EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Thirteen - 1929-1930
A Growing Sodality
and a Crashing Stock Market

More Lord Stories

Almost Fiction

I was looking over the list of books published by McGraw-Hill.  To the salesman I said, in comment: An unusual variety.  But evidently no fiction.

Not exactly, he replied.  But we have something close to it.

And he handed me their famous publication, Life Begins at Forty.¹

Clear Evidence

Well, said Father Dave Hamilton, once of St. Elizabeth’s Negro Church in St. Louis, I’ve come up against my most complete marriage case.  And he chuckled at the memory of it.

Yesterday morning a young Negro about thirty years of age walked into my office, accompanied by a Negro woman perhaps five years his senior.

‘We want to get married,’ blurted the young man.  So I motioned them to chairs and began the usual questions.

The man was a Catholic; the woman was a non-Catholic.  We polished off the preliminaries in a hurry.  The man’s answers were quick, complete, and satisfactory.  Then I turned to the woman.

‘Are you a Catholic?’

‘No, suh.’

‘Baptized?’

‘I’m a Baptist.’

‘Were you ever married?’

‘Yes, suh.’

‘Where’s your husband?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Well, my good woman,’ I said, ‘you say he is dead.  But are you able to prove it?  How do you know he is dead?’

The woman looked me straight in the eye.  ‘I shot him,’ she answered.  And from her handbag she produced her papers of dismissal from the penitentiary for the murder of her husband.

It was an open and shut case, and I saw them out with secret envy of the heroism of the young man who was willing to be husband number two.²

The Sodality Movement

In June a national Student’s Spiritual Leadership Convention for men was held at Loyola University in Chicago with 373 delegates.  The following year was one of solidification.³  During the 1929/1930 school year there were six Sodality Leadership Schools as compared to twenty the previous year.  By now the Central Office had worked with some 575 universities, colleges, and high schools.

Pamphlets of 1929

Don’t Say It

Fashionable Sin

Forward America!

Marry Your Own

Prodigals and Christ

They’re Married

When Mary Walked the Earth

Lord wrote Don’t Say It: What Gossips, Male and Female, Do to the World.  This is the second Father Hall pamphlet and the second with the Dick and Sue Bradley.  The twins, their parents, and Father Hall are on the porch after dinner.  As they reflect on the beauty of the moon on the lake the topic shifts to Mrs. Bradley’s bridge game the day before where two of the women were real gossips.  The subject turns to gossip.

Father Hall makes a number of interesting points:

The average man and woman take refuge from their own failures and shortcoming by tearing to pieces anyone who has surpassed them.⁴

Whenever anyone rises above the level of the mob, the mob reaches up to pull him down.⁵  (One subtitle in the pamphlet is Envy, Mother of Gossip.)

Any person who knowingly reveals the secret serious sin of another to persons who have no right to know is guilty of mortal sin.⁶

If the person concerned in the story is one whose reputation could be blasted by telling things about him that are not seriously sinful, that might easily be a mortal sin.⁷

Fundamentally it is a form of murder.  Coldly and deliberately a knife is driven into a reputation.  Ruthlessly a character is slain.  A fair name is ruined in the eyes of others.  And in the eyes of mankind, as in the eyes of God, everyone has the same right to his reputation and fair name that he has to his life.  Gossip is a sort of spiritual murder.⁸

Dick asks about gossip that is true.  Father Hall responds that there are many truths that may not be told such as what is said in confession or confidential conversations with lawyers and doctors.  Of course if what one tells is a lie, we call that calumny, and it is an even more serious sin.⁹  For twenty people who listen eagerly to the gossip, not one listens to the truth about the story.¹⁰

The discussion returns to the beauty of the reflection of the moon on the lake and the suggestion that rather than gossip people should talk about the beauty of people and the beautiful things they have done.

Fashionable Sin: A Modern Discussion of an Unpopular Subject would sell over 125,000 copies by 1963.  It is an important pamphlet because it shows Lord’s views on the world around him.  According to Lord, that world made immorality acceptable.

Under the subtitle Puny Man Lord argues:

It is a little difficult perhaps to talk about sin to a group of neopagans who know almost nothing about God.  If there is no God to command, there are naturally no commandants.  If there is no one to reward or punish, it is silly to talk of eternal sanctions.  George Eliot, in a simpler age, felt that sin was punished right here in this life; but experience does not always keep step with the theory.  Even the natural law, which man finds in his heart, forbidding him to sin and commanding him to do good, is argued out of existence by our modern pagans.¹¹

Lord’s Thoughts on Oscar Wilde

Lord actually loved many of the writings of Oscar Wilde yet Lord had this to say about him under the subtitle, Sin as a Cult.

Oscar Wilde was the man who popularized to a dying Victorian world the idea that sin was a joy.  To him a thing was delightful because it was forbidden.  Think, he once wrote, how much pleasanter is the life of a woman; how many more things are forbidden her.  So under his brilliant leadership, though his followers are slow to acknowledge their master, the worship of sin as the joy-giver is recommended.  Sin was pleasure; sin was happiness; sin was joy.  Christianity had blighted with its sense of sin the freedom and happiness of pagan lives.  Christ, the pale Galilean, as Swinburne put it, had blighted the world, which grew gray with His breath.

. . .

We are almost fortunate that the brilliant prophet of the modern cult of sin was sad Oscar Wilde.  His life speaks more loudly than any argument could of the frightful futility of the theories he preached.  Brilliant Oscar Wilde seated among his adoring friends and arguing with startling epigram that sin is joy, that depravity and perversion are natural, that immoral black is moral white, that the happy man wears his vice like the sunflower on his coat!  Sad Oscar Wilde hounded from society because he practiced what he preached and wrote from prison his De Profundis, the tortured cry of an agonizing soul!  Poor Oscar Wilde lying on his deathbed, deserted like the prodigal by those who had fed on his cleverness, watched by his Catholic friend physically rotting away from the effects of sweet sin, clinging to his friend’s hand and begging for the favor (granted him by the merciful God he had cynically flouted) of the Catholic sacrament!

Sin a joy?  Stand at the deathbed of Oscar Wilde, if you are brave enough, and let him tell you, not with the glib and glittering wit of health, but with the gasping, broken truths of death.

If sin is joy, then inevitably the conclusion follows that the sinners are the joyously happy.  You will search long for the happy sinner.  You will find hilarious ones, wanton and vociferous ones, madly gay ones, but not the deeply, truly, permanently happy.¹²

This passage is included to shows Lord’s views in 1929, almost 90 years ago.  Obviously, one today could bring up the point that the end of Wilde’s life would have been different had there been more humane laws at the time.

Lord also wrote the pamphlet Forward America!: A study of the reasons why the United States, especially the Catholics of the United States, should lead the world in Mission activity.¹³  Lord argues that American Catholics owe a debt because of the missionaries who came to North America.  We have produced the greatest race of Pugilists; we are not so interested in producing the greatest race of mission priests.¹⁴

Lord calls for Catholics to support the missions.  He notes that Protestants raise far more money for the missions and send more people.  In 1924, Protestants sent 17,137 missionaries while Catholics sent only 800.  Finally Lord asks parents to send their Greatest Gift: their sons and daughters.

Plays of 1929

Lord created two shows: School’s Over and The Shepherd of His Flock.  Lord wrote School’s Over for Nerinx Hall High School.  This charming play in five scenes has lots of details relevant to female students of time.

Synopsis

In one scene two seniors reminisce about the good and bad of high school.  In another scene a girl struggles to write the class poem despite multiple interruptions.  In a third scene a girl struggles to write prophecies about her classmates for the year book.  Frustrated she considers drawing them randomly from a hat.

PROPHET: . . . out of right hat, Mary; out of left, ‘Prima donna until she eloped with the iceman.’

PAL: Won’t go.  By the time the prophecy is due, we’ll all have Frigidaires; nobody can elope with them.¹⁵

Other girls enter and dream of marriage to movie stars Van Johnson and Ronald Coleman.  [1945 version]  The Prophet proposes various careers for different girls including a nurse, a lawyer, and a professor.  She predicts that Margaret will marry Chester, an N.C.B: a ‘Nice Catholic Boy.’  Margaret breaks down in tears, But Chester and I broke our engagement last night, and runs out.¹⁶

She predicts that Stella will be a missionary to China and as for Edwina:

PROPHET: You’ll turn your well-known cooking abilities to good purpose, establish a hot-dog stand, which is gradually enlarged until it is a huge hotel specializing in hamburgers made of ham and your famous holeless doughnut.¹⁷

In the scene Packing the Grip a girl talks about keeping her collection of poetry.

PAL: The poetry by all means.  I know a young wife who cooked her eggs by poetry.  Three stanzas of St. Agnes’ Eve, soft-boiled; six stanzas, hard-boiled; ten stanzas, Easter eggs.¹⁸

The girl packs her worn ukulele and Sodality medal.  She gives her favorite Madonna picture to the ‘Freshie’ desperate for some reminder of the parting senior.

The girls exit and the figure of ALMA MATER appears.  She calls her messengers to bring gifts for the girls ill-prepared for the world they are going out into.

The Shepherd of His Flock

Lord also created The Shepherd of His Flock published by the Queen’s Work.  (An unpublished French translation exits.)  It is not known how many times it was produced.  The Shepherd of His Flock, a dramatic program to honor a clergy member, is not a play but rather of series of vignettes.

Synopsis

The PROLOGIST, dressed as a biblical shepherdess, enters carrying a lamb and addresses the honored bishop, chaplain, or pastor.  Children bring in a shepherd’s crook and toy lamb to put before him.  A Dance of the Shepherdess Moon follows.

The opening scene shows Abel’s sacrifice of a lamb with two Angels watching.  In the next scene, David the Shepherd King, David recites Psalm 23.  Samuel enters to anoint David as King and Shepherd of Israel.

The Shepherds of Bethlehem and The Good Shepherd Christ scenes follow with Christ, a cripple, the Prodigal Son, and Mary Magdalen.

CHRIST: Come to me, all ye that labor and are heavily burdened, and I will refresh you.  For I am the Good Shepherd, I know mine and mine know me.¹⁹

The scene Choice of Shepherds follows in which Jesus calls Peter to feed his sheep.  A Shepherds’ Dance to Percy Grainger’s Shepherd’s, Hey! follows.  The show ends with the curtain opening on an altar scene with a statue of Agnes Dei.

A Story Told by Daniel Lord

St. Lawrence Would Have Enjoyed It

A little nun was teaching her Negro class catechism.  The name of the genial St. Lawrence came up.

And who is St. Lawrence? asked the nun.

They all looked blank.  So she offered a few suggestions: martyrdom . . . the gridiron . . . roasted to death...

A little black face gleamed with light.

I know, he cried. That was the saint they barbecued.²⁰

Lord Pamphlets Published in 1930

Christ Lives On

I Can Read Anything

The Months with Mary

Random Shots

Speaking of Birth Control

A Traveler in Disguise

Truth’s the Thing

You Can’t Live That Way

Christ Lives On: His Life Is Daily Repeated in the Eucharist and A Traveler in Disguise: A Story of the Blessed Sacrament, are two of a number of pamphlets on the sacraments.  The Months with Mary is devotional.

I Can Read Anything; Alright Then, Read This! is the first of four pamphlets on literature.  Lord gives a sophisticated discussion on the dangers of reading immoral and anti-religious literature.  Sin doesn’t seem sin when it is committed by charming people.  We start by loving the sinners and end by denying that what they do is sin.²¹  The well-read Lord expects his audience to know such literary references as Ibsen, Shaw, Dumas, Renan, Loisy, Harnack, and Tyrell.

Referring to a recent book, Sue states, Everyone is reading it.  One is just out of the conversation if one hasn’t read it.²²  Imagine a time when being current for a young person meant having read the latest book rather than having the latest phone app.²³

This is the fifth dialogue pamphlet between Father Hall and the twins Dick and Sue who are eighteen.  Lord wrote at time when smoking was accepted: Dick glared, threw his cigarette away, lighted another in an evident attempt to gain time to gather his forces, and then leaned forward [to speak].²⁴

Hall questions the notion that people, especially young people, can read anything and it will not harm them—particularly immoral literature.  Hall admits he has known women who read books about running off with someone’s husband and then done it.  Regarding current popular literature Hall notes:

They make sex the center of all, the source of all happiness, the dominating principle of all lives.

You’ll notice by the way that most of these characters you meet in the literature that ‘shows you life ’are the failures, outcasts—the sad and horrible wrecks either in body or soul—of the world.  They are not those who make life richer but those who rob life of his richness.²⁵

Daniel Lord’s main response to literature he felt was inappropriate was to compete and create his own.  I Can Read Anything would sell over 151,000 copies by 1963.  Lord also wrote an article Blow Off the Dust!: Make Catholic Classics Available, calling for inexpensive copies of Catholic literature.²⁶

In Random Shots: Brief Thoughts on Things That Count Lord comments on fourteen topics including the courage to be pious, a call to canonize more mothers as saints, not cluttering the mind with ugly thoughts, and praising what is good.  Some of the section titles are Manners Toward God, The Compliment of Hypocrisy, and Too Easy to Write [stories about sex].²⁷

Lord’s Views on Birth Control

Speaking of Birth Control, the first of four Lord pamphlets on the subject, would sell over 218,000 copies by 1963.  Dick and Sue have finished their first year of college.  Sue mentions that many girls at college have been talking about birth control.  The twins go talk to Father Hall about what must have been a hot topic at the time.

Father Hall sees two categories of women: those who pursue sex of pleasure and mothers.  He comments:

Now just what happens when a woman is asked to practice birth control?  She is asked to exclude from sex the one thing that dignifies and nobles it.  She is expected to give up the ideal of motherhood and to regard sex as a self-gratification and marriage as the source of pleasure merely.  She is asked to become a ‘daughter of joy,’ a ‘woman of pleasure.’  Her body is no longer to be the sacred temple of life but the object of man’s desires and appetites.  She is expected to substitute lust for love, passion for reference.²⁸

For married couples, Father Hall comments that the availability of birth control means couples do not learn self-control and temporary abstinence.  This makes them more susceptible to temptations by other people.  As for over-population, the Catholic answer is the call for religious vocations to live celibate lives.

Father Hall describes birth control as a crime.

Then comes the crime of birth control, the betrayal of a most sacred trust, the abuse of a noble faculty, the perversion of a most important power.  The man or woman says to God, I will take the tremendous power you gave me, and I will use it, not for the noble purpose of bringing children into the world, but for my own selfish pleasure.  I will refuse you, God, the free cooperation you ask of me in the creation of human beings and will gratify base passions in myself and others.  What though I slam the door shut in the face of children who might be born?  What if I refuse to give you citizens for your heavenly city?  I am using my powers only for myself—for self-gratification, self-indulgence.²⁹

Under the subtitle The Road to Adultery, Father Hall notes The men and women shouting the loudest for birth control in one breath are in the next breath laughing at the Christian standards of virtue and decency and sexual fidelity.³⁰  Now notice: the very same people who are urging birth control are talking glibly of free love and self-expression, of compassionate marriage and sexual freedom.  They laugh at chastity and make fun of virginity.³¹

What about married couples who want to wait several years before having children?  Lord rejects this argument by noting how many divorces of childless people happen in the early years.  Without children to bind them together, couples can get bored with each other.

