m 

I rCJ m a r » , Ecfwa^ 

it The Giri'^Kai• 
l i f e r i . 

Reverend Edward Lodge Curran, LL.B., Ph.D., 
-, Nine addresses {delivered in the Catholic Hour, ' spon-sored by. the National Council of Catholic Men I with the cooperation of the National |$ Broadcasting Company and its ;*•' ; V - v 1 Associated .-Stations. 3 

(On Sundays from May 15 ¿t» July 17, ; 1932) 
I. V Thè Christian Manifesto. 

II. /Hie Christian Home. 
III. Two in One iiesii. 

r W v t i m in One Spirit. 
IV. Two inOrie Failure, w 
Vi. A Woman's Triumph. 

VII. Thriesholds jo| Póter^y. § 
Vili. Forgotten Virtues. 

IX. A. Nation's Strength. 

NATIONAL COUNCIL OP CATHOLIC MEN > Sponsor ,'ofr the Catholic Hour 
: (1314 Massachusetts Avenue 

1 Washington, D. ; & 





THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 
Reverend Edward Lodge Curran, LL.B., Ph.D., 

Nine addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, spon-sored by the National Council of Catholic Men with the cooperation of the National Broadcasting Company and its Associated Stations. 
(On Sundays from May 15 to July 17, 1932) 
I. The Christian Manifesto. 

II. The Christian Home. 
III. Two in One Flesh. 
IV. Two in One Spirit. 
V. Two in One Failure, 

VI. A Woman's Triumph. 
VII. Thresholds of Poverty. 

VIII. Forgotten Virtues. 
IX. A Nation's Strength. 

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC MEN Sponsor of the Catholic Hour 1314 Massachusetts Avenue Washington, D. C. 

Printed and dis t r ibuted by Our Sunday Visitor Hunt ing ton , Indiana 

by 





AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION 
Despite the tremendous changes in transportation and industry and methods of communication, the home remains the most' important unit in life. It is the tabernacle of our loveliest memories and the source of a nation's greatness. He who has builded and maintained a Christian home is rich beyond the dreams of the wealthiest financier. 
The modern world has failed to give the home anything like the care and solicitude which it lavishes upon other in-stitutions and activities. I t has failed to realize that the architecture of the spirit is greater than the architecture of stone. 
The Catholic Church has concentrated its greatest eiforts upon "the home. Possessed of the mandate of Christ, she denies the right of any individual or any institution to inter-fere with the unity and sanctity of the home. For her, chil-dren are still the loveliest products of humanity. For her, human love is still capable of divine transformation even as Christ changed the water at Cana of Galilee into wine. 
If the following addresses succeed in making one home more Christlike and one heart more happy, the author will be glad that his words have not died with the breath that begot them. 

Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, LL.B., Ph.D. 



DEDICATION 
To My Mother and Father 

Whose love for me begot a Christian Home That neither time nor eternity Shall ever erase from my grateful memory." 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 5 

THE CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO 
Address delivered on May 15, 1932 

Forty-one years ago today, the silvern voice of 
a great Pope, Leo XIII, was raised in defense of 
organized and unorganized labor by the promul-
gation of his Encyclical Letter on "The Condition 
of Labor." It was greeted with a chorus of approval 
by all those who recognized that, since the inception 
of our modern machine world, the laborer had been 
defrauded of his hire, and the capitalist exalted upon 
a pedestal of pagan success. The voice of Leo was 
the voice of Christ amongst the poor. The warning 
of Leo was the warning of Christ unto the rich. 

Every May, with its bursting blossoms, brings to 
certain elements within our disordered society the 
recollection of the Communist Manifesto .of the 
founder of modern Socialism, Karl Marx. Every 
May should likewise bring the remembrance of this 
great Christian Manifesto of Leo XIII. One year 
ago, the present Pontiff, Pius XI, issued his own 
Encyclical, "Quadragesimo Anno," on the occasion 
of its fortieth anniversary. Forty-one years have 
not silenced its message nor diluted its efficacy. 
Forty-one years of failure to realize its ideals and 
incorporate its suggestions within the economic 
structure of the world, have done as much as any-
thing else to plunge us into our present economic 
disaster and despair. 

Never, before the proclamation of that Encycli-
cal, had any authoritative voice been raised so val-



6 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 6 

iantly and so fearlessly in defense of the working-
man. Never had the principles of justice as applied 
to employer and employee and their mutual rela-
tionships been so clearly and courageously asserted. 
The Pope, it is true, took the side of labor, but he 
did not take the side of labor to the destruction of 
the capitalist. He recognized the duties of the em-
ployer, on the one hand, and the co-existent duties 
of the employee, on the other. Against the per-
nicious revolutionary (doctrine which still insists 
upon an inherent and inevitable class warfare be-
tween employer and employee, the august Pontiff, 
mindful of humanity's divine beginning and end, 
mindful, too, of humanity's common redemption by 
Christ, proclaimed the mutually important and 
complementary roles which capital and labor must 
play in the interests of themselves and of the body 
politic. "Capital cannot do without labor," he in-
sisted, "nor labor, without capital." 

Not, however, in the interest of the working man 
as a mere individual were the great truths of that 
Encyclical spread like seeds of wheat across the 
world. The Pope envisaged no such fiction as the 
absolutely independent isolated man. The laborer 
whose cause he pleads, the laborer whose dignity 
he espouses, the laborer who is worthy of a living 
wage, the laborer who must have freedom of union 
with his fellow workers for their mutual assistance 
and protection, the laborer whose labor must not be 
a chattel knocked down to the lowest capitalistic 
bidder, is preeminently the father and head of the 
Christian family. 

In the very beginning of his Encyclical Pope Leo 
XIII points out the priority of the family over the 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 7 

State in time and nature and dignity. Just as man's 
right to private property flows from his nature as 
a human being, so man's right to live in the society 
of the family antedates the existence of the State. 
In- the beginning of the world, before the existence 
of the State, God created man, male and female. In 
the beginning of history, before the slightest trace 
of statehood appears upon its discolored pages, man 
and woman were living in the society of the family. 
The family has its reason for existence independent 
of the State. The Spartan theory of ancient Greece 
and socialistic Europe is unhistorical as well as 
inhuman. The family has its laws and duties, its 
rights and privileges, apart from any tolerance or 
sufferance by the State. Into the precincts of the 
family the State must not enter by decree or law, 
save in matters that affect the general public wel-
fare. "No human law," the Encyclical says, "can 
abolish the natural and primitive right of marriage, 
or in any way limit the chief and principal purpose 
of marriage, ordained by God's authority from the 
beginning. Increase cmd multiply. Thus we have 
the Family: the 'society' of a man's own household; 
a society limited indeed in numbers, but a true 
'society' anterior to every kind of State or nation, 
with rights and duties of its own, totally independent 
of the commonwealth." 

The preservation of the family, according to the 
Encyclical, is of the greatest importance to the 
peace and securiy of the State and society, as a 
whole. The invention of machinery has worked a 
wholesale revolution in that concept of labor and in 
that concept of the family, which prevailed before 
our modern factories stained the bluish firmament 



8 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 8 

above us with their threatening flame and smoke. 
Prior to the nineteenth century apprenticeship was 
a noble preparation for the nobler position of master 
workman. The union of working men in Guilds had 
for its purpose better and more artistic production, 
as well as mutual protection and assistance. Most 
important of all, each Guild was permeated by the 
principles of the Christian religion, the only guaran-
tee that society has against the excesses of labor on 
the one hand and the excesses of capitalism on the 
other. 

In the beginning of the nineteenth century ma-
chinery increased the number of idle laborers. Labor 
became a drug on the market. When men struggle 
to secure work, when they stand in the market place 
all the day idle, labor itself experiences a dangerous 
(division. The hands of the laborers are raised 
against one another. Capitalism profits by the strug-
gle. Fortified by the specious and pagan philosophy 
of freedom of contract, the capitalist was able to hire 
labor at the lowest possible contract price. Women 
and children were thereby forced to enter the labor 
market with the consequent disruption and deterior-
ation of the home. Nothing has so damaged the 
status of the Christian family within the past one 
hundred and fifty years as the advent of our newer 
machine-made industrialism. Had the contract be-
tween labor and capital, at the outset of the indus-
rial revolution, taken into consideration thenecessary 
cost of supporting a family, fewer mothers would 
have grown prematurely old in the factories, and 
fewer children would have fallen by their .sides, 
mangled in body and maimed in mind. 

Against such disruption of family life the En-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 9 

cyclical of Pope Leo XIII shines forth like a life 
buoy off the reefs at sea. It is to the interest of 
the public, he says, "that family life should be car-
ried out in accordance with God's laws and those 
of nature." Against the same disruption of family 
life the commemorative Encyclical of Pope Pius XI 
directed its most forceful condemnation. "Intoler-
able, and to be opposed with all our strength," Pope 
Pius XI writes, "is the abuse whereby mothers of 
families, because of the insufficiency of the father's 
salary, are forced to engage in gainful occupations 
outside the domestic walls to the neglect of their 
own proper care and duties, particularly the educa-
tion of their children." 

The gruesomeness of the picture of women and 
children torn from the sanctuary of the family to 
become so many purchasable units in the market of 
industry, has been ameliorated and modified by so-
cial legislation enacted in most civilized countries 
during the last decade or two of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Encyclical on the "Condition of Labor," 
demands much more than alleviation by modern 
legislation. Child labor and female labor must be 
repudiated in the larger interest of the home and 
society. "Women," it asserts, "are not suited to 
certain trades; for a woman is by nature fitted for 
home work, and it is that which is best adapted at 
once to preserve her modesty, and to promote the 
good bringing up of children and the well-being of 
the family." 

The payment of a living wage alone can keep the 
Christian family intact. A living wage, in the defin-
ition of Pope Leo, is one that enables the workman 
"to maintain himself, his wife, and his children in 



10 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 10 

reasonable comfort." A living wage is one that 
allows some small surplus, after the necessary ex-
penses of the family are defrayed, to be set aside for 
the sudden vicissitudes of life and for protection 
against the disabilities of sickness and old age. It 
is the family which regulates the amount of a living 
wage, and not the wage which regulates the number 
of a living family. The wage that prevents the 
working man from maintaining his family in de-
cency and proportionate comfort, the wage that 
necessitates the presence of the wife and children 
in the labor market, is not a living wage. It is a 
homicidal wage, with the family as its wholesale 
victim. 

The Encyclical on the "Condition of Labor," 
which we commemorate today, is not then a mere 
charter of the isolated workingman's right to jus-
tice. It is all of that and more. By its insistence on 
the priority of the family over the State and the 
welfare of the family as the highest good of the 
State and the maintenance of the family as the first 
duty of human toil, the Encyclical is eloquent with 
the Church's universal and constant interest in the 
primary unit of all civilization. To drift away from 
the concept of the family as developed by the Ency-
clical, to refuse to take the family as the basis of 
the distribution of the fruits of labor, is to deny 
the spirit and letter of the Encyclical, just as much 
as to insist on the inevitability of class warfare 
between capital and labor. In the Encyclical of Leo 
XIII, the Church stands out against the tyrannical 
State and against the tyrannical industrialist, as 
the greatest defender of the family known to man. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 11 

THE CHRISTIAN HOME 
Address delivered on May 22, 1932 

Home is the loveliest word in all the myriad 
languages of mankind. When there is no home, 
the fire of human genius grows cold, the weight of 
human achievement grows heavy, the attractiveness 
of life grows empty, the spaces of the soul become 
a desert. Home is the stage setting for the drama 
of life. We begin our lives in a home; we live our 
lives in a home; we shall give up our lives in a 
home. To live better and to die better we must 
ennoble our concept of the home. 

Against the gray though sometimes golden walls 
of history two pictures of two homes stand out in 
pathetic contrast. One is the picture of the proudest 
home erected by the genius of man before the coming 
of Christ. It is the home of the ancient rulers of 
the civilized world. It is the tabernacle to which 
the leaders of the legions of Caesar returned after 
they had trodden on the bodies of their fallen ene-
mies. It is the refuge whither the senators and 
patricians of Rome retired when all day long they 
had debated on the safety and security of the empire. 
It was surrounded by the protection of the Roman 
law and ornamented by the presence of household 
gods beside its hearth. It was subordinate to the 

, field of battle and the oratory of the senate chamber 
and the business of the market place. It received 
little mention in the classic literature of antiquity. 
It is too little investigated by the modern historian. 



12 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 12 

Wars and the rumors of wars, kings and the descen-
dants of kings, laws and the infractions of laws, 
still crowd too thickly the accounts of bygone civil-
izations. The heart of civilization is the home. 
The function of civilization is the family. The 
flower of civilization is marriage. Without that 
Roman home there could have been no permanent 
peace, no shining accomplishment, no external glory, 
no historical magnificence of the empire. 

The home that we shall visit in imagination is not, 
however, the product of our imagination. It is an 
historical reality based on excavated facts. Time 
and the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius have preserved 
its physical outlines. In the year 79 rivers of lava 
from Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of 
Pompeii at its base. For seventeen hundred years 
the frozen lava preserved its treasury of homes un-
disturbed. In the eighteenth century the lava was 
removed. There, stripped of its stony sarcophagus, 
was revealed the Roman home as it existed in the 
days when the name of the Caesars was a catchword 
of power, and when the power of the Caesars made 
their name prominent amidst all mankind. 

The home that we enter is the house of a citizen 
of Rome, one of the few who controlled the destiny 
of the many, who were slaves. We pass through the 
door into an open courtyard, the atrium, which re-
minds us of the courtyards in the center of many of 
our modern apartment houses. Around it are the 
rooms of the family. In its center is a fountain 
whose laughing waters flirt with the marble statue 
of some Roman goddess. Her silence and serenity 
seem to say that she is oblivious of the beauty of the 
waters before her, and indifferent to the tide of life 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 13 

that splashes and surges around her. There are 
magnificent paintings upon the walls. There is the 
sound of birds in the shrubbery, and the blowing of 
flowers in the garden, and the busy noise of slaves, 
and the laughter of children, and the humming of 
home life which even the thunder of a conquering 
empire cannot efface. 

Within that home which the destructive volcanic 
force of Mount Vesuvius has so strangely preserved 
for us, everything is regulated by the will and whim 
and caprice of the husband. He is lord and master 
of all he surveys. He is king and priest. The home 
is his temple. Hel has power of life and death over 
his children. His wife is distinguished from his 
slaves by the love he bears her, but her time and her 
activities and her ministrations are just as complete-
ly and just as slavishly within his absolute control. 
Perhaps he lived in the days when the husband could 
divorce his wife at will. Perhaps he lived in the 
days when the birth of a female child was distaste-
ful. No matter when he lived, the wife and the chil-
dren of a Roman home were mere extensions of his 
personality. No power could determine his attitude 
towards them. No religious belief that he enter-
tained impressed upon his mind the mutual sacred-
ness and respect of their relationship. No poetical 
idealism which he gathered from the literature of 
the ages held up the home as the source of all happi-
ness and the sanctuary of life's loveliest accomplish-
ments. Love and obedience and order and comfort 
might be present in his home, but there was nought 
bf religious tenderness or spiritual equality or sa-
cred affection. What mattered it that he, the Roman 
husband, was derelict in his marital obligations. The 



14 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 14 

lives of his gods as depicted in literature and ac-
cepted by the state, were full of marital infidelities. 
He was no better and no worse than his gods. 

Beside that picture, grim in outline and gray in 
texture, is the picture of the home that we have 
known, in the midst of which we have lived, and to 
which all men must turn anew today, if they hope 
to save anything from thé volcanic wreckage of civ-
ilization that surrounds them. The home to which 
our tired footsteps gladly turn is not the home of a 
slave. Thank God, since the coming of Christ, hu-
manity has multiplied its freemen. The home which 
is our proudest production may not be as lavish as 
the home of our Roman patrician. There may be 
no courtyard with blowing flowers and laughing 
fountain. There may be no Roman goddess in 
serene but silent marble. There may be no magnifi-
cent paintings upon the wall. There is but one mag-
nificent painting upon the souls of those who consti-
tute that home. It is the portrait of Christ. 

It is that portrait which distinguishes the Chris-
tion household from the Roman. It was the coming of 
Christ that revolutionized the concept of the home 
because it was the coming of Christ that revolution-
ized the status of woman. In Greece and Rome 
woman was but a very negative factor. She was the 
breeder of children. She was the source of the 
State's man power. Only those who' had sold their 
womanhood for gold were honored for a little while, 
by those who used them while they abused their 
wives. In the teaching of Christ, in the pronounce-
ments of the Church, woman was a very positive 
factor. Her birth was just as important a thing as 
man's. Woman had a soul to save, thoughts to be 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 15 

elevated, emotions to be controlled, dreams to be 
realized. God alone, and not her husband, and not 
the law, and not even the empire, was to be the mas-
ter of her soul. To woman Christ and the Church 
restored what ages of paganism had taken away 
from her; her spiritual sovereignty and her domestic 
equality. 

On that basis and on that basis alone were the 
homes of the world refashioned in the institution 
known as the Christian family. The Roman home 
had but a remote and impersonal connection with 
religion. Religion merely trespassed as an official 
across its threshold. The Christian home became 
a tabernacle of religion, where the passions of man 
were to be controlled by the purity of Christ, where 
obedience was to be clothed in the tenderness of 
Christ, and where the power of the husband over 
wife, and the power of both over children, was to 
be exercised in the charity of Christ. The greatest 
treasure of the Roman home was the symbol of its 
household gods. The greatest treasure of the Chris-
tian home is the grace of Christ in its builders. The 
greatest' member of the Roman home was the hus-
band or paterfamilias. The greatest member of the 
Christian home is the personality of Christ. 

The gods of Greece and Rome, as the poets 
tell us, were only happy when they had left their 
mansions on Mount Olympus and wandered in 
satisfaction of their base desires across the world. 
Christ, who is our God in fact and not in litera-
ture, identified Himself, for our sakes, with a 
human home. He was born in a rocky cave sur-
rounded by the first Christian family. He lived for 
thirty years, subject to His mother and foster fath-



16 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 16 

er, within the quiet precincts of that home in Naz-
areth, where the presence of God was as lavish as 
the air, and where the peace of God was as fragrant 
as the unfolding of springtime flowers. At the mo-
ment of His death, within the bed chamber of Cal-
vary, upon the pillow of His cross, He thought of 
home, and gave His mother to Saint John, and Saint 
John as son to His mother, to perpetuate the home 
that His birth had founded. 

For us who follow Him, religion must be no 
mere official or unwanted visitor within the home. 
Religion must cross the threshold and remain there, 
to brighten the walls with holy pictures, to cleanse 
the atmosphere with holy thoughts, to fill the souls of 
all home dwellers with holy peace and aspirations. 
Statesmen still look to Roman law and organization 
for their guidance. Generals still study the military 
tactics of Caesar. Artists still copy the statues of 
Roman goddesses to grow supreme. We who have 
but a little time and less genius to create must look 
to Christ the home builder as our model. In all 
phases of domestic activity we must be guided by 
His teachings. Only then can our home become life's 
greatest contribution to mankind. Only then shall 
our homes remain to win us eternal glory, even as 
the homes of the buried city of Pompeii outlived 
the conquests of Caesar and his name. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 17 

S & 3 - ¡ S a i l 
TWO IN ONE FLESH 
Address delivered on May 29, 1932 

Marriage is life's most important contract. It 
is not what the stage depicts it to be. Happy mar-
riages do not form thé theme of our modern drama, 
presuming, of course, that we have anything modern 
approaching the status and dignity of drama. The 
essence of all dramatic writing is struggle : struggle 
between man and the forces of nature ; struggle be-
tween man and man in the arena of business or 
politics or love or war. Consequently, happy and 
successful marriages offer no inducement to the pen 
of the dramatist or the emotional art of the actor. 
Marital virtue, marital loyalty, marital sacrifice find 
little place or encouragement behind the footlights 
or within the changing scenes of our modern photog-
raphy of motion. 

Nor is marriage what the State assumes and de-
crees it to be. According to the Domestic Relations 
Law of most of our States, marriage is a contract, a 
mere agreement between two parties, a man and a 
woman, to live a life in common. The consent of the 
participating parties alone is necessary to establish 
it. On the other hand, we sometimes find the courts 
of an individual State attempting, in their judicial 
opinions, to inculcate the doctrine that the contract 
of matrimony is a peculiar one, laden with great per-
sonal responsibilities, fundamentally altering the 
lives of its participants, and fraught with momen-
tous possibilities of good for the commonwealth. 

The best statement of this idealistic attitude is 
found in the words of the United States Supreme 



18 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 18 

Court, in the case of Maynard v. Hill. "Marriage," 
Mr. Justice Field therein declares, "is more than a 
contract. The consent of the parties is of course 
essential to its existence; but when the contract to 
marry is executed by the marriage, a relation be-
tween the parties is created which they cannot 
change . . . It is an institution, in the maintenance 
of which in its purity the public is deeply interested, 
for it is the foundation of the family and of society, 
without which there would be neither civilization 
nor progress." 

The matrimonial legislation of the various States 
of our Federal Republic is not always in harmony 
with this idealistic attitude of the United States 
Supreme Court. Most of the States, it is true, sur-
round the beginning of matrimony with some sort of 
ceremony. The young couple must apply at the 
office of the city or town clerk for a marriage license. 
They must truthfully answer questions relative to 
age and parentage and occupation and health. They 
can present the license, when secured, only to those 
recognized by law as capable of performing the 
marriage ceremony. Should they, in their own 
conceit, be so "liberal-minded" and so "progressive" 
and so "intellectual" as to be free from the so-called 
slavish bonds of religion, they may have the ecstatic 
happiness of becoming man and wife in the white-
washed, uncarpeted, loft room atmosphere of a city 
hall or a village court. What a legal anti-climax 
to the romantic climax of their courtship! 

Not a word is spoken here of the duties of mar-
ried life. Not a mention is made of the responsi-
bilities of married life. Not a syllable is whispered 
of the sacred character of the marital obligation. Not 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 19 

a plan is suggested for the future guidance of the 
family. The performance of the purely civil con-
tract of matrimony is not much different in cere-
mony or formality from the scene which takes place 
at the signing of a contract to sell goods or at the 
closing of title for the purchase of real estate. It 
assuredly does not involve the formality and cere-
mony which surrounds the incorporation of a bank 
or railroad or a great industrial enterprise. Greater 
care is taken and greater advice is given and greater 
warnings are suggested at the birth of a big business 
than at the birth of a home. 

The negligent attitude of the State at the incep-
tion of the home is emphasized, almost to a criminal 
degree, by the failure of the State subsequently 
to be interested in the welfare of the married 
couple. One of the principal purposes of marriage 
is the birth of a family. The State makes no effort 
whatsoever to apply its sovereign power to the 
realization of that purpose. The majority of the 
sections of the State's Domestic Relations Law deal 
with the dissolution of marriage. Few of the mat-
rimonial sections of the State's Civil Practice Act 
refer to anything save the method of affecting such 
dissolution. The State does not extend to the mar-
riage status anything like the helpful supervision 
which it exercises in the guardianship of infants 
or the execution of a charitable trust. While the 
State has no right to assume exclusive and inherent 
jurisdiction over the formation or interpretation of 
the marriage contract, it should, however, surround 
the contract of marriage when legitimately perform-
ed before her with something of the dignity with 
which it surrounds the inception of other and lesser 



20 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 20 

contracts. The State should be interested in the 
preservation of the! marriage bond far more than it 
is interested in its dissolution. 

For us Catholics, marriage is what Christ decreed 
it to be. Christ hallowed the contract of marriage 
by His presence at the marriage feast of Cana of 
Galilee, when He gazed upon the waters as they 
blushed to wine. Christ raised the contract of mar-
riage to the status of a sacrament, as such took it 
away from the jurisdiction of the civil power, and 
placed it within the jurisdiction of His apostles and 
their corporate successor, the Church. He gave it 
a sacred character, not to increase the obligations 
of married life but to render the fulfillment of all 
marital obligations much easier. In the teaching of 
Christ, as in the practice and preaching of the 
Church, Marriage, like Baptism, Confirmation, Pen-
ance,-Holy Orders, and all the Sacraments, is a sign 
and source of eternal grace. The names, the prom-
ises and the performances of the married couple 
become inscribed upon the record book of God. 

There can be no better beginning of married life 
and no greater prophecy of a happy family, than a 
sincere and faithful compliance with the require-
ments of the Church. As the custodian of the Sac-
raments of Christ, the Church has placed around the 
sacramental contract of matrimony a dignity and a 
ceremony and a formality far different from the 
empty ritual of the State. The Church, in the 
interest of the Christian family, warns her women 
not to select for their life partners men whose lives, 
religiously speaking, are a failure. Our young girls 
are not asked to wait for the coming and courting 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 21 

of saints. They are asked to place no faith in men 
who have no faith in God. They are bidden not to 
trust their lives to men who have broken trust with 
.God; not to give their love to men who have no love 
for Christ; not to unite a heart of sacrifice with a 
heart of sin. They are urged to select as the foun-
dation of the Christian family, the solid rock of 
sacramental truth, and not the shifting sands of 
human passion. The girl who refuses to take this 
moral warning into consideration is making the 
risk of matrimony a far greater gamble than the 
ordinary circumstances and personalities of life may 
indicate. She is throwing aside a Supreme Court 
whose primary interest is the family, and to whose 
counsel and judgment her future husband may some 
day agree to submit when the coercive power of love 
has somehow mysteriously melted away. 

The Church, through her parish priests, instructs 
the loving couple in the nature and duties of married 
life. She emphasizes the family as the primary pur-
pose of their union. She insists that they be married 
before the priest and two witnesses, whenever any 
one of them or both of them be a Catholic. She 
draws them within the sacred arms of the sanctuary 
as a sign of the sacramental graces with which the 
arms of Christ will enfold them. When our young 
Catholic men and women enter upon the status of 
matrimony as the Church desires them to do, they 
are doing their utmost to make their own lives 
happy, and to make their family an asset to civiliza-
tion and the commonwealth. If marriage be sur-
rounded by the ceremony of the Church and the 
grace of Christ and the sincerity of the individual, 
it is securing a momentum of spirituality and a tide 



22 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 22 

of sanctity that will remain with it through the 
storm and sacrifices of the years to come. To begin 
well does not always mean to end well; but to begin 
wrong is nearly always equivalent to ending wrong. 

The Christian family then takes its characteris-
tics from the' quality of the marriage that begot it, 
even as a stream reveals the lucidity and purity of 
its bubbling sources. The attitude of men and wo-
men towards marriage is fundamentally their atti-
tude towards the family. When marriage is a mere 
experience, the family is blighted at its source. When 
marriage is a contract, the family is assured of in-
ception. When marriage is a sacrament, and it is 
always that for those who are baptized, the family 
is closest in purpose and plan and perfection to the 
Nazarean home of Mary and Joseph and Jesus. 

By her insistence on the sacramental status of 
Matrimony the Church has rendered her greatest 
gift to all divisions of humanity, irrespective of their 
allegiance or aversion to her. Her Christian heri-
tage of marriage and family life has been able to 
increase the stream of life despite the indifference 
of the modern State, and to cleanse it of all poison 
from the tributaries of our modern press and stage. 
The Church respects all marriages: those that are 
merely civil contracts between unbelievers, and those 
that are sacraments as well, because contracted by 
baptized believers in Jesus Christ. Above the dis-
sonance of life the Church hears forever the words 
of God in the morning of creation: "For this cause 
shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave 
to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh." 
Above the delusion of life the Church sees forever 
the sacramental presence of Christ at the marriage 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 23 

feast of Cana in Galilee. In the mind of the Church, 
free love is the negation of the family. Sacramental 
love is the Christian family itself. 



24 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 24 

TWO IN ONE SPIRIT 
Address delivered on June 5, 1932 

The favorite occupation of the last half of the 
nineteenth century was war. Its favorite philosophy 
was pessimism. The shadow of Schopenhauer loom-
ed like a giant dragon across the horizon of men's 
minds. The sentimental shoddiness of man's spirit 
broke through the gorgeous robes of such poetry as 
Oscar Wilde's. It reached its apotheosis in Edward 
Fitzgerald's translation of the quatrains of Omar 
Khayyam. The Sermon on the Mount yielded in 
attractiveness and force to such lines of lovely hope-
lessness as these: 

"We are no other than a moving row Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the sun-illumined lantern held In midnight by the master of the show." 
More hurtful to the Christian regime than all 

the expression of pessimism was its source. The 
sinister theory of Charles Darwin and his popular-
izers filtered through men's souls like poison from a 
snake bite. Throughout the nineteenth century the 
natural sciences of astronomy, geology, comparative 
anatomy, physics and chemistry, made rapid pro-
gress. Had they maintained their proper channel 
and been influenced by their own proper tide, science 
would have merited our sincerest admiration. 
Science, however, was not allowed to remain single 
in its domicile. The evolutionist who believed that 
in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdom all 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 25 

present species evolved, without the intervention of 
a living God, from some species long ago, seized upon 
the new scientific advances and abducted the sciences 
to prove his evolutionistic hypothesis. The mind of 
humanity was tainted by the forced and unnatural 
union. "Contemporary literature," as a prominent 
Catholic scientist wrote, "officiai teaching of all 
grades, scientific popularization under all its forms, 
have propagated the materialistic thesis, which 
maintains that for the world there is neither begin-
ning nor end ; it is eternal ; it evolves by its own in-
herent powers from the atom to the human con-
science. Hence there is absolutely no need of a God 
to create." In the nineteenth century science, coerc-
ed by evolution, lost its own independent vitality. 
Wherefore science committed suicide. Evolution 
evolved itself into mental tyranny. 

Evolution was the last concerted philosophic 
attack upon the sacred institutions of humanity. 
Three centuries before, the ecclesiastical institution 
founded by Christ became the object of man's pas-
sidnate hatred. The freedom of man's soul would, 
no longer brook any supernatural control. The 
Church was presumably buried at the cross roads 
with a rotting stake in her heart, symbolical of hu-
manity's religious suicide. But two other institu-
tions remained to fetter the spirit of man. One 
was the Christian family. The other was the Chris-
tian State. We have lived to see them both the tar-
get of the poisonous arrows of materialistic evolu-
ion which denies the word of God in the beginning, 
in the end, and through the whole gamut of exist-
ence. No mere contribution of applied science to 
humanity, no mere mechanical discovery that has 



26 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 26 

made life easier or more comfortable, no mere in-
vention that has cheapened and increased the pro-
ducts of human labor, can ever make up for the de-
vastating effects of that philosophic tyranny and 
error that corrupted the idea of the Christian 
Church and the Christian State and the Chris-
tian family. Their innate truth and strength 
alone have prevented their annihilation. As 
ideals they stand unbroken like rocks that resist 
the tremendous poundings of the sea. In prac-
tical life they have been seriously maimed and 
mangled by the theory of popularized evolution. The 
world has been reduced by the pseudo-scientist to 
the status of a kennel for the housing of an ancestral 
animal known as man. 

When we contemplate the forced violation of the 
Christian family by the housebreaker known as evo-
lution, the wonder is not that there have been so 
many defeats, but that there have not been as many 
more. Mankind is ever ready to take the ways of 
least resistance. Lust is easier and quicker and 
more profitable than love, because it involves no 
duties or responsibilities. The nineteenth century 
made love identical with lust. Mysticism yielded to 
misery. Sacramental marriage was to become so 
much scientific breeding. Fortified by the newer 
scientific belief that men were only animals on a 
great trek from savagery, and not indissoluble spirit 
and flesh on a great march towards God, the scarlet 
queen of lust was crowned on the skeleton throne 
of a pagan philosophy. 

No inheritance of man then, was so shaken and 
threatened by the advent of the theory of evolution 
as the Christian family. Where there is no spirit, 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 27 

there can be no love. Where there is no love, the 
only foundation of marriage can be lust. Where the 
only foundation of marriage is lust, then assuredly 
it is tyranny to incarcerate two human beings in the 
bonds of marriage, when, because of the death of 
lust, the home has become a prison morgue. When 
the Christian tradition of the sacredness of mar-
riage had been set aside, it was futile to speak of 
the spiritual purposes of marriage, and more futile 
to expect that the cross-pollination of humanity 
would result in the blossoming of a child. When, 
according to the teaching of the evolutionist, there 
was no spiritual sound to the symphony of life and 
no spiritual harbor at the lone sea's end, marriage 
as the union of two in one spirit was madder than 
the maddened dream of a madman. 

If the scientific tendency of the nineteenth cen-
tury had been content with the status and designa-
ion of a theory, if it had been satisfied with its own 
laboratory of test tubes, the Church would have al-
lowed it to flounder in the darkness of its own exper-
imentation. When, however, it presumed to enter 
the realm of ethics and religion, when" it cast its 
baleful shadow across the classroom, when it tres-
passed across the threshold of the home, when it de-
manded belief in itself as the price of some shadowy 
and unsubstantial salvation on earth in the coming, 
age, the Church girded herself with the truth of 
Christ for the conflict. She assumed the right and 
the duty to revolt against the presumptuous blas-
phemy of Haeckel when he said: "Man who exalted 
himself to be the son of God is found to be only a 
placental mammal." In the interests of an unsus-
pecting public as well as of her own children, she de-



28 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 28 

nounced the same pagan dogmatism when it ap-
peared in the columns of a popular magazine some 
years ago. "Aldous Huxley," said a literary critic, 
"is in search of love but he can find only ridiculous 
and obscene biological facts, for love, like God and 
the other most important human possessions, does 
not exist." Out of the fen lands of such thoughts 
as these has been begotten the serpent brood of free 
love and companionate marriage and childless un-
ions, which are alike in their denial of God and in 
their repudiation of the sacredness of that love 
without which the Christian family can never have 
a beginning. 

The love which is at the foundation of the Chris-
tian home is not the offspring of the flesh. When, 
in his condemnation of divorce, Christ spoke of 
Christian marriage, He alluded to those, "whom 
God hath joined together." When the greatest apos-
tle in the early Church, Saint Paul, called marriage 
a "great sacrament," he pointed to the love which 
Christ had for His Church and the mystical union 
of Christ with His Church, as the prototype of the 
love which the husband must have for the wife in 
the creation of the Christian family. In the estab-
lishment of the Christian home spirit must be joined 
to spirit, as well as flesh to flesh. Since man is both 
spirit and flesh, any less union between the creators 
of the Christian home is an impossible and an ab-
normal and a severable one. The spirit can not be 
satisfied with mere union of the flesh, nor can the 
union of flesh be permanent or productive without the 
union of the spirit. It is unscientific as well as un-
christian to expect two individuals to live together 
and love together and last together, when at the 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 29 

very outset their affection is mathematically divided. 
Had the pseudo-scientific investigator of the nine-
teenth century taken into account the twin nature of 
man, had he realized what his own introspection 
would have proved to him, he would not have fallen 
into the hopeless fallacy and the hideous experiment 
of reducing the marriage status to the transitory ex-
perience of the jungle. 

The Church does not minimize the element of 
human love in marriage. She exalts it because she 
knows that true love is a thing of the spirit as well 
as of the flesh. Both must be present or else neither 
can endure. Against the insidious conclusions of the 
nineteenth century, now woven into the poetry and 
education of our own, the Church insists that mar-
riage is not synonymous with emotional love alone. 
From the purely human point of view the love that 
inaugurates marriage can not help but change its 
emphasis of expression as the years go by. Love, 
as the poet knows it, stands dominantly upon the 
threshold of matrimony and opens the door and 
floods the rooms with golden splendour. Throughout 
the early days of married life the expression of 
emotional love may be in the ascendancy. All other 
affections are merged in its tidal wave. The first 
fine fury of emotional love, however, can not last 
forever. Its emotional climax comes early. As it 
wanes, like the moon, the expression of spiritual 
love must rise like the sun. Spiritual love is more 
lasting than emotion and more enduring than pas-
sion. Happy the man and woman who realize that 
this love of spirit is more than half the. battle in a 
successful married life. 

In the dawn of the world God created emotional 



30 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 30 

love to people the earth and realize His dream of a 
created humanity. In the dawn of Christianity 
Christ consecrated spiritual love to people the Chris- | 
tian home and made it the prophetic tabernacle of 
heaven. God created the waters. Christ changed 
them into wine. It was for the sake of this spiritual 
love that Christ raised the union of humanity's 
emotions in the contract of marriage to the dignity 
and status of a sacrament. In marriage, as well as 
in all life's other activities and relationships, the 
spirit is to be superior to the flesh, both blessed 
however by the sacramental grace of Christ. 

As the foundation of the Christian family, then, 
marriage is to be the union of two in one spirit even 
more than the union of two in one flesh. Those who 
have lived marriage successfully are never tired of 
congratulating the Church for opposing the nine-
teenth century's exaltation of the flesh and its denial 
of spirit. They know with a conviction more assur-
ing than any hopeless evolutionistic argument can 
hope to attain, that the decline in emotional love 
must be counter-balanced by an increased expression 
of the spirit. The existence of both, flesh and spirit, 
alone can beget the Christian family. The existence 
of both, flesh and spirit, alone can produce that 
deeper love, a thing of the spirit more than of the 
flesh, whose light shines in the eyes of old married 
couples, and whose beauty seems to say in the words 
of Browning: 

"Grow old along with me; The best is yet to be." 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 31 

TWO IN ONE FAILURE 
Address delivered on June 12, 1932 

The present world is a panorama of tremendous 
failures. We are fond of pointing to the collapse of 
capitalism in America and of wondering what form 
of economic and industrial structure will rear itself 
upon the crumbling ruins. We are fond of noting 
the seeming inability of democracy to grapple with 
the fundamental needs of mankind and of judging 
what change is about to take place in the structure 
and function of our political institutions. The great-
est failures in modern life, however, are those of the 
spirit. A bruised spirit is worse than a broken body. 
The collapse of married life through divorce is worse 
than the collapse of capitalism or the tottering of 
democracy. 

In its simplest terms divorce means that a man 
and a woman have made a failure of their wedded 
lives. Once, with open eyes and yearning hearts, 
they entered upon the sacramental status of mar-
riage. Once, each to each and forever, they pledged 
their lives, their love, their cooperation, their devo-
tion. Once, they took each other for better or for 
worse. Once, they faced the problems of life to-
gether. Now, by their petition, they acknowledge 
that the problems of life have conquered them. Now, 
they seek to give the lie to their solemn promises. 
Now, they tell the world that neither of them had the 



32 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 32 

intelligence or the stamina to surmount the waves 
of misunderstanding. Once, they set out across the 
sea of human existence together. Of their own free 
will they unfurled the sails. Of their own free will, 
perhaps, they brushed aside the admonition of par-
ents and the advice of friends and the warning of 
those who were capable of directing them. Now, 
they would come back separately, with sails furled 
and authority divided and dreams wrecked and the 
ship of life itself damaged almost beyond repair. 

They can never come back to their former unmar-
ried status. They are social bankrupts. Like busi-
ness or commercial bankrupts they carry around 
with them the reputation of defeat. They are an 
anomaly in society. They pretend to have dissolved 
the marriage contract in order to regain the status 
of single blessedness. The history of divorce shows 
that such a protestation is a subterfuge. The 
divorcee has no intention of remaining alone. At the 
first appearance of resurrected emotion the divorcee 
is ready to fly into another binding obligation which 
generally proves as unsuccessful as the first, but in 
consummating which he is fortified by the knowledge 
that a second failure may likewise result in a second 
dissolution. From the purely human point of view 
it would be interesting to investigate how many 
second marriages of divorcees are actually happy 
and successful. If newspaper accounts be worthy of 
any belief, we are forced to admit that the man or 
woman who has made a failure of the first marriage 
too often makes a failure of the second. The decree 
of divorce, then, does not merely dissolve a solemn 
contract. It opens the way to a whole series of mat-
rimonial failures and defeats. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 35 

Individually, relatively few divorcees are ever 
happy after the issuance of their decree. They can-
not divorce themselves from the memory of that 
splendid faith and hope and love in which they first 
were married. They cannot divorce themselves from 
the prick of conscience which in its own intimate 
and inimitable way points out the issues that they, 
the married couple, might have settled by a little 
understanding and a little spiritual love, without 
submitting their troubles to the indifferent adjudica-
tion of a divorce court. They cannot divorce from 
themselves the thought of their children growing up 
apart from the family atmosphere wherein they 
were begotten, or learning, upon coming of age, that 
the love between their father and mother was suf-
ficient to beget them, but not sufficient to beget the 
marital sacrifices so necessary for the preservation 
of the Christian home. 

Children who are deprived of a proper education, 
because of the narrow-mindedness of their parents, 
have a right to subsequent revolt against such crim-
inal neglect. Children who reach manhood or 
womanhood with some physical deformity, because 
their parents, though able, refused to make the nec-
essary financial sacrifices to cure them, have like-
wise a reasonable basis to withold the respect in 
which their parents should ordinarily be held. In the 
same way, children who have been deprived of that 
home atmosphere which only the united presence of 
father and mother can create, have a right to re-
volt against the selfish processes of divorce. 

To the latter proposition, of course, there are cer-
tain bona fide exceptions. The Church is not tyran-
nical in her legislation. The husband who is guilty 



34 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 34 

of cruelty, the husband whose presence is a constant 
menace to the peace and security of his wife, has 
no right to remain within the precincts of the 
Christian home. He is neither a fit companion for 
his wife, nor a fit guardian for his children. The 
home is better off without him. His removal, by 
separation alone, may even be the means of reform-
ing him and of later renewing the Christian family 
when his disposition and mode of living shall have 
changed. 

The ordinary atmosphere of divorce involves no 
such impossible personalities or impossible situa-
tions. The dominant theme of the ordinary divorce 
is selfishness. The main motive of the ordinary 
divorce is the desire to be freed of the duties of mar-
ried life. The fact that there are more divorces 
amongst the rich and the middle classes than 
amongst the poor is competent if not convincing 
proof of that tragic indictment. Separation, without 
any attempted dissolution of the marriage bond, is 
sufficient to rid the home of an objectionable wife or 
an objectionable husband. Divorce, with the privi-
lege of attempted remarriage, is but an incentive to 
the guilty party to continue his or her philanderings, 
and a denial of those family rights to which children 
are entitled even more than the parents. 

Because of the human failure of divorce, it is al-
most inconceivable that any sovereign power should 
recognize divorce on the basis of public policy. 
Public policy should direct its energies to the main-
tenance and preservation of all contracts. Public 
policy does not allow the buyer of real estate to re-
pudiate his contract, simply because in his own un-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 35 

influenced judgment he made a bargain which later 
proves distasteful to him. Public policy might well 
be. satisfied with decreeing a judicial separation 
where because of the character or activities of the 
husband or wife, it is humanly impossible to main-
tain the marital association or bring up children in 
the proper atmosphere of peace and love and moral-
ity. By dissolving the marriage bond and permitting 
remarriage public policy is a direct and criminal ac-
complice in the perpetration of life's greatest public 
failure. 

That unfortunately is the attitude of public policy 
in nearly all the sovereign states of our American 
Republic. There is only one State in the Union which 
refuses to dissolve marriage. That is the State of 
South Carolina, where no divorce has been permitted 
since 1878. In every other State divorce is permitted 
by judicial decree for reasons ranging from adultery 
in New York, cruelty and drunkenness and abandon-
ment and a host of reasons elsewhere, to mere men-
tal incompatibility in Nevada. We have not yet 
reached that loose and licentious degradation of 
public opinion which holds sway in modern Soviet 
Russia, and which permits the married couple to 
dissolve their marriage by mutual agreement. When 
that day comes, though God grant it may never come, 
public policy shall have entered into a shameful 
alliance with private lust. 

This divorce legislation of America is a greater 
and more sinister blow at our country's institutions 
and safety than all the red oratory that illuminates 
our street corners or all the rumblings of revolt in 
our communistic centers of despair. Because of our 
marriage ideals we Catholics are amongst the great-



36 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 36 

est defenders of modern America. We refuse to 
admit that a marriage once validly entered into and 
consummated can ever be dissolved. Again and 
again we have pointed out this cancer of decay. Once 
admit the slightest reason for divorce and the way 
is open for the spectacle which confronts us in too 
many of our sister States. It is no uncommon thing 
fo r a married couple who cannot secure a divorce in 
one State to move to another State and take up resi-
dence for the sole purpose of dissolving their mar-
riage. It is no uncommon thing for a man to be con-
sidered married by one State and unmarried by 
another. 

To such a confusing conclusion the United States 
Supreme Court gave its approval in a certain cele-
brated case. A husband left his wife in the State of 
New York and became a resident of the State of 
Connecticut. He obtained a decree of divorce in 
Connecticut, where he remarried. His wife was 
never brought before the Court. In a later suit, 
instituted by the abandoned wife for judicial sep-
aration, the husband offered the Connecticut decree 
as a defense. The Court of New York refused to 
recognize it and the case went to the United States 
Supreme Court, where it was decided that the State 
of New York was not obliged under the Federal 
Constitution, to recognize the Connecticut divorce. 
As long as New York failed to recognize it, the 
same man was married to one woman in Connecti-
cut and to another woman in New York. 

No such confusion greets us when we consider the 
attitude of the Catholic Church towards divorce. Her 
teaching is the teaching of Christ. No teaching of 
Christ is so clear and convincing as His pronounce-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 87 

ments against divorce. To lessen His influence 
among the people, the Pharisees called the bills of 
divorce that Moses permitted, to His attention. Not 
even the might or the magic of the name of Moses 
could silence Him. "Because Moses," He said, "by 
reason of the hardness of your heart permitted you 
to put away your wives : but from the beginning it 
was not so." "And I say to you," Christ continued, 
"every one that putteth away his wife and marrieth 
another committeth adultery; and he that marrieth 
her that is put away from her husband, committeth 
adultery." There is no hedging, no pretense, no ex-
cuses, no condoning cause for divorce in these words 
of Christ. They are the sum and substance of what 
we Catholics call the indissolubility of marriage. 
They are the proclamation of Christ that a valid 
marriage once entered into cannot be dissolved for 
any reason short of the great reason for the dissolu-
tion of all life's relationships, death itself. Above 
the decrees of our law courts, more eloquent and sin-
cere than the United States Supreme Court itself, 
is the command of Christ: "What therefore God 
hath joined together, let no man put asunder." 

The Church's legislation against divorce is no 
mere human legislation, passed to penalize those who 
have made their marriage a failure. It is divine 
legislation directed to the preservation of the Chris-
tian family. In the creation of that family God has 
certain sacramental rights. In the maintenance of 
that family the children have certain inalienable 
rights. To preserve and safeguard those rights the 
Church like Christ insists that each valid Catholic 
marriage and each valid non-Catholic marriage is in-
dissoluble. She provides for separations in well 



38 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 

recognized and well deserving cases. She refuses to 
relinquish one jot or tittle of the matrimonial teach-
ings of Christ. She consecrates the union of two in 
one flesh and in one spirit. She refuses to consecrate 
or encourage or tolerate the union of two in one 
failure. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 39 

A WOMAN'S TRIUMPH 
Address delivered on June 19, 1932 

Again and again through life we hear the proud 
and patronizing statement that woman is totally 
subordinate to man. The inference has generally 
been that man is made in the image and likeness of 
God, so woman is made in the image and likeness of 
man; that as man must direct all his activities to-
wards God, so woman must direct all her activities 
towards man. To refute that generalization, which 
is not the teaching of the Catholic Church, we need 
only turn to the description of creation. 

In the twenty-seventh verse of the first chapter 
of the Book of Genesis we read: "And God created 
man to his own image: to the image of God he creat-
ed him: male and female he created them." Here, 
in the very beginning, there is no inferiority of 
honor or prestige or position between the sexes. 
Here the word "man" is used in the generic sense, 
embracing both sexes, the male and female alike. 

Not until we reach the eighteenth verse of the sec-
ond chapter do we come upon that scene which man 
in his false pride has indelibly engrafted upon his 
mind and which he presents from time to time in 
presumed biblical justification for the attitude of 
masculine superiority which he entertains towards 
woman. "And the Lord God said: It is not good for 
man to be alone; let us make him a help like unto 
himself... Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon 
Adam; and when he was fast asleep, he took one of 



40 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 40 

his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God 
built the rib which he took from Adam into a wo-
man; and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: 
This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; 
she shall be called woman, because she was taken 
out of man." The reading of these lines discloses 
nothing inferior or subordinate in quality as far as 
the creation of woman goes. Adam was formed from 
the slime of the earth. Not until that slime had be-
come a rib did God decide upon the creation of wo-
man. Woman was merely second in time. In the 
mind of God where there is no time, the second 
thought is coequal with the first. 

Nor, according to the biblical account, was wo-
man fashioned to be the slave of man. A helpmate 
is not a slave. A helpmate is a partner. Man and 
woman constituted the initial partnership of the 
human race. Each had to act in the interests of the 
partnership. Disassociated from the partnership 
of a life in common, each stood equal before the eyes 
of God. Whatever subordination was imposed upon 
woman by reason of her physical structure, was 
purely for the benefit of the partnership as such, 
and not for the benefit of man as an isolated individ-
ual. Where woman is subordinate to man for the 
sake of this partnership, the ideal of the Christian 
family is realized. Where woman is subordinate 
to man simply for the sake of the individual man, 
the threshhold of free love has been reached, or the 
tyranny of the past has been duplicated. 

The fact that the rights of women were delayed 
recognition so long in the history of the world has 
been due to the tyranny of man and not to the plan 
of Almighty God. Until modern times all civiliza-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 41 

tions represented more or less a denial of thè proper 
status of woman as revealed in the creative verses 
of the Book of Genesis. Many times the Church was 
obliged to tolerate such tyranny. Never did she 
adopt it or encourage it. The inferior position in 
which the common law of England and our own 
country placed married women, was based on the 
theory that husband and wife were one legal person. 
Consequently a wife could make no contract with 
her husband. She could hold no property apart 
from him. Her earnings belonged to him. Although 
she remained the legal owner of any real estate pos-
sessed by her before marriage, all the rents and 
profits of such real estate were the property of her 
husband. -Her personal property was absolutely 
within his dominion. Upon her death her heirs could 
make no claim to it. 

No married woman could sue in the law courts 
independently of her husband. This disability 
reached its most sandalous conclusions in the sub-
ject of marital rights. Whenever the wife's affec-
tions for - her husband were destroyed the husband 
might sue the wrongdoer for the alienation of such 
affections. Whenever a third party was guilty of 
adultery with his wife, the husband might sue the 
wrongdoer, for criminal conversation. Whenever, 
for any reason, a third party deprived the husband 
of the services of his wife, a civil suit for such loss 
of services might be instituted by the husband. 
When, however, the wife was the injured party and 
the husband the guilty accomplice in the commission 
of adultery, no suit could be maintained by the wife 
against the wrongdoer for criminal conversation. 
Nor could the wife sue for the alienation of her hus-



42 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 42 

band's affections. Nor can she yet sue for the loss 
of his services. As was pointed out in Blackstone's 
Commentaries, the great legal bible, so to speak, of 
the English Common Law, the legal inferiority of 
the woman was deemed to bar any interest in the 
affection or chastity of her husband. She could not 
sue without joining her husband as a party plaintiff, 
and it was not to be expected, even from such an 
heroic sex as the male, that the husband who had 
allowed his affections to be alienated or who had 
sinned against his marriage vows, would join as 
party plaintiff against the third party with whom 
he was already joined in affectionate or adulterous 
relationship. 

Today nearly all of these legal disabilities 
have been removed by statute in every one of the 
constituent states of our great American Republic. 
Today a woman may sue and be sued in her own 
name. She may sue a third party for committing 
adultery with her husband and for alienating his 
affections. Today she may hold and enjoy the rents 
and profits as well as the title to any real estate pos-
sessed by her before marriage or acquired there-
after. Today all her personal property belongs to 
her. Today she can make a will without the per-
mission of her husband. Today she may contract 
with every one, even with her husband. Today the 
married woman is no longer a legal slave. Today 
she has become what God Himself wished her to be 
when He created her in the morning of the world, 
what the Church proclaimed her to be in the noon-
day of Christianity, and what she herself must con-
tinue to be until the night-time of existence has 
pome: the helpmate of man, the equal of man as an 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 43 

individual, the partner of man in the great partner-
ship of the human family. 

The woman of today at the pinnacle of her 
triumphs, with outlets for all her faculties and 
genius, is face to face with another danger. She 
runs the risk of sacrificing her greatest triumph in 
allegiance to that which is merely secondary and 
transitory. All her accomplishments, all her eman-
cipations from the spiritual slavery of paganism and 
from the industrial, educational, political and legal 
subordination of our earlier modern era, are as 
nothing compared with the great calling for which 
she has been physically fashioned, towards which 
she emotionally tends, and from which she is being 
diverted by the pagan philosophy of the present. 

No woman judge or lawyer or physician or leg-
islator can compare in efficiency, in contribution to 
civilization, in permanency of influence, with the 
woman who has answered the most intimate bidding 
of her soul and set out, God willing, like the cru-
sading knights of old, upon the grand and glorious 
career of Catholic wifehood and womanhood. She 
may be obliged, perhaps, to sacrifice her individual 
aspirations. Counterbalancing this loss will be the 
two, three, four and five-fold contribution of her 
sons and daughters to humanity. Happy the woman 
who can hold public position or give public service, 
and not simultaneously neglect the prior claims of 
home and husband and household. Happier the wo-
man who, unable to serve two masters, is willing 
to set aside the selfish yearnings of her heart for 
the preservation and progress of that immutable 
unit of all civilizations—the Christian family. 

The Church never indorsed the legal disabilities 



44 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 44 

of woman as represented by the Common Law, nor 
accepted in her own moral theology that attitude 
towards woman upon which it was founded. In the 
teaching of the Church sin is neither male nor fe-
male. In the teaching of the Church the only valid 
subordination of woman to man is the biblical subor-
dination so necessary for the human family. As a 
wife, a woman is not the mere outlet for the passions 
of man. As a partner in the marriage relationship, 
she is the helpmate of man and the procreator of 
future generations. Upon entering the marriage 
status, both man and woman must subordinate all 
individual activities for the realization of the high 
ideals and purposes of that relationship. The Com-
mon Law overemphasized the subordination of wo-
man to man in the marriage status. The common 
philosophy of today over-emphasizes the independ-
ence of woman to the detriment and destruction of 
the Christian family. 

The normal vocation of woman is wifehood. The 
greatest triumph of a woman is motherhood. Without 
children the Christian family is imperfect. Without 
children there is no dominant reason for the con-
tract or sacrament of matrimony. Companionate 
marriage falls by its own definition. Companionship 
depends upon alternate absence and association for 
its attractiveness. Marriage depends upon constant 
intimacy and legitimate procreation for its success. 
Companionate marriage is equivalent to saying that 
there can be temporary permanency or permanent 
uncertainty. 

The Christian family participates in the crea-
tive activity of God. There are no joys in all the 
world so deep and satisfying as the joy of a man 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 45 

upon becoming a father or the joy of woman because 
a child has been born of her. The most thoughtless 
debutante is a willing witness to this truth, once she 
has experienced the joys of Christian motherhood. 
Without the sound of children's feet upon the stairs, 
and children's heavy breathing in the nursery, and 
children's laughing voices through the day, the 
Christian family for those who are responsible for 
childlessness is a family with nobody in it and a 
house with a broken heart. 

While glorying in the possession of her newly-
found freedom, woman must use that freedom in the 
interest of that higher vocation to which she has 
been called from the very beginning and to which 
she is dedicated whether she will it or not, until the 
end of time. Only then will she dissolve the dark-
ness of our modern paganism by the light which 
streams from her motherly countenance. Only then 
will she give to the world the greatest gift of which 
she is capable : the treasury and the triumph of her 
motherhood. 



46 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 46 

THRESHOLDS OF POVERTY 
Address delivered on July 3, 1932 

There are some wrongs in life that men forgive 
but never can forget. One of them still lingers 
like a spectre in the Southland. It is not the recol-
lection of those starving years wherein the line of 
gray that faced the line of blue dissolved into the 
merest skeleton of opposition. It is not the thought 
of Lee's surrender at Appomattox. It is not the 
defeat of the Civil War. It-is the name and per-
sonality and memory of General Sherman. Across 
the plains and hills of Georgia his army marched 
triumphantly from Atlanta to the Sea. When he 
passed, the ruined homes of Georgia stood like 
black charred tombs against the sky. 

The crime of Sherman against the South has 
been the crime of modern industry against the 
world. Before the existence of the factory the 
home was the center of industry as well as of life. 
Husband and wife and children were in constant 
contact every hour. No matter how hard their 
mode of life may have been, it was sweetened by 
the constancy of home companionship. Poverty 
may have lingered within the domicile, but the 
peace of the Nazarean home was there to brighten 
the face of poverty. Poverty may have stripped 
the cupboard bare, but the peace of home associa-
tions filled heart and soul and mind to overflowing. 
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, fac-
tories poured their thick and grimy smoke against 
the sky. Homes were emptied of their wage earn-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 47 

ers. Around the walls of factories men clamored 
for employment. Within their foul, ill-smelling 
depths, men labored, divorced from the sight of 
sunlight and the smell of flowers and the tranquil 
domesticity of their firesides. 

It was only for a little while, however, that the 
factory system kept father and mother and chil-
dren apart. Too soon, for the health and happi-
ness of each of them, were they united. Industry 
reached out across the seas to backward countries 
whose raw products were so necessary for the 
greedy and tireless stomachs, of machinery. In-
dustry likewise reached into the rooms of every 
cottage in the land and every house in the city 
streets for the precious members of the Christian 
family. Since wages were low all members of the 
home had to cooperate as wage earners. The feet 
of children, of five and six years of age, were 
heard in pitiable rhythm throughout the dark and 
coaldust laden atmosphere of dangerous mines. 
The eyes of mothers grew dim above the spinning 
looms. Husband and wife and child were again 
together, not in the private sanctity of the home 
but in the public degradation of the factory. 

The pagan capitalist had taken the loveliest 
product of God's creation, the human family, and 
severed it for his individual profit and pleasure. 
Women no longer had time to accept the respon-
sibilities of motherhood. What profited it them if 
they did ? The flesh of their flesh and the blood of 
their blood became so much more added sacrificial 
material upon the altar of economic tyranny. 
Fathers no longer had time to supervise the de-
velopment of their households. Tired with the long 



48 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 48 

day, that began in darkness and ended in darkness, 
they reached home to indulge in the forgetfulness 
of drink or succumb to the transitory unconscious-
ness of sleep. Children no longer had time to re-
tain their childhood. The loveliest period of their 
life was robbed of its dreaming and its playful-
ness. The innocency of their souls was stained by 
economic association with those who sinned through 
despair, even as the brightness of their cheeks was 
bleached by the unwholesome man-made air that 
surrounded them. The factory had become their 
home. The mine had become their nursery.- Ma-
chines had become their playthings. Despair had 
become their daily dream. 

For the crime of disrupting the human family 
all lovers of humanity must forever denounce the 
abuses of the beginnings of modern industry, even 
as the children of the Southland denounce- the 
abusive march of Sherman's army. When mother 
and child were forced to work to supplement the 
scanty wages of the father whom God had ap-
pointed the natural wage earner of the family, the 
plan of God in the creation of the human family 
was marred and blackened almost beyond recogni-
tion. There can be no Christian home unless 
parent and child are together day by day. There 
can be no Christian home unless the father receives 
a living wage sufficient to maintain the constant 
companionship of the home. The civilization that 
can boast of skyscrapers and yet permit foul tene-
ment slums to blossom like weeds along the water-
fronts and within the crowded areas of our cities, 
deserves no eulogy from the lips of man. The in-
dustrial system that gives no more than the indi-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 49 

vidual wage earner is able to demand of it, the 
industrial system that refuses to take the family 
needs as the basis of labor's participation in its 
profits, is a greater enemy to the Christian family 
than war or disease or famine or poverty or death. 

The paganism of the birth of the Industrial 
Revolution lay not in its material transformation 
of the world but in its refusal to recognize the dig-
nity of labor. Few of the founders of big business 
admitted with Pope Leo XIII that "there is noth-
ing to be ashamed of in seeking one's bread by 
labor." Few remembered, in the words of the same 
pontiff, "that the blessings of nature and the gifts 
of grace belong in common to the whole human 
race and that to all, except to those who are un-
worthy, is promised the inheritance of the King-
dom of Heaven." • Few had the moral courage to 
agree with him as he said: "when there is question 
of protecting the rights of individuals, the poor 
and helpless have a claim to special consideration 
. . . and wage earners, who are undoubtedly 
among the weak and necessitous should be especi-
ally cared for and protected by the common-
wealth." 

No sane lover of humanity can desire to return 
to the age when the home was a complete economic 
and industrial unit in itself. Time does not turn 
backward in its flight. Humanity has been bene-
fited by the march of years. Life has grown 
mechanically much easier. Knowledge has become 
winged. Information encircles the globe with the 
rapidity of wireless. The great mass of humanity 
in our western hemisphere receives at least the ele-
ments of education. The glory of God has revealed 



50 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 50 

itself in the growth of skyscrapers as well as in 
fields of waving wheat. The State has expended 
its energies in social and industrial legislation for 
the benefit of the workingman. Christianity has 
penetrated the heart and soul of many a capitalist 
who considers the workingman his brother in 
Christ and who lavishes his charity upon all 
humanity. 

Despite these facts the world today is reaping 
the harvest of its failure to sow Christian prin-
ciples deep in the minds and souls of leaders of a 
bygone age. Take any economic reasons alleged 
for the present depression, and we are brought face 
to face with a common denial of religion and 
morality which lies beneath every one of them. 
Whenever the employer has refused to give the 
employee a fair share of the profits of his busi-
ness, it has been because of greed and avarice and 
a failure to realize that because of his wealth he is 
in a special manner his brother's keeper. When-
ever wealth has been amassed in this country at 
the expense of those who dwell in unutterable pov-
erty, it has been because of the pagan philosophy 
that possession of this earth's goods alone sp.ells 
heaven. Whenever certain bankers have allowed 
their banks to become so many gilded gambling 
dens, where the hard earned savings of the poor 
have been squandered in the speculations of the 
rich, it has been because of a denial of all respon-
sibility to God. The modern world has collapsed 
because God has been removed as the .cornerstone 
of industry and of life. 

The Church has no indictment against wealth 
and capitalism as such. The Church, speaking 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 61 

through the Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII, 
insists upon the sacredness of private property. 
The Church maintains that the rich have rights as 
well as duties, privileges as well as obligations. 
The Church has indicted our modern form of in-
dustry only when the -leaders of modern industry 
have refused to be controlled by the justice and 
charity of Christ. She refuses to glory in sky-
scrapers so long as one Christian home disinte-
grates and collapses. Monuments of industry, she 
proclaims, must not be erected upon the ashes of 
ruined homes. For her the Christian home is the 
only valid unit of earthly existence. No form of 
industry must ever interfere with its rights and 
privileges. Poverty induced by economic oppres-
sion must never be permitted to interfere with the 
birth of children or the duties of father and mother 
within the home. The Christian home cannot exist 
without the spirit of Christ. Nor can the Chris-
tian home exist where the spirit of economic 
slavery traces its handwriting of poverty and 
despair upon the walls. 

Upon the ruins of our present industrial system 
a newer industrial structure will inevitably be 
raised. Christianity must have a prominent part 
in the erection of this newer industrialism. The 
principles of wage insurance and workman's com-
pensation and old age insurance and copartner-
ship between employee and employer are Christian 
doctrines enunciated by that great Pope of Labor, 
Leo XIII, and by his illustrious successor, the pre-
sent pontiff, Pope Pius XI. As the representative 
of the Christian family the Christian laborer must 
insist upon the christianization of industry. Mod-



52 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 

ern economic reform must exalt the family above 
the factory, and the child above the capitalist. 

Like the troops of Sherman the army of modern 
industry has violated too long the homes of our 
common humanity. It is time for the peace loving 
population of Christianity to rebuild those homes, 
even as the sons and daughters of the Southland 
have restored the homes that the ravaging army of 
Sherman once leveled to the ground. No matter 
what principles our newer form of industry may 
adopt, Christian principles must, be present, or 
else our present economic despair shall only die to 
live again. No longer can industry be the architect 
of the home. The Christian home, with its human 
trinity, is the only licensed architect of life. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 53 

FORGOTTEN VIRTUES 
Address delivered on July 10, 1932 

It is not the walls which make a garden. It is 
the flowers blowing clouds of incense across the 
grass. It is not the walls of a house which make a 
home. It is the wealth of domestic virtues cluster-
ing within. The laws of most civilized states merely 
attempt to preserve the family skeleton intact. They 
do nothing to nourish the flesh and blood of home 
existence. Only the Catholic Church assumes the 
role of gardener, as she steps through the arbored 
archway of each Christian home, to till the soil im-
pregnated by Christ's sacramental grace, so that the 
flowers of -forgotten virtues may bloom forever 
there. 

Most houses are not destroyed by sudden tor-
nadoes. They are not worn away by tramping feet 
upon the stairs. They are not burned by glowing 
lights within the windows. Most houses fall to 
ruin through decay. They seem unable to bear the 
weight of emptiness or listen to the tragic sound of 
silence. Much quicker than the house which holds 
it, the home must likewise yield to emptiness and 
silence. There is no greater enemy in the home 
than the pagan silence which locks the mouths and 
freezes the hearts of those whose love should beget 
an endless symphony of kindly thoughts and deeds 
and words. To live in the midst of such pagan si-
lence is to dwell upon a grim unmelting iceberg, in-



54 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 54 

creased by every tide of life that flows around ft, 
swelling in weight and volume until at last the icy 
mass has split the walls and broken loving hearts 
upon its icy cross. 

Love should never defeat itself by silence. Where 
is the man or woman who does not recall with ten-
derest recollection the softest whisperings of affec-
tion in courtship time? Where is the married man 
or woman the happiness of whose married life is 
not bound up with the constancy of spoken devotion? 
The husband or wife whose lips are coldly silent do 
more to harm the happiness of the home than all the 
disease that may some day pollute its healthy atmos-
phere. In these days of rational psychology, when 
all men know so much about the human mind, it 
seems so strange that a husband should fail to 
realize the necessity of love's expression. How 
tragic it is for the woman ultimately to conclude 
from her husband's petty vengeful silence, that, after 
all, his protestations of love were merely passion! 
How tragic it is for her to discover that outside the 
home her husband is the soul of geniality, while 
within the home his raspy voice is never loosened 
except in petty quarreling! Even then the sound of 
his voice seems immeasurably better than the silence 
of the breakfast table behind a paper, or the silence 
of the evening hours behind a pipe, or the silence 
of the night times she spends alone. How can the 
Christian home endure, when no look or word or 
deed of kindness dissolves the drudgery of the day? 

The life of Christ, which is the model of the 
Christian home, was replete with the eloquence of 
love. We have never been fully told about the beauty 
of the home of Nazareth. We can only suspect the 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 55 

whispered love that passed so often between its 
holy members.' We do know the love Christ lavished 
upon His apostolic household. The members of that 
godly domicile were old men and tired men and 
worn out men. They had given up all things for 
Christ. They had left their fishing nets flapping in 
the waves, their comrades and their relatives crying 
in the dusk. For that Christ resolved He never 
would upbraid them. He taught them and lived 
with them. He saw to the nourishment of their 
bodies and the supernatural development of their 
souls. They were with Him always. Never once 
did He speak to them unkindly. Never once did He 
rebuke them. Not even when Peter denied Him did 
He burst forth into righteous indignation. He 
looked at Peter and begot in the eyes of Peter a well 
of tears. He looked at Magdalen and begot in the 
soul of Magdalen a furnace of love. He looked at 
Mary and John, down through the blood-clotted vis-
ion of the cross, and begot in the hearts of Mary 
and of John the domestic affection of the Christian 
home. 

Beneath the cross of life, today, each married 
couple stands like Mary and John. The love of each 
married man for his wife should have something of 
the love that each man holds for his aging mother 
throughout the years. The love of each married 
woman for her husband should have something of 
the love that a mother always possesses for her son. 
Such love can never know the paganism of silence. 
Passion satisfied is always steeped in silence. Love 
unsatisfied is always vibrant with expression. The 
sacramental love of marriage is no such limited crip-
pled thing, like the gasp of a drowning man, as 



66 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 56 

that which forms the theme of our modern movies. 
It is love in all its aspects. It is a jewel with a thou-
sand facets. It is the eloquent love which Christ had 
for His apostles, and which He bade John to have 
for Mary and Mary to have for John as they stood 
at the foot of the cross. 

If that love be present in the hearts of married 
couples, the forgotten virtue of respect will likewise 
blossom there. The modern pedagogical world 
makes no attempt to analyze respect or develop it in 
the souls of our younger generation. Human love 
alone is supposed to be the secret of marital success. 
Human love alone is supposed to contain all marital 
virtues in its being. Yet, no virtue of Christ can 
survive unless it be isolated in the mind of man, de-
tached from the weeds of passion, and individually 
nourished in his soul. Virtues are not shapeless airy 
things which cling to human love like iron filings to 
a magnet. Each virtue needs a special plan and 
method and accomplishment. Men do not merely 
become good in the Catholic Church. They become 
patient and kind and pure and just and charitable. 
Not until the soul has run the gamut of every virtue 
does the Catholic Church look upon its work and 
call it good. 

Within the garden of the Christian home the 
flower of respect should shine ever brilliantly. The 
respect of children should be something more than 
lip service. Respect means the constant rendering 
of little services by children to their parents: the 
placing of chairs at the table, the free-will offering 
of tiny helps, the graceful greetings of morning tide 
and evening tide, the little surprises of love's ex-
pression that children can be taught as easily as their 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 57 

games. The home that is hallowed by childish cour-
tesies is blessed by the grace of God. No stranger 
crosses the threshold without detecting it. No chil-
dren cross the threshold outward bound without 
spreading the influence of such domestic courtesies 
far and wide, until at length in adult years it sur-
rounds and penetrates the homes that they them-
selves are called upon to build. 

The respect which children bear their parents, 
however, is only a reflection of the respect which 
they observe their parents bearing to each other. 
Childhood is the time of imitation. The husband 
who lacks the common courtesies which every man 
should show unto a woman, the courtesy of holding 
her wraps upon departing, the courtesy of allowing 
her to precede him through the doorway, the cour-
tesy of rising when first she enters the room, the 
courtesy of first helping her at table, the courtesy of 
greeting and addressing her respectfully, must ex-
pect no similar courtesies on the part of his chil-
dren towards their parents or towards one another. 

The Christian home is not merely a place to sleep 
and eat. The Christian home is a tabernacle of 
Christ's sacramental grace. Like the tabernacle of 
the altar, the tabernacle of the home should be lined 
with gold of eternal love and dressed with the white 
and silken drapery of respect. The care which the 
parish priest lavishes upon the altar should find its 
imitation in the care which husband and wife should 
lavish upon the home. Both are born of respect. 
Both result in a deeper respect for the inhabitants 
of the tabernacles. 

When domestic courtesies such as these are pres-
ent in' the home, the poorest home becomes a treas-



58 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 58 

ury of happiness. Without them, the wealthiest 
home along the wealthiest avenue in the world de-
generates to the status of the pyramids: a monu-
ment that houses the crumbling ruins of the dead. 
The domestic courtesies which the Church reveals 
as marital virtues, are more conducive to happiness 
than a retinue of servants. They sweeten the meals 
in common more effectively than the highly paid ser-
vices of English butlers or the highly seasoned dish-
es from French kitchens. The giver of courtesies is 
blessed even more than the recipient. 

Since salvation is the eternal purpose of our 
existence, surely Christ meant the home to be a 
constant training place for virtue. We are not 
called upon to do heroic deeds in life. We are only 
asked to take the opportunities of each day and 
mint them by the grace of God into the golden coin 
of eternal currency. The home is alive with the 
seeds of forgotten virtues. Courtesy is the means 
of blossoming them into flowers. The home that 
lacks domestic virtues is boarded up, windows and 
doors, with the sign of pagan emptiness and desola-
tion. The home that is filled with domestic virtues, 
no matter how dark its depths or bare its walls, is 
filled with the breath of spring and the glow of love 
and the peace of Christ eternal. 

In this as in so many other things, the Catholic 
Church stands out as one of the greatest benefactors 
of all humanity. She proclaims the necessity of do-
mestic kindness and domestic respect and domestic 
courtesy to all the world. Little mention of them is 
found throughout the myriad pages of classic litera-
ture. Little stimulation to practice them can exist 
jn a civilization that facilitates the anarchy of di-



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 59 

vorce and minimizes the importance of children. By 
her denunciation of divorce and birth control, the 
Church has strengthened the Christian home from 
without. By her insistence upon the forgotten vir-
tues the Church has strengthened the Christian 
home from within. Only by the practice of these 
forgotten virtues can the dwelling place of man 
approach the immutable happiness of "home, sweet 
home." 



60 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 60 

A NATION'S STRENGTH 
Address delivered on July 17, 1932 

• 
The greatest leaders in America have not been 

its captains of industry. The greatest institutions 
of America have not been its banks. The greatest 
buildings in America have not been the skyscrapers 
which pierce the clouds with their fingers and which 
step down, as it were, into the waters of New York 
harbor to welcome the incoming citizen and his 
family. The greatest institutions and the greatest 
buildings of America have been its homes, scattered 
across our beautiful countryside or clustering by the 
thousands upon the acres of our crowded municipal-
ities. The greatest leaders in America have been 
the fathers of homes and the heads of families. This 
year we celebrate the bi-centeriary of the birth of 
him who is indisputably America's greatest citizen. 
When we think of Washington, our first associated 
thought is not the battlefield, nor the law court, nor 
even the White House. With the name and person-
ality of Washington we immediately link the quiet 
rambling Mount Vernon house, on a Virginia hill 
above the Potomac, which was his home. 

As in the time of Washington, so today, America 
is face to face with the fundamentals of existence. 
A little while ago we were drunk with the wine of 
big business. A little while ago we were the cap-
tains of world trade. A little while ago we were 
living the seven years of feasting in the land of 
Egypt. Today we are living the seven years of 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 61 

famine. The streets are echoing with the footsteps 
of idle laborers. The world has forgotten its luxur-
ies. Humanity is crying out for bread. False lead-
ers fail to analyze the true issue that lies before us. 
It is not the issue between Republican and Demo-
crat. It is not the issue between wet and dry. It is 
not the issue between capital and labor. It is the 
oldest issue in the history of the world. It is the 
issue between law and lawlessness, between govern-
ment and anarchy, between civilization and decay. 

No institution can resolve that issue in our 
country's favor so perfectly and so completely as thè 
Christian home. The Christian home is based upon 
an absolute respect for law and order. The walls 
of the Christian home are solidified by religion. The 
atmosphere of the Christian home is purified by 
morality. The cross of Christ is on its walls. The 
day opens and closes with prayer. The model of 
the Nazarean home is ever before it. Obedience to 
God and the State and the Church is the cardinal 
principle of its activities. 

Because of obedience the Christian home is a na-
tion in miniature. There can be no valid nor vir-
tuous citizenship where there is neither authority 
nor obedience to authority. Authority is the right 
which an individual or an organization possesses to 
compel the obedience and cooperation of those in 
whose interest the authority is held and exercised. 
Authority itself must have a basis in which it in-
heres, out of which it grows and unto which it de-
velops and progresses. By what right, in other 
words, do governments compel the obedience of their 
subjects? Is it by right of conquest? Is it because 
of fear ? Is it because of the mere utilitarian philos-



62 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 62 

ophy that obedience to government renders the 
course of trade more successful and the conduct of 
our every day existence more materially fruitful 
and secure? Or is it merely because within the 
breast of every group and individual there is an 
instinct of dependence that finds its most honorable 
expression in submission to those who have been 
established as the guides and guardians of public 
welfare? 

To accept any one of the foregoing reasons ex-
.cept the last as the sole basis of obedience is to 
deny or at least to demean the spiritual nature of 
mankind. To assert that fear or force or oppor-
tunism or material success fundamentally accounts 
for the peaceful relationship that must exist be-
tween ruler and subject, is to render the life of 
every government precarious and to make every in-
dividual a potential anarchist, whenever his pri-
vate gain or personal feelings come in conflict with 
the declarations and decisions and course of gov-
ernment. 

The government of the Christian home alone 
furnishes the proper model for good citizenship. 
Who is the parent who will allow his child to rest 
obedience upon the purely material basis of pro-
tection or gain or comfort? Who is the parent who 
can be satisfied with mere servile obedience, with 
observance of domestic laws, and regulations 
through filial fear alone? No home can long exist 
wherein the religious background of love and duty 
and obedience is extinguished and submerged. And 
no nation, which is composed of homes, can long 
exist, if in the minds of its citizenry there is no 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 63 

higher warrant of respect for law than individual 
comfort or pleasure or fear. 

It is at this juncture that the Christian home 
plays its dominant part in the training of the citi-
zenry of tomorrow. The Christian home recognizes 
God as the source and summation of all life's activi-
ties. The Christian home insists that the ultimate 
authority behind the commonwealth, like the au-
thority behind itself, is God. The Christian home 
is the enemy of criminal anarchy. In the cloudy 
passionate mentality of criminal anarchy no 
governmental authority has an immutable basis for 
existence. Men have the right to destroy any gov-
ernment that displeases them. The burden of proof 
is on those who would maintain it. In the cl^ar con-
cept of the Christian home all legitimate authority 
must be obeyed. The burden of proof is on those 
who would destroy it. Obedience to law is not a 
matter of private convenience or personal better-
ment; It is one of the essential components in the 
corner stone of all morality. 

That is why the Christian home has always been 
on the side of legitimately constituted government. 
That is Why the Christian home is loath to commend 
the forces of armed revolt. That is why the enemies 
of government direct their greatest efforts against 
the home. That also is why every government 
should make the home and the family the object of 
its finest legislation. During the past one hundred 
years legislation has too often been the monopoly 
of the individual industrialist. Laws have been 
passed to guarantee the accumulation of wealth 
rather than the more equitable distribution of it 
amongst the nation's homes. Legislatures elected by 



64 THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 64 

the "vested interests," have bowed to the avaricious 
programs of their masters, forgetful of the fact that 
the greatest vested interest in any land is the primal 
unit of civilization, the family. Governments do not 
exist for individuals. Governments exist for the 
preservation and development of the home. The 
government which surrenders its operations to the 
individual, sets up a tyranny of wealth on the one 
hand and the revolutionary menace of the criminal 
anarchist on the other. Peace and happiness and 
law and order are products of the home. 

Christ, who was welcomed in the Jewish homes 
of Palestine was crucified by individual fanaticism. 
The Jewish nation was not averse to Christ. The 
Jewish «people listened lovingly to His Doctrines. 
The Jewish Pharisees received Him at their table. 
The Jewish women held their children high above 
their heads so that Christ might see them and bless 
them as He passed. Not until Christ's preaching 
threatened the wealth and position of the Temple's 
leaders, did He court their individual enmity and 
revenge. A few men entrenched in power, fearful 
for the continuance of that power, were able to 
arouse the populace against its friend. The greatest 
deception was practiced upon the Roman govern-
ment. The Jewish leaders who hated the Romans, 
petitioned the Roman government to indict Christ 
for the false crime of treason, and to crucify Him 
in order to satisfy their individual resentment. The 
lover of homes succumbed to the hatred of indi-
viduals. 

The tragedy of Christ is duplicated in the history 
of every nation known to man. The home that is 
the strength of nations is neglected by the nation. 



THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY 65 

Individuals who use the nation, are stimulated and 
protected in their program of private aggrandize-
ment. Individuals who might be converted into 
heads of families by legislation favorable to the 
home, are allowed to nurse their wrongs in private 
until a million sparks of resentment have coalesced 
into a scarlet flame of national conflagration. No 
nation that has the slightest interest in its own 
preservation, can afford to tamper with the unity 
and sanctity of the home. The nation that facilitates 
the processes of divorce, the nation that sanctions 
the pernicious practices of birth control, the nation 
that fails to make the home the unit of industry 
and citizenship as well as of life, is signing its own 
death warrant and moving towards inevitable de-
struction. 

The home is the surest and safest tabernacle of 
patriotism. Washington the General is only sur-
passed in the love and affection of the American 
people by Washington the home lover. Throughout 
the nation today the replicas of his home at Mount 
Vernon are standing in our city parks. May they 
recall the true greatness of America. May they 
awaken the minds of all governments to the import-
ance of the home. The message of Mount Vernon is 
greater than the message of Valley Forge. The 
homes of a nation are greater than its history be-
cause its history is written by its homes. 



CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS OF THE CATHOLIC 
RADIO HOUR 

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the 
Studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New 
York City. March 2. 1930). 

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the 
National Council of Catholic Men and its Officials, and to all 
who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use 
this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy 
expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its 
musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of 
inquiries, must be met. That responsibility rests upon the 
National Council of Catholic Men. . . 

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States. 
To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to 
express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For 
this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly 
will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am 
sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic 
background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and 
with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-
tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . . 

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is 
no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that 
task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the 
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our 
country-men. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country 
who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material, 
and a more spiritual standard among our people. 

With" good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-
thy for us, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue. 
So may it be fulfilled. This work of dedication voices, there-
fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known, 
to explain with the charity of Christ, OHr faith, which we 
love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make 
better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing 
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine 
through Christ: pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating 
our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only 
justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques-
tioning hearts. 



CATHOLIC HOUR ADDRESSES 
OUR SUNDAY VISITOR is the au thor ized publ isher of all CATHOLIC HOUR addresses in pamph le t fo rm. The addresses published to date , all of which a r e still avai lable ( " T h e W a y of t he Cross" obtainable only f r o m the Nat iona l Council of Catholic Men), a r e listed below. Others will be published a s they 1 a r e delivered. 
" T h e Divine Romance," by Rev. Dr. Ful ton J . Sheen, 80 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $9.00 per 100. 
" T h e Moral Orde r " and "Mary , the Mother of J e sus , " by Rev. Dr. George Johnson, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $6.00 per 100. 
"A Trilogy on P raye r , " by Rev. T h o m a s F. Burke, C. S. P., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quan t i t i e s $5.00 per 100. 
" T h e Story of t he Bible," by Rev. Dr. F ranc i s L. Keenan, 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $6.00 per 100. 
" F o u r Religious Founders , " by Rev. Dr. F r a n c i s J . Connell, C. SS. R., Rev. Benedict Bradley, O. S. B., Rev. T h o m a s M. S'chwertner, O. P., Rev. Sigmund Cratz, O. M. Cap., and Rev. M. J Ahern, S. J . . 56 pages and cover. Single copy, price 15c post -paid. In quant i t ies , $6.00 per 100. 

" T h e Philosophy of Catholic Educa t ion ," by Rev. Dr. Char les L>. O'Donnell, C. S. C., 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $5.00 per 100. 
"Chr i s t i an i ty and the Modern Mind," by Rev. John A. Mc-Clorey, S. J. , 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $6.00 per 100. 
" T h e Moral Law," by Rev. J a m e s M. Gillis, C. S. P., 88 pages and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $9.50 per 100. 
"Chr i s t and His Church , " by Rt . Rev. Msgr. Joseph M. Corr i -gan, 88 pages and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaid. In quan t i t i e s $9.50 per 100. 
" T h e Marks of t he Church ," by Rev. Dr. J o h n K. Car twr igh t , 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $5.50 per 100. 
" T h e Organizat ion and Government of t he Church , " by Rev. Dr. F ranc i s J Connell, C. SS. R., 48 pages and cover. Single copy 15c postpaid . In quant i t ies , $5.50 per 100. 
"Moral Fac to r s in Economic Life ," by Rev. Dr . F ranc i s J . H a a s and Rev. Dr. John A. Ryan, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $5.00 per 100. 
"Divine Helps for Man," by Rev. Dr . E d w a r d J . Walsh , C. M., 104 pages and cover. Single copy, 30c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $11.00 per 100. 
" T h e Pa rab les , " by Rev. John A. McClorey, S. J . , 128 pages and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $12.00 per 100. 
"Chr i s t i an i ty ' s Contr ibut ion to Civil ization," by Rev. J a m e s M. Giliis. C. S. P., 96 pages and cover. Single copy, 25c postpaidl In quant i t ies , $10.00 per 100. 
"Mani fes t a t ions of Chr i s t , " by Rev. Dr. Fu l ton J . Sheen, 128 pages and cover. Single copy, 35c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $12.00 per 100. 
" T h e Way of t he Cross ," by Rev. Fu l ton J . Sheen, 32 pages and cover (prayer book size). Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $4.00 per 100. 
"Chr i s t Today , " by Very Rev. Igna t iu s Smith , O. P., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 16c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $5.50 p e r 100. 



t m ^ t 
- T h e Chris t ian Fami ly , " by Rev. Dr E d w a r d Ix>dse Cur ran 68 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quan t i t i e s $7.00 

Per 100. „ , „ r . „ , „ " T h e Dublin Euchar i s t ic Congress ," by Hi s Eminence Wil l iam Cardinal O'Connell. An add re s s r eb roadcas t f r o m Dublin 12 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid . In quant i t ies , $3.75 per 100. 
"Rura l Catholic Act ion," by Rev. Dr. E d g a r Schmiedeler , O. S B., 24 pages and cover. Single copy, 10c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $4.50'per 100. "Religion and H u m a n N a t u r e , " by Rev. Dr . Joseph A. Daly, 40 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $5.50 per 100. " T h e Church and "Some Outs tanding Problems of t he Day ," by Rev. Jones I. Corrigan, S. J . , 72 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $8.00 per 100. "Conflicting S t a n d a r d s , " by Rev. J a m e s M. Glllis, C. S. P . , 80 pages and cover. Single copy, 20c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $9.00 per 100. 
" T h e Hymn of the Conquered," by Rev. Dr. Fu l ton J . Slieen, 128 pages and cotfer. Single copy, 35c. postpaid. In quant i t ies , $12.00 per 100. " T h e Seven Las t Words , " by Rev. Pul ton J . Sheen, ves tpocket size, 32 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $3.00 per 100. " T h e Church and the Child," by Rev. Pau l H. Fur fey , P h . D., 48 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid . In quan t i t i e s $5.50 per 100. 
"The Lord 's P rayer Today , " by Very Rev. D r ; Igna t ius Smith , O P., 64 pages and cover. Single copy, 15c postpaid. In quant i t ies , $6.00 per 100. 

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