EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Seventeen - 1934
A Tribute to Iva and
The Legion of Decency

Conventions

In July two student Sodality conventions were held with the theme: The Love of Christ Drives Us On.  The college convention had 283 students, 34 priests, 1 brother, and 33 sisters.  The high school convention had 728 students, 41 priests, 3 brothers, and 282 sisters (all from 237 schools).¹   One conference resolution acknowledged the bishops as the immediate superiors of Sodalists and begged that Catholic youth be used in the bishops program of Catholic Action.²   What the delegates did not realize was that the Sodalities and the Queen’s Work staff were doing more for Catholic Action than many bishops.

The Summer School of Catholic Action met in August in St. Louis (143 students, 90 sisters, 20 priests, 50 auditors) and in New York (376 sisters, 199 lay men and women, 75 priests, 200 auditors).³   A night class version was also offered for working men and women.⁴

Other Imaginary Interviews in The Queen’s Work

CATHERINE OF SIENA DISCUSSES THE MERITS OF ROMAN AND AVIGNONESE CLAIMANTS TO TIARA

TELLS OF HER WORK IN RESTORING PAPACY TO ANCIENT SEE OF ROME

VLADMIR ULYANOV CALLS KERENSKY AN AMATEUR AND PREDICTS WORLD REVOLUTION TO END RELIGION

SLAVE STATE TO CRUSH DEMOCRACY AND TO SUPPLANT CROSS WITH HAMMER

Pamphlets of 1934

Christ and His Church

How To Pray the Mass

It's Christ or War

A Letter to One About To Leave the Church

The Motion Pictures Betray America

A Novena to Mary Immaculate

Our Lady's Assumption

Thanksgiving After Holy Communion

'Tis Christmas in Your Heart

In Christ and His Church: These Two are One Ford Osborne and Helen Webb from New York visit Father Hall at his house in Lakeside.  The housekeeper Mary brings out mint juleps.  [The earlier housekeeper was Hilda.]

Father Hall had come to love quite sincerely the clever Ford Osborne, whose prose humor appeared in all the smart magazines; and he had grown to feel a real affection of the bright, intelligent Helen Webb, whose verse had the tang of Dorothy Parker’s without the latter’s cynical malice.⁵

Ford comments on how he admires and respects Jesus but dislikes the Catholic Church.  Hall then proceeds to show Ford that the two cannot be separated.  According to Father Hall:

The whole process was that of a skilled organizer’s imparting to his followers his spirit and ideals and purposes.  He was visualizing an entire future in which they would carry forward His work.  And He trained them elaborately and painstakingly for the task of carrying His name and work before all the people.⁶

According to Father Hall, the Church as it evolved over the centuries, was in its essentials, the vision of Jesus.

This is another pamphlet with Lord as the ‘Great American Catholic Apologist and Salesman.’  Not surprisingly, Lord does not get into the complicated historical questions of what Jesus actually had in mind for the future of his movement or the complex and non-linear development of the early church.  Nor does Lord tackle the issue of those moments in history when the Catholic Church drifted significantly from the teachings and example of Jesus, e.g. Pope Julius II leading his armies.

It’s Christ or War

Lord wrote It’s Christ or War in 1934.  The original version is hard to find.  Existing copies—the revised version written after World War II—have a cover of Jesus reaching out over a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb explosion.

In this pamphlet Father Hall visits Helen Webb and Ford Osborne for lunch in New York.  The discussion turns to an article tracking the history of war that found the century with the greatest peace was the 12th century from 1100 to 1200 when the Catholic faith dominated Europe.

Father Hall talks of a unified culture under the Catholic Church in the 12th century that was subsequently torn apart by the Protestant Reformation.  The rise of individualism followed with philosophers such as Voltaire and Nietzsche.  Marx talked of class warfare.  The rise of science failed to produce a unified culture.  Instead it brought the idea of survival of the fittest and the battlefields of Flanders became the experimental laboratory.  Today no unified culture world culture exists.  According the Hall:

During the 12th century we came closest to having a perfectly united Christendom.  And today the world is divided by hatreds, deep, long-fostered, and so radical that they drive men almost against their wills into devastating wars.⁷

Father Hall calls for a return to a Catholic world and a Catholic culture: There is only one world culture, and that is Catholic.⁸

While philosophies speak with stridently discordant voices, within the Catholic Church Scholastic Philosophy speaks in common-sense voice with perfect unity of principles and perfect logic of application.  And that philosophy once more rises above national and class lines and is a rule of thought and mode of life for all the people.⁹

Father Hall speaks of Mystical Body theology.

More than that, what he does to a fellow Christian he does to Christ.  His sword thrust, his leveled machine gun, his zooming airplane passes through and beyond the body of the man he has slain and strikes at the heart of the world’s Savior.  As long as you did it to one of these my least brother, you did it to me.¹⁰

Father Hall’s word’s bring to mind the murals of Maxo Vanka.  In the small town of Millvale Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh, Vanka painted religious murals in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in 1937 and 1941.  He created powerful and startling images trying to understand the Christian message in the wake of World War I.

Daniel Lord had an oversimplified view of history.  To idealize the 12th century requires that one ignore the brutality of the Crusades which Father Hall describes as misunderstood.  Lord’s contemporary Joseph Husslein S.J., had similar take on history that only under Catholic teaching could a harmonious and just society be created.¹¹

In his writings Lord several times uses World War I as an illustration of what happens when nations follow the principle of ‘survival of the fittest.’  Although Darwin developed the concept, he used it in a descriptive way try to explain the mechanism of biological evolution.  He never intended it in a prescriptive way on how humans should treat one another.

A Letter to One About to Leave the Church

Lord set A Letter to One About to Leave the Church in Father Hall’s office:

Outside in his small, well-kept yard spring was holding high festival.  The tulip bed made a goblet display by Tiffany seem cheap and colorless.  The green of the grass looked bright and almost saucy under the insolent fingers of the late afternoon sun.  The ivy against the little church was alive with small cry, bright, perky little leaves.  And somewhere in the large maple that centered the scene he could hear robins alternating fussy home-building with bursts of happy whistling.¹²

Father Hall reads and answers a letter from Helen Claire, who attends a fashionable Eastern, non-religious, college.  Helen Claire gives her reasons for leaving the Catholic Church that she had grown up in:

I just can’t help but see the ridiculous superstition and tyrannical didacticism behind the church. . . . But why must I do things which God never actually commanded? . . . Must I perform all those duties at a certain time, in a certain place, or else be damned?  It’s just not reasonable.  Why, just because I was born a Catholic, must I remain in the church?  Why am I allowed no will, no mind my own in the matter? . . . And above all, why should I receive any eternal reward if I merely meekly follow the dictates of others out of fear or out of mental laziness?¹³

Father Hall answers her objections.  He states All I am asking is one simple question: if you are not a Catholic what are you?¹⁴   In response to the question Can’t you worship God in your way? Hall answers The fact is, they don’t.¹⁵

This pamphlet is based on Lord’s own experience of receiving hundreds of such letters.  One of the reasons he wrote pamphlets was so he could answer such letters with a pamphlet.

This pamphlet answers the more intelligent criticisms of the Church again making Lord the ‘Great American Catholic Salesman.’  In 1950 Lord would write A Letter to a Friend Not of My Faith to answer common rumors, falsehoods, and misconceptions about Catholic faith and practice.

In Our Lady’s Assumption Lord traces the history of Christian teaching on the Assumption.  Lord bases his version on the tradition coming from St. Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem.  In this tradition Mary died and was buried in a tomb.  However Thomas the apostle showed up late and wanted to see the body.  So they rolled back the stone of the tomb to look inside and the body was gone.  In its place flowers grew.

Other traditions hold that Mary did not die; that she went to sleep hence, the event is called the Dormition of Mary.  However ‘dormition’ means ‘sleeping’ which could be understood as something other than death or as a metaphor for death.

Sallie Riley: The Movie Rater

A Great and Splendid Woman

Sallie Riley is dead.  When the lists of famous American women are compiled by those newspapermen who are hoodwinked by the glamorous and the headline hunting among the female of the species, Sallie Riley's name will probably not be listed.  But few women have in so short a time done as magnificent a constructive job as she did.

The Legion of Decency was launched.  If people were going to go to the good films and stay away from the bad, they had to be told which were good films and which were bad.  No one wanted to take that job.  For the person who happened to put on the good list a film that some dignitary objected to was going to have his knuckles severely rapped.  And anyone who happened to put a popular favorite on the bad list was going to be accused of prudery and bad taste and even an unpleasant mind.  Everyone agreed that the cat needed belling.  But who was willing to bear the opprobrium that went with the job of tying on the bell?

Through one of those strange and apparently accidental chains of circumstances Sallie Riley found herself in the position: She was the woman who first sifted all the pictures that went under the various classifications of A, B, and C.  She had the wise guidance of wise priests.  Her judgment, when she doubted or hesitated, was referred to a board of theologians.  But the first decision was hers.  And during those first months when the Legion of Decency swept onto its triumphant work and the lists were issued as guides for movie-goers, Sallie Riley, working quietly behind the scenes, did one of the greatest critical jobs I have ever known.¹⁶

NOTES

•   ¹ See Queen’s Work XXVII (October 1934), 1, for stats.
•   ² Florence, 126.  See pp. 125-27 for the conferences.
•   ³ Although the SSCA would continue until 1968, the number of parish conventions and student conventions is unclear after this point.
•   ⁴ Florence, 137.
•   ⁵ Lord, Christ and His Church (QW, 1934), 3.
•   ⁶ Ibid., 7.
•   ⁷ Lord, It’s Christ or War (QW, 1934), 13.
•   ⁸ Ibid., 31.
•   ⁹ Ibid., 29.
• ¹⁰ Ibid., 27
• ¹¹ Werner, Prophet of the Christian Social Manifesto, 48-61.
• ¹² Lord, A Letter to One About to Leave the Church, (QW, 1934), 1.
• ¹³ Ibid., 3-4.
• ¹⁴ Ibid., 9.
• ¹⁵ Ibid., 18.
• ¹⁶ Lord, People You’ll Like to Meet, 97-98.  Her name is spelled ‘Sally Reilly.’  Skinner in The Cross and the Cinema, 40-43, gives a more complex evaluation of her work.  See also Walsh, Sin and Censorship, 132-133.

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Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner