EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Sixteen - 1933
Six Days You’ll Never Forget!

I am convinced that if we now complain of lacking Catholic lay leaders, the fault is not with the natural abilities and initiative of Catholic laymen and women.  The fault lies with the older generation of priests, Religious, and parents, who persisted in doing all the work, curbing and curtailing the energies of youth, hand feeding a very competent generation, and killing the power to lead by keeping them constantly and most discouragingly in check reins and lead strings.¹

—Daniel Lord “Some of Youth’s Virtues”

More on the Catholic Literary Revival

Several Catholic literature conferences took place in America in the next years.  In November 1933 Lord attended the Rocky Mountain Catholic literature Congress in Denver.  “The conference keynote was sounded by Father Lord when he insisted that the Catholic literary revival was not merely the production of books, but a “great binding force,” that alone could save the world from discord and chaos.”  Lord also spoke of the importance Catholic drama.²

Catholic Student Writers’ Guilds would be created at a number of colleges.³  Colleges also had literature committees.  The Queen’s Work office sent out support materials.  Lord started THE SCRIVENERS’ GUILD.  (The famous publishing company is Scribner’s.)  Lord’s group had about fifty members.  Its goal was to assist and encourage amateur writers by offering them constructive criticism by experienced writers and help them get published.⁴

Conventions

For 1933 the Summer School of Social Action was split into three sessions: Loyola University in New Orleans (190 attendees), St. Mary’s Academy in Milwaukee (603 attendees), and St. Francis Xavier High School in New York (649 attendees).⁵  The cost to attend for was $10, and $15 for room and board.  At the SSCA Lord got the cream of American Catholic Youth who were smart, intelligent, and motivated.  From here on out, the SSCA would be described as “Six Days You’ll Never Forget”.⁶  The third Parish convention took place in June in St. Louis with 865 attendees.

Tracking the Central Office activities is difficult because they did so much.  Lord and his creative staff innovated new ways to build the Sodality movement: such as running night classes during the SSCA.  Lord set the tone, his staff responded.

A Play and a Textbook in 1933

In 1933 Lord’s only play was Your Visitation and Ours, a musical pageant for graduation at the Academy of the Visitation in St. Louis.  The year marked the centennial of the Academy in North St. Louis city.  It moved to the suburbs in 1962.

The scenes, introduced by the Angel of the Visitation, include the history of the Sisters of the Visitation and the founding of the school.

1. Annunciation

2. Visitation

3. Vocation of St. Jane Frances de Chantal Who Founded the Order

4. Vision of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

5. Foundation of School in 1833 in Kaskaskia, Illinois

6. Flood of 1844 (A clever and humorous scene of children being rescued from the flood.)

7. Graduation 1883 (This includes a Delsarte dance.)

8. Graduation Today

Chapters in Daniel Lord’s textbook Religion and Leadership

• I. Why A Catholic College?
• II-VI. Qualities Expected Of a Catholic College Student or Any Catholic Leader
•     1. Faith
•     2. A Shining Example
•     3. Use of Opportunities
•     4. Honor and Honesty
•     5. Comradeship
• VII. The Chapel
• VIII-X. Mass: I, II, III
• XI. The Church and History
• XII. The Church and the Present
• XIII-XIV. The Church as Christ’s Representative: I, II
• XV. Great Catholics
• XVI. The Catholic Faith as a Working System of Life
• XVII. The Devotional Life of the Church
• XVIII. An Outline of Catholic Doctrine
• XIX. An Outline of Scholastic Philosophy
• XX. Loyalty to the Person of Jesus Christ
• XXI. The Living and Present Christ
• XXII. A Heavenly Mother
• XXIII. Purity
• XXIV. The Use of Confession
• XXV. Priestly Consultation
• XXVI. Prayer
• XXVII. Catholic Action

More Articles in The Queen’s Work Articles

“Cecil B. De Mille, After Visit to Russia, Tells of the Soviet’s Remarkable Motion Picture Propaganda: It Converts to Bolshevism Tribes Inaccessible to the Czars.”⁷  De Mille discusses how his film The Godless Girl was recut to fit the Soviet message.  He describes a Soviet movie showing how the miserable lives of villagers could be transformed to modern living conditions with doctors and hospitals by the Soviet system.  DeMille tells how a projector was carried on a mule to the next village for viewing.

In his regular comment “It Occurred to Me” in the June issue Lord put an item “LEAVE IT TO THE JEWS”:

We all listened to that radio broadcast in which the Jews protested violently against the Hitler persecution.  More power to the Jews.  Nobody steps on their toes or bashes in the heads of their shopkeeper or loots their stores and gets away with it.⁸

The November issue included a blurb in “Bits O’ Things” on a famous Theosophist:

ANNIE BESANT was just about to introduce to the world a new messias, when she died.  Hope springs eternal, and the capacity of the human mind for swallowing absurd religions seems limitless.  Her first messias, Krishnamurti, went bad on her.  But she fumbled about for a second.⁹

“With Prohibition Gone Will Youth Return to True Temperance?
Grave Decisions to Be Made.”

The November issue ran an article: “With Prohibition Gone Will Youth Return to True Temperance?  Grave Decisions to Be Made.”¹⁰  It provides a good summary of Lord’s views on alcohol.

One hardly dared talk about temperance without being mistaken for a violent prohibitionist, and that was an insult which made many a sincere man and woman wince.

All the while the Church pleaded for true temperance.  It kept insisting on the historically proved facts that alcohol inflames the passions of a young man and lowers the moral resistance of a young woman; the roués, from time immemorial, have laid siege to innocence with drink; that while maturity may drink wisely, youth usually drinks foolishly; that the drunken young man or woman drags down with him the reputation of his church; that youthful drinking is physically harmful; that self-restraint must be learned in youth if it is to be practiced in later years; that unhappiness of individuals and of families arises from the misuse of drink.  While controversy was high and the whole question of drink was bound up with the Eighteenth Amendment and the incredibly stupid Volstead Act, one hardly got a hearing for any of these important facts.¹¹

Lord offers several points that are just as relevant today when many young people grow up with liquor readily available and have many opportunities to drink without adult oversight:

1. While drink at home and in the family circle may be wholesome and pleasantly stimulating, has drink among young people ever really helped a social function?

2. What precise effect has drink upon the moral strength of young men and women?

3. Is the girl wise who trusts herself to the young man who dulls her moral sense with drink?

4. Since life is difficult and self-restraint essential, would young men and women learn self-restraint through temperance in drink?¹²

Pamphlets of 1933

The Call to Catholic Action

Confession Is a Joy?

Our Precious Freedom

Revolt Against Heaven

The Christmas Child

Confession is a Joy? would be Lord’s second best-selling pamphlet, selling over 340,000 copies in 36 printings by 1963.  (One assumes that the success of this pamphlet was not due to the failure of readers to follow the advice of the next two best-selling pamphlets: Going Steady, and What to Do on a Date?)  The setting is a Friday Poker Club at the Bradley home with two other Catholic couples.  In 1933 the men are smoking cigars. . . inside!  The subject of going to Confession on Saturday comes up.

A few days later at a dinner they raise their questions with Father Hall who explains and defends confession.  He states “However it’s worth remembering that while happiness in the next world is lost by mortal sin, this world is made horribly unpleasant by venial sins—small jealousies, petty meanness, uncharitableness, small lies, fits of anger, nagging.”¹³

Hall recommends shopping around until one finds a regular confessor with whom one can talk.  He suggests using priests as spiritual guides.  Hall notes “A Catholic who uses confession correctly has no repressions.  He has told his poisonous secrets and got them once and for all out of his system.”¹⁴

As one who typically talks of the ideal, Lord, speaking through Hall, does not address the problem of those who have had bad experiences in confession.  Some people in Lord’s day found confession frightening.  They did not find loving acceptance and an understanding of their mistakes, but rather found condemnation.  Insensitive priests in confession sometimes damaged people’s faith.

In Our Precious Freedom Father Hall visits the Bradley parents after Thanksgiving.  The twins have been away as freshmen at college and apparently when they came home for the break they went off partying and probably drinking.  Their parents are worried.  After Christmas Father Hall talks to the twins.  (What parent would not be jealous of the Bradley’s who have the perfect priest wading in to guide their children?)

Father Hall talks about the freedom we have and the necessity of laws to regulate it.  However he is not talking about political freedom but rather moral freedom.  Young people such as the Bradley twins have great freedom.  How are they going to use it?

“No question about it,” Father Hall said, gesturing with the stem of his pipe, “liberty, freedom, is one of the most glorious gifts that falls into the hands of a man or a woman.  Men cherish it with all the strength of their souls.  Women love it more than life.  Nations rise and fall because of liberty and its abuse.”¹⁵

Father Hall continues:

Now here’s what I’m leading to.  The freest people in the world are always the ones who live under the completest code of laws.  The more civilized a people, the greater its respect for laws and customs.¹⁶

A cursory glance at Lord’s writings might give one the impression that he seems to be overly worried about young people doing wrong or perhaps he was too concerned with sin.  Critics of Augustine sometimes make the same point.  However for both Lord and Augustine the real issue was responsibility for human actions.  Although often greatly restricted by one’s environment, humans have great freedom and therefore great responsibility.

Lord wanted humans, especially young people, to see their freedom and to make good choices.  Lord firmly believed that making good moral choices led to happiness and well-being, while bad choices led to unhappiness.  This of course is the point Aristotle made.  Daniel Lord, with his extensive conversations and correspondence with young people, found ample evidence for his view on the importance of acting morally.

Revolt Against Heaven starts with the rebellion of Lucifer and his army in heaven, then moves to the role of Jesus as the savior, then to the continual conflict: “The war between good and evil, between Christ and Lucifer, between those who accept the Savior’s leadership and those who reject it, goes on unendingly.”  Section subtitles include “Cashiering Christ,” “Millstones,” and “Worship of Self.”¹⁷

NOTES

•   ¹ Lord, “Some of Youth’s Virtues,” America 48 (January 14, 1933), 354.
•   ² Sparr, To Promote, 44.  See also Gerard Ellard, S. J., “The Denver literary Congress,”American Ecclesiastical Review 90 (April 1934): 407-18.
•   ³ Sparr, To Promote, 40.  See p. 179, note 35 for an example.
•   ⁴ Ibid., 147.  See Gavin, 111.
•   ⁵ Florence, 135-36.
•   ⁶ Gavin, 100-103.
•   ⁷ “Cecil B. De Mille, After Visit to Russia,” The Queen’s Work, XXV (June 1933), 3.
•   ⁸ The Queen’s Work, XXV (June 1933), 12.
•   ⁹ The Queen’s Work, XXVI (November 1933), 8.
• ¹⁰ Lord, “With Prohibition Gone Will Youth Return to True Temperance?, The Queen’s Work XXVI (November 1933), 6.
• ¹¹ Ibid., 19.
• ¹² Ibid.
• ¹³ Lord, Confession is a Joy? (QW, 1933), 33.
• ¹⁴ Ibid., 18.
• ¹⁵ Lord, Our Precious Freedom (QW, 1933), 6.
• ¹⁶ Ibid., 15.
• ¹⁷ Lord, Revolt Against Heaven, (QW, 1933), 23.

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Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner