A MAN APPROVED
by LEO TRESE

“Use all care to present thyself to Cod as a man
approved, a worker that cannot be ashamed, rightly
handling the word of truth”
(2 Timothy II, 15)

SHEED & WARD
NEW YORK
1953

7

COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY SHEED & WARD, INC.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-5197

NIHIL OBSTAT
John F. Finnegan

Censor deputatus

Detroit, Oct. 6, 1952

IMPRIMATUR
❖ Edward Cardinal Mooney

Archbishop of Detroit
Oct. 7, 1952

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS
page
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

Vocation
My Mass
The Divine Office
Mental Prayer
Hearing Confessions
Preaching
Poverty
Chastity
Obedience
The Priest and the Mystical Body
Charity
Humility
The Apostolic Priest
The Priest andWorld Vision
The Passion
The Real Presence
Holy Hour
Queen of the Clergy
The End and the Beginning

1
6
15
21

26
36
46
54
63
73
82
90
99
108
114
125
130
137
144

A MAN APPROVED

1. Vocation

Why did I become a priest? It is a question
that is open to a glib reply. If I were speaking for the
edification of the faithful, I might be tempted to give an
answer only half honest. I might say that, in the idealism
of my youth, I responded to the high challenge of
Christ’s, “Come, follow Me”; that I chose to seek my
happiness in a life self-dedicated to the service of God
and the salvation of souls. Actually, of course, I myself
had very little to do with becoming a priest. I am a
priest because God wanted me to be one and saw to it
that I became one.
My own motives in the matter, if I am mercilessly
sincere with myself, may have been anything but noble.
My attraction to the priesthood probably had its roots
in the deep faith of my parents. Their reverence and
admiration for the “good Father” was so obvious as to
make the priest, in my eyes, the most important person
in the community. It was a position in life worth achiev-

2

A Man Approved.

ing. Maybe I could be a priest too, and have men doff
their hats to me and speak to me always with deference,
and give me the best pieces of chicken and the biggest
portions of dessert.
Then perhaps one of the priests of the parish took an
interest in me. His attention flattered me and enkindled
in me the hero-worship that is latent in every boy. I saw
him only from the outside, but what I saw, I liked. He
had a nice car, always new-looking. His hands and
clothes were always clean—none of the sweat and grease
and dirt that seemed characteristic of the jobs other
people had. And the priest always had time for ball­
games and swimming and the other things that seemed
to me an important part of life.
So I began to think that maybe I’d like to be a priest
too. And of course the first time I mentioned it at home,
my parents were manifestly proud and happy. They
were afraid to say anything that might influence me too
much, but they couldn’t hide their hopes. And the Sisters
at school got wind of it and took more notice of me,
and began to show me special consideration in a hundred
little ways. And my uncles and aunts and cousins, my
pals and—yes, my girl friends—all helped with the infla­
tionary process. Until I began to feel an important
person indeed, a chosen one, a marked man. And I
liked it.
Off to the seminary I went, and all through the years
of my studies many loving hands carried me carefully
on a cushion. Most of my chums went to work in auto
plants, or gas stations, or driving trucks. For myself, a
few Summer weeks spent working in the railroad car
shops or the corner grocery sent me hustling back to

Vocation

3

the seminary in the Autumn, only too glad to return.
Life moved on pleasantly, through philosophy and the­
ology. I loafed a good bit, improvising recitations and
boning up for examinations. I griped about the food
(which was costing me nothing), managed an occasional
show on a free afternoon, and added my pontifical bit
to the bull sessions at which we settled all problems of
souls and the Church.
With weekly confession and daily Communion, temp­
tations were not too obdurate in my sheltered life. And
so, almost before I knew it, I was up for subdiaconate,
and the fateful vow by which I would put the world
behind me. There was a moment of compunction and
worry right at the end; but my spiritual director quickly
pooh-poohed my scruples, and when the Bishop said,
“Huc accedite,” I took the step.
Then the final year spun past, as I practiced the Mass
and baptized the doll. Priesthood approached, and I felt
very holy in chapel and very inspired. But outside chapel
I was thinking
D far more about First Mass invitations and
souvenir cards and breakfast arrangements than I was
about the miracle that was going to happen to me. The
miracle happened, and my quiet father cried when I
blessed him, and gray-haired priests knelt to me, and I
was feted and all but adored. I was a priest, and I loved it.
And that is the history of one vocation. I do not claim
that it is typical. It leaves out, I know, many intangibles.
But I do not think it would be extreme to say that few
of us can claim, in honesty, that we are priests today
because, and only because, under a selfless and inner
compulsion, we have followed from our youth the
vision of God’s glory.

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A Man Approved

No. We are priests solely and only because God
wanted us to be. What kind of net God may have used
to draw us within the sanctuary gates does not matter
now. What motives, however human and worldly, He
may have used as levers upon our selfishness is no longer
important. It is enough to know that God, in a tre­
mendous mystery of unmerited love, finally got me
where He wanted me.
I once heard an unfortunate priest excuse his derelic­
tion on the ground that he only became a priest to please
his parents. As though that mattered. As though he
shouldn’t have been eternally grateful to God for having
used the likeliest tool that came to hand. As though
Nathaniel didn’t follow Christ, in the first instance, out
of curiosity; and Peter and James and John because they
hoped, in the Kingdom, to occupy the seats of the
mighty. It is axiomatic that God works through natural
causes. It isn’t the “how” of my priesthood that matters,
but the ultimate “why.”
That means God’s “why.” For reasons that only He
knows, God looked upon me and loved me. He hoped,
by successive graces, to arouse in me a corresponding
love—the amor amicitiae and the amor benevolentiae that
in time would make me truly one with Him. He has
succeeded, let us hope, to a degree. But the degree will
vary in each of us, according to the extent of our cor­
respondence, according to the generosity of our response.
“To him that hath shall be given.” As grace has builded
progressively upon grace, our priesthood has become
steadily more selfless, steadily more happy, steadily more
fruitful.
All that is required of us is that we hold ourselves

Vocation

5

receptive to God’s love. Our main duty is to remove
the obstacles—to peel off the asbestos, so to speak, so
that His love may have a chance to penetrate and warm
us through and through, melting the frost and germi­
nating the seed of spiritual life within us. No feverish
activity is asked of us, just that we give God a chance.
Either He will do the work, or it will not be done.
So we pray. Every day, and often through the day,
we listen for God’s Voice. No matter what problems or
worries we may have brought with us to altar or priedieu, we park them on the floor behind us. Whether it’s
building or finance or housekeeper or janitor troubles,
or a scandalmonger or a stubborn committeeman—they’ll
wait for us; and when we pick them up again, we are not
surprised to find they’ve lost a lot of weight. With minds
and hearts emptied of every possible distraction, we
shall be attuned to the Voice of His Love, Who can
speak so clearly, yet ever so softly; never forcing Him­
self into competition with any other voice.
And it will be in a spirit of generosity that I shall
come to my prayer. With a willingness to let God have
His way with me. I shall not be afraid to listen to His
Voice; afraid of what I might have to give up; afraid
that He might ask more than I am prepared to give. As
though God ever would ask that which is beyond my
present strength. Or rather, as though He ever would
ask anything of me without at the same time giving me
the needed strength. His love will be the Spiritus forti­
tudinis as well as the Spiritus Sapientiae.
Praying thus, with a recollected and a generous heart,
I think that I may, in time, grow up to my vocation.

2. My Mass

Sometimes we priests feel that we are very
busy men—and, within our own limited environment,
quite important persons. We may be in parish work,
instructing converts, visiting the sick, catechizing young­
sters, administering temporalities. Or we may be in school
work, developing minds, fashioning Christian leaders,
directing athletics, dramatics, the choir.
Whatever our particular field may be, we probably are
satisfied that we are doing constructive work, essential
work, priestly work. There may be some who chafe at
the feeling that they are stymied in their present job;
that they do not have the opportunity to do the really
great work of which they are capable. But for most of
us, such thoughts come, if at all, only in our darker
moments.
However, regardless of which group may claim me,
it is profitable for me to remind myself again and again
that there is only one thing 1 do which pertains essen-

My Mass

7

tially to my priesthood. There is only one thing that is of
transcendent importance, and that is my offering of the
Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. By eternal standards, nothing
else that I do matters much.
My assigned duties, insofar as they are the fulfilling
of God’s Will, may not be contemned. But a great deal
of what I do, I must confess, could be done by an intelli­
gent and a trained layman. This is true even of many
of my parochial duties. And what a layman couldn’t do,
God very readily could accomplish by other means; for
example, by a direct infusion of grace.
But not my Mass. Not my Mass. For that tremendous
act, God needs me. In His economy of salvation, nothing
else could take its place, and no one else could do it.
What would it matter even if I did feel myself frustrated
and bottled up in a dead-end job? I could be condemned
to doing nothing else but chopping wood all day long,
and my priesthood still would be a thousand times justi­
fied by the Morning Sacrifice with which each day
begins. We have heard it said that if we had lived, after
ordination, only long enough to offer once the Eucharist,
our long years of study and preparation would have been
well repaid. We have heard it said, and we know that
it is true. Not because of what that Mass would do for
us, but because of what that Mass would do for the
Church, for souls.
I need to nail that down fast to my consciousness.
That there is only one thing that really matters in my
day; only one thing by which I, as a priest, stand or fall,
and that is my Mass. By nature I may be an indifferent
speaker, preaching the “vera doctrina" in a stumbling
sort of way. Temperamentally I may be a rather inept

8

A Man Approved

teacher, fatiguing rather than firing my students. I may
be an untalcnted and inefficient administrator, hopeless
in the face of problems of maintenance and expansion.
But none of this matters, really.
Because the thing I’m ordained for, the thing I was»
called for, is something in which no one can top me!
Once each day I can stand upon the very pinnacle of
human existence, and there is no one above me, but only
God.
Isn’t it a pity, then, that so often I hurry through my
Mass, the one action of the day that really counts, as
though it were just an incidental to the day’s beginning?
As though it were only one detail among others, one
duty of many? A sacred detail, a holy duty, of course.
But one to be executed with dispatch, so that I can get
on to other and maybe “more important” affairs?
If I have dulled the luster of my Mass by a routine
attitude, the fault will lie, most probably, in my lack of
preparation. In human affairs, nothing of any importance
ever is undertaken without careful readying. Whether
it is a thief casing a layout, an insurance salesman ap­
proaching a prospect, or a lover planning to propose to
his girl—always there is spade-work.
Surely then in a matter of such supreme importance
as my mediatorship between God and man; surely as I
contemplate vesting myself with the Personality of
Christ—almost as though I were going to crawl inside
His skin and speak with His Voice—surely this, if ever,
is a time for preparation.
I shall not be condemned as an extremist, I know, if I
set a half-hour as the very minimum of time that I must
spend in anticipation of my Mass—not counting the time

My Mass

9

of my vesting nor the time I spend puttering around the
sacristy. Ten of those thirty minutes will not be too
much time for the careful formation of my intention,
for a recollection of the many persons and causes for
which I wish to offer my Mass. Nor for my effort,
above all, to identify my will with Christ’s in the Mass,
so that He and I may be one Victim. “Make Your Will
mine, O Lord. Even if I cannot see Your Will, even if
I fear It and try to blind myself to It, make me do Your
Will—in spite of myself, if needs be.”
No, ten minutes will not be too much for all this.
And then but twenty minutes are left for that very least
period of mental prayer with which my Mass should be
prefaced. For this, nothing else will substitute, if I am
to ascend to the altar in the full consciousness of my
priesthood. It is mental prayer alone that will make me,
Deo adjuvante, a little less unworthy of my partnership
with Christ.
I have never yet failed, through negligence, to make
my morning meditation, without feeling that I had
robbed myself irreparably of many Mass-bestowed graces
that might have been mine. Mass without meditation, it
seems to me, is somewhat like my Bishop making an
unheralded visit, and finding me sprawled in soiled shirt­
sleeves in an untidy room with a detective story in my
hands. All feelings of pleasure and satisfaction that such
a visit might afford would be dulled by stirrings of
uneasy regret.
Habits of neglect are so easily formed. The extra sleep
of one morning makes it so much easier to stay in bed
the next. The psychologist William James may seem a
strange sort of witness to call against myself. But who

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A Man Approved

could put it better than he (in his Principles of Psy­
chology): “The hell to be endured hereafter, of which
theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for
ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our
characters in the wrong way. ... We are spinning our
own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so little
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play,
excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, I
won’t count this time! Well! he may not count it, and a
kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted,
none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibres the
molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up
to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness,
wiped out.”
Not a bad sermon for a scientist to preach. I must try
to remember it tomorrow morning as I shut off the
alarm and start to roll over for another five-minute
snooze. It’s time I began to give those little molecules
something else to work on. And God’s grace something
more to work on, too.
So I have spent a fruitful half-hour in preparation for
my Mass, and I come now to the foot of the altar.
Introibo ad altare Dei. What will my Mass mean to me
today, and every day? Am I conscious of the fact that it
is no mere act of private devotion that I am about to
perform? Do I realize that the Church has placed in my
hands the collected and corporate love of every one of
her children, to be borne by me to the altar, to be there

My Mass

11

united with Christ’s own Love, and offered by Him to
God our Father?
My hands are to be Christ’s hands; my lips, His. By
my agency Christ is about to open a door upon Eternity,
so that today’s members of His Mystical Body may
hang with Him upon the Cross, united with Him in His
role of Victim. With God, I know, there is no time—no
past, no future; there is only the tremendous NOW. So
that there is a sense in which it is perfectly true to say
that Christ on the Cross hangs before God the Father
forever. And in the Mass Christ will accrete to Himself
upon the Cross, the whole Mystical Body by which He
lives in the world today.
Of these things I must be aware. Aware too that
through me, because of the intentions of the Church
which I make my own, God’s graces are going to flow
through me to Christ’s Church, and through His Church
to every least cell of His Mystical Body. It is a two-way
traffic, albeit a holy traffic, upon which I am about to
embark.
Surely then the essential disposition at which I must
aim in my celebration of Mass is one of identification
with Christ—as complete an identification as it is humanly
possible to achieve. It is not as an automaton that I wish
to stand at the altar. The love will flow up through my
hands, willy-nilly, and the graces will flow back. But it
will be tragic if there is nothing of me in the going,
and nothing for me in the coming. “Lord,” my heart
will be crying, as I stoop for the Consecration, “Lord,
make me one with Thee! Take my heart and make it
Thine! Transform me by Thy love! Don’t let me stand

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A Mm Approved

here untouched and unmoved. Take me, all of me, and
do with me what Thou wilt!”
I’ll not worry about distractions. In my fallen human
nature, they are inevitable. Except for the saints (about
whom I would not know) there’s none of us that can
hope to achieve the perfect mass, with a mind that
wanders not even once. I shall be on my guard against
distractions, of course. But the distractions that will
come in spite of myself are not going to make me lose
the rich satisfaction of my Mass. At the worst, I shall
rally my errant attention at certain focal points of refer­
ence: the beautiful doxology of the Gloria, the majestic
salutation of the Sanctus, the recollection of my heavenly
colleagues at the Communicantes, the renewal of my
self-offering at the Fiat voluntas tua.
And my inner recollection will reflect itself in my
external bearing. I shall remind myself that I am not
offering Mass in isolation, merely for my own pious
satisfaction. I am the minister of the Church, representing
the Mystical Body of Christ. The members of that Body
are there behind me, if only in the person of the server.
They are trying to offer the Mass, too. It is their Mass
as well as mine. Maybe I can say Mass rapidly and still
offer it with great piety and awareness. But it is robbing
others if I race through the Mass at a pace that these
others cannot follow. I am robbing them in an even
more foul way if my haste seems to belie the majesty
and the wondrousness of what I am doing; if my slip­
shod, jerky, or hasty movements lessen the esteem of the
Mass in the hearts of those who see me.
If one has fallen into the habit of saying Mass rapidly,
it is difficult, admittedly, to form the contrary habit of

My Mass

13

reading our Mass with deliberation. It is difficult to
re-train oneself to walk with dignity from corner to
middle and back to corner again; to turn towards the
people in a way that will exemplify recollection, and to
make all gestures—signs of the Cross, extension of hands
—in a manner that will be a silent sermon on Faith. But
these are not “little” things. And if it means half an hour
for a low /Mass with Gloria and Credo and a few Com­
munions, or forty-five minutes for a sung Mass—well, it
will not be the congregation who will complain of my
leisurely pace.
Certainly I have no desire to be more Catholic than
the Church. But if I may digress a bit, I must admit that
I belong to the Mass-of-the-day school. It is not for me
to say that daily requiems are to be contemned. I can
only say that for my part, I find it much easier to be
recollected, and I derive much more personal profit from
my Mass, when I follow the calendar of the Church. My
requiems are limited to Anniversaries and Month’s
Minds. And I can honestly say that I shall be more than
content if the Masses offered for me after death are
Masses de festo or de tempore. The laity, who more and
more are coming to know and use the Missal, are not
mere faddists or crack-pots when they express a weari­
ness at the daily appearance of black vestments.
That, however, is strictly by way of parenthesis and
personal opinion. I should not want it to distract from
emphasis upon the more essential truth: that no priest
need fear for his salvation if he genuinely loves his Mass.
That means prefacing his Mass with an adequate prepa­
ration. It means approaching the altar with the conviction
that, “Here is the only tiling in life that matters. I don’t

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A Man Approved

care what else happens to me today, so long as I offer
this Mass well.” It means that he tries, through the prog­
ress of his Mass, to unite himself as closely as possible
with Christ (“Take my heart; unite it with Thine; with
Thine offer it to God our Father!”).
It means that he tries to act out, in his external bearing,
the Faith that he wishes he had; being psychologist
enough to know that outward demeanor can fortify inner
sentiment, hypocrites to the contrary notwithstanding.
It means, too, that he can kneel afterwards and honestly
feel that he has tried, during the half-hour that is past,
really to give God the best that is in him. It means that
he has celebrated with a consciousness that it is not
just his Mass, but the Church’s Mass, the people’s Mass,
and that they have a right to see the Mass preached in its
very offering. I wish that I could be sure that I have
described myself. I wish that I could be sure, each
morning, that I had done, and done so well, the one
thing for which God has called me and anointed me.

3. The Divine Office

For a body of men trained in the science of
logic, we priests can be, at times, surprisingly illogical.
We are quick to spot, and to expose, the rationalizations
of the laity; when, for example, they excuse themselves
from frequent Communion on the plea that they cannot
fast late and cannot get up early. But how blind we can
be to the fallacies in our own reasoning, especially as it
applies to our spiritual life.
On no subject are we apt to be more glaringly illogical
than on the subject of prayer. We know that a priest is
bound, by the very nature of his vocation, to a life of
more-than-ordinary sanctity. We know too that there
is no solid sanctity without depth of prayer. A priest
who does not pray is a monstrosity—a blind man offering
himself as a guide, an ignorant man professing to be a
teacher, one whose tepidity and mediocrity are a stum­
bling block to his people.
We acknowledge all this as axiomatic, of course. We

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A Man Approved

do not even need Canon 125 to impress upon us the
absolute necessity of prayer—of far more prayer than that
established as a minimum for the laity. Yet see what
happens. When work piles up and days grow crowded
with more duties than one man seems able to handle, do
we meet the pressure by saying, “My first and primary
duty is prayer; no matter what other activity has to be
neglected or abandoned, I must pray”? Is it not, rather,
by some freak of logic, the other way around?
As my days grow more crowded, spiritual reading
ceases, since I barely have time to scan the sport page and
the funnies. My work carries me into the late evening,
and the Divine Office, postponed all day, is now recited
with nodding head and heavy eyes. I roll into bed clutch­
ing my rosary, and manage a decade or two before un­
consciousness grips me. A sick priest is no good to anyone
(I reason), and a man has to have an irreducible mini­
mum of rest. So I sleep until the last possible moment
in the morning, and make my preparation for Mass as
I walk from the rectory to the church.
The picture doesn’t fit every priest, thanks be to God.
But it isn’t purely a fanciful picture, either. It does hap­
pen. I know, because it has happened to me. And I’m
not talking now about exceptional days, when a sick-call,
perhaps, has kept me out half the night, or a domestic
emergency has consumed half the day. I’m talking rather
about the ease with which we can make every day an
exceptional day, so that our obligation to prayer receives
nothing more than the lip-service of “mafiana”—a tomor­
row that never comes.
Getting down to brass tacks, there is our most ines­
capable prayer-duty, the Divine Office. We all recite our

The Divine Office

1Ί

Breviary daily, of course. The gravity of that obligation
was so well drilled into us in the seminary that we’ll
manage to get it done, even if we have to read our Book
by the light of the dash-lamp. Fidelity to one’s Office has
become almost as much the hallmark of one’s priesthood
as Friday abstinence has become the final test of a man’s
Catholicity. A Catholic who has begun to eat meat on
Friday, we count as pretty definitely lost to the Church;
and a priest who has begun to omit his Office would be
counted as being in the last stages of disintegration. So
we say our Office every day. But how?
Let me say, by way of parenthesis, that this is not a
Latin scholar who speaks. A sin of my youth, from which
I still suffer, was an obstinate dislike for study, especially
for dull drilling on tenses, cases, and vocabulary. So I
don’t pick up my Breviary today in happy anticipation
of the eloquence of St. Ambrose or the grandeur of St.
Augustine. And I am not one of those who rejoices over
the new translation of the Psalms; so far as meaning goes,
I can’t tell the difference from the old. I mention this
only to indicate that I am not speaking from an ivory
tower—a classical savant scolding those of lesser breed.
What then can a priest like myself, a Latinical incom­
petent, hope to get out of the recitation of his Office,
aside from the merit of obedience? Well, if the obedience
is wholehearted, that alone will pay well on the time
invested. And my obedience is wholehearted if I do all
that I can to make the Office a real prayer, and not a
mumbo-jumbo performance that may have in it more of
irreverence than of merit.
There are three things which will determine how well
I say my Office and how much I get out of it: first, the

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A Man Approved

time I assign to it; secondly, the circumstances under
which I recite it; and thirdly, the state of mind in which
I undertake it.
As for my state of mind, it is essential that I realize the
role I am fulfilling in the reading of my Breviary. I am
a mouthpiece of the Church, of the ecclesia orans. 1 have
been officially commissioned by the Church to speak for
her in offering praise to God. I am the agent, the deputy,
of the entire Mystical Body of Christ. It is not essential
that I understand what I say; the Church understands
what I am saying—she has put the words in my mouth.
And God understands what the Church, through me, is
saying. Largely unintelligible though the words I speak
may be, that detracts nothing from the glory that the
Church, through me, is giving to God; nor does it de­
tract from the merit that I myself gain.
If I do understand, it is well, of course. The inspiration
that I gain will be greater, the instruction that I absorb
from the Fathers and the Doctors will be richer. (Flow
I should love the opportunity to read the Divine Office
daily in the vernacular! )
But, with or without understanding, the good that
accrues to the Church which prays through me, will be
a constant factor. And the merit that accrues to myself
will be equal, too, so long as I come to the Office in a
spirit of prayer, and make it a free and consciously
directed act of divine w'orship. If I don’t understand a
word I say, yet read my Office reverently, with senti­
ments in my heart of love for God, adoration of His
Divine Majesty, sorrow for my sins and in reparation
for them—then even God will not ask more than this.
It hardly needs pointing out that this state of mind, this

The Divine Office

19

spirit of prayer, is not easily established at eleven o’clock
at night, after a busy day that leaves one mentally and
physically fagged. It is not easily established, either,
sprawled out in an easy chair, with one ear cocked to
the radio, or one eye on the TV set. We haven’t the
right to complain, surely, of the burden of the Office—
to say that we get nothing out of it—if we haven’t given
our Breviary a square deal; if we haven’t come to it in a
spirit of prayer, thoughtfully, reverently, and quietly.
How insistent we are on quiet and decorum as we offer
our Mass. Yet our Office, our liturgical prayer, is really
an extension of our Mass, and should be only a little be­
low it in the care with which we surround it.
The best place for the recitation of our Breviary is
the same place where any other prayer is best said, when
possible: in the presence of Christ upon the altar—in
Whose Name and as one of Whose members we are
praying. There are times when that will not be feasible,
of course. And right here a thought occurs to me: we
priests spend so much time and money in ministering to
our physical comfort and enjoyment; yet how few of us
take the trouble to contrive a little private oratory for
ourselves which would be really conducive to prayer. A
corner of our bedroom or study, with a sturdy prie-dieu
that will have a shelf for our spiritual books; and a chair
that will be comfortable without being sybaritic; a cruci­
fix on the wall, and perhaps a little shelf above the priedieu with a statue of our Blessed Mother, and maybe a
vigil light and a sprig of flowers in season. And a good
light at our shoulder, of course.
The best tune? It doesn’t matter too much, so long as
it is a time set definitely aside for this purpose, and not

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too late in the day. The half-hour immediately after
breakfast, for example, or immediately before lunch, for
Prime to Compline; and immediately before or after
dinner for anticipating Matins and Lauds. Or if we’re
not the anticipating kind, then it can be Matins and Lauds
in the morning, and Prime to Compline in the afternoon
or early evening. (Zeal does not flag so easily, and atten­
tion does not tire so readily, if our Office is divided
between two periods of the day.) But whatever time we
fix, let it be held inviolable from all except the most
critical emergencies. We do not let parish or personal
business delay our Mass; our Breviary-time should be
almost as sacred.
If we already have adopted some such plan for our­
selves, then there is no hollow mockery in our words
as we ask the Lord to help us pray digne, attente, ac
devote.

4. Mental Prayer

The three chief duties of our priestly day are
our Mass, our Divine Office, and our Meditation, in that
order of importance. But while there is a gradation of
importance, yet the three are tied together so intimately
that any one cannot be neglected without the others suf­
fering as a consequence.
The Church seems to have taken cognizance of this
fact by tightening the screw a little bit as we go down
each step. It is taken for granted that we shall offer our
Mass, so there is no law that says we must. But there is
a canon which says we mist recite our Divine Office
daily—with the enforcement left to ourselves. At the next
level the Church isn’t quite so trusting—she says that the
Ordinary must see to it that we spend some time daily
in mental prayer.
My own Ordinary has never inquired into my habits
of meditation—for which I am grateful, even though I

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have, often enough, betrayed his trust. Not his trust
alone, but the trust of all the people who depend upon
me to be their “city built upon a mountain.”
I know, well enough, that there is nothing whatever
in my day that has right of precedence over my mental
prayer—with the possible exception of administering the
last Sacraments to the dying. It isn’t in a spirit of delib­
erate indifference that we skip our meditation, not unless
we’re a long way down the hill.
But a fellow can sit on the side of his bed late at night,
and look at the alarm clock as he pulls off his shoes, and
say to himself, “This was a tough day, and every minute
of it was spent doing God’s work. Certainly the good
Lord won’t object to me taking a little extra sleep in
the morning.” We wouldn’t dream of omitting our Mass
for the sake of the extra sleep, but meditation—well, we’ll
make it up another time. The Lord will understand.
He does understand, of course. He understands our
spiritual sloth, which hides itself under the disguise of
physical activity. He understands only too well our
infection with the heresy of good works, in which mus­
cular fatigue is canonized and perspiration is confused
with merit. The devil understands too, since he probably
played no small part in jockeying us into such a state of
mind.
It is not my intention to marshal here all the argu­
ments in favor of meditation. There is no need to review
all the authorities, from the Lloly Spirit Himself, Who
says that “with desolation is all the world made desolate,
because there is no one who thinketh in his heart,” down
through all the masters of the spiritual life who tell us,

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23

quite simply, that there can be no real sanctity without
systematic mental prayer.
We have all read the same earnest admonitions. We
have all heard the same urgent warnings. It isn’t that we
aren’t intellectually convinced of the need for medita­
tion. It’s just that. . . well . . . it’s just that. . . . All right,
it’s just too dam hard to get up in the morning. And if
we don’t get our meditation in before our Mass, the odds
are fantastic against getting it done during any other
part of the day.
Even right after Mass doesn’t work. I’ve tried that
myself, and have found that hunger for the morning
coffee and cigarette are far stronger than hunger for the
consolations of the Spirit. There may be heroic souls
who can make it work; but anyone as heroic as that
probably will find it easy to roll out of bed half an hour
earlier in the morning.
As for later in the day: well, you’ve probably tried
it, as well as I. You’ve persevered for a day or two,
maybe for a week or two. And then some hectic day
you had to skip it, and the next day was just as bad, and
the next. . . .
No, there’s no use kidding myself. Either I make my
meditation in the morning before Mass, or I don’t make
it at all. And if I have got into the habit of skipping
meditation, it becomes progressively harder to get back
on the track. Because look, I say to myself: I’m really
not such a bad priest. I’m chaste and sober and decent
and hard-working. I preach a good sermon and take
good care of my people. I admit that daily meditation
would be good, and I’ll get back to it eventually. But

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I’m not such a bad guy, after all, so meditation can’t be
too important.
And all the while, of course, the reason I think I’m so
good is because I don’t meditate. I don’t get a good look
at myself. I keep judging myself by how much worse
I could be; even judging myself perhaps (God save
Charity!) by someone else whom I consider worse than
myself.
But once I get down to persistent mental prayer, I’ll
begin comparing myself with my true pattern, Christ—
instead of with some self-fashioned blueprint of my own.
I’ll be almost appalled at my former complacency, as the
shadows and the dark spots and the crooked lines begin
to show up.
At the same time as my evaluation of self grows more
realistic, so also will my peace of mind increase, by
some rule of divine ratio and proportion. I shall find more
satisfaction in my work, more happiness in my day.
Progressively I shall find more of God in my activities,
and less of self. Decisions will come easier, and my touch
in all things will be surer. Because, starting each day
with a good solid look at the Image I must copy, I shall
come to be able to say more and more truthfully with
St. Paul, “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me”!
All that it takes, ultimately, is a brutal hand in setting
the alarm clock, and an even more brutal shedding of the
blankets. I don’t, honestly, think that I shall sicken and
die because of a half-hour less sleep each morning. (I
only wish that I could hope to die in such a good cause! )
Modern medicine has discovered that mental health con­
tributes more to longevity than does physical perfection.
It seems reasonable that daily meditation will contribute

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25

more to my length of years than all the capsules and
tablets which clutter my medicine cabinet shelf.
So I shall add a new antiphon to my night prayers:
“Look, God, it’s eleven-thirty now; -please help me get
my feet over the side of that bed at five-thirty tomorrow
morning! ”

5. Hearing Confessions

One of the major problems of our priesthood
is to protect ourselves against that numbing, deadening
effect upon our sense of the sacred which daily intimacy
with the mysteries of the Faith tends to inflict. We are
dealing continually with miracles of grace, and familiarity
moves in like a thick and penetrating fog. It obscures
and makes dull the awe and wonder that was ours when
we first spoke the words “Hoc est enim corpus meum,”
or “Ego te baptizo” or “Per istam sanctam unctionem.”
This tendency to casualness, almost to nonchalance, is
perhaps nowhere more evident than in our administra­
tion of the Sacrament of Penance. From the age of seven
this mystery of mercy has been a commonplace to us
as recipients; and the brief thrill we felt when we first
raised our hand in absolution disappeared all too soon, as
penitent followed penitent and the words “Ego te
absolvo” became mechanical upon our tongue.
We well could afford to spend several mornings of

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27

private meditation upon the incident related in the fifth
chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, when men for the first
time heard human Ups give assurance of God’s forgive­
ness of sin: “Thy sins are forgiven thee! ” It is no wonder
that the onlookers went away exclaiming, “We have seen
wonderful things today!” It was not alone of the physical
miracle that they spoke. They had seen Jesus do more
amazing things than the healing of the palsied cripple.
No, they had witnessed what mankind had been hunger­
ing for, unconsciously, for centuries: an assurance of
release from the awful burden of sin.
It is so hard for us to realize what it must have been
like to live under the ancient law of fear. Even today,
the best of us face the prospect of death with a certain
trepidation and feeling of misgiving. Even with all the
healing and saving grace that is at our disposal, we cannot
escape the uneasiness that the thought of judgment
arouses. And if we have been so unfortunate as to think
that we may have fallen from grace, how dark and taste­
less is our day, until we have presented ourselves to the
shriving hands of a fellow-priest!
So perhaps we can achieve a faint understanding of
the joy that must have welled up in the hearts, not of
the scribes and Pharisees, of course, but in the hearts of
the simple people of good faith, who heard Christ’s
words to the cripple, “Thy sins are forgiven thee!”
Those who heard must have felt a tremendous surge of
relief to know, even vicariously, that a power had come
to earth which had dominion over sin.
Outside of a rare and positive revelation, the best of
souls went through life in dread uncertainty as to their
relationship with God. He was so distant and silent—

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and they were so fearful. The patriarchs and prophets
would find it hard to understand how you and I could
ever take for granted the so-facile opening of Heaven,
and the so-audible descent of God’s mercy, as we know
it in the Sacrament of Penance.
Indeed, it was an event to shake the universe, when
Christ appeared to His apostles on Easter Sunday night
with the quiet greeting, “Peace be with you.” The con­
notations of what happened then were in some ways
more momentous than what had happened on the even­
ing of the previous Thursday. That God should deign
to be our food was stupendous. But that He should
further deign to make us in some degree fit to receive
him! That mankind, tossing and turning under the
burden of virulent poison in its veins, should suddenly
find the toxin drained away, and know blessed peace
and rest at last! This is the miracle that we must never
forget. It is a thought that should be in our mind every
time we take our seat in the confessional.
There are other things to be remembered, too; other
things that Christ tried to impress unforgettably upon
us, when He entered the Upper Room on Easter Sunday
night.
Fie entered a room filled with men who were sunk
deep in dejection. Well they might be. In spite of the
Master’s repeated and explicit prophecies of His death;
in spite of His emphatic avowals that His kingdom was
not of this world;—to the very end the apostles basked
in the expectation of an earthly reign and a temporal
glory. There was great virtue among them, but there
was pride and ambition too. Judas was not the only
sinner.

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29

But their dreams had come crashing down about their
cars with such suddenness as to leave them helplessly
dazed. From Palm Sunday to Holy Thursday everything
seemed so beautifully promising. Then in a period of
less than twenty-four hours they saw their Invincible
One seemingly collapse in the hands of His enemies. (I
never have known either sensation, but I suppose that a
priest who was momentarily expecting to be appointed
a bishop, if he suddenly were cited to appear before an
ecclesiastical tribunal to face charges he could not an­
swer, would experience some of the nightmare horror
which the apostles had endured.)
It was with shame that they avoided each other’s eyes,
and had so little to say to one another. “We shall go up
to Jerusalem and die with You!”, they had boasted; not
really believing that it might come to pass. Yet, where
had been their braggadocio on Thursday night, and
Friday? A mongrel dog would have been more loyal to
his master, than they.
Then, with no sound of door or window opening,
Christ stands in the midst of them. There is a scene that
would repay a lot of meditation. What would I have felt,
if I had been one of them! For an awful moment I can
feel my heart jump and stop its beating. I try to swallow,
and there is no saliva, even if my throat were not para­
lyzed. The palms of my hands grow wet, and cold sweat
trickles into my eyes. My knees, my legs, begin to
buckle, and I back towards the wall lest I sprawl on the
floor.
But a word stops me: “Peace.” And suddenly I know
what peace is and begin to breathe again. And confu­
sion and fear evaporate. And all the formless shame that

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has been tormenting me wells up in one great lump of
grief that bursts and disappears like a bubble of soap—as
the Voice of Mercy speaks in calmness and in love:
“Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” As God breathed a spirit
into Adam, so now a new spirit is breathed into me; a
spirit that is at once forgiving, and the power to forgive;
a spirit that at once creates, and makes me a re-creator
too.
“Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven
them,” says this Master for whose rewards I have so
ignobly bargained, in Whose prophecies I have disbe­
lieved, and from Whom I fled in His hour of need.
“Whose sins you shall forgive,” He says, with no word
of my own derelictions. This is mercy indeed, thrice
compounded. This is gentleness, this is tact and under­
standing that are divine.
From my meditation on that scene, I cannot turn,
without a renewed realization of all that my role of con­
fessor entails. I cannot again—at least not soon again—
enter the confessional reluctantly, to assume the role of a
robot-like absolution machine. Much less shall I grumpily
settle myself in the box to become a harsh inquisitor,
making difficult for souls that which Christ tried to make
so easy.
Whether for one confession or a hundred, I shall never
put the stole around my shoulders without first kneeling
to ask God for the grace to be an effective channel for
His mercy. As I first open the slide I shall try to be con­
scious of the wonder that has been entrusted to me;
conscious too of the nearness of Jesus, of His presence
there beside me, inspiring the advice that I must give,
ratifying my every judgment.

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31

And as the penitents come, one by one, I shall be
unhurried in my handling of each soul; of this one, here,
now, whose eternity may depend upon his moment with
me. I shall rigorously shut out of my mind all thought
of the long line that may be waiting. If some grow rest­
less and leave, God has His own ways of bringing them
back. And if my night’s rest must be shortened, what
better penance to offer for those who are weak and
whose perseverance is doubtful?
Deliberate and unhurried I must be—and attentive, too.
It will not be easy to keep alert, as the hours pass and
there comes a steady procession of pious souls, whose
pecadillos fall almost unheard upon my tiring ears. Yet
they must not fall unheard. Because not all the stultify­
ing sins are the big ones that bring me to attention.
If I preach on the Gospel of the Magdalen or the
woman at Jacob’s Well, that the lot of the harlot may be
easier, in Judgment, than the lot of the prideful or the
spiteful—then I owe it to those many souls who are smug
in their self-righteousness, to save them from the Hell
into which their own blindness may be leading them. A
plain but kindly word of advice on his predominant fault
can do much to awaken such a penitent from his leth­
argy. And I cannot speak that word unless I am listening
to what he is saying; listening as though this were the
only confession I had to hear this day.
Taking each confession as though it were the only
one to be heard will make easier the practice of another
virtue so essential to the confessor: patience. Whether it
is an infrequent penitent who comes ill-prepared, and
whose examination of conscience we have to make for
him; or whether it is an habitual sinner who manifestly

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has not followed the advice we gave him last time;
whether it is a child who does not talk loud enough, and
who insists on telling us things that are not sins at all;
whether it is one of these or any other type of trying
penitent—/ shall be patient, as Christ would be patient.
One sharp word from me may undo all the good that
God’s persistent grace has been trying to build up in that
soul for weeks or months past.
Indeed, it is not even enough that we keep a firm hold
on our human irascibility. Patience, after all, is a negative
virtue. We must go further than that. We must pray for,
and we must develop within ourselves, the virtue of
compassion. As we bend our ear to the penitent, it must
ever be with the yearning love for souls with which
Christ bent over the palsied man; it must ever be with
the mildness and the gentleness with which He said to
His apostles, “Peace be with you.”
The penitent may have entered the box stubborn,
argumentative, uncontrite. It will be our tenderness, and
not our harshness, that will melt his recalcitrance. God
help me if I snap at a penitent, “What did you do that
for?”, “Don’t you know any better than that?”, “You
don’t even know what sorrow is!”—and all the other
things I might say, in which the tone of my voice, even
more than my words, would cut and flay instead of heal.
Christ was not a browbeater, and I must avoid this
devil’s trap. “The bent reed thou shalt not break, and
the smoking flax thou shalt not extinguish,” will be my
eleventh commandment.
Another quality that we recognize as basic to a fruitful
administration of the Sacrament of Penance is the virtue
of prudence. It seems wise to check up on ourselves

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33

occasionally, to make sure that we are using the delicacy
of a surgeon as we probe into tender consciences. We
are content, certainly, with confessions that are integral;
we are more apt to be wearied than otherwise by un­
pertinent additions. But there are times when we must be
content with the barest minimum of integrity, lest our
attempts to make the penitent be more specific in his
avowal also make the sacrament odious to the sinner.
It is here, especially, that prudence will be quick to
detect a shame that is too deep for open avowal. It is
here that prudence will meet the penitent on his own
terms of half-revelation, rather than implant in him a
fear of the sacrament, which may be a barrier to further
progress.
It is prudence, too, that will move us to weigh well our
answers to penitents’ questions, and our solutions of their
problems. Snap judgments, particularly in doubtful mat­
ters, have no place in the guidance of souls. A lawyer,
faced with a fine point of law, is not ashamed to tell a
client that he must wait for an answer until competent
authorities have been consulted. We confessors can be
no less cautious. We dare not let vanity prod us into
stating as a fact, a principle or a solution that is uncer­
tain or half-forgotten in our own minds.
An indirect result of our zeal for the Sacrament of
Penance will be to move us to preach this sacrament
frequently. Considering its importance, twice a year
would not be too often, surely, for a sermon on Con­
fession. Two things, I think, need special emphasis. The
first is an explanation of the Sacrament of Penance as a
means of perfection. So many people have the idea that
Confession is a curative medicine only, to be used for

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healing purposes when the soul is infected with serious
sin. They need to be reminded constantly that it is a
preventive medicine also; that the special grace of this
sacrament is to build up a resistance to sin, the way
inoculation or vitamins build up resistance to disease;
that virtues can be much more easily acquired when we
invigorate ourselves regularly and frequently with the
strength of spirit that absolution can give.
The second point which needs emphasis in our preach­
ing is the foolishness of being afraid, anyone, ever, to go
to Confession. A reminder to our people of the meaning
of the Seal of Confession will help here; reminding them
of how next-to-impossible it is for the priest to know the
penitent’s identity; but reminding them further that even
if the priest did know the penitent, he could not ever,
in any way, refer afterwards to what has been told
him in Confession—not even to the penitent himself. A
few graphic examples will help, here.
But above all we should drive home the point that
the priest never listens with contempt to the avowal of
sins, however grave or seemingly shameful the sins may
be. We must make plain that the priest has a great love
and compassion for the sinner, even as Christ has; so
that, the bigger the sin, the happier the priest is to wel­
come the sinner to repentance, and the greater is the
admiration of the priest at the humility of him who
confesses. A reminder, too, that the priest himself goes
to Confession, and knows the penitent’s viewpoint, may
be a new thought to some.
And let us give assurance that a priest never scolds, in
Confession. The confessor may try to help by showing
the penitent where he has gone astray; the confessor may

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35

instruct on the steps the penitent must follow to avoid a
relapse into sin; but the confessor will never scold. (And
of course we must stick together, all of us, to see that this
promise is kept!)
As another by-product of his zeal for the Sacrament
of Penance, the good pastor will see to it that his people
have the opportunity, at least a few times in the year, to
receive absolution from a visiting confessor. We may
think we know our parish well; we may be convinced
that we have a parish of saints. But just as surely as we
announce that a strange confessor is coming to our
church (in the smaller towns, particularly), just so surely
will there be souls in the congregation who will breathe
a sigh of relief, and be waiting for the visitor when he
comes.
Finally, and above all, we shall pray for our penitents.
Each time we leave the confessional we shall kneel before
the altar to pray for those whose souls have just passed
through our hands. Every Mass that we offer will contain
a special memento for our penitents. We shall pray for
their perseverance, and that grace may remedy our own
defects of administration. We shall pray that our peni­
tents may not be our accusers, when mercy shall have
given way to justice and we stand before our Master’s
tribunal. Then indeed shall he be blessed, as he gives an
account of his talents: the confessor who has practiced
the patience, and the compassion, and the mercy of
Christ.

6. Preaching

The mission of the Church is to teach, govern,
and sanctify souls. The mission of the Church is our
mission, too. The reason for the existence of the Church
is the reason for our existence as priests. Unless we are
called to the administration of a diocese, we have little
to do with the governance of souls. But we have every­
thing to do with the teaching and the sanctification of
souls.
We fulfill our duty of sanctification through the
administration of the sacraments; particularly and most
fruitfully through the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass. But he will profit little by the Mass who does
not know the Mass. He will gain a minimum of grace
from the sacraments, who receives them in ignorance or
misunderstanding. He will serve God in stingy fashion
who does not love God with an all-consuming love.
And his love for God will be weak indeed who does not
know God as He really is.

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37

Old stuff, of course, this emphasis on our duty of
preaching. But I think that those who have weathered a
few years in the ministry will agree that it is a duty in
which we have to keep continually prodding ourselves.
I know that I, for one, have all but forgotten the thrill
that was mine the first time I laid the Gospel book down
on the pulpit and began, “My dear friends in Christ. . .
It was a justifiable thrill, too. Because, in a sense, I was
just as much a direct agent of Christ in that moment as
I was a few minutes later when I leaned over the altar
and murmured, “Hoc est enim corpus meum.” The
Holy Ghost was just as actively working through me
in that moment as He had been the night before when I
had whispered, “Ego te absolvo.” The thrill of that first
sermon is one that I ought to feel every time I ascend
the pulpit. I ought to, but of course I don’t. Human
nature is too fickle, and repetition dulls the edge of even
the most sacred emotion.
But it still remains true that the cause of Christ is
never so completely in my hands as when I fold those
hands across my stomach and fix the congregation with
what I hope is an arresting eye. If we might ignore the
fine points of theology, we almost could call preaching
the eighth sacrament. It is not for nothing that we must
be ordained before we can preach. It is not for nothing
that we wear a stole for this sacred function. It was not
for nothing that the apostles ordained deacons to feed
the poor and to care for material administration, so that
they themselves might be freer to attend to the ministry
of the Word.
The Word! Spelled with a capital W. That is the key
to it all. Because when we preach, we are handling the

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Word of God, the Wisdom of the Father. And the
Word is Christ. We are handling Christ, admittedly, in
a different mode than in the Eucharist, but it is the same
Christ Who is dependent upon us. Before we were or­
dained, while we still were laymen, we might talk as
often or as long as anyone would listen. But it was only
after ordination that our talk became preaching. It was
only then that our words acquired sacramental value.
So that, concomitantly with our words, God’s grace
flowed out over our hearers, to penetrate dull minds and
touch laggard hearts, and so effect entry for our words.
And so the health of the Church rises and falls with
the frequency and the quality of our preaching. There
are countries today, nominally Catholic, where unbelief,
anti-clericalism, and radicalism are rife; largely, we are
told, because preaching was neglected. Where everyone
was Catholic, there seemed little need for explanation of
truths which were accepted from the cradle. But the
faith languished, vocations starved and died, and the
Church suffered. None of us, I am sure, would care to
succeed to a parish where, say for a period even of ten
years, no sermons had been preached except on the great
feasts and during Lent.
We are very conscientious, God be thanked, about
offering Mass and administering the sacraments. We are
very attentive to the duties of visiting the sick and
instructing converts. But in our hierarchy of values, we
dare not let anything come between these and our
preaching. Not temporal administration, not money­
raising, not athletics, and above all, not our personal
pleasure. It is easy for us to see ourselves clothed with
Christ as we stand at the altar or kneel by a sickbed. But

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39

we have to keep continually goading ourselves lest we
forget our Christlikcness when we stand in the pulpit.
For myself, whenever I meditate upon Judgment, a
good bit of my uneasiness arises from remembered dere­
lictions in this very matter. I look back to weeks when
I have been very busy with pastoral duties, but not too
busy to read the trivialities of the daily news, to enjoy
the sedative reading of a secular magazine, or to listen
to a few favorite radio programs. I look back to weeks
such as that, when I have come into the rectory after
Saturday night confessions and, just before going to bed,
have decided to see what the Gospel is about for tomor­
row. What kind of a sermon did I prepare, I wonder,
with a mind so tired and a spirit so lethargic? And
should I not fear that in Judgment souls may rise up to
level an accusing finger at me, because I was to have
spoken the Word that might have saved them, and did
not? Pointed, soul-jarring, interest-fixing thoughts were
needed, and I mouthed platitudes.
In this, as in so many of our clerical shortcomings,
we sometimes try to pass the blame back to our seminary
training. There was a time, perhaps, when the professor
of sacred eloquence seemed to be chosen for his piety
and knowledge of English grammar. Necessary qualities,
both of them. But I am sure that for today’s professor of
pulpit oratory, quickness of imagination and skill in the
art of persuasion have been added to the list of qualifica­
tions. There are few seminaries—if any—in which the
Homiletics courses is any longer relegated to a minor
spot in the seminary curriculum; as though the “how”
of saying a thing mattered very little.
But even we of the older generation would be childish

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indeed, were we to take refuge in any real or fancied
failure of our seminary training. Because the real failure,
if there is one, is far more likely to be in our own lack
of conscientious application and industry. The best semi­
nary training in the world would not enable me to pre­
pare a soul-searing and soul-saving sermon on Sunday
morning as I walk from the rectory to the church. There
is a lot of jolting about the “dabitur vobis.” Actually
there is a dabitur vobis for the preacher; the Holy Ghost
will inspire and direct him. But it will be in his serious
and conscientious effort at preparation that the inspira­
tion will come; not in an eleventh-hour-and-fifty-ninthminute frenzied search for something to say.
Always, in preaching, the first job is to decide what to
talk about. The easy way is to glance through the Gospel
of the Sunday, and then repeat the same hoary admoni­
tions that we preached a year ago—or two years ago; the
same pious cliches that our people have been listening to
from us and from our predecessors for time without end.
Not that repetition isn’t good. But we all know how
stifling that kind of repetition can be.
It is so unnecessary, too. There isn’t a Sunday Gospel
that will not yield a rich variety of thoughts and lessons,
if we are willing to expend more than a modicum of
effort, and if we prod our thinking with a good commen­
tary. There is such need today for good punchy sermons
which will make vivid to our people the implications of
their membership in Christ’s Mystical Body; sermons that
will give them a vision of their dignity as children of
God; sermons that will shatter their lethargy and arouse
them to the lay apostleship for which the Holy Father
pleads.