This pamphlet includes several weak arguments such as the idea that birth control will undermine evolution since the better people will practice it and not reproduce.  Father Hall also refers to the story in Genesis of Onan who is killed by God for spilling his seed.  However, Onan’s sin was his failure to fulfill the duty of Levirate marriage to get the widowed wife of hid dead brother pregnant so the line of his dead brother would carry on.  Lord writings on birth control reflect typical Catholic views on the subject of the time.

Truth’s the Thing: A Catholic Viewpoint on Everyday Subjects is thirteen short stories about religious faith and coming to faith where everyday subjects are used as metaphors.  This is another example of Lord as The Great American Catholic Apologist.

You Can’t Live That Way

In You Can’t Live That Way Lord uses his skill as a story teller to make readers think.  In the second of four vignettes, Their Souls Shall Meet, a man grieves over the death of his wife after a year of marriage.  His teacher of material philosophy, who drew him away from religion, appears to the grieving man to tell him that his wife will live on after death in the world soul.  The man answers What do I care for your world soul. . . If you cannot give me her, you cannot give me anything but bleak despair.³²

His deceased mother appears to tell him:

As surely as heart cries to heart, as love demands fruition, as goodness and purity cannot perish in vain.  Faith joins hearts separated by the abyss of death.  Faith unites time with eternity.  The woman you loved lives and loves you still.³³

In the last vignette, People Who Do Things, a society woman tells her social secretary to set up an event with people who do things.  The secretary suggests inviting the man who comes home after a hard day’s work to play with his children, a woman who creates a warm home on a tight budget, a cook who does amazing things in the kitchen.  Of course the society woman rejects such ‘frivolity.  The secretary answers:

If there is any frivolity, it is certainly in your believing that only those people matter who do silly things like dabble in bad verse, or toy with a delicate-scented vice in badly written plays, or muss meaninglessly in clay, or breed dogs that will take the place of babies.³⁴

NOTES

•   ¹ That Made Me Smile, 153.
•   ² Ibid., 31-32.
•   ³ Florence, 63.  See also 64, 113.
•   ⁴ Lord, Don’t Say It (QW, 1929), 6.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 7.
•   ⁶ Ibid., 12.
•   ⁷ Ibid., 16.
•   ⁸ Ibid., 16-17.
•   ⁹ Ibid, 17.
• ¹⁰ Ibid., 24.
• ¹¹ Lord, Fashionable Sin (QW, 1929), 5.
• ¹² Ibid., 13-14.
• ¹³ Lord, Forward America! (New York, Jesuit Mission Press, 1929) inside cover.This pamphlet is described in Endres, “Global Missionary Zeal,” 52-53.
• ¹⁴ Ibid., 15.
• ¹⁵ Schools Over, 11.  Jesuit Archives.
• ¹⁶ Ibid., 19.
• ¹⁷ Ibid., 21.
• ¹⁸ Ibid., 37.
• ¹⁹ Lord, The Shepherd of His Flock, (QW, 1929), 10.
• ²⁰ That Made Me Smile, 91-92.
• ²¹ Lord, I Can Read Anything (QW, 1926), 26.
• ²² Ibid., 5.
• ²³ Footnote Phone apps are the current new technology.  Future readers should replace “phone apps” with the latest trend.  It is a safe bet that reading books will not be the replacement.
• ²⁴ Lord, I Can Read Anything, 7.
• ²⁵ Ibid., 36, 38.
• ²⁶ “Blow Off the Dust!: Make Catholic Classics Available,” The English Bulletin VII (April 1930).
• ²⁷ Lord, Random Shots: Brief Thoughts on Things That Count (QW, 1930).
• ²⁸ Lord, Speaking of Birth Control (QW, 1930), 8-9.
• ²⁹ Ibid., 29.
• ³⁰ Ibid., 15.
• ³¹ Ibid., 21.
• ³² You Can’t Live That Way, 13.
• ³³ Ibid., 14.
• ³⁴ Ibid., 27-28.

Chapter 12    Chapter 14

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner