's arms,

not in the attitude of one who was taking a plunge
into the darkness, but as one who knew where He
was going—^to a homecoming with His Father.

In that Last Word and Last Gospel which took
Him back to the Beginning of all beginnings, name-
ly, His Father, is revealed the history and rhythm
of life. The end of all things in some way is to get
back to their beginnings. As the Son goes back to
the Father; as Nicodemus must be born again; as
the body returns to the dust—so the soul of man
which came from God must one day go back to God,
Death is not the end of all. The cold clod falling
upon the grave does not mark ‘‘finis" to the history
of a man. The way he has lived in this life deter-
mines how he shall live in the next. If he has
sought God during life, death will be like the open-
ing of a cage, enabling him to use his wings to fiy
to the arms of the Divinely Beloved. If he has fled
from God during life, death will be the beginning of
an eternal flight away from Life and Truth and
Love—and that is Hell. Before the Throne of God,
whence we came on our earthly novitiate, we must
one day go back to render an account of our steward-
ship. There will not be a human creature who, when
the last sheaf is garnered, will not be found either

to have accepted or rejected the Divine Gift of Re-



120 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

demption, and in accepting or rejecting it to have
signed the warrant of his eternal destiny. As the
sales on a cash register are recorded for the end of

the day, so our thoughts, words, and deeds are
recorded for the Final Judgment. If we but live
in the Shadow of the Cross, death will not be an
ending, but a beginning of Eternal Life; instead of

a parting, it will be a meeting; instead of a going

away, it will be an arriving; instead of being an
end, it will be a Last Gospel—a return to the be-
binning. As a voice whispers, “You must leave the
earth”, the Father's voice will say, “My child, come
unto Me”.

We have been sent into this world for only one
purpose, namely, to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the

Mass. We are to take our stand at the foot of the
Cross, and like those who stood under it the first
day we are asked to declare our loyalties. God has
given us the wheat and the grapes of life, and as

the men who, in the Gospel, were given talents, we
must show return on that Divine Gift. God has
given us our lives as wheat and grapes. It is our

duty to consecrate them and bring them back to God
as bread and wine—transubstantiated, divinized,
and spiritualized. There must be harvest in our

hands after the springtime of the earthly pilgri-

mage. That is why Calvary is erected in the midst
of us, and we are on its sacred hill. We were not
made to be mere on-lookers, shaking our dice like
the executioners of old, but rather to be participants

in the great Drama of Redemption. If there is any
way to picture Judgment in terms of the Mass, it is
to picture it in the way the Father greeted His Son,
namely, by looking at His hands. They bore the



THE SEVENTH WORD 121

marks of labor, the callouses of redemption, and the
scars of salvation. So too when our earthly pilgrim-
age is over, and we go back to the beginning, God
will look at each of our hands. If our hands in life

touched the Hands of His Divine Son, they will
bear the same livid marks of nails; if our feet in
life have trod over the same road that leads to Eter-
nal Glory through the detour of a rocky and thorny

Calvary, they too shall bear the same bruises ; if our
heart beat in unison with His then it too shall show
the riven side which the wicked lance of jealous

earth had pierced. Blessed indeed are they who
carry in their Cross-marked hands the bread and

wine of consecrated lives signed with the sign and

sealed with the seal of Redemptive Love. But woe
unto them who come from Calvary with hands un-
scarred and white.

God grant that when life is over, and the earth is
vanishing like the dream of one awakening, when
eternity is flooding our souls with its splendors, we
may with humble and triumphant faith re-echo the
Last Word of Christ: “Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit’’.

And so the Mass of Christ ends. The Confiteor
was His prayer to the Father for the forgiveness of
our sins

; the Offertory was the presentation on the
paten of the Cross of the small hosts of the thief and
ourselves; the Sanctus was His commending our-
selves to Mary, the Queen of Saints; the Consecra-
tion was the separation of His Blood from His Body,
and the seeming separation of Divinity and human-
ity

;
the Communion was His thirst for the souls of

men
;
the Ite Missa Est was the flnishing of the work



122 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

of salvation; the Last Gospel was the return to the
Father whence He came.

And now that the Mass is over, and He has com-
mended His Spirit to the Father, He appears to give
back His Body to His Blessed Mother at the foot of
the Cross. Thus once again will the end be the be-
ginning, for at the beginning of His earthly life He
was nestled on her lap in Bethlehem, and now, on
Calvary, He will take His place there once again.

Earth had been cruel to Him. His feet wander-
ed after lost sheep and we dug them with steel

;
His

hands stretched out the Bread of Everlasting Life
and we fastened them with nails

;
His lips spoke the

Truth and we sealed them with dust. He came to
give us Life and we took away His. But that was
our fatal mistake. VV'e really did not take it away.

We only tried to take it away. He laid it down of
Himself. Nowhere do the Evangelists say that He
died. They say : “He gave up the ghost”. It was a
willing, self-determined relinquishment of life. It

was not Death which approached Him, it was He
who approached Death. That is why, as the end
draws near, the Savior commands the portal of
death to open unto Him in the presence of the Fath-
er. The chalice is gradually being drained of its
rich red wine of salvation. The rocks of earth
open their hungry mouths to drink as if more thirsty

for the draughts of salvation than the parched heart

of man; the earth itself shook in horror because
men had erected God’s Cross upon its breast. Mag-
dalen, the penitent, as usual clings to His feet, and

there she will be again Easter morn; John the priest

with a face like a cast moulded out of love, listens

to the beating of the Heart whose secrets He learned



THE SEVENTH WORD 123

and loved and mastered; Mary thinks how different
Calvary is from Bethlehem. Thirty-three years ago
Mary looked down to His Sacred Face; now He
looks down to her. In Bethlehem Heaven looked up
into the face of earth; now the roles are reversed,
and earth looks up into the face of Heaven—but a
Heaven marred by the scars of earth. He loved her
above all the creatures of earth, for she was His
Mother and the mother of us all. He saw her first
on coming to earth

;
He shall see her last on leaving

it. Their eyes meet, all aglow with life, speaking a

language all their own. There is the rupture of a

heart through a rapture of love. Then a bowed
head, a broken heart. Back to the hands of God He
gave pure and sinless His Spirit, in loud and ringing

voice that trumpted eternal victory. And Mary
stood alone a Childless Mother. Jesus is dead!

Mary looks up into His^eyes which are so clear
even in the face of death : “High Priest of Heaven
and earth. Thy Mass is finished I Leave the Altar of
the Cross and repair into Thy Sacristy. As High
Priest Thou didst come forth from the Sacristy of
Heaven, panoplied in the vestments of Humanity
and bearing Thy Body as Bread and Thy Blood as
Wine. Now the Sacrifice has been consummated.
The Consecration bell has rung. Thou didst offer
Thy Spirit to Thy Father, Thy Body and Thy Blood
to man. There remains now nothing but the drained
chalice. Enter into Thy Sacristy. Take off the gar-
ments of mortality and put on the white robes of
immortality. Show Thy Hands, and Feet, and Side
to Thy Heavenly Father and say: ‘With these was
I wounded in the house of those that love me’. Enter
High Priest into Thy Heavenly Sacristy, and as Thy



124 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

earthly ambassadors hold aloft the Bread and Wine
do Thou show Thyself to the Father in living inter-
cession for earth even unto the consummation of the
world. Earth has been cruel to Thee

;
but Thou wilt

be kind to earth. Earth lifted Thee on the Cross,
but now Thou shalt lift earth unto the Cross. Open
the Door of the Heavenly Sacristy, 0 High Priest.
Behold it is now we who stand at the door and
knock

And Mary, what shall we say to Thee? ‘'Mary,
Thou art the Sacristan of the High Priest! Thou
wert a Sacristan in Bethlehem when He did come to
Thee as Wheat and Grapes in the crib of Bethlehem.
Thou wert His Sacristan at the Cross, where He
became the Living Bread and Wine through the
Crucifixion. Thou art His Sacristan now, as He
comes from the altar of the Cross bearing only the
drained chalice of His Sacred Body. As that chalice
is laid in your lap it may seem that Bethlehem has
come back again, for He is once more yours. But
it only seems—for in Bethlehem He was the chalice
whose gold was to be tried by fire

;
but now at Cal-

vary He is the chalice whose gold has passed through
the fires of Golgotha and Calvary. In Bethlehem He
was white as He came from the Father, now He is
red as He came from me. But Thou art still His
Sacristan! And as the Immaculate Mother of all
hosts who go to the altar, do thou 0 Virgin Mary,
send us there pure, and keep us pure, even unto the

day when we enter into the Heavenly Sacristy of the
Kingdom of Heaven, where Thou wilt be our eternal
Sacristan and He our eternal Priest”.

And you, friends of the Crucified, your High
Priest has left the Cross, but He has left us the



THE SEVENTH WORD 125

Altar. On the Cross He was alone ; in the Mass He
is with us. On the Cross He suffered in His Physi-
cal Body; on the altar He suffers in the Mystical
Body which we are. On the Cross He was the
unique Host

;
in the Mass we are the small hosts, and

He the large host receiving His Calvary through us.
On the Cross He was the wine ; in the Mass, we are
the drop of water united with the wine and conse-

crated with Him. In that sense He is still on the
Cross, still saying the Confiteor with us, still for-

giving us, still commending us to Mary, still thirst-
ing for us, still drawing us unto the Father, for as
long as sin remains on earth, still will the Cross

remain.

“Whenever there is silence around me
By day or by night
I am startled by a cry.
It came down from the cross

—

The first time I heard it.
I went out and searched

—

And found a man in the throes of Crucifixion.
And I said: ‘I will take you down’.
And I tried to take the nails out of His Feet,
But He said: ‘Let them be
For I cannot be taken down
Until every man, every woman, and every child
Come together to take me down.’
And I said: ‘But I cannot bear your cry.
What can I do?’
And He said: ‘Go about the world

—

Tell every one that you meet
There is a Man on the Cross’.” *

Elizabeth Cheney



THE FINDING OF THE LOST
Address delivered on April 12, 1936

The Incarnation of Our Blessed Lord was an-
nounced to a Virgin—Mary. But His Resurrection
was announced to a converted sinner—Magdalene.
Arid both were fitting. Only purity and sinlessness
could welcome the all holy Son of God into the world,
and hence Mary Immaculate met Him at the door
of earth in the city of Bethlehem. But only a re-
pentant sinner who had herself risen from the grave
of sin to the newness of life in God could fittingly
understand the triumph over sin. Hence not to the
Virgin Mary, but to Magdalene, are the glad tidings

of the Resurrection first announced. In this con-

trast is hidden the great truth of Easter Day : The
Resurrection is for sinners. It is the final and abso-

lute proof that Our Lord has come not “to call the
just, but sinners.”

The fact that the Resurrection was first an-
nounced to Magdalene was already a proof that
Easter is for the sinner, but the way in which she
was chosen proves it still more. To the honor of
womanhood, it must forever be said : A woman was
closest to the Cross on Good Friday, the first at the

tomb on Easter morn. That woman whom John
alone mentions in his history of Easter morn was
Mary Magdalene: “On the first day of the week,
Mary Magdalene cometh early, when it was yet
dark, unto the sepulchre; and she saw the stone

taken away from the sepulchre. She ran, therefore,
and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple

whom Jesus loved, and saith to them: They have



THE FINDING OF THE LOST 127

taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we
know not where they have laid him”. One thought
seemed to have absorbed her soul, that the Body of
the Holy One had been lost! Not with her was it
‘out of sight, out of mind'. She must find him!
After telling Peter, she came back to the tomb weep-
ing. “Now as she was weeping, she stooped down,
and looked into the sepulchre, and she saw two
angels in white, sitting one at the head, and one at
the feet, where the body of Jesus had been laid.
They say to her: Woman, why weepest thou? She
saith to them: Because they have taken my Lord;
and I know not where they have laid him”. There
was no terror at seeing the angels, for the world on
fire could not have moved her, so much had grief
mastered her soul. “When she had thus said, she
turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing; and
she knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith to her:
Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?”
And Saint John tells us she thought it was the gar-
dener.

But perhaps Magdalene was not far wrong after
all, for He was indeed the Heavenly Gardener. Every
fiower that blooms was once a thought in His mind

;

every riot of color on a green stem owes its life to
Him

;
every seed of grace in every soul is planted by

His hand. As the new Adam He too has His Garden
of Paradise to cultivate with His grace, to plant

with His inspiration, to nourish with His everlasting

waters.

However, when Magdalene took him to be the
gardener, she of course meant the gardener of Jo-
seph of Arimathea, whom she thought might know
where the lost one could be found. And so she pros-



128 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

trates herself on her knees before Him and says to
Jesus : “Sir, if thou hast taken him hence, tell me
where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away”.
Poor Magdalene ! Worn from Good Friday, wearied
by Holy Saturday, with life dwindled to a shadow
and strength worn to a thread—she would “take him
away”. Forever she stands as the type of love that

can banish the hardest burden, and think the
heaviest burden light.

“Jesus saith to her : Mary.”

That voice was more startling than a clap of
thunder. She once heard Jesus say He called His
sheep by name. And now to that One who individ-
ualizes all the sin, sorrow, and tears in the world,
and marks each soul with a personal, particular, and
discriminating love, she turns and, as the red livid

marks in hands and feet meet her gaze, she utters
but one word “Rabboni”. Christ had uttered
“Mary” and all heaven was in it. It was only one
word she uttered and all earth was in it : “Rabboni”.
After the mental midnight, this Dazzle ; after hours

of hopelessness, this Hope; after the search, this
Discovery; after the loss, this Find. Magdalene
was prepared only to shed reverential tears over the
grave; what she was not prepared for was to see
Him walking on the hills of the world. Yet such is
the truth of Easter Day: the Resurrection of the
Dead, the Triumph of the Defeated, and the Finding
of the Lost

;
the springtime of the earth, the waking

of life, the Trumpet of Resurrection blowing over
the land of the living.

From that Easter Day on let no one believe he is
beyond Redemption. There is nothing too far gone

for salvation ; there are no hopeless cases ; there are



THE FINDING OF THE LOST 129

no lost sheep that cannot be found
;
no lost coins that

cannot be recovered to rejoice the finder and her
neighbors

;
no prodigals beyond the hope of the em-

brace of the Father and the banquet of the fatted
calf. If ever a cause in the world seemed lost, it was
Good Friday night when the Redeemer was sealed in
a rock with hideous wounds on hands and feet and
side—and yet within three days the stone which the
builders rejected was made the cornerstone of the
Temple of God. If you could have seen Him stand-
ing before the Judgment seat of Pilate, forsaken,
betrayed, beaten and alone

;
if you could have heard

the mob scream ‘‘Crucify”, and watched Pilate hold
up his hands in the morning sun, with water drip-
ping from them like glittering jewels; if you could
have seen that strong, powerful young man of
thirty-three years go down to what you might have
called a premature death of crucifixion—never for a
moment would you have supposed that Pilate was
the one who was really judged, that the victorious
mob was the one which really lost the day, and that
the hands which were nailed would one day bless the
world. And yet such is the lesson of Easter Day

—

the Resurrection of the Dead, the Triumph of the
Defeated, the Finding of the Lost; the springtime of
the dead earth, the waking of life, the Trumpet of
Resurrection blowing over the land of the living.

A dead Washington will not fight for his coun-
try; a dead Lincoln will not war for its unity; a
dead Shakespeare will not sing his lyric drama; a
dead lawyer will not save you from your legal woes

;

a dead doctor will not cure you of fever. Just as
fantastic, just as shocking to common sense, seems
the declaration that the Crucified Christ will rise



130 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

again from the tomb, that the Buried King will walk
to His Eternal Throne, that the dead sinners like

Magdalene will live again. And yet such is the les-
son of Easter Day—^the Resurrection of the Dead,
the Triumph of the Defeated, the Finding of the
Lost; the Springtime of the dead earth, the waking
of life, the Trumpet of Resurrection blowing over
the land of the living.

Now, why cannot Easter happen again since
Christ is risen? Cannot the hopeless once more have
hope? Cannot Magdalenes once more be forgiven?
Cannot the prospect of Death be converted into
Life? Apply this lesson of hope firstly to the
modern world and secondly to your own personal
lives.

Many minds regard our modern world as hope-
less. It is indeed like a vast and horrible Good Fri-
day where everything divine seems gone down to
defeat. The future never seemed so completely un-
predictable as it does today. Mankind seems to be in
a kind of widowhood, in which a harrowing sense of

desolation sweeps over it, as one who set out on life’s
journey in intimate comradeship with another, and

then is suddenly bereft of that companion forever.

There are wars and rumors of wars. Economics is

a tangled mess. Communism is robbing men of
their souls and a false education stealing away their
faith. Lives have been made fiabby with worldli-
ness, and ill-prepared for the rigors of an enforced

discipline. Platitudes abound on lips and unrealized

desires embitter hearts. Everywhere there is

confusion, hopelessness, and despair.

And yet there need not be such hopelessness and
despair. The world seemed just as hopeless before.



THE FINDING OF THE LOST 131

when it crucified its Savior; and yet with all its
paganism and nationalism it arose to newness and
freshness of Christian life and civilization. The
miracle of the Resurrection can happen again. The
world may rise once more as it rose before, at least
a dozen times since the advent of Christianity. But
let us suffer no illusions. It will not rise to peace

and happiness through economic and political
remedies alone

;
it will rise only through a spiri-

tual regeneration of the hearts and souls of men.
The Resurrection of Our Lord was not the resump-
tion of an old life; it was the beginning of a new
life. It was the lesson of Christmas all over again;
namely, the world will be saved not by social re-
covery but by re-birth—rebirth from the dead by
the Power of Divinity in Christ.

This is the refrain which has been ringing
through this radio course from the beginning: that
is, we must not reconstruct our old life, we must
rise to new life. There must be a new energy intro-
duced from without, in the absence of which we
must rot in our graves. Christ rose from the dead
by the Power of God. It is vain for us to try to rise
by any other Power. This Life and Power the Risen
Savior has given to His Mystical Body the Church

;

His truth comes to us through His Vicar; His Life
comes to us through the Sacraments

; His Authority
comes to us through the Episcopacy. But here is the
stumbling block of the world. It may admit that by
the Power of God Christ rose from the tomb, but it
will not admit that that Power of the Risen Christ
continues beyond that tomb. It sees the Church on
its human side, made up of weak, frail creatures and
therefore thinks it something to be ignored. It



132 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

makes the same mistake Magdalene made the first
Easter morn. She mistook the Risen Savior for the
gardener; that is, for but a human thing. The
world too sees the Risen Christ in His Mystical Body
the Church, and takes it to be the gardener—some-
thing human and not divine. But Divinity is there
as it was in the Garden the First Easter, and only
th^t same Divinity can give hope to a hopeless
world. We may yet attain our peace if we but seek
not the political and the economic, but the new Life
of the Kingdom of God. For such is the message of
Easter Day—the Resurrection of the Dead, the Tri-
umph of the Defeated, the Finding of the Lost; the
springtime of the earth, the waking of life, the
Trumpet of Resurrection blowing over the land of
the living.

What is true of a despairing world is true of the
individual souls in it. This earth of ours today is

filled with men who have lost their way; with souls
whose sins have been psychoanalyzed a thousand

times, but never forgiven once; with bodies that

have been embittered by pain and never sweetened

by a vision of the cross ; with hearts that have pur-

sued a thousand fancies, only to be utterly disillu-

sioned at the end ; with the poor who thought riches
would give them peace of mind ; with the despairing
who thought drink could make them forget.

But to all these souls, the Easter message rings

out: There is no reason for despair. The Resur-
rection was announced to a Magdalene—a soul once
like our own. Peace awaits you in the service of

the God who made you; Certitude awaits y<^ in
Infallibility; Redemption awaits you in the Mass;

Pardon beckons you in the Confessional; Love de-



THE FINDING OF THE LOST 133

sires you in the Eucharist. And all that can be
yours provided you do not mistake Christ for the

gardener, and think the Church which prolongs His
Life is only a human thing in a dying world.

What He did to bodies during His earthly life,
He is doing to souls now in His Mystical Body, the
Church. Had you and I walked down the street with
Him, we would have noticed that it was principally
only what our modern sociologists call the depen-
dents, the defectives, and the delinquents which in-
terested Him. What always seemed to catch His
eyes was a beggar like Lazarus lying yonder in the
shadow of a rich man’s door, all sores and rags and
vermin, from whom the rest of men stepped back as
unclean; the blind man of Jericho shrieking and
shouting for light; the woman of the coast town
suffering from an issue of blood; the corpse of the
son of the widow of Naim; the woman taken in sin
stretched in the dust welting under the gaze of the

Pharisees and cringing in fear from their stones;
the poor laborer with a patch on his garments; the

little children who annoyed busy men. But to Him
these were all citizens of a world of infinite possi-
bilities. The old beggar was an immortal soul clean
enough to nestle in the arms of Abraham; the blind
man had eyes that could see Divinity which men
with earthly eyes had missed

;
each and every one of

these aimless looking creatures who seemed beyond
the power of recovery might change at any second,
for the love of God was beating down on them, anc
under its rays these sorry grubs might become glor*
ious, winged creatures, if they but saw in Him no*'
the humanity of a gardener but the Divinity of the
Crucified Savior, walking in the newness of life. Foi



134 THE PRODIGAL WORLD

such is the message of Easter Day: The Resur-
rection of the Dead, the Triumph of the Defeated,
the Finding of the Lost

;
the springtime of the earth,

the waking of life, the Trumpet of Resurrection
blowing over the land of the living.

And so in conclusion, the thought I would give to
you is that no matter how hopeless things seem to be,
there is still hope, for Christ is the Resurrection

and the Life. He that can make snowflakes out of
dirty drops of water, diamonds out of charcoal, and
saints out of Magdalenes, can also make you victor-
ious if you but confess Him in His earthly and Mys-
tical Life as Christ the Son of the Living God.

Alfred Noyes relates in his Unknown God the
transforming power of Christ. He says that in his
early days he once dined with the poet Swinburne.

Swinburne, you remember, was one of the best
known anti-Christian poets of modern times; the
poet who refused to give glory to God, but only to
man, for “man is the master of all”. During the
course of a conversation about Russian atrocities the

expression of Swinburne, which up to this time had

been kindly, suddenly changed ; and like a child pos-

sessed—in the old direful sense of possession—^he
spat out these words: “Christianity itself never

conceived anything more ghastly”.

Many years after Swinburne’s death, Noyes
visited the vicinity of his old home. The gates were
open and the dark winding road to Swinburne’s

house was strewn with ferns and flowers in two
regular lanes by the hands of nuns; for the poet’s

old home had become a convent. And it was now
the Feast of the Sacred Heart. At the door of the



THE FINDING OF THE LOST 135

house a procession was forming, with long lines of
children in white, and the blackrobed nuns behind

the fair bearers of the canopy. Then with lights and
incense the priest with the Host moved slowly for-
ward under the canopy, preceded by the procession,
singing O Salutaris Hostia over the very same paths
in which the poet had written his anti-Christian
songs. Then the long procession stopped at a
flower decked altar, before which all knelt for Bene-
diction in the mellowing, scented air.

And as the hymn Tantum Ergo rang out, Noyes
said he glanced up over the walls of the former li-
brary, which is now a chapel of the Sacred Heart,
and on its window saw the initials of a former owner
unchanged : I. H. S. Those of you who know what
those initials mean understand the lesson of Easter

:

The dead may still rise from their graves

!



THE PURPOSE OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from the address of the late Patrick Cardinal Hayes at the in-
augural program of the Catholic Hour in the studio of the National
Broadcasting Company, New York City, March 2, 1930.)
Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the National

Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all who, by their financial
support, have made it possible to use this offer of the National Broad-
casting Company. The heavy expense of managing and financing a
weekly program, its musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent an-
swering of inquiries, must be met . . .

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States. To our
fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to express a cordial
greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For this radio hour is one of
service to America, which certainly will listen in interestedly, and even
sympathetically, I am sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its
historic background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and with
its own notable contribution to the discovery, exploration, foundation
and growth of our glorious country ...

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is no light
task. Our prayers will be with those who have that task in hand. We
feel certain that it will have both the good will and the good wishes of
the great majority of our countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover
of our Country who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less
material, and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympathy for
all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue. So may it be ful-
filled. This word of dedication voices, therefore, the hope that this radio
hour may serve to make known, to explain with the charity of Christ,
our faith, which we love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve
to make better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven; a strength, and a power divine through Christ;
pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating our common every-day duties
and joys, bringing not only justice but gladness and peace to our search-
ing and questioning hearts.



127 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 42 States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii

i 0

WSFA* 1440 kc

KAWT 1450 kc
KWIR 1240 kc
KTAR 620 kc
KYCA 1490 kc
KOI U 1450 kc
KVOA 1290 kc
KYIIM 1240 kc

..KERO 1230 kc
KMI 580 kc
KFI 640 kc
KCRA 1340 kc
KPO 680 kc
KIST 1340 kc

KOA 850 kc
WTIC* 1090 kc

WRC 980 kc
WIAX 930 kc
WIOD 610 kc
WORZ 740 kc
wroA 1370 kc

Tampa WFI A 970-620 kc
Cnpnrgin Atlanta WSR 750 kc

Augusta WTNT 1230 kc
Savannah WSAV 1340 kc

Iflnhn Boise KIDO* 1380 kc

Illinois Chicago WMAO 670 kc
Peoria . WFFK' 1350 kc

Indiana Elkhart WTRC 1340 kc
Fort Wayne .. WOWO 1190 kc
Indianapolis WIRF* 1430 kc
Terre Haute WBOW 1930 kc

Iowa Davenport woe* 1490 kc
Des Moines WHO 1040 kc

Kansas Hutchinson KWRW 14S0 kc
Wichita KANS 1940 kc

Kentucky Louisville WAVF* Q70 kc
Louisiana Alexandria .. _ _ . . KYSI 1400 kc

Baton Rouge - WJ BO 1150 kc
Lafayette KVOI 1340 kc
Lake Charles _ . . KPLC 1490 kc
Monroe KNOE 1230 kc
New Orleans WSMR 13S0 kc
Shreveport KTRS* 14R0 kc

Maine Augusta . _ WRDO 1400 kc
Bangor.. Wl R7* 690 kc

Maryland Baltimore WTRO 14R0 kc
Cumberland WRAI 1090 kc

Massachusetts Boston WR7 1030 kc
Springfield WR7A 1030 kc

Michigan Detroit WWI 9S0 kc
Flint WTCR 600 kc
Saginaw WSAM* 1400 kc



127 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 42 States, the District of Columbia, and Howaii

WFRC I Ire
Nibbing...’ WMFG i.-^nn k<-

KYSM 19-^n kr
RSTP i snn Irr

Rochester KROC i.?AO Vr
KGHI 70n ke
KRRM 14Sn kr
RGIR 1^7f) kr

Great Falls KXl K i4nn kr
Helena RXI 1 lOAf) kr

Nebraska.. . XOOY 1940 kr
Omaha . WOW 590 kc

XOH* kr
New Hampshire. WFFA 1940 kr

ROR lO.SO kr
WRFN O.-^O kr
WNRC 660 kc
WGY 810 kc
WISF* 1 9.-^0 kr
WSOC 1940 kr
WPTF 6R0 kr
WSIS 600 kr
KFYR .5.50 kr
WOAY 970 kr

nhin Cleveland WTAM 1100 kr
1 imn Wl OX 1940 kr
Toledo wspn* 1.S40 kr
Zone.sville WHIZ 1940 kr

Dklnhnmn Oklohomn City WKY* 9.S0 kr
Tulsa KVOO 1170 kr

Oregon Medford KMFO 1440 kr
Portland KGW* 620 kc

Penn.'jyivnnia Allentown WSAN 1470 kr
Altnonn WFRG 1.R40 kr
Frie WFRC 19.R0 kr
Inhnctown WIAC 1400 kr

1 ewistown WMRF 1490 kr
Philadelphia KYW 1060 kr
Pittsburgh KDKA 1090 kr
Reading WRAW 1.R40 kr
Wilkes-Rarre WERE 1.R40 kr
Williamsport WRAX 1400 kc

Rhode l<;lonH Providence . ... WJAR 920 kc
Eolith Onrolinn Charleston WTMA ..... -. .. 1250 kc

Columhia WIS* 560 kr
Oreenville WFRC* 1.R.R0 kr

^oi ith Onkotn Sioux Falls XSOO-XELO -1140-1230 kc
Tenne<;«;ee Memphis WMC* ... - 790 kc

Nashville WSM* 650 kr
Tevnc Amarillo . . KGNC* 1440 ke

FI Paso . .. XTSM* 1-R80 kr
Fort Worth WPAR* R90 kr
Houston .KPRC* 950 kr
San Antonio WOAI 1900 kr
Wesloro XRGV* 1990 kr

1 Itoh Salt Lake City KYDL* . 1320 kc
Virginio Harrisonburg** WSVA .550 kr

Martinsville WMVA 1450 kr
Norfolk WTAR* 790 kc
Richmond WMBG .... 1380 kc



127 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS
In 42 States, the District of Columbia, and Howoii

Washington Seattle KOMO* 950 kc
Spokane KHQ* 590 kc

Wisconsin Eau Claire WEAU 790 kc
La Crosse WKBH ... 1410 kc
Marinette WMAM* 570 kc

Hawaii Honolulu KGU ... 760 kc
* Delayed Broadcast
** AM and FM

(Revised as of March 6, 1949)



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Not By Bread Alone,” by Rev. John M. McCarthy, 40 pages and cover. Single
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“The Everlasting Kingdom,” by the Rev. Edmond D. Benard. 64 pages and cover.
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“The Love That Waits For You,” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 120 pages
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“This Nation Under God,” nine addresses by laymen, 64 pages and cover. Single
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“Operation Survival,” four documentary programs on Communism, by Robert C.
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“Hope and the Voyager,” by the Rev. Edmund, 32 pages and cover. Single copy,
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“Charity Begins At Home,” by the Rev. John M. McCarthy and guests, 64 pages
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“The Woman,” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D., LL.D., 96 pages and
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“Spring Fervor,” by the Rev. James E. Manton, C.SS.R., 40 pages and cover. Single
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“Your Son in the Service,” by Commander Donald F. Kelly, chaplain, U. S. Na\^;
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“Careers In Christianity,” a series of addresses by Prof. James M. O’Neill, Rev.
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“Mercy—Eternity—Truth,” by the Rev. Wilford J. Diamond. 32 pages and cover.
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“A New Commandment,” by the Rev. Edmond D. Benard. 36 pages and cover.
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“Christ Our King,” by the Very Rev. Msgr. Henry A. Carlin. 48 pages and cover.
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“Under Northern Lights,” by Colonel William J. Clasby, Chaplain, U. S. Air Force.
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“The Life of Christ,” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. 120 pages and cover. Single copy,
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“Education And Society,” by the Very Rev. Robert J. Slavin, O.P., Ph.D., S.T.M.
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“Shrines Across The Sea,” by the Rev. Joseph E. Manton. 40 pages and cover. Single
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