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41

A simple solution, of course, for the ever-recurring
problem of “What to say?” is to preach a course of
sermons. We all are familiar with the fact that the great
majority of our Catholics are ill-instructed. Even those
who attended Catholic schools have to a great extent
forgotten in adulthood what they learned as children.
Moreover, as their minds mature, they find that their
earlier religious concepts often are inadequate to cope
with the exigencies of today’s living.
A course on the Commandments, for example, will give
us opportunity to talk about racial justice and to attack
the sin and scandal of segregation. It will enable us to
talk about Christian ethics in business—about jerry-built
houses, maybe, that are sold at twice their worth. It will
afford us a chance, too, to preach (with the Popes beside
us) of social justice in industry, of the inequities of a
system which denies the worker a fair share of the wealth
he has helped to create. (And may God give us the
courage to preach such needed sermons, even though our
wealthy best-giver is sitting in the front pew!)
Then—how long to talk? The old saw that after
twenty minutes the preacher is talking to no one but
himself is not wholly valid. Visiting lecturers will come
to town, and people will pay good money to listen to
them for forty-five minutes or an hour. But those lec­
tures have been planned and re-planned, written and
re-written. There is only partial truth in the old joke
about the man who could talk for two hours on a
moment’s notice, but needed a whole day to prepare a
five-minute discourse. A long talk that is a good talk
needs a lot of preparation.
However, in most city churches, long talks are out of

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the question. The church must be emptied and another
congregation admitted. But even with Masses every hour,
there should be time for something more than a threeminute fervorino. It takes more than three minutes to
present a thought adequately to one’s listeners, turning
the thought about, the way one might turn a jewel in
one’s hand, so that every facet may be seen and appre­
ciated.
It takes time to present illustrations and similes and
examples and stories—the tools of speech which make all
the difference between a good sermon and a dull one—
the tools which Christ Himself used so freely. It is not
for me to lay down any hard-and-fast rule. But it seems
hardly possible that a good sermon could be preached in
less than ten minutes, with fifteen a more desired opti­
mum.
Then there arises the eternal question: to write, or not
to write? Should our weekly sermons be committed to
paper, or is it enough simply to think out our sermon,
and with its outline firmly fixed in our mind, to preach
with some degree of spontaneity? Well, we all know the
answer to that, whether or not we act upon it. There is
no better sermon than one that has been well thought
out, then written out, then corrected and revised. No
glib-tongued extempore speaker can beat that kind of
preparation. Even though we do not memorize what we
have written, the very fact of writing will so fix the
thoughts in mind as to make delivery a pleasure, rather
than a nervous strain.
Writing the sermon out in full also will give us oppor­
tunity to polish our style. We can tighten up our sen­

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43

tences, for example, sometimes making an adjective take
the place of an entire clause. Notice the difference be­
tween sentence (a), “Our Blessed Lord has great com­
passion for sinners, and no one needs to fear approaching
Him, however great his sins may be,” and sentence (b),
“No sinner, however depraved, need fear to approach
the compassionate Christ.” There are twenty-two words
in the first sentence, and only eleven words in the second;
yet they say the same thing.
One of the greatest benefits of a written sermon is that
it enables us to eliminate those pet phrases which we all
acquire in the course of time, phrases which grow mean­
ingless to our hearers because we use them so often. Like
the priest who never speaks of the sacrament of Penance
without calling it, “The sacred tribunal of Penance”; or
the priest who never speaks of eternity without referring
to, “The blessed vision of God in Heaven.” Nice phrases,
both of them, but monotonous when they creep into
every sermon.
Yes, the written sermon unquestionably is the ideal,
and all praise to the man who has the character to make
it his weekly practice. But I should be a hypocrite if I
said, “This is the way it must be done,” when I’m not
doing it myself.
If we follow the alternative, and preach from an out­
line, there is one essential, it seems to me, to making our
sermon effective: we must write out, or at least fully
think out, our introduction and conclusion. So much de­
pends upon getting the interest of our listeners right at
the start; still more depends upon leaving them with
what a radio performer would call a strong punch-line—

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the whole gist of our sermon balled up tightly into one
final sentence or short paragraph that the hearer will
carry away and not easily forget.
And when all is said and done about the mechanics of
this tremendous responsibility of preaching: the prepara­
tion for it by meditation and reading, the perspiration
for it by thinking and writing; when all is said and done,
there remains the one over-all sine qua non of fruitful
pulpit oratory: the living of what we preach. It was a
wise ancient who said, “I cannot hear what you say, for
the noise of what you do!”
No matter how polished the rhetoric, I cannot preach
upon temperance or mortification if I am known as a
tippler and a “good liver.” I cannot preach upon poverty
if I am known to love the good things of life. I cannot
preach the Mass if my own speed and slovenliness at the
altar give the lie to all that I say. An oratorical genius
without virtue is no match for a tongue-tied saint. Skill
and mechanics will constitute about one-tenth of a good
sermon. The other nine-tenths consists in the utter sin­
cerity of my words, the interior assent to and practice
of what I propound.
And may my first assent be to the truth of this: that
preaching is one of my proudest privileges as a priest—
the heralding of the Good Tidings, the handling of
God’s Word. To this truth also: that there are few
duties of my priesthood to which it can take second
place; and that there are few priestly obligations upon
which, after my Mass, I shall be more searchingly scru­
tinized at Judgment.
It was not idly that Paul so solemnly warned Timothy:
“Attend unto reading, to exhortation and to doctrine.

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45

Neglect not the grace that is in thee, which was given
thee . . . with imposition of the hands of the priesthood.
Take heed to thyself and to doctrine: be earnest in them.
For in doing this thou shalt both save thyself and them
that hear thee.”

7. Poverty

Something which we are apt to forget, with
regard to the threefold counsels of Poverty, Chastity, and
Obedience, is the fact that Christ proffered His counsels
to everyone, not just to an elite few. In fact, it is possible
even to forget that when we call them “counsels,” we
are not intended to infer that they are a matter of indif­
ference. As though a man might choose to be poor, or
chaste, or obedient, only if and when the spirit moved
him.
This misconception is particularly widespread with
regard to the counsel of Poverty. In spite of our corny
jokes about the religious priest taking the vow of poverty
and the secular priest keeping it, it is generally true that
we regard the obligation of poverty as something pretty
much limited to monastic enclosures. We forget that
when Christ lived there were no monks or nuns. It
wasn’t to a Jesuit or a Franciscan that He spoke when
He said, “Go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor,

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47

and come follow Me.” It was to a very ordinary sort of
person that Christ spoke; to someone who wanted to do
a little more than the minimum, to someone who felt
some stirrings of desire to encompass a little more than
the bare essentials of sanctity.
It was only as the monastic and religious Orders were
founded, with the counsels as a sine qua non of membership, that people began to take the comfortable view that
poverty, chastity, and obedience could properly exist
only within the framework of canonical vows. They
ceased to be universal ideals, desirable for all and acces­
sible to all.
Especially poverty. Because, of course, chastity—ac­
cording to one’s state in life—is so inescapably imposed
by natural and divine positive law, that a vow merely
becomes a secondary bulwark. The obligation to obedi­
ence also is sufficiently explicit as to leave in bad con­
science anyone who would defy his lawful superiors. But
poverty? Hmmm. Anyone who undertakes that, outside
religion, is likely to be classed either as a fanatic or as
an impractical idealist.
All this in spite of the fact that Christ hammered away
at the importance of poverty far more than He empha­
sized the necessity of chastity or obedience. Because He
well knew, of course, where emphasis was needed. Even
good pagans might abhor the gross sins of the flesh, and
unaided reason could demonstrate the right order in­
volved in obedience. But as for detachment from the
material goods of this world: well, the Son of God Him­
self has trouble pounding that into the heads of His
followers.
Did it ever occur to us, I wonder, that when Christ

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said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God,” He didn’t exempt priests from the grim warning?
Riches, we have to remind ourselves, is a relative thing.
It takes much less to make a rich priest than to make a
rich industrialist. Not only in a literal sense, because of
fewer material needs—lack of dependents and greater
economic security. But in a larger sense also, because as
priests our obligation to detachment is so much greater,
and the harm we may do ourselves by any degree of
covetousness is so much more imminent. A little mate­
rialism in a priest is like a little pepper in one’s coffee;
it has no place there at all.
There is no need to stress the great harm that has come
to the Church, the great scandal that has been given, by
clerical acquisitiveness. I am not referring to the tonsured
magnificence of the Renaissance, to the beneficed lords
of times past. I am thinking of more contemporary inci­
dents, such as the death of a priest whose will, admitted
to probate, reveals assets perhaps of a hundred thousand
dollars or more. Bequests to charity can never take the
sting out of such a will, any more than holy water can
make fish out of meat. The question always in the public
mind is, “Where did he get so much money? Why did
he hang onto it?” If a priest finds himself receiving
money out of proportion to his needs, surely the time to
give it to charity is now, while it still is an act of charity;
not after death, when the grave has tom it forcibly from
his grasp.
It is only in passing that I refer to such incidents, be­
cause few of us are in danger of leaving a fortune behind
us. But instead of congratulating ourselves that we are

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49

not as the rest of men, we shall do better to subject our­
selves to a searching survey, as to our own particular
fulfillment of the obligation to poverty. I say “obliga­
tion,” because the apostles are our pattern of priestly
sanctity; we are not wholly formed as priests until we
can say with Peter, “Behold, we have left all tilings to
follow Thee!” It is for us to accept joyfully the invita­
tion which the rich young man declined sorrowfully. It
is for us to come after Christ in genuine poverty of spirit,
and to see in the Church’s legislation for holders of bene­
fices a rule of conduct for ourselves: the distribution to
the poor of all income beyond our actual needs.
How may we offend against the virtue of poverty? It
is with a considerable degree of trepidation that I pro­
pose that question. It is, to begin with, a touchy subject.
Then there is the added presumption of me, a secular
priest, undertaking to examine the consciences of my
colleagues on a matter in which I myself am far from
perfect. My only defense is that it is Christ, not myself,
Whom I would propose as a pattern. My only excuse is
the hope that, in speaking to others, I may be shamed
into doing more myself.
How then may we safeguard the spirit of poverty in
our priestly lives? First of all by scrutinizing our lives
for evidences of superfluities in things material. There is,
for example, the everyday matter of transportation. A
priest today needs a car, and he needs a car that is sound
of wind and limb, a car that will get him there depend­
ably, and get him back. But there are many cars on the
market today that will fill the bill, below the Cadillac
or Chrysler level; yes, even below the Buick or Packard
level. I am fingering here a tender point, I know. Many

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good priests, exemplary priests, drive big cars. “Some of
my best friends drive Cadillacs and Chryslers,” I could
truthfully say.
And yet, let us make this a moment of complete hon­
esty. Let us admit that there is a spirit of materialism
involved, when we spend several hundred dollars extra
for a car, when a Ford or Chevrolet or Plymouth would
get us, just as quickly and just as surely, where we want
to go. Can we quite deny the incongruity of a priest
behind the wheel of a top-drawer job? Not to mention
the scandal (maybe not a big one, but a widespread one)
of a pastor who drives through his parish in the latest
model super-duper, while most of his parishioners have
to be content with older and more modest jalopies? I
shall not belabor the point. I do not wish to identify my­
self as a Jansenist or a Manichean. I can only say, Thank
God for the love and loyalty of our people, who so
seldom give voice to what must sometimes be a source
of troubled thoughts to them.
What is true of automobiles is true also of many other
things in a priest’s life. There are the summer “cottages”
that often are better homes than many of our flock have
for year-around living. There are expensive vacations at
expensive hotels, beautiful leather golf-bags loaded with
enough irons to break a caddy’s back, costly cameras,
the best in television sets. In fact, the best in everything—
which so often seems characteristic of our care of our­
selves; all the baubles which so often we seem to use as
opiates against that inner, restless urge to a greater sanc­
tity. None of these things is necessarily sinful, nor even
an occasion of sin. But they are attachments which are
outside the love of God. As someone has pointed out

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51

(I think it was St. John of the Cross), a silk thread will
serve as well as a rope, to keep a bird from flying.
Then, there is another way in which we may fail in
poverty, which is less easily detected because it hides
itself under a mask of selflessness. This is the self­
attachment of the priest who has made his parish a pro­
jection of himself. I can keep my people bent and groan­
ing under a constant financial burden, supposedly all for
the glory of God, when in reality it is for the glory of
me, Father Biggus. “I’m not doing this for myself,” I
piously tell my people: “It’s your parish, you’re the ones
who will benefit, not I.” And so I pass over the plans
for a modest and solid structure that would be adequate,
and proceed with a magnificent edifice that will open
the eyes of other pastors and be a lasting monument to
myself—God rest my people when I’m gone.
It is all very well for me to say that nothing is too
good for the House of God. But do I mean just here
in my own prosperous parish, or do I mean everywhere?
If I am to apply the thumb-rule of poverty that seems
basic to this virtue: that I have no right to two coats,
so long as my neighbor has none; then the thought of
shabby clapboard churches in our own South and West,
of thatch and bamboo chapels in mission lands, may move
me to blue-pencil some of my own specifications.
There are varying degrees of this vicarious acquisitive­
ness. We can—unconsciously —identify ourselves with our
parish to the point where we look upon any falling off
in revenue as a personal affront. It is this state of mind
that is responsible for most of the “money talk,” the
Sunday-after-Sunday carrying of the dollar sign into the
pulpit, which is a scandal to the weak and a source of

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uneasy shame to the strong. The pathetic part of it is,
that after I have put on my weekly act of scolding and
cajoling, I end up probably with less of a return than
the pastor who gives his “money talk” once a year, and
is content the rest of the year with an occasional com­
mendation of the parishioners’ generosity.
We have to watch ourselves, too, in the matter of
stole-fees. Even the best of us, whose personal wants are
few and who give their surplus to charity, can become
demanding in the matter of stole-fees. I have often
wished, myself, that the whole system of stole-fees could
be abolished, but it has been with us for a long time and
doubtless will remain the established practice of the
Church. Yet, it would be such a pleasure to be able to
smile and shake my head and say, “I can’t take any
offering for the administration of a sacrament; that’s
what I’m here for; it’s all provided for in my salary.”
As things stand, I hardly may do that; I may not sab­
otage an approved custom of the Church. But when
someone asks, “How much will that be, Father?” I still
can smile, and I can answer, “Whatever you want to
give; whatever you feel you can afford.” I can watch a
baby carried away from the font without calling the
godparents back to tell them, “You forgot something;
that will be two dollars, please.” I can even watch a
hundred dollars’ worth of flowers being carted out of
church after a flashy wedding and finger the five-dollar
offering in my pocket without bursting a blood vessel­
even though I had expected at least twenty-five.
Let’s put it this way: any time that anxiety, annoy­
ance, or resentment on my part is concerned with money,
then I am failing in the virtue of poverty, I am lacking

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53

in detachment. And it is no adequate defense to say,
“It’s the parish that I’m thinking of, not myself.” I am
sure that Christ must feel far more at home in the some­
what shabby church of a priest who is a poor money­
getter but a gentle shepherd of his flock, than in the
glistening and gold-leafed showcase of the hard-driving
executive who finds godliness in blueprints.
There is so much more that could be said about this
virtue of poverty. The need of a priest to be an openhanded man of charity, finding more pleasure in giving
ten dollars to a family of seven than spending the same
ten dollars on a roll of color film for his movie camera.
Sharing the contents of his wallet (however thin he may
have to spread it) with every worthy appeal that the
postman brings. Leading a life, not necessarily of pen­
ury, but of simplicity, content with the ordinary com­
forts and decencies that the ordinary workingman has to
be content with. Giving no part of our heart to the
world, nor craving the luxuries that the world would
have us think necessities. Strong in the faith, which never
shall be betrayed, that God will not be outdone in
generosity. Scorning to hoard against a future that God
already has guaranteed.
“Then Peter answering, said to Him: Behold we have
left all things, and have followed Thee: What therefore
shall we have? And Jesus said to them: Amen I say to
you, that you who have followed Me, and everyone that
hath left house or brethren or sisters or father or mother
or wife or children or lands for My Name’s sake, shall
receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting”
(Matt, xix, 27-28).

8. Chastity

Why did we take the vow of chastity, any­
way? The obvious and the easy answer is that we had
to take the vow of chastity if we wanted to become
priests; and we did want to become priests. But to give
the real answer, the essential answer, we have to recall
what is involved in our vow of chastity.
God, we know, could have provided for the prop­
agation of the human race in many alternative ways.
He could have provided for some process of self­
germination. He could have had us grow up out of the
ground, like stalks of corn. He could have directly
created each human body, as He already does create each
human soul.
Instead, He chose to share with human beings His
own creative power. In His infinite goodness, He chose
to make us male and female, so that men and women
might cooperate with Him in bringing into existence
human beings, destined to live for all eternity. Husband,

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yy

wife, and God: a Trinity spanning Heaven and earth.
Precisely because it is a sharing of God’s own creative
power, the sexual faculty is a holy and a sacred gift,
not by its nature something nasty and degrading; a truth
we priests cannot stress too strongly in our talks on
marriage and holy purity.
The procreative faculty is, then, outside the realm of
grace, our most precious possession. We have not taken
the vow of chastity because the power to propagate is a
shameful thing, unworthy of a priest. We have taken
our vow of chastity because in our love for God, we
have been moved to offer to Him our most treasured
natural gift, the one with which man is most loath to
part—and therefore the one most worthy of the God
Whom we profess to love with all the power of our
being.
I do not say that it is an adequate gift. There is only
one adequate gift that we can offer to God, and that is
His Christ in the Mass. But at least we may call it a
proportionate gift, this surrendering back to God of the
awesome power of life which He has implanted within
us. It is the part of love to give, and give, and GIVE.
How often we read of human lovers who in their
sensual infatuation have not only stripped themselves of
material possessions, but even have sacrificed honor and
betrayed trust, in order to give and give to the object
of their affections.
We do not admire or condone such madness. But this
tawdry caricature of love should make us realize that
there must be a sort of holy madness in our love for
God. If indeed we may call “madness” an impulse
which is so supremely logical: the abandoning to God

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of our physical fecundity, in loving gratitude for the
spiritual fertility which God has bestowed upon us: the
sharing with us of His highest creative power, the power
to beget saints rather than progeny.
It is important, I think, that we steep ourselves in this
conviction—this view of our vow of chastity as a gift of
love and gratitude freely offered to God; the surrender
of something treasured, a token offered for something
far more precious. If we regard our vow merely in a
negative light, as a denial of self for the purpose of dis­
cipline, or as a penance imposed by the Church to ensure
a more efficient clergy—then indeed will our vow be a
heavy burden, and our temptations a constant crucifixion.
Because of course there will be temptations. With
many of us, the full force of what our renunciation means
doesn’t strike us until some time after ordination. The
sheltered life we led in the seminary, the careful rever­
ence of friends and acquaintances, the eager anticipation
with which we looked forward to receiving the tremen­
dous power to consecrate and to forgive—all these things
brought us to subdiaconate and priesthood by a fairly
easy path. Celibacy, we felt, would be a cinch; a small
price to pay for our admission to the sanctuary.
The very jokes we told in the seminary, it seems to
me, were a gauge of our innocence, and a sign of the
lightness in which we held the grand gesture of “the
Step.” Did you ever notice how, as the years pass, those
jokes lose their humor, and are so seldom heard in a
gathering of older priests? Which brings to mind the
distinction we must make between innocence and virtue.
We call a child innocent, but we do not call a child
virtuous. Innocence has not become virtue until it has

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faced temptation, and conquered; using the word “vir­
tue,” of course, in its popular sense.
We are familiar with the idea of temptation being a
gift of God, at least permissively; yet when we are the
recipients of such gifts, we view them reluctantly. We
know that there can be no crown without a cross, but
we do wish that our own particular cross might take
some less violent form. We must, however, evaluate our
temptations aright, and in their very severity see the
measure of the degree of glory God has in mind for us.
The great saints have not been men and women who
tripped lightly through life without temptation. The
great spiritual heroes have been men and women who
have wrestled with great temptations and have, for love
of God, been victors.
Well, where does our danger lie? I must confess right
here that I often have listened with something close to
impatience to retreat-masters discoursing on “the dan­
gers from the opposite sex.” My impatience has been due,
no doubt, to my memory of my own mother and sister,
and all the countless good and holy women I have
known. I don’t think that any woman will pose a real
threat to any man’s virtue, unless the man himself is
already “on the prowl.” We priests need to exercise dis­
cretion, certainly. But it is a discretion that is learned
at the prie-dieu, rather than from a volume of pastoral
theology. If a priest were to betray his vow, his fall
wouldn’t begin with a lack of discretion. It would begin
with a neglect of the spirit and practice of prayer.
The man of prayer, the priest close to God, moves
through his priestly work unworried and unafraid. His
spiritual vision is acute. He is quick to recognize danger

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and quick to heed its signals. I honestly feel that for the
priest of good will, the danger to chastity from without
is not the arresting problem that it sometimes is repre­
sented to be.
But there still is the problem of our temptations from
within. There are the thrusts of rebellious nature, reluc­
tant to obey a wounded will. It is here that the greater
danger lies, even for the man of good will, the man of
prayer. There is danger from the sheer spiritual fatigue
of constantly parrying the probings and prickings of our
adversary, week after week, year after year. Always hop­
ing that time will bring surcease, yet always finding the
same old enemy waiting for us when a moment’s idle­
ness befalls us, when tensions build up, when nerves are
ragged from pressure and strain. It is the weary monotony
of it all that constitutes the greatest threat to our love
for God. And we need not be ashamed if we are moved
to cry out with St. Paul, “O Lord, please deliver me
from this sting of the flesh.”
The answer of course is the same that St. Paul got,
“My grace is sufficient for thee!” That is the thing we
have to keep hammering home to ourselves: that God’s
grace is sufficient. There is no temptation powerful
enough to defeat the omnipotence of His love. There is
never a time when the devil can catch God napping.
There is never a time when anyone can say in honesty,
“I sinned because I couldn’t help it.”
But it is not enough to be conscious of God’s ever­
present grace surrounding us like a bulwark, bearing us
up, impenetrating the cracks and crevices of our human
weakness. We must be conscious of the weakness, too.
We must totally abandon all confidence in ourselves,

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because it is confidence in self that bars entry to grace.
We have to tell ourselves over and over again that there’s
no sin in the book that we couldn’t commit and wouldn’t
commit, if it were not for God’s grace.
It is this totally unfounded confidence in self that can
account for many habitual sins. The sinner turns from
his surrender to temptation, and in a combination of
angry disgust and wounded pride (a far cry from con­
trition!), he vows, “I’ll not do that again; I’ll not be
such a fool; I’ll not be such a weakling!” And all the
while the truth of it is that he is exactly that kind of a
fool, that kind of a weakling. All of us are, priests in­
cluded. We have to impress upon ourselves our innate
weakness, so that we can say, and mean every word of
it, “Dear Master, I’m a pushover for the least of Satan’s
wiles; please keep me tied up tight in the protective
bonds of Your grace.”
This honesty with ourselves must extend to other
points, too. We must be as objective in our judgment of
ourselves as we would be with a penitent in the con­
fessional. It is the part of human deviousness to want to
give ourselves all the breaks, theologically speaking. We
know that so far as matter is concerned, there is no
“little” sin against chastity. But we could, were we not
vigilant, manage to juggle “sufficient reflection” and
“full consent of the will” to the point where an overt
sin would become a semi-deliberate act or merely a
strong temptation. We would be quick to disillusion a
penitent of such self-blindness; we must be equally
objective with ourselves. Unless we are mercilessly hon­
est with ourselves, God’s eager grace will have to stand
by in frustration, powerless to help us.

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We must be honest with our confessor, too. We know
what power the Sacrament of Penance affords for the
resisting of temptation. A^accination is not one-tenth so
effective in opposing the germ of smallpox as the grace
of Confession is in opposing sin. But of what benefit
could Confession be, if it were filled with evasions, half­
truths, and specious avowals. Into what complete atrophy
a person might fall, if once he began to tamper with
the integrity of Confession. He could be so smugly sure
that all was right with God, even while his soul might
be petrifying in unacknowledged sin.
Honesty, honesty, honesty. That is our part in safe­
guarding chastity. Honesty with ourselves, honesty with
our confessor, honesty with God. Only by such honesty
shall wTe keep from snatching back from God by stealth
the gift we so proudly presented to Him in public on
the day of our subdiaconate. And surely such honesty is
little enough to exact of ourselves, when God’s grace,
God’s love, is doing all the rest. It is because of the
universal human tendency to self-deceit, that it seems
wisest to lean over backwards in our attempts to be
objective with ourselves. I should not presume to re-edit
the moral theology books. But in this particular case, we
cannot do better than to give the benefit of the doubt
to the Sacrament of Penance. At the same time I would
emphasize what we all know, and did know long before
we were priests: that we simply cannot sin without
intending to. That a temptation can be persistent, and
obstinate, and diabolically recurrent, without being sin­
ful at all. That such temptations in fact can be a tremen­
dous source of merit and a grand promise of glory.
Certainly there is no priest who is trying his best to

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be a true man of God—putting his prayer-life above and
ahead of his external activity—who need fear mortal sin,
whether it be against chastity or any other virtue. I do
not think that any priest who faithfully and consistently
makes a half-hour meditation every morning need fear
for his chastity. If he meditates every day, then every­
thing else will fall in line. His Mass will be devoutly
offered, his Divine Office will be prayed with recollec­
tion (if not with understanding), he will manage time
for a daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament and for a few
minutes of spiritual reading before he goes to bed. He
will end his day with a frank and sincere examination of
conscience, and he probably will go to bed with a rosary
in his hand.
A man just can’t live a day like that, and then ignore
God’s outstretched Hand when a storm of temptation
tries to blast him off his feet. A man can’t love God
twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes of the day,
and then betray that love for a single moment’s pleasure
and gratification.
A quarter-century ago and more, I made mv first
retreat as a priest. I recall that I was mildly scandalized
at two talks the retreat-master gave—one on mortal sin
and one on chastity. Such talks seemed so out of place,
directed to the disciples of the Lord. At best, it seemed
time wasted that could so much better have been given
to more inspiring and challenging subjects.
That was a long time ago, and I was fresh from the
seminary—not good, but innocent. With the passing
years, I’ve seen a brother priest, now and then, drop out
of sight. I’ve come to know myself better, too. And I
look back to the young fellow I was with a certain

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nostalgic sorrow, or maybe pity. I would that I and all
my fellow priests, young and old, might have preserved
that starry-eyed idealism through the years.
But whatever toll time may have taken, in innocence
if not in virtue, we have not, I hope, grown cynical.
I myself have come to see the fabric of our common
priesthood, not as a diaphanous thing of light and bright­
ness, but as a tough warp and woof of quiet struggle
and dogged perseverance. A coarser weave than I
thought, but more enduring. It is a priesthood I am
proud to be a part of. It is a priesthood whose fidelities
witness daily to the invincibility of God’s grace. So in
courage and perseverance we shall weather our storms,
whose raging gusts can never drown out the Voice that
is our hope, “Aly grace is sufficient for thee!”

9. Obedience

Benedictine monks take only one vow: the
vow of obedience. Since poverty and chastity already are
prescribed by their Holy Rule, no specific vow beyond
that of obedience is necessary.
Secular priests likewise take but one vow: that of
chastity. Poverty and obedience are so inherent in the
ideal of the priesthood, that explicit vows would be a
matter of supererogation. The types of poverty and
obedience peculiar to the secular priesthood differ in
application and sanction from that of the regulars—but
their urgency is none the less real. A worldly priest, we
ail recognize, is a living contradiction. So is a self-willed
priest, although I am not so sure that we are as quick
to recognize, here, the inconsistency.
Poverty, chastity, obedience—all these are merely parts
of the total love which we expressed when we exclaimed,
with Peter, “Behold, we have left all things to follow
Thee.” Through many years of careful appraisal, we

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reached the conclusion that there was nothing of value
in all creation, except the Christ Who called us.
And so we willingly surrendered the right to physical
paternity. We cheerfully renounced—at least as an ideal
—superfluous possessions. We even gave up (surely we
must have realized what we were doing?) the one thing
which fallen nature is most loath to part with: attach­
ment to our own will.
In our catechetical instructions, we point out, time and
again, that the Christian moral code is simply a mani­
festation of love. “If you love Me, keep My command­
ments.” We point out that love for God is not a matter
of feeling or emotion; much less of speech. It is a mat­
ter of doing, of willing. “We can say that we love God
until we are blue in the face,” we may tell a prospective
convert, “but if we do not do what God asks us, then
our words, and even our palpitating hearts, are lies and
delusions.”
It’s funny, isn’t it (in a sad sort of way), how we can
finish an instruction like that, and then maybe five min­
utes later hit the ceiling as we open a letter from our
Ordinary and find our diocesan taxes upped, or some
privilege curtailed? We wouldn’t dream of deliberately
breaking one of the Commandments; God’s Voice still
thunders too unmistakably from Sinai. But it is so easy
to forget that God speaks also through the voices of our
superiors. And since the folly of men is the wisdom of
God, it follows surely that His Will is found just as
definitely in a seemingly stupid or ill-advised directive
as it is in an admittedly smart chancery decision.
If called upon to give direction to a nun, we do not
hesitate to point out to her that, even if her superior’s

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command appears unwise, the superior still must be given
the benefit of the doubt. “Whether your superior’s re­
quest is wise or not, dear Sister, just do the best you can,
and the merit of your obedience before God will be the
greater.” At some time or other, most of us have given
advice along those lines; but have we given it to our­
selves?
We grow understandably disturbed if we hear that
some parishioner has criticized our omniscience in matters
of parochial administration. But on higher levels it is
different; it is always open season on bishops and their
delegates. It is so hard to see God’s handwriting in a
pastoral letter. Synodal decrees, rubrics of the ritual or
missal, even Papal encyclicals, often are accepted with
the proviso (in our own mind) that they will be inter­
preted in the light of our own better understanding, and
applied with adjustments to our own special circum­
stances and needs.
Perhaps it is unfair of me to corral others within the
maverick fold, when honestly and objectively I can
speak only for myself. I do know that it is seldom I
approach an examen on Obedience without uncomfort­
able misgivings. This time it may be neglect of my
spiritual exercises as prescribed by Canon Law, or neglect
in the matter of clerical attire, or cutting comers with
the rubrics, or slothfulness in carrying out some ex­
pressed wish of my Ordinary. Another time, it will be
something else. But I know that in any case, I shall be
striking my breast before I get through my examen.
And yet, several times a day, I tell God that I love
Him. Which means that I ought to be firmly attached to
His Will. What He wants, I must want. Not only in

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matters of virtue versus sin, but even in matters of virtue
versus the indifferent, even in the choice of the greater
good over the lesser. I love God, and so I must try to
view everything through His eyes and act accordingly,
even in the simplest and least important of my decisions,
even in what I might call my non-religious activities. As
we leave the plainly marked path of laws, decrees and
directives behind us, the going gets more and more
rugged.
Because the obedient priest, the truly God-loving
priest, does go far beyond legislation and mandates. He
sees the evidence of God’s Will in all the circumstances
surrounding himself. He knows that God does not send
angels from Heaven, normally, to manifest His Will; if
He did that, everything would be so easy. No, His mes­
sengers are the people we encounter every day, and
obedience robes itself with patience. So I am patient
with the wearisome bore who sits in my office and
rambles on, while the plans I’ve made for that particular
hour (maybe good and priestly plans, too, like visiting
the sick), have to be revised or dropped overboard;
because this man, believe it or not, is a messenger from
God.
And I am patient with the altar-boy when he drops
the cruet, with the janitor when he forgets to stoke the
furnace, with the Altar Society president when she
messes up a project I had clearly explained to her, with
the housekeeper when she puts too much salt in the
soup. In all of these persons, and in the hundreds of
others who cross my path in the course of the day and
week, I see messengers of God, manifestations of His
Will—or at least, I should. Over and over again I say to

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myself, “God must have wanted it this way, or He
wouldn’t have allowed it to happen; if this is what He
wants, this is what I want.” Someone has said that it is
easy to accept crosses that come directly from the Hand
of God—illness, for instance—but that it is difficult for
us to accept crosses that come to us through third parties.
We feel that the cross has been in some way degraded,
that it has lost some of its dignity; we find difficulty in
seeing the Hand of God at all, so well does He conceal
it. Actually His Hand is there, and the eyes of love will
find it; at least at the second or third glance.
We are patient too under the blows of what the world
calls “blind chance,” but which we know are bits of
God’s plan and design. When the rain comes pouring
down on the day we had planned a little outing for
ourselves, when our tire blows out as we are hurrying
on a Communion call, when the power-line breaks and
the lights go off and maybe the heat—and so on and so on
through all the annoying incidents of fife—we still are
patient. God knows what is happening and is letting it
happen, so it must be what He wants. Which means that
it must be what is best for me, hard as it is to see at the
moment.
Besides patience, obedience has another robe, which
we might call courage. Patience and courage go together,
but they are not exactly the same. A person could con­
ceivably be patient and still be downhearted, discour­
aged. But one who sees God’s Will everywhere is not
discouraged; not often, and not for long.
I am not referring here to those passing fits of formless
depression into which any of us may be plunged now
and then, those occasional “blue” days that are apt to

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afflict all but the most phlegmatic or the most incurably
optimistic. Such transient spells of melancholy are more
physical than spiritual; we know that things will look
different tomorrow, so we just keep busy and wait for it
to wear off. Much less am I thinking, when I speak of
discouragement, of St. John of the Cross’ “Black night
of the soul,” the spiritual aridity experienced by souls
far advanced in perfection. I can’t talk about that, be­
cause 1 haven’t got that far.
When I speak of discouragement, I am thinking of a
self-sufficient soit of man who feels that the success of
his priesthood depends upon the success of his under­
takings. The sort of man who is plunged into moody
darkness if some plan upon which he has lavished much
thought and labor goes completely awry. The sort of
man who wonders whether it is all worthwhile, when his
Sodality prefect runs off and gets married by a judge,
or his building-fund drive flops, or (if he’s an assistant)
the pastor turns thumbs down on plans for a Catholic
Action group. The sort of a man who thinks, in spite of
his theology books, that goodness ought to mean freedom
from temptation, and who is moved almost to abandon
the struggle when he finds that rebellious flesh can be
so stubborn, and wayward mind can turn to such ugly
thoughts.
The obedient priest, he who loves God and seeks His
Will only, suffers discouragement from none of these
things. Because he knows that to God, success and failure
by human measurement are meaningless terms. With God
it is only intention and effort that count. Frustration may
follow upon discouragement, his every cherished plan
may be a washout; but he jogs along, this man of cour-

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age, serene in the knowledge that in the final accounting,
his failures will add up just as high as another man’s
successes. And as for temptations: “Well,” says the
courageous man to himself, “some people have cancer,
some have arthritis, and I’ve got temptations. Maybe I’d
like to swap crosses, but God has worked out what is
best for me, and I’ll not let it get me down!”
Obedience has still a third cloak—the robe of content­
ment. One who seeks God’s Will only, is completely
contented with his present lot. Secure in the recollection
that sanctity is achieved by the doing of ordinary things
extraordinarily well, the priest who has made God’s
Will his only measure of performance has no overween­
ing desire for a chance to demonstrate his talents in a
wider field. He is free from ambition; he is not looking
for bigger worlds to conquer.
And ambition can be such an insidious enemy to our
priestliness. It doesn’t have to be a big ambition. Maybe
just a city parish instead of a rural flock. Maybe not a
pectoral cross, but just purple piping on our cassock.
Maybe not a diocese, but a deanery. Yet, keeping one
eye out for the “main chance” leaves only one eye for
our present duties. The ambitious man is a man of
divided allegiance. Since he regards his present job as
only a temporary stopping-off place in the course of his
advancement, he seldom gives the present job the best
that is in him. He forgets that if God has a big job in
store for him, God will see that he gets it. And when he
gets it, he’ll be a lot better in the job if it has come to
him without any scheming or conniving. The priest to
whom God’s Will is everything will look upon his
present job as the final and ultimate task of his life. At

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an ecclesiastical function, he will sit in a pew and see
his classmate (who got much poorer marks than himself
in the seminary) at a prie-dieu in the sanctuary, without
feeling galled or neglected.
Patience and courage and contentment; these are qual­
ities that characterize the obedient priest, the priest who
loves God, the priest who lives with but one idea and
one ideal: the identification of his own will with that of
God. Can we imagine the impact that such a priest must
have upon his people, as he moves among them day by
day—patient, cheerful, and content? Such a man doesn’t
have to be a great scholar or an eloquent preacher. His
life is his best sermon, his very smile, and most casual
words are gentle weapons which soften obstinacy and
win the lukewarm. Himself rooted fast in God’s Will,
his strength will draw, irresistibly, those who are weaker.
He’ll be a popular priest in the best sense of the word:
a people’s priest.
His will not be the synthetic popularity of the man
who sets out consciously and determinedly to make him­
self liked; who tries to be “one of the boys” with the
men, a wit with the women, and hail-fellow-well-met
with everyone. This man’s hollowness and insincerity are
sensed, if not recognized, by everyone he tries to charm.
His is not the crowded confessional, if there is anyone
else hearing; it is not to him that people turn in their
deepest anguish, if there is anyone else to whom they
can go. Sooner or later his façade will crack; an access
of temper or an outburst of bitterness or an act of selfish­
ness will ruin the reputation he so sedulously fostered.
All because there is no real substance, the substance of
God’s Will, within the shell.

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Sometimes the collapse is complete, and another name
disappears from the Directory. Whenever I hear of a
brother who has dropped out of the ranks, I think how
tragic it is that he lost his way in his search for happi­
ness; how tragic that he got trapped in a dead-end street,
when the way was so plainly marked. Because he teas
searching for happiness, like all the rest of us—priest and
layman alike, saint and sinner too. Happiness is the one
thing we all are seeking, the one thing we ask of life,
the one thing we have the right to, the one thing God
made us for. The pity of it is that so many lose their
way, and get sidetracked into some by-lane such as per­
sonal recognition, or possessions, or conviviality, or
specious love.
Actually, the path to happiness for anyone lies in the
generous, wholehearted, complete acceptance of God’s
Will as our norm of life. When by long-repeated acts
we have formed the habit of meeting each situation as it
arises on the basis of, “What, under these circumstances,
would God probably want me to do?”, we are well on
our way.
The issue of obedience, then—of obedience in all its
connotations—is an exceptionally happy life for the
priest. It may be a calm and unexciting sort of life, but
it will be a deeply rich and satisfying one. Ninety per­
cent of our unhappiness in the priesthood comes from
the feeling that we have, in some way, failed. But we
can't fail, if the thing we do, or say, or try is God’s Will
expressing itself through our instrumentality. No matter
what the external evidence may be, if it is God and not
self we have been seeking, then we are one hundred
percent right. Conversely, just as surely as we find our­

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selves unhappy, it means that our will is at odds with
God’s.
To love God, and to manifest that love with a com­
plete dedication to doing His Will as perfectly as we,
in our human weakness and blindness, can: this is the
whole sum and substance of obedience. It is the epitome
of a truly priestly life, of a truly happy life.

10. The Priest and the Mystical Body

Anyone entertaining the mistaken notion that
theology is a dead and sterile science would have only
to contemplate the great development that has occurred
in recent years in the doctrine of the Mystical Body to
realize his error. Especially since Pius XII’s encyclical
Mystici Corporis has there been a prolific literature on
the subject. When we of the older generation were in
the seminary, our acquaintance with the doctrine of the
Mystical Body was pretty much limited to a casual bit
of exegesis on the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians,
or the fifteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. But now
there is a rich abundance of reference material, from
learned tomes to popular treatises in book and pamphlet
form, to enlarge one’s understanding of the implications
of Christ’s analogy of “The Vine and the Branches.”
“I am the vine; you are the branches,” Christ said; “he
that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much
fruit: for without Me you can do nothing.” St. Paul

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illuminated Christ’s words for us in that famous passage
in First Corinthians which begins: “For as the body is
one, and has many members; and all the members of the
body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also
is Christ.” The doctrine was further elucidated by the
Fathers and Doctors of the Church, notably St. Augustine
and St. Thomas. But never was it so fully understood
in its practical applications, until today.
We know that the term “Mystical Body” describes a
very special and a very real bond which unites all who
have been baptized in Christ with Him and with each
other. It is not a physical union, and yet in its own way
it is a closer union than physical. The individual cells
of our own body are not so compacted together and so
interdependent, one upon the other, as are the members
of Christ’s Mystical Body. Because it is a union so super­
natural, so unique, it has its own special term: a mystical
union. Just as the union of the Divine and Human
Natures in Christ is so transcendent as to need a special
term: the Hypostatic Union. To those who look upon
us from the viewpoint of eternity and see us as we are,
you and I and each member of Christ’s Church are bound
to each other and to Christ in an intimate, unified, and
interacting whole. It is the Floly Spirit Who is the bond
of this unity; a unity that is closer and tremendously
more vital than that of the cells which make up this mass
which I call my body.
We know all this so well. Yet it is not easy to bring
the meaning of it, for myself, home to me. I accept the
doctrine in theory, but it is so hard to remember and
to apply it in practice. I suppose that if the individual

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75

cells of my own body were suddenly accorded the gift
of self-consciousness, they would have a similar difficulty
in realizing their incompleteness except as part of the
whole. They probably would feel supremely indepen­
dent. And I as their head might have a better under­
standing of what Christ is up against in His dealings with
His Mystical Body.
What are some of the implications of this doctrine,
which should influence our life and work? Well, since
accretion to the Mystical Body comes through Baptism,
we might start there, at the beginning. Baptism is a
tremendous event in which a soul passes from potential
to actual membership in Christ. Yet in many parishes it
is a hurried ten or fifteen minutes of mumbled Latin that
must seem to the uninitiated almost like the magical
incantations of a medicine-man. Crosses are traced, water
is splashed, and there scarcely is an advertence on the
part either of priest, sponsors, or parents to what we
might call the sensation that is created in Heaven, as the
Holy Ghost comes to enfold, impregnate, and possess an­
other soul. Another cell is added to the stature of Christie
ever-growing Body; a soul which by its goodness will
add to the health of that Body, or by its badness will
weaken or wound.
What can we do? We could, if we have not already
done so, give our people a course of instructions on this
sacrament of supernatural birth that would breathe new
life and meaning into the catechism definition which we
all mouth so glibly and so unthinkingly. Then parents,
godparents, and friends alike, would be aware of the
stupendous thing that is happening at the Font. They

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would all but feel the breeze of the Holy Spirit’s ad­
vent, all but feel the heat of His love. Such a series of
instructions could well end with an actual baptism per­
formed before the eyes of the congregation, in the
sanctuary on Sunday morning; while another priest, or
a well-coached layman, would give a carefully prepared
explanation and translation as the ceremony proceeded.
Our people might even be urged to revive the beauti­
ful and significant custom of preparing and using an
individual baptismal robe for the child (or adult). The
robe would be made on simple lines much like a dal­
matic, to be slipped easily over the head. It would be
so much more significant than the doll’s dress or linen
towel usually touched to the shoulder—which never was
intended to clothe anyone, anyway. We might, too,
return to the custom of an individual baptismal candle,
decorated and adorned, to be kept and lighted on the
anniversary of one’s baptism—which incidentally should
become a day at least as joyful and important as the
anniversary of one’s physical birth.
What can we do? We can, if we have not already
done so, expound to our people the fact that, by mem­
bership in Christ’s Body, they share in Christ’s eternal
Priesthood. Our instructions, again, would revitalize the
mechanical rote of catechism definitions. Our people
would see themselves as they should and must be, active
participants in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, with something
to contribute and something to carry away; not mere
passive spectators, as a visiting pagan would be. We can
make them see themselves as providing, in a certain
sense, the raw material of the Sacrifice, the love and
self-immolation which Christ gathers from each of their

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hearts—uniting it with His own infinite Love, and carry­
ing it thus transformed to God, our common Father.
We can make the words of the Mass, the ceremonies
of the Mass, the meaning of the Mass come alive for
them; so that the Offertory collection, for example, will
no longer be a grudging surrender to moral pressure,
but a cheerful and conscious expression of the inner
offering of self, which accompanies the gift. Holy Com­
munions may increase, too, as our people learn that while
they do profit from any Mass at which they assist, yet
they do not fully participate in the Mass unless they
partake of the Victim Who is offered. And as our people
come to realize the meaning of their membership in
Christ’s Mystical Body, there may be born in them the
desire to make the Mass more fully their own by praying
it with the priest, through the dialogue Mass and the
congregational singing of High Mass.
I do not think that I am a “liturgical fanatic.” I do
not worry particularly about the cut of my vestments,
and I do not know a dossal from a dorsal—except that
one is found on a shark, and the other somewhere about
the altar. The revival of the Offertory and Communion
processions is a beautiful ideal, but rather impractical,
I fear, in our big city parishes. Indeed, when properly
understood, there is no reason why four or six ushers
proceeding reverently up the aisle to lay their baskets
inside the sanctuary gate need be any less significant
than the same men making the same journey with bread
and wine in their hands. The altar “versus populi” is
something that appeals very strongly to me; if I were
building a church, I think I should try to have such an
altar. But it doesn’t really matter in what direction the

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altar faces, unless the people understand what is going
on there. Once they do understand, it probably matters
even less.
None of this said in criticism of the Liturgical Move­
ment. The things that I have mentioned are not essential
to the Liturgical Movement, as the great luminaries of
that modern crusade will be the first to admit. The
heart and core of the Liturgical Movement is to make
the Mass and the Sacraments once more a living reality
to our people: acts of true popular worship, co-acting
and co-living with Christ. But the Liturgical Movemcn*
will never completely get out of the ivory-tower stage
until we shepherds and guides of the flock open to our
people the full beauty and wealth of the liturgy. We
shall never do that unless we have come to know and
love the liturgy ourselves, to know it as something more
than a set of rules in red print. No doubt there have
been some changes in seminaries in the course of a gen­
eration, but I know that twenty-five years ago, liturgy
to me meant rubrics. Like many another older priest,
whatever appreciation for the liturgy I may have devel­
oped, I have had to dig out for myself.
Since there is no true understanding of the liturgy
without an understanding of the doctrine of the Mystical
Body, it is fitting that the Holy Father’s Mystici Corporis
should have preceded by four years his other great
encyclical, Mediator Dei, in which the soul of the
liturgy is exposed with such clarity and conciseness, and
the Liturgical ^Movement given definitive bounds and
direction. These are two encyclicals that should be
“must” reading for every priest; more important, in my
opinion, than the great labor encyclicals of Leo XIII and

The Priest and the Mystical Body

19

Pius XI. They touch the very essence of Christian life
and worship. We parish priests may never have occasion
to lead our people in a fight for social justice, for indus­
trial councils or guilds. But we have daily occasion, nay,
necessity, to lead them to sainthood. And while we are
on the subject of reading, I should like to recommend
the finest liturgical reference library available in English:
the yearly publication of the Liturgical Conference pub­
lished at Conception, Missouri. These paperbound vol­
umes contain the proceedings of the annual Liturgical
Week, and are available all the way back to the first
one, in 1941.1 From these alone, a priest can acquire a
deep fund of liturgical knowledge and practice, to be
digested and passed on to his people.
For us as priests, the doctrine of the /Mystical Body
has, or ought to have, immense personal significance. In
our attitude towards our Mass, for example. If we are
conscious of the dependence of the Church, Christ’s
Mystical Body, upon us, her official organs of prayer;
if we realize that the level of grace available to Christ’s
members rises and falls with every Mass that we offer
or omit, with every liturgical Hour that we recite care­
lessly or well: then how loath we shall be to miss even
a single Mass, unless circumstances make our celebration
physically impossible. To a priest imbued with a sense
of his importance to the ecclesia orans, the planning of
a vacation will be made always with a view to the
possibility of daily offering the Holy Sacrifice while on
holiday. “Some sinner that I have never seen may need
1 A selection of representative papers for the first six years has
also been compiled in one volume by Mary Perkins: The Sacra­
mental Way (Sheed & Ward).

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this Mass,” such a priest will say to himself, as he goes
up to the altar at the cost of his own comfort and con­
venience. The same will be true of our Breviary. We
shall settle to our Office wondering what soul or souls
will be helped by it. We shall undertake it with the
determination that no soul shall fail to grasp salvation
because we have failed, through careless recitation, to
make the needed grace available.
And in our work with our people—how much easier
it all becomes, if this thing of “seeing Christ in our
neighbor” has become something more than a pretty bit
of rhetoric! Our burden becomes so much lighter if we
can really see and feel that we are dealing with Christ
when He chooses to come to us, as He so often does, in
the person of some parochial pest. It may be a busybody
woman or a truculent man, a gabby time-waster or a
scatterbrained youngster. Yet it is so easy to be kind and
gentle with the weak and the ignorant (and the weak
and ignorant outnumber the malicious by ten thousand
to one)—it is so much easier to be patient and lighthanded with them, when we see the Heart of Christ in
the rise and fall of their breasts. Sometimes at swankv
parties, professional jokers are brought in disguised as
waiters or servants, to spill the soup and insult the dis­
tinguished visitors. Christ sometimes comes to us in
strange disguises, too.
And when we reverse the glass and see Christ in our­
selves—as He pre-eminently is in His priests—the trans­
formation in our work is even more notable. If we can
go through our day with the firm conviction, “It is
Christ Who walks where I walk, Christ Who speaks
when I speak, Christ Who does what I do,” what a solu­

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81

tion we have to our problems! So often, as we are dealing
with some recalcitrant or temper-trying person, and
our own temper is about to slip the leash, we shall
remember, “Are the words on my lips the words that
Christ would speak? Is this the way that He would deal
with this soul for whom He died?” My whole approach
will change in an instant, as I strive to make Christ not
unworthy of Himself. And what is true of particular
situations is true of my ordinary and habitual contacts.
Only let me start to treat my assistants (or my pastor)
and the nuns and the parochial staff as Christ would treat
them—and then let me see what loyal helpers I shall
have. Just let me move among my people, the young
and the old, the sick and the sorrowful and the weak and
the careless, as Christ would move, and I shall see a new
reverence for me enkindled in every heart and home in
my parish.
A pastor beloved and his voice heard; a flock joyful
in living and ardent in prayer; the Sacraments cherished
and the Mass understood and actively shared; a com­
munity of saints begun! That is the parish in which
Christ in His Mystical Body has become a living reality.

11. Charity

I don’t suppose that I could start an argument
with anyone by saying that Charity is essential to true
priestliness. All of the Christian virtues are important for
us, of course. Which virtue is most necessary of all
generally depends on which virtue one happens to be
talking about. A retreat-master who is talking about
Prudence will say, “This is the one virtue a priest must
have.” If his topic is prayer, he will say, “This is the
one virtue we can’t get along without.” Well, with
St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians to
back me up, I’ll be content to say this: we’ll not make
much progress, either in our personal lives or our sacer­
dotal work, without a determined effort to acquire and
to enlarge the virtue of Charity within us.
Charity. Love. Love for Christ. Love for Christ in His
Divinity. Love for Christ in His Sacred Humanity. Love
for Christ as our Redeemer, love for Christ as our Master.
Love for Christ—and perhaps this contains them all—in

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His Sacrament of Love, in the Eucharist, by virtue of
Which we as priests exist.
It is the virtue that ought to be the burden of all our
prayers: that we may love Christ more. In our prayers
to our Blessed Mother, in our prayers to our Guardian
Angel, in our prayers to our favorite saints—always there
should be that dominant and ever-recurrent theme:
“Help me to love Christ more! ” In our morning prayers
and our night prayers, in our Mass and in our Office—
always this should be the primary intention: “Beloved
Jesus, teach me to love Thee as I ought!”
At the moment, however, it is of one facet of Charity
that I would speak: love for Christ as manifested towards
Him in His members; loving Christ in my neighbor. Or
perhaps better I should say, letting Christ love Himself
in my neighbor. Because we have seen, in treating of
the Mystical Body, that it is just as important (perhaps
more so) to see Christ in myself as to see Him in others.
If I am to be successful in the practice of fraternal
charity, it is not enough for me to say to myself, “I
must love this person because, in spite of his repulsive­
ness, Christ is in him.” I also need to realize that I must
love this person because Christ is in me. Through me as
an instrument He wills to express His love, His tender­
ness, His compassion, towards others.
Our ministry can be so enriched, if the Charity of
Christ pervades all our waking hours. If I am conscious
of the fact, and never let myself forget the fatt, that
Christ has no other way of making Himself audible and
visible to those around me, except through me. My ef­
forts at the practice of fraternal charity become so much
easier, if they are based upon this determination to make

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Christ worthy of Himself. If I am land and considerate,
because I would not want to belittle Christ by having
Him act selfishly. If I am patient and forbearing, because
anything else would, in a sense, force Christ to bear
witness against Himself.
To be very practical, if I am conscious of my oneness
with Christ, I shall keep my mouth shut in clerical
gatherings when the stilettoes are unsheathed and the
game of conversational darts is introduced. Unfortunate­
ly, it’s a tragic sort of game we play, and play too often;
this toying with the reputations of others. So when
someone throws the first piercing point and says, “Did
you hear about the latest scrape they say that O’Halligan
got into; got pinched for speeding the other night and
tried to fight it out with the cops?”—even as my mouth
opens to make the next toss by saying, “Yeah, he never
should have been ordained,” I suddenly realize that
Christ wouldn’t say that, and I swallow hard, and my
mouth slowly closes. And when the conversation gets
around to Guggenheimer who is, according to popular
opinion, always sucking up to the bishop, I strain an­
other vocal tendon to prevent Christ from saying some­
thing He never would have wanted to say.
The first time we try this, it makes for a very drab
and discouraging evening. Especially if we have estab­
lished something of a reputation as a wit by our past
assaults upon the foibles and weaknesses of others. As
we sit silent and confused, our friends are apt to ask us
what the trouble is—whether we’re off our feed, and
what’s on our mind, anyway? But that stage passes, and
gradually our friends begin to take us at our true worth

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—which is so much higher because now ours is the very
personality of Christ.
Make no mistake about it; the most popular priest in
any crowd, the one most loved and respected, is the man
who is never a threat to anyone’s reputation. If he gets
stuck with a tough assistant (or pastor), you’ll never
know it from him. If he gets moved, and his successor
tries to belittle him and criticizes his administration, this
man offers no angry defense nor recrimination. Even
when the conversation turns to the most recent act of
official unreasonableness, this priest is maddeningly silent.
At least it is maddening to those of us who consider
diocesan officials to be always fair game. He may have
a wonderful sense of humor, but it will never touch the
reputation of another. His wit will be the quiet kind.
When he slips across a fast one, the resulting laughter
will be explosive, but no one’s character will go up in
the explosion. Strangely enough, he’s the one most missed,
most regretfully missed, if he’s absent from the crowd—
the best possible proof that a priest doesn’t need a sharp
and cutting tongue in order to be popular. There are
such priests as the one I’ve been describing. Myself, I
must pray that I may increase the number by one.
If we don’t stick together, we priests, together in
Christ, then God help us indeed. Of course there will be
priests who annoy us, priests whose very obvious faults
irritate us, priests who don’t see eye to eye with us, and
always seem to rub us the wrong way. There’ll always
be (to our discerning eye) clerical politicians and
roman-collared toadies and demanding bishops and un­
reasonable chancellors. But there’ll always be me, too.

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And would that I could hear myself analyzed and
dissected by those who are out of sympathy with my
own complacent view of myself. But even supposing that
I am as good as I think I am: still let my treatment of
these others be the treatment of the Christ Who is in
me—a yearning love, a compassion, a prayerful will that
Christ may find the fullness of His stature in them also.
Or at the very least, let me be silent.
And if Christ-in-me is frustrated by sharp-tongued
criticism of others, what can I say of my interior
jealousy, resentment, suspicion, towards a brother priest?
Above all, how can I ever hope to identify myself as
one of Christ’s own at Judgment, if T harbor a grudge
against another, no matter how real may be the wrong
that he has done me? Have you never winced inwardly,
to see two priests who by accident have been thrown
together in the same crowd, studiously steering clear of
each other so that they can avoid having to shake hands
or say hello? Christ said, “If you are my disciples, love
your enemies, do good to them that hate you!” He said
that to everyone, of course. But primarily to us, His
priests.
I remember a pastor (long since dead, God rest him)
who felt that he had been betrayed by another priest,
once his best friend. Ever afterwards he would not
speak to the man, he did not want to hear the man’s
name mentioned, he would not go where he thought he
might encounter the man. Yet every morning he would
go up to the altar, and in robust tones he would sing
his Pater Noster, seemingly with no advertence to the
horrible inconsistency of what he was doing. I am not
passing judgment upon him. In every other way he was

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an exemplary priest. He would have had a horror, I am
sure, of ascending the altar steps with a sin against purity
or temperance upon his soul. But there is something
peculiarly blinding about sins against charity, something
diabolically distorting, that seems to completely anes­
thetize one’s conscience. We joke sometimes about the
“Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum” of the Psalm.
But there just isn’t any possible way for a priest to recon­
cile a spirit of rancor or resentment with Christ’s charge:
“If therefore thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there
thou remember that thy brother hath anything against
thee; leave there thy offering, and go first to be record
ciled to thy brother, and then coming thou shalt offer
thy gift.” '
Essential too is our charity, our Christ-consciousness,
in all our dealings with the laity. People can be most
awfully exasperating at times, in and out of the parish.
But Christ is not one to give way to exasperation. Follow
His patience, His kindness, through the Gospels. His
patience and kindness towards His ambitious apostles,
His slow-to-believe disciples, towards the Samaritans and
the sinners and the importunate favor-seekers and the
merely curious who dogged His path looking for won­
ders, and gave Him no rest.
There was only one class of persons towards whom
Christ showed what we might call sharpness, and that
was the hypocrites—the rulers and leaders of the people,
who burdened their laity and excused themselves.
But there are no hypocrites like that, among those
with whom we have to deal. There are no hypocrites,
in the classical sense, in our parishes. There is ignorance
in plenty. There is thoughtlessness in even greater abun­

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dance. There is lack of security which expresses itself
in over-aggressiveness. There are feelings of inferiority
which manifest themselves in forwardness. There are all
of these, and many other human shortcomings besides;
which, to the discerning eye, the Christ-illumined eye,
arouse pity and compassion, but never impatience and
wrath.
As I have made my pastoral rounds, year after year,
seeking to reclaim a stray sheep here and there, it has
been heartbreaking to encounter fallen-away after fallenaway who have abandoned Christ because they had
found Him wanting—in one of His priests. They don’t
put it that way, of course. But Father So-and-so had
been unkind to them when they buried their mother,
or Father Nameless had hauled them over the coals be­
cause they wouldn’t make a pledge for the new church,
or Father Someone had publicly condemned as defective
the work they did on the rectory roof. I remember one
whose excuse was that a priest had hit him over the head
with a book when he was in the tenth grade.
You know all the stories as well as I, so there’s no
need to continue the litany. The point is that these
people—all our people—have only one chance to see
Christ clearly, and that is to see Him in us. They see
Him there, or they don’t see Him at all. I remember one
priest who was unimpeachable in every way, except that
he was that curse of any parish: a scolder. He was chron­
ically impatient with all the human imperfections of his
flock, individually and collectively. Hardly a sermon did
he preach that didn’t have its undercurrent of sarcasm
and petty nagging. Was it any surprise that his box was
not busy on Saturday nights, and that hardly anyone

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ever rang the rectory doorbell unless they were desperate
indeed? /Marriages out of the church increased, babies
of lax parents went unbaptized, but he could see no fault
of his own. “These people are no good anyway,” was
his explanation; “there’s no faith in this parish.” Yet they
were good people, and the seeds of faith were there. But
they had sought Christ in their parish and had not found
Him where they had a right to look.
In our priestly work we do so need to be patient, and
patient, and patient again. What St. Alphonsus said
about confessions: that he would rather go to hell for
having been too lenient than for having been too severe
—is doubly true of our other duties and contacts. Even
when our righteous anger seems patently justified by
the malice and the pertinacity of the one with whom we
deal, we still shall be on the side of the angels if we
swallow our wrath, however righteous, and let the
malice and the pertinacity find in us no more resistance
than Christ offered to the servant of the High Priest.
We dare not talk about our charity being tried to the
limit. Our charity can have no limits, because it must be
the Charity of Christ.
St. Peter probably never dreamed that his phrase,
“Charity covereth a multitude of sins,” would be so
often abused and misquoted, and I shall not try to twist
it now. But the instinct of our people is sound when they
choose to condone almost any other fault in a pastor, so
long as he is kind, compassionate, gentle, and longsuffering. Because, no matter to what other human frailty
he may surrender—so long as he exemplifies fraternal
and pastoral charity, the image of Christ in him can never
be wholly obscured.

12. Humility

A group of us were discussing a mutual ac­
quaintance whom all of us liked—a person of some
eminence in his own field. We were trying to analyze
why we liked him, what it was that made him an
attractive personality. Several qualities were tossed
around: sincerity, simplicity, affability, thoughtfulness,
and a few others. All of them fitted, but none of them
quite told the whole story; until someone said, “He’s a
humble man.” That was the precipitant which ended the
discussion. Everyone agreed that humility was the one
word which explained everything. Our absent friend was
a humble man.
I must confess that I myself hadn’t realized, before,
just how much territory the virtue of humility could
cover. I had learned about it, of course, in moral and
ascetic theology; I had made periodic meditations on
humility, as we all do. I knew that humility is the root
of all virtue, that without it there can be no real virtue

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of any kind, that other virtues without humility are like
a Christmas tree stuck in a pail of wet sand—pretty now,
but doomed to wither and die. I knew all this, but it
wasn’t until we took a good man apart that the full
potentialities of humility really struck home.
And it’s such a simple virtue, too. It is nothing more
than a correct estimate of one’s worth in the sight of God.
That means, logically, a recognition of one’s essential
worthlessness, since there is nothing we are or have that
is not due to God. Even for our moment-to-moment
existence, we depend upon the continuance of His pre­
serving power. We shudder to think what would happen
to us, if God were to take His eyes off us for a single
instant! We’d vanish with a “fffft” like a punctured bal­
loon, and even God couldn’t find us when He looked
back again. We know all this, but the mere intellectual
admission of the truth is not enough; it is only a begin­
ning. We are not truly humble, we are not practicing
the virtue of humility, until we have made the sense of
our own insufficiency, of our complete dependence upon
God, an active and a constant principle of operation in
our lives.
God knows we priests ought to be humble. No one is
better acquainted than we with the innate perversity of
fallen human nature. In the course of our pastoral labors
we have seen often enough exemplified the axiom, cor­
ruptio optimae pessima. We have seen giants topple, we
have seen talents prostituted, we have seen souls calmly
embark upon paths that lead to disaster and ruin. All
because they had confidence in the inerrancy of their own
judgments and the invincibility of their own strength. We
could have told them, had they but listened, that their

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self-confidence was as safe a guide as the instinct of the
moth. Yes, we have reason to know what the lack of
humility can do to a man. We have returned home to
our rectories often enough, sad at heart because of our
failure to win back to Christ a proud mind which had
set itself up in judgment over Christ and His Church.
It is so easy to detect the lack of humility in other
people—and so damnably hard to recognize the same
defect in ourselves. We might almost say, “Blessed is the
priest who has no talents; blessed is the man who is so
obviously inept that he cannot but recognize his own
deficiencies.” We might say that, except that the chances
are, if we were so situated, we’d be unlikely to see and
accept our lot happily. More probably, we would refuse
to admit our lack and would take refuge in a self-pitying
certainty that “the breaks are against me.”
Here is a little exercise that it is helpful to practice
occasionally: to take a quiet moment some time, and
mentally strip ourselves of everything that is due to God,
and see tvhat we have left when we’re done. Have I a
talent for speaking, for writing, for administration? Am
I good at winning converts, or adept at working with
young people? Am I a clever money-raiser, do I sing
well, have I an accurate eye for a golf ball? Let me think
back, if I can, to the time when I did not possess that
talent; not to the time when I first began to exercise it,
but to the time when I first consciously acquired the
talent for myself. Obviously, there never was such a time.
It may be that by study or practice I acquired facility in
the use of my talents. But the very opportunity given
me for such study and practice: did I devise the circum­
stances which made the opportunity possible? Was it I

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who chose the parents I had, the good parents, sound in
the Faith which came so easily to me? Was it I who
chose, in the first place, to come out of the nothingness
which preceded me? Did I have a vision of the glory of
God that one day could be mine, and in my nothingness
did I say, “I guess I’d better begin to exist, so that I can
achieve that happiness for myself”?
Or, to use the negative approach: let us ask ourselves
what we’d be like today, if we had had the start in life
that millions of others have had. I am thinking especially
of the case-histories of problem children I’ve dealt with.
Both parents divorced and remarried, sometimes two and
three times over; the children living now with one parent,
now with another; parent and step-parent both working,
no supervision for the children; truanting from school,
failing their grades, running the streets at night. No
knowledge of God except as a word of emphasis, no
knowledge of Jesus Christ except as an expletive. Finding
their recreation in the gutter, learning early their lessons
in evil; no schooling in decency and responsibility, not
to mention religion. Honestly now, what would we have
been, with a start like that in life? And dare we claim that
it was our own sagacity that saved us from it?
No, we do want to be humble, and we do try to be.
But the vice of pride, humility’s lack, is such an insidious
enemy, and can creep into our lives like the parasites from
which many tropical peoples suffer; parasites which sap
their energy, without any localized pain to tell of the
evil’s presence. So too pride can penetrate to our own
spiritual vitals, providing its own anesthetic as it enters.
We have heard of people—perhaps even we have encoun­
tered them—whose very outward virtue is built on pride.

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Men who are chaste or sober because it would be offen­
sive to their pride to surrender to gross desire; men who
are truthful because they pride themselves that “their
word is as good as their bond”; men who are openhanded
in generosity because it ministers to their self-esteem.
There is no need to prolong the list. And anyway, we
are not interested in others; it is of ourselves we want to
think. And we know well that we aren’t proof against
the tricks of pride. Has it ever happened to you, as it has
happened to me: that in a moment of piety, perhaps
during meditation or at the memento of the Mass, we
have for a moment become acutely conscious of our own
nothingness, have felt an access of genuine abasement
before God? And then, with that sense of unworthiness
scarcely formed in our heart, a little voice has whispered:
“See how humble you are—how very holy you are be­
coming!” God forgive us, it seems we can’t even be
humble without being proud of our humility.
Well, we shall probably make more progress in hu­
mility if we don’t keep digging into ourselves all the
time to see if we are humble. In fact, when we have
become truly humble, we’ll be the last persons in the
world to recognize the fact. Self-analysis isn’t nearly as
helpful here as is the more positive approach. First of all
there will be persevering prayer, asking God to help us
see ourselves as He secs us; because humility is His gift,
along with everything else; it’s not something we fashion
for ourselves.
Then, with a basis of prayer, there will be the effort to
keep ourselves reminded of our own utter poverty, of
our essential weakness, of our gullibility to the flattery
of the world, of the tortuousness of self-love in its efforts

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to take credit for what it has but little part in. A factory
worker who presses a button which causes a giant press
to descend and to fashion a beautifully wrought piece of
steel does not step back and say, “See what I did with
my own hands!” So we keep reminding ourselves, “I am
God’s, all God’s; all that my free will does is to press a
little button, and the power of God does the rest; and
God even helps me to press the button!”
While too much self-analysis is wasteful, if not actually
harmful, in the acquisition of humility; yet it is well to
run a quick check on ourselves from time to time, for
evidences of pride—if only to humble ourselves by seeing
how much pride we have.
Since humility is co-terminous with truth, we recog­
nize that it is not the part of humility to pretend we
haven’t a certain talent, if we do possess it. If God has
been gracious enough to give us some skill, physical or
mental, it would be a discourtesy to God to pretend we
do not have it. We can quickly recognize as the fake
it is, the pretended humility of the man who says, when
complimented on some accomplishment, “Oh, it was just
an accident,” or “You’re just kidding when you say
that,” or any of the other responses with which some
people meet compliments. This is what is called humilitywith-a-hook—a fainthearted disclaimer in the hope of
further praise. It is much more honest, much more
humble, to say a simple thank-you and to make mental
reference of the praise to Him to Whom it is really due.
In making our self-census, we note that one sure sign
of a lack of humility is an unwillingness to give honest
praise where praise is deserved. Now and then one en­
counters pastors, for example, who can never bring

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themselves to say a word of praise to the young priest
who has done a good job of work—whether it’s a sermon
he preached or a parish party he planned or a convert
class he organized. Willing and generous commendation
is not only good psychology, it is good Christianity. Such
a grudging pastor might offer in his defense the fear of
turning the young man’s head and making him conceited.
But if the young man is worth his salt he’ll pass the praise
on to God; if he doesn’t, that is no concern of the one
who offers it. In the meantime he’ll have had a solid lift
to spirits that may be flagging. We all enjoy a word of
praise, and there surely is no sin in the simple pleasure
we get from a compliment—so long as we don’t hoard it
for ourselves. I believe that there is a degree of humility,
achieved by the saints, where praise becomes distasteful.
I haven’t achieved that eminence yet myself—and I am
sure that God isn’t too displeased with the boost to
morale that comes from a sincere commendation.
But to get back to our spot-check for pride: Worse
than the man who never praises is the man who always
criticizes. He picks out the flaws in every successful
achievement of another. He is chronically suspicious,
and invariably imputes the worst possible motives to
anyone who does a generous or self-sacrificing deed. He’s
the man who never says, “It was a swell piece of work,”
but always, “It would have been a lot better if he had
done thus and so.” He is a proud fellow, this man;
secretly afraid that when someone else is being praised,
he himself is being condemned by implication. And of
course, no idea has any merit in his eyes, unless he first
thought of it himself.

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Another form of pride is found in obstinate addiction
to one’s own opinions—and it is surprising how many
good people suffer from it, to a greater or lesser degree.
The extreme example, of course, is the person who
simply can’t be argued with. If he says a thing is so,
that’s the end of it. The way he does things is the best
way, and any fool who says otherwise is still wet behind
the ears. You can quote Canon Law at him, and he
brushes it off: “What do those Romans know of our
problems?” You can quote the theologians, and he waves
them airily aside: “There’s a lot of stuff that isn't written
down in books!” When the brash assistant says, “You
can’t say a black Mass today, he answers, “Young man,
watch me, and you’ll see me do the impossible.” If he
is cornered, he still will save his face. Like the man who
swears that any kind of grape wine will do for Mass;
and when he is proven wrong, wiggles out by saying,
“Oh, you’re talking about licit matter; I was talking
about valid matter.” Yes indeed, we are far, far along
the path to humility if we can honestly say that we ac­
cept defeat gracefully, that we never cling to an opinion
through stubbornness, that we admit error quickly and
cheerfully when our mistake is shown to us, without
any effort to clutch shreds of dignity about us.
In treating of Charity, I have spoken of the pride that
manifests itself in uncharitable talk about others, particu­
larly about our fellow priests. This indeed is a phase of
pride that the best of us have to be on our guard against.
It is such a boost to our ego to point out by indirection
our own virtues, through the simple device of calling
attention to the lack of those virtues in others. But any

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time we try to elevate ourselves by knocking down
others to serve as stepping-stones, our humility is suffer­
ing a crushing defeat.
I don’t pretend to have touched upon all the phases of
pride, all the danger signals that point to a lack of hu­
mility. Pride is a villain of countless faces, an octopus
of a thousand tentacles. We slap him down here, and he
comes sneaking around from the other side. It sounds
like a tough assignment, this obligation to be humble.
It is a problem that was too big for some of the angels.
It is a problem that licked Adam, for all of his unclouded
intellect and unwounded will. But it is not too big a
problem for us, with the grace that God will give us,
with the example Christ has shown us. We can’t meditate
each morning, fashioning ourselves day by day according
to the pattern Christ has set, without coming to realize
what poor, weak, untempered, bending, breaking tools
we are in the Hands of God; without marvelling anew
that God still deigns to make use of us, when He could
have accomplished so much more by junking the whole
lot of us, and exerting His infinite power direct. We
can’t look at Christ daily, we can’t listen to Him atten­
tively, without absorbing some of the infinite humility
of His Sacred Humanity. “I cannot of iMyself do any­
thing. As I hear, so I judge; and My judgment is just;
because I seek not my own will, but the will of Him that
sent Me.” Think of it! That is Christ talking: “I cannot
of Myself do anything.” Dare we say more?

13. The Apostolic Priest

The term, “Apostolic priest” is, I know, tau­
tological. We might well say that a priest is apostolic by
his very nature as a priest. But that doesn’t necessarily
tell the whole story—any more than the infused virtue of
Faith, received in Baptism, guarantees explicit belief.
“Apostolic priest” is one of those terms that is much
easier to speak than to define. I suppose a simple descrip­
tive definition would be to say that an apostolic priest is
one who is never satisfied that he is doing enough; one
who, even as he looks out over his crowded pews, is still
keenly conscious of the other hundreds and thousands
who are not there.
In the eternal (and perhaps healthy) friction which
exists between pastors and assistants, I have heard pastors
say, “He’s a good lad and is conscientious about anything
I give him to do; but he doesn’t look for work, he has
no initiative.” And I have heard assistants say. . . . Well,

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we can skip that, but what each means is that the other
man is lacking in apostolic spirit.
Many priests, I am sure, have lost their missionary
spirit and have surrendered to dull routine, simply be­
cause they have been appalled at the sight of the task of
“restoring all things in Christ” and have deemed it hope­
less. Digging a little deeper, we might find that their
quick surrender was due to the possession of a “clerical”
mind. A clerical mind is a far cry from a truly priestly
mind. A clerical mind takes the view that the layman
must be “kept in his place.” If a thing needs doing, but
Father can’t find time to do it, then it must go undone.
Our task would be hopeless indeed, were we to deny
to the layman the exercise of the common priesthood
which, through Baptism, he shares with Christ; if we
were to forbid him to fulfill the role that is his through
Confirmation: the duty to share in Christ’s teaching
office. It is a duty (and a power) which has more or
less Iain dormant for nineteen hundred years. It is a duty
whose fulfillment is described commonly as “the lay
apostolate.”
There are many reasons why it is only in our own
generation that the layman is, so to speak, coming into
his own. None of us would be so foolish as to think that
we have yet seen the full flowering of the Mystical Body
of Christ—the full unfolding of God’s plan for redemp­
tion. From our human point of view, nineteen centuries
seems like a long time. But, as St. Peter well reminds us,
“One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a
thousand years as one day.”
No, we have not yet seen all the resources which God
has waiting in His arsenal of grace. It is the particular

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need of a particular age that moves God to activate an
agency or a power that has been latent in His Church
from the beginning. When the Deposit of Faith needed
a vault in which to survive the barbarian invasion of the
Roman Empire, the monastic orders were born. It was
in the monasteries that religion and civilization together
weathered the storm.
When, in the Middle Ages, the spirit of luxury and
worldly magnificence posed a threat to the health of the
Church, God fertilized another seed, and the mendicant
orders sprang up to revive the ideal of Christian poverty.
Then in the sixteenth century, when the ignorance of
God’s children sent them scurrying after false leaders,
there came the teaching orders to restore intellectual
discipline to a chaotic world.
There is no need to labor the point. It is sufficient to
recognize the fact that the apostolate of the layman, the
Church’s answer to today’s emergency, is a providential
part of God’s plan. It is not something thought up by
some hot-eyed zealot. It is not even something originated
by the Holy Father—for all that the last three Popes have
been urging the laity to undertake the full exercise of
their vocation. The lay apostolate is not something new
at all. It has been potential in the Church ever since the
sacrament of Baptism was instituted. But, up to our own
century, it scarcely progressed beyond the seedling stage.
And now suddenly, in our own generation, it has come
to full bloom—although not yet to full fruit. It is almost
as though God, like the timekeeper at the start of a race­
course, had cried, “NOW is the time!”, and had set
another part of His plan in motion.
First of all, it is an age
which calls,7 as never before,7
D

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for lay leadership. The threat to the world is not from
idolatrous barbarians, nor from ignorant heretics, nor
from lax and sensual Christians. The catastrophe which
faces us is far greater than any of these. It is the threat
of a culture which has looked at God, and has smiled
amusedly, and has looked away again. It is the threat of
a humanism which has known God and has chosen to
forget Him. It is the threat of an endemic pattern of
thought which calmly assumes that religion has no place
in everyday life. The workaday world, we are told, is a
practical place—religion is an aesthetic experience for
those who enjoy it, but it should be kept in its own
tightly sealed compartment. The threat has a name, and
its name is Secularism.
So the time is ripe for the layman to realize fully his
vocation as an apostle, as a sharer in Christ’s Priesthood.
Because, if Christ is to be restored to the fields of educa­
tion and government and industry and business and labor
and the family, it is the Catholic laymen and laywomen
who are in these fields, who must do the job. These fields
are, to a great extent, beyond the reach of priests and
religious. Bishops and priests can enunciate principles
and provide guidance; but the on-the-spot leadership
must come from the laity.
Not only is the time ripe, but the layman himself is,
probably for the first time in history, ready for the task.
It is almost within our own lifetime that a higher educa­
tion has ceased to be the privilege of a chosen few. And
it is almost within our own lifetime that the common
man has been admitted to the full sharing of political
and economic responsibility, which equip him for the
task of leadership.

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103

The time is ripe, the layman is ready; and, to complete
His design, God has seen to it that the science of theology
is equal to the need. The doctrine of the Mystical Body
was enunciated by Our Lord in the parable of the Vine
and Branches, and was further developed by St. Paul.
Then for nineteen hundred years the doctrine went all
but unnoticed. Until, within our own day, theologians
have seemed suddenly to realize the full implications of
this teaching, and have developed and expanded it to its
full stature. The grand unfolding of a slumbering dogma
reached its climax in Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Cor­
poris.
Another encyclical of the same Pontiff points up a
parallel development in the field of worship. Mediator
Dei calls upon the layman to assume his proper role as
an active participant in the public worship of the Church.
The liturgy is nothing less than Christ-at-prayer, Christ
in His Mystical Body. It is high time that the layman,
who by Baptism is a member of that Body and conse­
quently a sharer in Christ’s Priesthood, should make full
use of the powers that are his. This is the burden of the
Holy Father’s encyclical—and he is implementing the
encyclical in very practical fashion, as witness the revi­
sion of the Holy Saturday ceremonies, keyed to active
participation on the part of the congregation. The net
result is that the layman is going to find himself more
fortified, spiritually, for the grave task ahead.
The time is ripe, the layman is ready, theology and
liturgy are abreast of the need. The planets indeed are in
constellation. But still there is a certain degree of lag,
due to the difficulty which we find, priest and layman
alike, in readjusting our attitude of mind. For centuries

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we priests have looked upon the layman as the terminus
of our labors. If we bring him into the fold, keep him in
the fold, and bury him from the church, then our work
has been done.
But now we must see the layman as just one stage of
our work; indeed, the first stage of our work. He must
be no longer the terminal point of our labors. He must
come into his own as an apostle, a Christian leader. He
is our auxiliary, and through him the effectiveness of
each priest can be multiplied a hundred- and a thousand­
fold.
We must see that the layman was not baptized just so
that he might be the passive recipient of grace; he was
not confirmed just so that his own faith might remain
strong. He was baptized so that he might increase and
multiply himself, as any healthy cell should, and con­
tribute to the growth of the Body. He was confirmed
so that he might share his faith, and use the powers which
the Character of Confirmation has given him: the power
to teach in Christ’s Name—to teach especially by action
upon the institutions of which he is a part.
Of course, the layman himself must also alter his point
of view. He may no longer look upon himself as the selfsufficient beneficiary of the priest’s ministrations. He may
no longer be content to drink in grace for himself alone,
like a reservoir without an outlet. He must see himself
as a channel of grace. His will not be the kind of power
that Holy Orders gives, but still his priestly powers
through Baptism and Confirmation are tremendous. He
must see that he is one with the priest in responsibility
for the Christianization of society.

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105

Indeed, the special responsibility to apostolic action
which comes with Holy Orders is simply an intensifica­
tion, a greater personalization, of the responsibility which,
by virtue of Baptism, priest and layman share alike. Holy
Orders is a passing from Something to Something higher.
But Baptism is the big step—passing from Nothing to
Something. Unless we overcome the divisive mentality
that would set priest and people completely apart, the
Popes will talk in vain of Catholic Action.
If we admit that the day has come for the layman to
exercise fully his vocation, what follows then? Aren’t we
already teaching him all he needs to know? Surely in
our Catholic schools, in our sermons, in our convert
instructions, we are giving the layman all he needs in
order to get on with his leadership if he really wants to.
And yet we know by sad experience that it isn’t
enough to define Secularism, and say, “Now get busy
and put religion into your daily life!” Just telling a per­
son isn’t enough. Self-activity is a fundamental principle
of the educative process. In penmanship class, the teacher
doesn’t just write the letters on the board and say,
“Now write like that”; she goes around and guides the
clumsy hands, and makes them form the characters over
and over again. In English class, themes must be written
and re-written; in arithmetic, problems must be worked
and worked again.
We shall best teach our laymen to be leaders by giving
them practice in leadership; providing guidance, but
encouraging, insisting upon, initiative. Our job is to help
them to recognize problems, and themselves to find the
solution to those problems; to help them to bridge the

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gap between religion and life; to help them begin malting
Christ a living reality in their own particular environ­
ment: family, neighborhood, school, shop or office.
It is not my intention to write a treatise on the tech­
niques of Catholic Action. Others have done that far
better than I could do. But it seems pretty generally
agreed that a compact group provides the best field for
leadership training. It doesn’t matter much what the
group is called; it may be a Sodality, or a Legion of
Mary, or a St. Vincent de Paul Conference. Or it may
be one of the specialized Catholic Action groups, such
as the Young Christian Students, the Young Christian
Workers, or the Christian Family Movement. Or it need
have no name nor formal organization at all.
What is important is that there be a selfless priest who
will provide strong spiritual direction, helping the group
especially to come to a thorough understanding of, and
love for the Mass (which is the heart of all Catholic
Action), and helping them to absorb the spirit of the
Gospel, so that it becomes alive for them and applicable
to their own particular problems. Other tilings are im­
portant, too; such as a definite program of action and
the exercise of initiative.
But there arc obstacles to overcome before even a
beginning can be made. One objection that is frequently
heard is this: “It all sounds very fine, but there just
aren’t any laymen in my parish whom I could get to go
along with me on such a deal. They don’t want to be
bothered. They won’t spare the time.” (It has always
seemed a pity to me that the pastors who are looking
for leaders, and the laymen who are looking for a chance
to do something, never seem to be in the same parish.)

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101

But seriously, the obstacle at times is a very real one;
and yet rarely so great that prayer and dogged perse­
verance can’t overcome it.
Another difficulty more frequently proposed is that
there just isn’t time. The priests of the parish already are
operating on a crowded schedule, and there’s no possible
way to squeeze anything else in. It’s an honest objection
and a very real difficulty, I know by experience. But it
is the very reason why lay leadership is so urgently
needed—in order that our load may be lightened, and
that things may be done that we just haven’t time to do
ourselves. In the beginning, we may have to jettison some
duties that seem pretty important; but once the spirit of
the lay apostolate is abroad in our parish, we can go to
bed earlier nights and sleep with a lightened load. We
dare not seek escape by saying, “I have no time.” To
restore all things in Christ, there must be time—and the
apostolic priest will find it.

14. The Priest and World Vision

When I was in the seminary, I remember that
we had a chapter in pastoral theology entitled, “The
Priest and His Leisure.” The burden of the chapter was
that a priest, especially one stationed in a country parish,
could expect to have a good bit of idle time on his
hands, for which he should plan a sound program of
reading and study. Well, I suppose that book was written
before the era of automobiles and good roads—or maybe
by a priest who had never been in parish work.
It has been my own pastoral experience that a man
has to scheme, almost cunningly, to salvage any leisure
time for himself. Particularly in the country, where a
priest is not merely a pastor, but a neighbor and friend
as well, to be dropped in on and visited with, if one
happens to be going by. I am sure that all of us would
get a few smiles now, if wre were to read some of those
old pastoral theology books, with their grim warnings

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against the dangers lurking in the long, lonesome hours
a priest could expect to face.
Indeed, our danger today comes from another direc­
tion; we almost might say from the opposite direction.
In the past three or four decades, a priest has had to
take on, bit by bit, a whole new set of duties that were
known, at best, in skeletal form to our predecessors.
Nowadays a priest is expected to be, in truth, all things
to all men: domestic-relations adviser, youth counsellor,
recreational director, parochial school administrator, civic
leader, luncheon-club speaker, and what have you. Some
of it we have foolishly assumed at the expense of more
important work, but much of it wc just can’t escape. So
we trot through our day with no more mental nourish­
ment than a quick glance at the newspaper headlines,
and maybe a magazine or a radio program to settle our
nerves before we go to bed.
It is a dangerous condition, because our minds easily
grow stagnant and sterile unless they be fed. And we
can he totally unmindful of our own mental atrophy.
Our people will notice it before we do. They will notice
—in our conversation, as commonplace and trivial as
supermarket chitchat. They will notice it in the narrow­
ness of our judgments, and the ultra-conservatism of our
administration.
The Church suffers, too, as our vision becomes more
and more exclusively parochial. The Church is a living
organism, in which there must be organic growth and
a continual adjustment (notice I do not say, “change”)
to the culture and the circumstances of the times. We
priests are, in a sense, the nerve-system of the Church.

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It is through us, and only through us, that she reaches
out to contact individual souls throughout her vast do­
main. If the Church lags on cultural, social, and economic
questions, it is because we priests lag. To my mind it is
one of the tragedies of the twentieth century that the
clergy have so largely lost status as the intellectual leaders
of contemporary culture. The fault is not wholly ours,
admittedly; but some of it is.
I do not mean to imply that every priest should become
an expert economist and sociologist and intellectual lu­
minary. Our first duty still is to become saints. But our
sanctity will be more fruitful, more effective for others,
if we are cognizant of what is happening in the world
around us—at least of what is happening in the Church.
I do not mean the events that are happening—the things
we read about in the daily papers and hear about on the
radio. I mean rather the new problems that arise, the
new movements that are developing to meet new needs,
the new directions that are evidenced in a Church which
the Holy Spirit still informs.
All this may sound rather vague and formless. What I
am trying to say is that it behooves us to keep ourselves
intellectually vigorous, for the sake of the Church, for
the sake of the world which Christ wants for Himself,
and for the sake of ourselves. Which means that we must
do some serious reading, regularly and consistently, how­
ever crowded our day already may be. We do find time
for our meals and allow nothing else to interfere. We do
find time for our Mass and (I hope) for our meditation
and our Divine Office. In other words, w'e find time for
whatever we consider of indispensable importance. Which
means that once we have convinced ourselves of the

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unique necessity for serious reading, we shall manage to
fit an hour for it into our day. What could we not do
with an hour a day, thirty hours each month, given to
the acquisition of new ideas and the re-evaluation of old
ideas! We all know that grace builds on nature, so it
needs no pointing out that as our minds are enriched, our
souls will be enriched too, and our entire lives. Our
meditations, for example, will be so much more fruitful,
when they are fed constantly with new facets of thought.
To a priest of practical mind, this immediately raises
the question of what to read. It would be brash of me to
make reading recommendations to fellow-priests. I should
be likely to make myself ridiculous by suggesting books
and periodicals that are an old story to my readers. But
I do want to be practical, so I shall risk humiliation by
intimating a few possibilities. The suggestions item from
the twin dangers to which all of us are exposed: the
dangers of narrow parochialism and of mental rigidity.
To counteract those dangers, we need constantly to aim
at developing our world vision and at maintaining intel­
lectual flexibility.
First of all, with reference to periodicals, I think all
will agree that it is shamefully easy to waste time on
secular magazines. I know that I used to think that I
couldn’t live without the Saturday Evening Post and
Life and the Reader’s Digest. It took me a long time to
discover that I could get along quite nicely without them,
without suffering (I think) either morally or intellec­
tually. As a result, I have more time for such magazines
as Worship, America, Commonweal, and Today. Worship
(formerly Orate Fraires') deepens one’s knowledge and
love of the liturgy, which is so intimately connected with

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the contemporary “Catholic revival”; America gives a
sound and seasoned analysis of current problems and
trends; Commonweal and Today give the Catholic lay­
man’s viewpoint on the religious, cultural, social and
economic questions of the day. Such periodicals as these
are intellectually stimulating, even when (or perhaps
because) we do not always agree with the ideas proposed.
There are other magazines of equal value, but it is
pointless to weary the reader with a long list of names
with which he already is familiar. I do not even mention
the conventional clerical reviews, for the simple reason
that most of us, I am sure, already subscribe to one or
the other of them. And I think we shall agree that the
strictly priests’ magazines are largely limited to matters
of immediate and short-range interest. They have their
value, but more is needed.
Then, as to books, it is with diffidence that I mention
some favorites of my own—some recent and some peren­
nials. For the development of a broad, a universal outlook,
there are Cardinal Suhard’s great pastorals: Growth and
Decline and Priests Among Men. There is, too, Daniélou’s The Salvation of the Nations and Montcheuil’s For
Men of Action. (How these Frenchmen can write! ) Then
there are the great encyclicals, well-thumbed copies of
which should surely be in every priest’s library. Rerum
Novarim and Quadragesimo Anno, of course; but also
Pius Xi’s Casti Connubii and Divini Illius Magistri; and
above all, considering contempory needs, Pius XII’s
Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei.
Good follow-ups to the latter would be Pius Parsch’s
The Liturgy of the Mass, and Alary Perkins’ The Sacra­
mental Way. Régamey’s Poverty is a powerful book, too.

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113

And then there are Dom Mannion’s Christ in His Mys­
teries and Christ the Life of the Soul (I still am talking
of personal favorites), and Von Hildebrand’s Transfor­
mation in Christ and Edward Leen’s In the Likeness of
Christ and The True Vine and the Branches.
The titles I have mentioned are only surface-scratchers,
of course. The entire list could be read in the course of
one year, well and thoughtfully read, with only an hour
a day given to the reading. And there is so much to read
that is of lasting value, even while there are so many of
us who have not nearly tapped the full resources of our
intellectual powers, or realized our vast potential for
constructive thought.
I am not preaching, believe me. Scarcely a week passes
that I do not have to strike my own breast at the remem­
brance of golden moments wasted. But I hope that I am
not just trying to share my own guilt feelings when I
plead for one hour each day jealously protected from
encroachments and given to developing in ourselves a
priestly mind in the fullest sense: a mind fed on the
strong meat that befits strong men.

15. The Passion

Our love for Jesus Christ will not be verydeep, nor strong, nor enduring, if it is not fed by frequent
meditation on the Passion of Christ. It is here, at the
foot of the Cross, that our most lasting lessons of love
are learned. It was on Calvary that God’s love for man
reached its visible climax. It is with his gaze fixed upon
the crucifix that a priest learns what it means to be a
victim soul, to empty oneself of self, to lose one’s life
that he may find it.
There is no step in the Passion narrative that is not
rich in material for a priest’s meditation. Can we ever
exhaust, for example, the grim warning that Judas gives
us all, as he strides through the Garden with the rabble
at his heels—Judas the priest, who has fallen so far in
three short years? Look upon him now, as he comes
hurrying, the silver jangling in the bag at his waist. Look
at him now, and compare him with the man he was three

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years ago, when Jesus first looked upon him and loved
what He saw: a soul innocent and generous, quick to
answer the Master’s quiet invitation, “Come, follow Me!”
Judas was just as heroic in Iris renunciation as the other
eleven; he too left all things to follow Christ. We can
look back, and see in ourselves on the day of our ordina­
tion an image of Judas on the day of his calling, when
he turned his back upon his boat and his nets, and set
out after the Lord. With our hands enclosed in the linen
bands, there was in our heart the same nameless joy, the
same burning zeal and high resolve, that Judas knew as
he began to walk with Christ.
But Judas had a weakness. Not yet a vice, but a weak
ness, as every man has his weakness of one kind or
another. Judas, born and raised in poverty, found a thrill
in the feel and the look of money. From the thrill of the
feel, it was an easy step to the love of possession. Judas
had given his all for Christ, but little by little he began
to take back what he had given (even as a priest may,
little by little, begin to dabble in pleasures of the world
which had no place in his first vision of the priesthood).
It was so easy for Judas to indulge his weakness, too.
Jesus never rapped his fingers as the Iscariot dipped them
slyly into the common purse. Jesus never seemed to be
looking. Jesus never gave any sign, by word or manner,
that Judas wasn’t just as good as the other apostles. (And
we think here of the softening priest, who is complacent
in his progressive laxness, because God gives no sign of
displeasure. Life goes on just the same as ever. So he be-

eat it too. God becomes for him a slightly senile grandpa,

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who never will notice a little misbehavior. And the poor
priest, in his blindness, cannot see the hangman’s noose
dangling at the end of the road.)
So Judas puts his hands on the arms of Christ and leans
forward to kiss Him. Judas isn’t worried about the result
of his action. The Master has escaped His enemies many
times before, and will do it again. So completely has
Judas throttled his conscience that no act is evil now
unless its effects are evil. Nothing really harmful can
come of this little deal of his; it isn’t anything really very
bad that he does.
He kisses Jesus, then. And we think of the priest who
might go up to the altar to give a more intimate kiss than
Judas ever gave, with hands and lips toughened by sins
that have been rationalized into petty human faults—
simply because God’s wrath has not thundered from the
heavens. Not necessarily sins of impurity; lips perhaps
that have been blistered with the bitterness of angry
words, or fouled with jealous gossip about a fellow priest;
or a heart that is hardened by hatred for a brother, or
atrophied in obstinate contempt for his Ordinary.
So many changes can be rung on the story of Judas,
but the plot is always the same. Let me then take a good,
long look at myself. At myself on the day of my ordina­
tion, and at myself today. At myself on the day of my
First Mass, and at myself in today’s Mass. Let me not
take courage in my surrenders, simply because Christ is
not rapping my fingers, and God seems not to be looking
my way.
Well, we move on; on, with Christ, to Caiphas. To
Caiphas, who was even yet, at the moment Christ stood
before him, the lawful (let us say the ordained) leader

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of God’s people. And where was he leading them? To
the feet of the Alcssias Whom the prophets had fore­
told? Indeed, he was not leading them at all. He was
driving such as would be driven, and letting the strays
wander into whatever arid lands their weakness and
their ignorance might steer them to. Caiphas was the alltime prototype of the greedy and dictatorial pastor, who
forgets that the priest exists for the sake of the people,
and not the people for the sake of the priest. The ex­
emplar—was Caiphas—of the chronic money-talker, the
scolder, the man jealous of his stole-fees, the hard task­
master of those whose faith manages to survive his
harshness. “They’re no good!”, says the modern Caiphas,
of the weak and the errant. “It’s useless trying to do
anything for scum like that.” He barks at penitents and
frowns every time his blessed ease and privacy is invaded
by door-bell or telephone. He, with Caiphas, would
draw himself up grandly and say, “Do you know whom
you’re talking to?” The love of God dies out in his
parish, and if Christ were to appear in the midst of the
parishioners, they would not recognize Him, because
they never have seen Christ in their pastor.
Herod is another nutrient source of meditation. He
was of royal blood, even as was Christ Who faced him.
Like Caiphas, Herod was destined by God to be a leader
of His people. But it was a grudging and absentee sort
of care that he had for the subjects whose welfare lay
in his hands. His was not the sly conniving with passion
which characterized Judas; his was not the cold and
sterile faith of Caiphas; his was the false geniality of the
good-liver, the wine-bibber and the glutton. It was by a
steady round of feasts and friends and excitement that

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he drowned out any voice of conscience that remained.
A surfeit of pleasure was his way of smothering the
sense of duty.
Does Herod have his counterpart today? He does, if
there is a priest who inflates and stretches pleasure and
recreation beyond the bounds of moderation. A man
could pyramid his golf and fishing and bowling and
card-playing and visiting and traveling, until there would
be little time left for that full giving of one’s self which
distinguishes the Christlike priest from the timeserver.
If there is such a man, his people will wallow in their
sins, while he wallows in his play. Contraceptives and
intemperance in his parish? Petting parties among the
young and jealousies and cliques among the old? A mere
dribble of converts and vocations, a sparse confessional
and many Justice weddings? He does not see these things,
and if his conscience is twinged by a vagrant ray of
grace, he steps up the tempo of the wheel of pleasure.
That is, if there were such a priest.
Our eyes swing from Herod to Pilate, and we gaze
upon the most pitiful of all the tawdry characters of the
Passion. Poor Pilate! He wasn’t a bad man, as pagans go.
He was a well-meaning sort, really. But he was a tem­
porizer, a buck-passer, a leave-well-enough-aloner, an
evader of responsibility.
If Pilate were a priest, he would keep putting off calls,
unpromising but necessary, that he should be making on
the apostates and fallen-aways of his parish. He would
manage not to be home when quarreling couples called
to have him settle their differences, or when irate parents
came to complain about the disciplining of their children
in the parish school. He would read of some contcm-

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porary movement keyed to modern religious needs, and
would convince himself that he was too busy to do any­
thing about it; too busy, especially, for the study and
preparation that he himself would have to make. Whether
it would be the formation of apostolic lay leaders for a
program of genuine Catholic Action in the parish; or
whether it would be a liturgical revival in the parish,
with congregational participation in the Mass and a
restoration of liturgical processions and blessings; always
it would be side-stepped as a disturber of established
routine.
Pilate would not be a lazy priest. He would keep busy
about a hundred little tasks, rather than assume the bur­
den of one big undertaking. He would say, “Others
aren’t doing it. Why should I?” He would say, “The
bishop hasn’t commanded it. Why should I give myself
unnecessary headaches?” He would wash his hands and
say, “This isn’t my responsibility; let others look to it!”
Pilate has another example to offer us. (Poor fellow,
as we contemplate this weak and harassed man, it is a
comfort to know that he is listed in the martyrologies of
some of the Oriental churches. After all, he wasn’t a
believer; he wasn’t expected to know better.) But he has
another example to offer us, as he puts his pathetic ques­
tion: “What is truth?”, and then turns quickly away
before Christ has time to answer. He was afraid, of
course, of what the answer might be; afraid of what it
might entail.
There are a lot of Christians—and can I be sure that I
am not among them?—who ask the same question; and
then, startled at their own rashness, turn quickly away
for fear of what the answer might imply. What is truth?

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Truth is love, and love means sacrifice, and sacrifice is a
most unprepossessing word. It leers at us around the
corner of every meditation; it keeps nudging us through
every page of spiritual reading. Sacrifice! It has a bitter
taste upon the tongue, and a rough hard feeling to the
tentative probing of our fingers. Pilate caught a fugitive
glimpse of where Truth might lead him and swung
quickly away. It can happen to us, too. We can be lag­
gard in our pursuit of Truth because of the demands we
fear it may make upon our creature comfort—because we
fear it may be too disturbing to our present complacency.
Here again, “Let well enough alone” has been the
ruination of more than one potential saint. We forget
that the forbidding wall called mortification, against
which we fear to bang our heads, is made only of
papier-mâché. One good blow will penetrate it; one good
push will prove that it is not as tough as it looks. The
only hard thing, really, about embarking upon a career
of sanctity and letting God take us over completely is
deciding to do it. After that one honest and wholesouled act of courage, the rest is easy, because God does
most of it.
Physical penances, we find, aren’t something we pile
upon ourselves in a morbid sort of masochism. Penance
is a joyful expression of love. As our love grows on
prayer and a determined surrender of ourselves to God,
our spirit of detachment keeps pace. Renunciations will
be no penances at all. They will be the logical dropping
away of things that no longer interest us, in our new­
found love. And penances that we do deliberately assume,
will be taken on because we want them—because our love
drives us to them—because in our close union with Christ

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we are eager, as was St. Paul, to make up what is wanting
in the sufferings of Christ. The courage to dare was
what Pilate lacked. It is a grace we need daily to pray for.
Judas the priest and Caiphas the leader; Herod the
ruler and Pilate the judge; there is a little of each of
them in all of us. It is not for mere historical reasons that
God inspired the Evangelists to limn them so well.
But there is a man waiting at the end of Christ’s agon­
izing road who offers us example of a different kind:
John, the Beloved Disciple. Beloved, let us remember in
passing, because he was a virgin. His fearless presence at
the foot of the Cross—the only apostle with courage
enough to follow Jesus to the end—gives answer for all
time to those purveyors of lust who belittle chastity as
being unmanly and devirilating. No matter under what
scientific guise the cult of physical satisfaction may walk,
John’s dark silhouette on Calvary forever cries, “He is
strongest who has conquered self!”
However, I doubt whether it was John’s physical vir­
ginity alone which so touched the heart of Jesus. Because,
after all, Jesus loved the Magdalen too. No, there is
something still deeper here. John’s physical integrity was
merely the outward effect of his spiritual virginity, his
undiverted singleness of purpose, his unprostituted loy­
alty and love for Christ. Whether or not ours is the
lifelong innocence of mind and flesh that was John’s is
not what matters now—except as a possible motive for
sorrow and penance. We know that there is no one who
so completely blots out the past, and so entirely judges
by the present, as does God.
What counts, now, is whether ours is the virginity that
can be lost and regained, the virginity of a heart that has

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been given wholly to God, without quibble, compromise,
or lien. It is so hard to say (and to mean it), “Dear God,
take all of me, and do what you want with me! To live
and to labor, to live and to suffer, or to suffer and to
die; it is all one to me!” To say that and to mean it; to
implement it day in and day out with a definite program
of prayer, and examen, and spiritual reading, and visit to
the Blessed Sacrament, and unsparing labor for souls—
in simplicity, and humility, and love; that is the un­
divided allegiance, the spiritual virginity, that is potential
in each of us, right now.
And before we turn our eyes from St. John and raise
them to the Agonized Figure Who will give us the
strength we need, it is worth noting that of all the
apostles, Christ in the end asked least of him who had
given most. As we dodge and hedge and try to escape
the implications of love: the wholeness of the giving
which must be ours; as we think of the rigors of the path
and the violence to self that might be involved in answer­
ing Christ’s challenge, “Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly
Father is perfect”; as we hesitate at the choice, we well
may remember St. John again. Naturally speaking, lus
career, after he hazarded all on Calvary, was the easiest of
the Twelve. Radiating love, he went through life joy­
fully, igniting other hearts from his, bearing fruit a
thousand- and ten-thousand-fold; and died peacefully
in bed, with his disciples around him. Because the fire
in his heart was hotter than that which burned beneath
the cauldron of oil, he wears a martyr’s crown that
needed no blood for its purchase.
And now, finally, we do raise our eyes to the Cross.
We have looked at the crucifix so often that our senses are

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dulled to the vision. Can we ever clearly see the reality
for which it stands? Can we ever hope to sense even a
small part of the grief that filled the heart of Mary, for
example, who saw on the Cross her Little Boy, whose
curls she so often had fondled, the dust of whose play
she so often had bathed away? What words must have
been tumbling about in her memory—words of tender­
ness which He had spoken to her, words so precious
that she gave them not even to St. Luke.
Can we share even a small part of the grief of St.
John, as he recalls the bursting ecstasy that was his when
he first heard those lips (so parched and twisted now)
say softly, “Come, follow Me”? Can we put flesh on that
plaster figure that hangs before us; can we make it real
to our minds, until we hear the rattle and the wheeze of
the labored breathing, until we hear the crackle of the
tendons as the Body sags, and the Plead bends towards
us? If we can, maybe wTe shall be able to feel something
of St. John’s grief, as he speaks over to himself the words
he’ll never forget, the words of last night: “I pray not
for the world,7 but for them whom Thou hast Ü?given
Me. . . . Holy Father, keep them in Thy Name whom
Thou hast given Me; that they may be one, as we also
are ... I pray not that Thou shouldst take them out of
the world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from evil.
They are not of this world, as I also am not of this
world. Sanctify them in truth!”
Can I bargain ignobly still, as I listen to the singleness
of Christ’s own love beat its crimson tattoo, drop by
drop, in the dirt at my feet? “For you,” I seem to hear
the spatter say, “For you, for you.” Can I look at Him
open-eyed, and still say that there is anything I’ve got,

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anything I love, anything I count as dear to me, anything
at all that Vm attached to, that is worth the powder to
blow it to hell, if it comes, ever so little, between me
and Christ?

16. The Real Presence

As I kneel in the quiet of the late afternoon
for my daily visit with the Master, it is not a feeling of
emotional delight that I hope to arouse in myself. Rather,
the state of mind that I want to capture is the conviction
—I might almost say the cold conviction—of the reality
of Christ’s personal presence before me. I need to make
real to myself the fact that it is the Living Christ Who
is looking out at me, and waiting to hear what I have
to say.
Life in this world is essentially a lonely sort of ex­
istence. Each of us is bottled up within himself, depen­
dent upon the observation of his physical senses for what
he may know of another. No matter of how large a
family we come, no matter how wide our circle of
acquaintances may be, I am sure that at times we have
felt the sense of aloneness, of isolation, of moving about,
unknown and unknowing, among our fellows.
But our sense of aloneness can never become loneli-

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ness, so long as we have a vivid sense of the reality of
Christ’s personal presence before us upon the altar.
Between brother and brother, between husband and wife,
there can never be so complete a sympathy of nature,
so intimate a merging and intermingling of soul, as be­
tween ourselves and Christ. We always know what His
thoughts are; He has made His Heart an open book to
us. We know what He wants of us, what He wants for
us, what He will do for us. And it would be too elemen­
tary to remark that He in turn knows us in the deepest
and most secret recesses of our being.
This is the Master, then, before Whom I kneel. But
we are accustomed to His Presence, and it is so hard to
live, even with a miracle, day after day, without having
our sense of wonder grow atrophied, without developing
callouses on our capacity for awe. (I suppose that even
a child would lose the keen edge of his first-morning
ecstasy, if he had to look at his Christmas tree every day
of the year.)
So it is no wonder if so often we come into His
Presence or bend our knee in outward reverence without
actually thinking of Him before us to Whom we are
making genuflection. It is not surprising, perhaps, that
we can fall into the habit of regarding the Holy Eucharist
as a sacred Thing, giving to Christ in His Sacrament
much the same sort of respectful regard that we might
accord, for example, a relic of the True Cross.
It is a hard struggle, this resistance that we must con­
stantly maintain against human nature’s innate tendency
to inconstancy and boredom, against our proneness to
become casual with whatever is familiar, even with God
Himself among us. It is a hard struggle, but it is a

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vigilance in which we dare never to relent. The whole
fruitfulness of our priestly life—the achievement of the
goals which have from all eternity been set up for us—
depends upon our daily grasp of the reality of Christ’s
true, real, personal, living (I might almost say breathing)
presence in the Eucharist.
God knows that I am not looking down upon others
from some lofty height in this matter. If all the hours of
rude inattentiveness which I have spent in the presence
of Jesus Christ, in the Mass and out of the Mass, were
laid end to end—well, they’d make a fairly long Pur­
gatory, as I fear they one day may. I am drawing upon
a wealth of bitter experience when 1 talk of our need
for a more vivid faith, a more vital certainty, of the
Master’s actual and cognizant Presence.
If you have ever tossed away your cigarette butt (as
I have) at the sacristy door, and entered with a cheerful
good-morning to the altar-boys but no word of greeting
to Christ, and vested and gone out to the altar and on
through the Mass with about the same degree of advertence that one might give to any routine chore (such
as addressing envelopes or calling the numbers at a Bingo
game), then you’ll know what I mean. You’ll know what
I mean, too, if you’ve ever lounged at your prie-dieu
after Mass, trying to put in the decent interval of Thanks­
giving that the conventions seem to call for; rattling
through the Trium Puerorum, and then examining the
cobwebs on the ceiling with your mind on your morn­
ing coffee, rather than upon the God-man Who at the
moment has you within His embrace.
You’ll understand what I’m talking about, too, if
you’ve gone to bed night after night with no visit made

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that day to the church or chapel; busy days, of course,
but days nevertheless when there’s been time for the
evening paper, and a favorite program on the radio, and
a dozen other unessential things that we manage to
sandwich in between our real duties. Yes, I think you’ll
know what I mean when I say that it is an unremitting
battle, this effort to live our day as though Christ really
did dwell just next door to us. As though the light that
flickers before the tabernacle really did mean more than
a similar lamp burning before the statue of the Sacred
Heart.
There is nothing, there is just nothing that will so
transform our lives as priests, so breathe a new soul into
us, as will a living, vibrant certainty of the immanent
reality of Christ’s personal presence in the Eucharist.
Sometimes I’ve asked myself, as I’ve dawdled restlessly
before the Tabernacle: “Is this the way you’d act if you
were paying a visit to your bishop? Or the Pope?” More
than once the mere thought has been enough to straighten
my droopy back. “Christ is actually there, looking at
me,” I tell myself on such occasions, “Christ is there." And
not in the awesome and incomprehensible way that God
is everywhere, but Christ is right there looking at me, as
my own bishop might be looking at me if he were sitting
across the desk from me. Christ is thinking of me, and
to all intents and purposes, at the moment He is thinking
of no one else. He is listening to me; at least He is ready
to listen, if I have anything to say. Above all, He is
loving me.
There must be a certain sadness in His love, as He
regards my own self-centered coldness, my imperfections
and my infidelities. Yet in spite of my cheap smugness,

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in spite of the fact that my own mother couldn’t love
me if she saw me as Christ sees me, He is reaching out
to me with a prodigality of love that must leave the
angels breathless as they contemplate it; a love as real,
as palpable (could I but feel it) as an arm about my
shoulders. And there I kneel, absently biting at a callous
on my thumb, idly noticing a worn spot on the sanctuary
carpet, glancing at my watch to see if I’ve put in a pass­
able amount of time and can leave now. If only He would
lean out and slap me in the face, instead of enfolding me
so gently with His love!
If Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is alive to me, it can­
not but make a difference in my life. I am sure that if I
had to appear before my Ordinary every morning to
report to him on my plans for the day—I’m sure that
some of my days would be different from what they are.
Certainly a day planned under the scrutiny of Christ in
the tabernacle—than Whose eyes none are more inter­
ested—certainly a day so planned would be different from
some I’ve known. And if I were to drop back later in
the afternoon or evening, to render Him a progress
report, I am sure that many an hour, otherwise lost
forever, might bear fruit for Him to Whom all my hours
belong.

17. Holy Hour

Jesus, My Lord and Master, I do believe in
the reality of Your Presence here before me. Help me
by Your grace to be still more vividly conscious that
You are here. Help me to understand that You are not
a pious creation of my own imagination, nor yet an
abstract dogma of faith. Help me to realize that it is a
real Love in a real Heart that lives here, so thinly con­
cealed beneath a whiteness that is not even the whiteness
of bread, but an unsubstantial whiteness held up by
Your own Hands before Your Face, precisely so that my
knowledge of You may be by faith, as Peter’s was; so
that I may one day receive the reward of faith, and pass
through that veil to the everlasting vision of Your glori­
ous Countenance.
I know that You are here, my Lord. I know it, I know
it, I know it. In witness to that knowledge, I here and
now pledge myself to live henceforth, day by day, in
the consciousness of Your Presence. I promise to have

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no other aim nor ambition, but to do what Y ou want me
to do, and to do it in the way You want it done.
First of all, in order that this purpose of mine may not
wither and die, as so many of my past resolutions have
done, I shall commit myself to a daily period of mental
prayer, no matter what difficulties I may have to override
in order to do so. Because I know that the clear vision
with which I look upon You at this moment may quickly
blur and return to blindness if I do not renew that vision
in quiet and recollection at the beginning of each day.
With Your Presence real and instant to me, I shall
ascend to the altar keenly aware that by me, You in
Your Mystical Body are about to offer to Our Father,
Yours and mine, the sacrifice of Love which will ade­
quately adore Him. The sacrifice, too, which will release
unto all the members of Your Body the life-giving graces
by which You will live and act in them.
As I lean to caress the bread and the cup, and prepare
to loan You my lips for the speaking of Your words of
immolation, my heart shall go with my lips and be one
with Yours. As I later speak the Pater Noster, I shall
gaze upon Your Face as the apostles did, when they
first haltingly repeated this prayer after You. When I
bend to salute You as the Lamb of God, it will be with
an awareness that You are as immediately present to me,
under the un-inhering whiteness, as You were to the
Baptist, under the fleshly color upon which he looked,
when he pronounced these words before me.
And when I receive You in that act of Communion
which is denied even to the angels—that act of Com­
munion in which I so often have joined in careless and
unthinking fashion—I shall realize that, except for dying,

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I am now in Heaven. Only in Heaven will our inter­
mingling, our union, our oneness, be closer.
All through the day that follows, I shall walk with
You; never forgetting that of Your Body I am a mem­
ber; never unmindful of the fact that You have chosen
to make Yourself dependent upon me in Your contacts
with Your other members. No matter how foolish or
ignorant or arrogant may be the souls with whom I
deal, You shall speak to them through me. Ever mindful
of Your compassion for the weak and the errant, I shall
never force You to speak in accents of impatience, or
anger, or scorn. No matter what demands may be made
upon my time, I shall remember that all my time is
Yours, and that all Your time is for souls.
Whatever plans of my own I may have made, when
a call comes that You would answer, I shall go with
You. Whether it is someone sick who only imagines the
sickness; whether it is a family in trouble who have
brought the trouble on themselves; whether it is a plea
for assistance from those who are shiftless rather than
poor; whether it is a salesman who disturbs my rest or a
sodden drunk whom some glimmer of sanity has brought
to my door;—all who leave me shall say in their hearts:
I have found here the kindness of Christ!
Remembering how handicapped You are, without my
voice, to win souls to Yourself and to draw souls closer
to Yourself, I shall give great thought and effort to my
Sunday sermons. I shall not aim to have people say,
“How well he spoke!”, but rather, “How truly he
spoke!” As my people leave the church, some of them
will have thoughtful faces because, through me, You
have shown them their danger. Some will wear hopeful
expressions because, through me, You have given them

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new courage. Others will be happy of countenance be­
cause, through me, You have shown them an avenue of
closer approach to Yourself. No, I shall never again look
upon my preaching as an unessential duty to be dis­
charged if, and when, and in whatever fashion my more
pressing obligations permit. Not while I walk with You!
Mindful of Your all-embracing compassion for sinners
—for the Magdalen and the woman at the well and the
woman taken in adultery; for Zacheus the publican and
James and John the ambitious and Peter the weak—;
mindful that it is Your mercy and not my own that is
being offered to sinners in the Sacrament of Penance,
I shall never be miserly in dispensing it. I shall never
be grudging with Your forgiveness, as though it came
from an exhaustible supply. On the contrary, all who
enter Your tribunal will have me entirely at their com­
mand—at Your command.
If they come ill-prepared or ill-disposed, I shall not
hurry them or confuse them; I shall not listen to them
with divided attention, hustling to finish the line which
is waiting. With the obdurate and the poorly-disposed
I shall reason sweetly, as You would reason. No im­
patience shall harshen Your voice as heard through me.
And if ever there comes a time when I must close the
slide upon a penitent unabsolved, it shall not be in anger
at the penitent, but in sorrow at my own failure; in, sor­
row that I have not found the word that was needed,
and that my own prayers and penances have not been
such as to win the grace that was wanted here. And the
penitent will go away saying to himself, “I really must
try harder and come back again; Father felt so bad to
have to let me go.”
Yes, my Master, conscious of Your utter dependence

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upon me, I shall strive to let You work more recog­
nizably through me in the administration of all Your
sacraments—Your arteries of grace established at such a
painful cost to Yourself. I shall no longer work the
Heaven-shaking miracle of uniting new souls to You in
the sacrament of Baptism as though it were a minor
ceremonial, on a par with enrollment in the scapular.
Never again shall I mumble the words like a magical
abracadabra, and hurry through the ritual in such fashion
as to rob it of all solemnity.
On the contrary, with You actually following my every
gesture from Your place upon the altar, ready at my
Ego te baptizo to send Your Holy Spirit, like a lightning­
flash releasing a deluge from the sky; with You waiting
to absorb to Yourself the new soul over whom my hands
are hovering, I shall begin by explaining to those who
are present, the beauty and wonder of what is to happen.
And I shall move through the ceremony with all the
dignity that is due to the act of presenting another
member to You.
Even my marriage instructions will reflect my new­
found consciousness of You. I shall not be content with
a hurried presentation of such truths as the young couple
should know. I shall draw upon my own vision of You,
to give these hearts an understanding of the true meaning
of their partnership with You. They shall see themselves
as co-creators, and shall learn where their true happiness
lies. They shall come to the altar conscious of their share
in Your Priesthood, in the lifelong fulfillment of a sac­
rament which will keep You ever at their beck and call.
In the sick room, too, You my Jesus Who are so
visible to me, will become all but visible to Your suffer­

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ing member upon his bed, and to all who stand about.
As I pronounce Your words of healing forgiveness and
Your promise of hope, the worn-out or rotting flesh
before me shall be forgotten, and the dimly seen glory
of Your waiting and outstretched embrace shall rob
death of its ugliness, and make all throats catch at the
beauty of the fruition that is soon to be.
My Jesus, my Master, You are listening, You are, You
are. And no one knows better than You, how much I
shall need Your help to keep this reality of Your Presence
ever vividly before me; the reality of Your Personal
Presence here and in every tabernacle and on every altar
at which I shall ever stand or kneel; the reality of Your
Mystical Presence with me as I move through my day.
But I will remember, my beloved Christ. And the mem­
ory will transform my every moment of every day.
I shall find falling from me, like dead leaves from a
tree, all the petty attachments and self-indulgences with
which I have encumbered myself. The little luxuries that
I love, which seem innocent enough in themselves, yet
leave me that much less love for You; and mar, be it
ever so little, Your image in me. My pleasures and my
recreations shall be such that You may be my companion
still. My reading shall be such as You Yourself might
choose for me. That which is idle, or worldly, above all
that which is sensual, shall lose all attraction for me,
because of the panicky fear that will clutch at my heart
at the very thought that I may have taken, even for a
moment, another path than the one You are walking.
And even as I have begun each day, dear Lord, with
a long look into Your Countenance, so also as the day
wears on, I shall return to review with You the way

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that we have trod together. The disappointments and
the failures that we have met, together, will now pass
wholly from me to You. My shoulders shall straighten
and my burden shall lighten. Even the failures that were
wholly my own—the failures that came because I forgot
You and tried to do, with human wisdom and human
strength, what no man can do; even these failures You
will now take upon Yourself. And in my fatigue there
shall be joy, and such peace as I have never known on
my most feverish days, when I have labored to save
souls—without You.
These, beloved Master, are my resolutions. They are
brave words, big promises. Many of them have a familiar
ring; I have mouthed them before. But this time there
is a difference, because I know what I need, and I ask
it now. And I know as I ask it thus directly and per­
sonally that You will heed my prayer: Just give me the
grace to persevere in these two things: my daily medi­
tation each morning and my daily visit to You as the
day declines. Given these two graces, all the rest will
follow, as the night the day.
Dear Jesus, forgive me now all my foolish babbling.
You have been looking upon me all this time, as I’ve been
talking. Looking and listening with such a pitying love;
with love for what You see of Yourself in me, with pity
for the weakness and the crookedness that is myself.
Forgive me, and keep me as close to You, as conscious
of You always, as I am at this moment. I believe, O
Lord; help Thou my unbelief!

18. Queen of the Clergy

It is an abasing admission to have to make;
but the truth is that for me, sermons on Our Blessed
Mother always have been the most difficult to preach.
Always I have envied those priests who, at any time and
on any occasion, with or without préparation, can speak
fluently and beautifully of the Queen of Heaven—and
who can shed honest tears as they recount her prerog­
atives. I envy them, even while I listen to them, myself
emotionally unmoved.
There are emotional freaks, I suppose, as well as in­
tellectual and physical freaks. Perhaps it is as a freak
that I should classify myself. Whether there may be
others who must build their devotion to Our Lady on
as cold and realistic a basis as do I, I cannot tell. One
just doesn’t ask another priest, “How do you feel towards
the Blessed Mother?” It would be a question just as
personal, and in just as bad taste, as to ask a man how
he feels towards his own mother.

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A Man Approved

But the fact is that, in the absence of any natural
feeling of tender sentiment, I must establish my attach­
ment to Mary by bonds of faith. Beginning with the
lowest motive, the motive of self-interest, I remind my­
self that it is the common teaching of the Church that
Mary is the Mediatrix of all grace. It is not, admittedly,
a defined doctrine, not yet de fide. But when the Church,
who guards the Missal so jealously, introduces into it a
Mass in honor of the Mediatrix of All Grace, the matter
seems settled. Certainly I do not make my Act of Faith
with any reservations; I do not say, “I believe all the
truths which the Holy Catholic Church teaches—de fide."
Well, if all graces are dispensed through the hands of
Mary, I had better make sure that I am in her retinue.
I know, of course, that she is not a heavenly politician,
dispensing her favors to her favorites and disdainfully
ignoring those who will not be her sycophants. In fact,
if all that we have heard about our Mater Amabilis is
true, she is much more concerned (with the serene and
undisturbed concern of the Saints) about those who
least realize their need of her. She is, I am sure, much
more active in my behalf right now than she is about
those whom she can count as safely hers.
Not that I may presume upon my privileged position
of sinner. The graces which Mary is so eager to dispense,
first must come from the hands of her Divine Son. The
limitless mercy of His Heart, upon which Mary draws
so lavishly, cannot entirely escape the demands of His
awful justice. Even though Mary may look upon me as
loving mothers ever have looked upon wayward sons—
my Master, with more realistic gaze, will seek to discern

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in me some trace of the priestly loyalty to Mary that He
found in the heart of John at the foot of the Cross.
So I come to my second motive for devotion to Mary:
I must love her, if I profess to love her Child. For all
that He is God, for all that He is now glorified in
Heaven, Christ’s Humanity can never become so trans­
cendent that He ceases to be human. You, nor I, nor
any other man, ever loved his mother with the ardor of
perfect, selfless love, which Christ had and has for His
Mother. It is a human love which has not ended in
Fleaven, which has not even been changed in Fleaven,
since there was in it nothing of imperfection in the first
place.
If I love Christ, I must love those whom Christ loves.
I must love Christ in my neighbor, be he ever so repul­
sive. I must love Christ in His Saints. And above all and
first of all, I must love Christ in His Mother. And here
by a double exigency: not only as the Saint of all
Saints, as the perfect fruit of grace; but also as Mother
of Christ, simpliciter, Who is loved when she is loved,
honored when she is honored. In other words, I should
be bound to love and honor Mary even if she had not
been immaculately conceived, even had she not been the
spotless virgin that she is. I should have been bound to
love her simply because she is Christ’s Mother.
In trying to analyze my own shortcomings in this
matter of devotion to Mary (and it holds true also of
devotion to the Saints), it seems to me that the difficulty
can be traced to a lack of simplicity in my faith. “Except
you become as one of these children,” is a tremendously
hard lesson to absorb and practice.

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After several years of philosophy and theology, during
which we learn all about God’s immensity and impass­
ibility, we see the faith of our childhood as a touching
bit of naïveté which, we gratuitously assume, it is impos­
sible to preserve in our manhood. The picture of Mary
standing before her Divine Son and pleading for the soul
of some sinner, or arguing in favor of some cherished
cause proposed to her by a client, is a picture, we feel,
strictly for the kindergarten. Our minds have become
emancipated from all that. God has now become for us
a kind of nebulous, unchangeable Personality, filling all
of space and beyond, incapable of change because He is
incapable of imperfection. He is not to be wheedled, not
to be cajoled, even by the Saints, even by His Another.
So we are patronizingly indulgent towards our people
and provide them with vigil lights to burn if they wish,
but we ourselves would never be so credulous as to lischt
one. And we will have novenas to our M other of Per­
petual Help and our Mother of Sorrows if our people
want them, but we never go near them ourselves unless
it happens to be our turn to take the devotions. If we’ve
got to spend an hour in church, a Holy Hour is the
thing. Leave the rest for the untutored piety of the
faithful.
Is the picture overdrawn? I should like to think that
it is, so far as I am concerned. But I am not too sure.
I am not too sure, either, that I may not have been influ­
enced, in spite of myself, by the intellectual “liberalism”
of my day and my environment. It is not an atmosphere
conducive to childlike simplicity of faith. Even in my
preaching and convert instructions, I find myself often
tempted to soft-pedal such “archaic” doctrines as the

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eating of the fruit in Eden, the devil and his power,
limbo, the last judgment, and so on. I believe them all
myself, of course, but I hesitate to expose them to scorn
and ridicule by emphasizing them too obviously. I say
that I believe them all myself; yet the fact remains that
the moment I begin to compromise my faith outwardly,
it suffers inwardly. My own hold upon Truth weakens,
the moment I become afraid to champion it.
To most priests, strong in their devotion to Mary,
unhesitant in their exposition of the entire deposit of
Faith—no matter how offensive it may sound to “modern”
ears—the foregoing will sound all but incomprehensible.
In any case, the temptation to water down doctrine, the
related temptation to view popular devotions to Mary
as—well, if not puerile, at least as an emotional outlet for
the untutored—is a temptation that succumbs quickly to
a moment’s meditation on the one great truth: that God
has made man to His own image and likeness. Materialists
smile pityingly at what they term the anthropomorphism
of the Christian religion. Our God, they say, is merely
a projection of ourselves, of our own fears and hopes
and cravings. We have made God in our own image.
Their observance of fact is accurate enough. Our God
is in our own image. But the materialist has confused
cause and effect. Our God is an image of ourselves, not
because we have made Him that way, but because He
has so fashioned us. One of the great surprises that awaits
us in Heaven, I am convinced, is the discovery of how
human everything will seem to be. I say it will be a
surprise to us, who have studied theology, and have
explored the vast reaches of an Infinity in which there
is no space and an Eternity in which there is no time.

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It will be a surprise to some of us, but not to the body
of the faithful, who see God and all that pertains to Him
in the very simple and human terms in which He has
chosen to reveal Himself. Their instincts are sounder than
ours, perhaps, because they have not been confused by
having to grapple with the metaphysical implications of
truths that are so face-plain to them.
I think that we cannot emphasize to ourselves too
strongly, nor too often, that there must be much that is
“human” in God, because there is so much that is God
in us. It is true, there are incalculable surprises in store
for us when the veil of eternity is drawn back for us,
and we see God as He is, Face to face. It is true that our
first ecstatic reaction will be, “My God, I never realized
it was like this!” But on the very heels of our enraptured
amazement will come the reaction, “How natural it all
seems!” Everything will so gloriously transcend our
wildest imaginings, and yet everything will seem, even
in its transcendence, quite “natural.”
Which brings me back to the necessity of seeing in
the Mother of Christ, a Mother of my own, devoted to
my interests, my champion and advocate before God.
I need not complicate things by speculating as to how
her pleadings fit into God’s prescience and God’s un­
changeableness. They do fit in; let it go at that. So I shall
steep myself in the thought that I am never closer to
Jesus than when I am in the company of Mary. I shall
realize how unbecoming it is for me, a priest, to joke
about the piety of the faithful as they flock to novenas,
or as they kneel in unaffected trustfulness before Mary’s
altar. It is they who have the clearer perception, with
vision unclouded by intellectual pride. It is they who
will have the fewest surprises awaiting them in Heaven.

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143

Not only for my own sake, but for the sake also of
those souls entrusted to me, I must as a priest have a
tender love and devotion to Mary. Is there a tough
sinner I am trying to reclaim? Then I shall go to Mary.
Are my labors mighty and the fruit little? Then I shall
go to Alary. Has life become flat, stale and unprofitable;
is my work a bore, the future discouraging; am I be­
deviled by temptations that make me wonder whether
I should have been a priest; has my house of cards col­
lapsed and my pet project perished in disaster? Then
humbly as a child, and with the confidence of a child,
I shall go to Mary.
Even though her Rosary is not prescribed under pain
of sin, it will take just as grave a reason to make me miss
my rosary as it would take to make me miss my Office.
I shall know her Litany by heart and recite it as I drive.
I shall make her Memorare a part of my morning and
night prayers. I shall wear her Scapular. I shall prepare
two or three good sermons on her, her virtues, her lov­
ableness—and I shall preach those sermons on the slightest
provocation. I shall have her picture in my room, second
in honor only to the crucifix. And above all, I shall have
her name in my heart.
With a program like that, what priest could possibly
go to Hell? I am not a secret agent for a candle com­
pany and am no advocate of parishes which commer­
cialize vigil lights and promote them as a matter of
revenue. But I do think that Mary could do with more
priests who, alone in church, could guilelessly drop a
dime in the slot and leave a flickering flame to plead
silently for themselves and their people, before Mary’s
shrine. That is the kind of faith that will move moun­
tains. It is the kind of faith that will save souls.

19. The End and the Beginning

If I knew for certain that I was going to die
tomorrow, surely it would make a big difference in the
way I lived today. All the petty problems that occupy
my mind at this moment would fade like fog before a
Summer sun. I would see my worries then as insignificant
matters which my foolish mind has magnified out of all
proportion. My temptations too would cease to be a
major threat; I’d feel supremely confident that I could
deal with any temptation for the space of one day. And
how easily and how fervently I’d pray, if this day were
to be my last! I never would have started the day by
shutting off my alarm and snatching a few minutes extra
sleep at the expense of my meditation. I might follow the
classical prescription for my last day on earth, and find
in my regular round of work the best possible fulfillment
of God’s Will. But it is a safe bet that I would not omit
my spiritual reading on the plea that there was no time;

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145

I would not mouth through my Breviary with one eye
on the clock and half my mind on something else.
“Sub specie aeternitatis!" So often, at our annual re­
treat, we have been warned that this may be our last
retreat. So often our meditation book has reminded us
that we may die tomorrow and has urged us to live as
though this day veere our last. The thought may have
impressed us, just for a moment. But it had no lasting
effect. Because in our hearts we knew that this wouldn’t
be our last retreat, that really we wouldrit die tomorrow.
Every time we have felt that way, of course, we have
been right. Another day has dawned for us, another re­
treat has come around. But some day, some day we’ll be
wrong. It really will be our last retreat; it really will be
our last meditation, our last Mass; it really will be our
last day of life. And we’ll find it out too late to do any­
thing about it.
We have heard it said that more priests die suddenly
than any other class of people. Apparently God wants us,
above all people, to be ready for death whenever it may
come. Whether or not that is true, whether or not the
actuarial tables would prove it—the fact is that death will
be unexpected enough, whenever it comes. One priest
friend of mine died alone in his Summer cottage; another
dropped dead on the golf course; another on a vacation
cruise; two died in highway crashes. Even the ones who
died in bed did so, most of them, after very short sick­
nesses that they never expected to be fatal.
I am not going to become melodramatic about this
death business. We priests are too sophisticated, I might
almost say too cynical, to be taken in by any phony ap­

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peal to the emotions. But the truth is, however vivid we
get in our imaginings concerning death, we still shall fall
short of the grim reality.
Let me suppose that I have the grace of a forewarning
concerning my own death. I have contracted pneumonia,
let us say, and my heart is failing. One of my priest
friends, hesitatingly and fumblingly, tries to break to me
the news that I am on my way out. “How are you
feeling, Joe (or Fred or Tom)?”, he’ll ask. “Not so good
eh? Well, you’ll snap out of this; just keep your chin up.
But don’t you think it’d be a good idea to have old
Father Peter come in and anoint you? Give the Sacra­
ment a chance to do you some good, you know. What’s
that? Are you going to die? O no, no, no, sure not!
There’s too many prayers being said for you. We aren’t
going to let you get away from us that easy. But just the
same, it’s only good sense to get the benefit of Extreme
Unction, just like you yourself have preached often
enough. So how about it, huh?”
I nod my head weakly and my friend goes out of my
room mopping his forehead, and old Father Peter, who
has been waiting down the hall, is with me in a minute,
whipping out his purple stole as he pulls a chair up beside
my bed. “Now don’t try to talk too much,” he tells me;
“just mention any sin you think of that you’re especially
sorry for, and include all the rest of them in your act of
sorrow . . . Dominus sit in corde tua et in labiis tuis . .
By this time I’m plenty worried. This doesn’t sound like
just a safety measure; this has all the appearance of the
real thing. My last Confession. MY LAST CONFES­
SION! And I’m so sick and so weak, and my mind is so
confused. Just mention the sin I’m most sorry for, Father

The End and the Beginning

ΜΊ

Peter says. O merciful God, there are so many of them!
Which shall I pick? . . .
And then in a moment the room is full of people. My
feverish eyes make out the faces of several of my family,
and two or three nuns, and a couple of priests, all kneel­
ing around the bed while Father Peter goes about his
work. “Per istam sanctam unctionem . . .” My eyes, the
windows of my soul; so often unguarded; the things
they’ve looked at, the things they’ve read . . . My ears,
so greedy they’ve been in listening to scandal, so thirsty
in drinking in praise, so open to the risqué and the ob­
scene . . . My nose, so discerning over a glass of brandy
or a vintage wine; so easily intoxicated, perhaps, by a
heady perfume . . . My lips, so loose with anger and sar­
casm, so quick to judge and condemn, so unworthy of
the Body and the Blood . . . My hands, my doubly
traitorous hands, are they really a part of me? Must I
answer for all that they have done? . . . And my feet (I
do not feel the chill as they are uncovered; a greater
chill has set in long since) my feet; where have they car­
ried me? In every direction, it seems to me now; in every
direction except towards God.
Then faintly to my ears there come the prayers that I
myself have so often recited in casual fashion at other
bedsides: “Depart, O Christian soul, out of this sinful
world . . .” My vision is dimming fast, but my hearing
still is acute enough to hear someone’s broken sob. And
then . ..
That is as far as I can go. Each of us must finish the
picture for himself. What manner of man was this, whose
hands they are so reverently crossing now upon his breast,
whose glazing eyes they are so gently closing? What man­

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ner of man was this, who stands now naked and stripped
of pretense, beneath the terrible all-revealing light of
God’s justice.
Was he a man who sinned once, and sinned again; until
it no longer seemed sin, but an inescapable weakness of
nature; until he no longer bothered to mention it in con­
fession, or glossed it over until it seemed but a pecadillo;
a man in whom conscience, so often betrayed, finally
turned traitor itself, so that compunction died and the
complacency of atrophy reigned, and sacrilegious Mass
after sacrilegious Mass piled up to his account? Is this
the man of secret sin, of whom even now those about the
bed are saying, “He was such a good priest; surely he’ll
go right to Heaven! ”? And even while they say it, he has
been judged, he has seen the searing truth—not God, but
himself through God’s eyes—the darkness where there
should be light, the emptiness where there should be
love. “He was such a good priest,” they say; and even
as they are dusting off their knees, the unconsuming fire
of Hell is upon him; the awful burning thirst for the
Love which he has forever cast away; the desperate,
hopeless, racking hunger for the God Whom he must
find, or perish; and he cannot find Him, yet he cannot
perish. And the thirst intensifies, and the hunger grows
and becomes insupportable, yet he must support it. And
God is here and God is there, but it is not God, it is only
himself that he meets at every turn; until in his frustra­
tion he would tear himself madly to shreds, but he cannot.
Yes, he is in Hell, this man who so often made a mockery
of God’s grace.
But didn’t he have the sacraments at the end? Didn’t
he make an act of contrition and receive absolution for

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his sins? He knows now, too late, that it isn’t as easy as
that. Grace so often rejected is not so easily conjured at
will. It wasn’t sorrow that gave such vehemence to his
last act of contrition. He wasn’t sorry, only scared; scared
with an awful fright at the possibility of death and what
it might mean. But even in his desperation he couldn’t
throw himself, in one last and real act of love, at the foot
of the Cross; he had been out of practice too long.
So they dressed him in purple vestments and the bishop
came to celebrate his requiem and they laid him away.
He helped a lot of other people towards Heaven. He
offered Masses for their intentions, absolved their sins,
fed them on the Bread of Life, preached the Gospel to
them, assisted them to die. God, Whose arm is not fore­
shortened by His human instruments, let His graces flow
freely and without contamination through these sincalloused hands; so that souls were saved, yet he who
saved them is in Hell.
Let us hope that the whole thing is a flight of morbid
imagination—an eventuality that never happens. But it
cottld happen; it could happen even to me. Our greatest
danger, I think, is not from our familiarity with holy
things; it is rather from our unfamiliarity with our ad­
versary. It seems so easy for us—well as we know our
faith and strongly as we believe—it seems so easy for us
to forget that Satan is a very real person. He is closer to
us, in presence and power, than the man who sits beside
us on the bus or at the ball game. We don’t exactly look
upon the devil as a pious fable; we have too much intelli­
gence for that. But he does fade into the far background
of our thoughts, a very dim sort of reality. Yet he has
the intellect of an angel, a cunning and cleverness far

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beyond that of the most brilliant human genius. He has
the power and command over physical nature which God
gave to all the angels. He will not be clumsy in his ap­
proach to us. He will not be obvious. He will not be
hurried. He is more devious than a communist, more
patient than a chess-player. He may today be planning
a line of attack against me that will not bear fruit for a
year, or two, or ten. And if he fails, he will have another
ready. We’ll never see his hand, nor recognize his face—
except at our prie-dieu.
It could happen to us, this death in sin. It could happen
to us if ever we were such fools as to put confidence in
ourselves. The moment that I say to myself, “I am
strong·,” is the moment when I am weakest. The moment
I feel confident and fearless, is the very moment that I
teeter on the edge of the abyss. We have only one defense
against the world, the flesh, and ourselves: God’s grace,
God’s love.
And that is why we can end this chapter, as we began
the first, on a note of high hope. God made me because
He wanted me with Him forever. As He cast His eyes—
forgive the human imagery—as He cast His eyes over all the
infinite number of images in His mind, preparatory to an
act of creation, He stopped when He came to the image
of me. And for some reason buried deep within the
mystery of the Godhead, He loved what He saw, and
called me into being. He wants me in Heaven; He wants
me ever so much more than I want Him. He’s not going
to let me get away from Him easily.
It is this consciousness of (let me say it) God’s stub­
born determination to have me, that buoys us up as we
recite our act of hope each morning, our act of contrition

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each night. The picture of the dying priest is our picture,
only up to the point where we ask, “What manner of
man was this?” We shall have compunction in those last
moments, certainly. As the faintly rancid odor of the
Oleum Infirmorum penetrates our nostrils, we shall be
thinking, “Dear God, I have used maybe one grace out
of every thousand that You have given. I have done so
little for YOU, Who have done so much for me. Always
I was going to do better, and now it is too late.” And as
my ears strain to follow Father Peter’s words, “. . . for
although he has sinned, yet he has still retained a true
faith in Thee, Father, Son and Holy Ghost... remember
not, O Lord, the sins and ignorances of his youth . .
even as I listen, my fuzzy mind will be saying, “You
know, dear Lord, I did watch with You each morning in
my daily meditation, even though it was such a poor sort
of effort; amid all the distractions of my Mass, I did try
to unite myself with You, I did mean it when I said, at
the Elevation, ‘Do what You will with me’; I did, in quiet
and recollection, try to speak Your praises attente ac
devote in my Office; I did try to make Your Mother
mine, as You will see if You look at the worn beads on
my rosary; in my daily visit, I did talk out my problems
with You, and did try to listen for Your counsel; I did
try to preach You and Your Love, and not me and my
cleverness; I did try to be patient in the confessional and
charitable in my speech, and kind and compassionate
always to everyone. I didn’t do any of these things very
well; I was forever picking myself up and starting over.
But there’s one thing You do know, dear Lord, I never
stopped trying, 1 never stopped trying. It’s so little I have
to offer—but it’s so little You ask . . .”

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All is darkness now, and silence. And as my spirit
gathers itself within the very fastness of my being, pre­
paring itself for that tremendous leap out of time into
eternity; as Christ stands smiling, waiting, with out­
stretched arms; and Mary beside Him, eager for the em­
brace of another wayward son come home; and all the
souls whom I have helped onward before me crowd
joyfully about them both; now in that last instant my
soul braces itself for the blasting blow of the vision of
God’s glory, for the smashing impact of His love. And
the last living cell of dying brain emits its last feeble
spark of energy, and forms the words which are at once
my release and my springboard: COME, LORD JESUS!
And I am home.