EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Twenty - 1937
The Restless Flame in a Triumphant Jamaica

A Story Told by Daniel Lord

Blessing of Daggers

The confessions had dragged along far into the night.  The priest was growing quite weary.  He slid the little confessional door open with a mechanical gesture and then started bolt upright.

On the other side of the grille was the unmistakable muzzle of a gun pointed at him.  In a flash he made an act of contrition, an act of resignation, a kind of acceptance of the robbery—or martyrdom—that was intended for him, and waited for the next thing to happen.

What happened was this: A voice rich with a young brogue said, Excuse me, father, but I’m a new cop.  And I was wondering if you’d mind blessing my gun.¹

Daniel Lord on Marriage

Pamphlets on Dating and Romance

Pamphlets on Marriage

Pamphlets on Birth Control

Pamphlets on Divorce

Books on Marriage

Money Runs or Ruins the Home

Money Runs or Ruins the Home (1942) is another straightforward and highly relevant pamphlet.  It is written for people in the middle class, not the very rich or the very poor.

Lord states, So in dealing with money we are dealing with power.  When we as members of the family share money with others, we are sharing power.  When we are mean and stingy, we cut away others’ power to do things.²

Lord calls for collaboration between husband and wife.  Every member of the family should start by determining to be, where money is concerned, as generous as possible.³

Parents need to set good examples on handling money for children.  Children will form their spending habits on the pattern of their parents.⁴  Children should be given allowances so they learn to manage money.  Allowances should be tied into doing chores.  When possible, children should be in on the discussions of the family budget.  Some portion of what a child earns should go to help the family.  Every child, as soon as he or she becomes a wage owner, should simply take it for granted that he is going to contribute to the family finances.⁵  Lord also recommends that during the school year it is better if young children do not work so they can put all their energies on school.

Lord mentions the situation where a grandmother or grandfather lives with the family and helps with the work.  A fine sense of dignity and self-reliance is developed when money allowances are given in return for work done.⁶  This is not to be seen as charity.

Money discussions should begin before marriage.  Any other course is the course of Sir Ostrich.  Lord calls for Frank Finances in marriage.  When the husband is the sole wage earner:

To the wife should be allotted a definite sum, over which she may exercise a practically unsupervised control.  Anything less simply means the end of her freedom, her sense of personal power, or individual security.⁷

Lord calls for a just division of money.

I feel the most intense pity for the wife-slaves or who are too, too numerous in America.

. . .

This is a position of gross humiliation, to which no free American Catholic woman should be expected to submit.  Husbands who have absolute control of the power of the purses are either tyrants at heart, frankly contemptuous of the brains, distrustful of their own lives, thoughtless, or arrogantly stupid.⁸

Lastly Lord states, The financial rock on which many marriages wrecked is uncertainty about income.⁹

Jamaica Triumphant

In 1937, Lord wrote and produced Jamaica Triumphant.  In January he traveled to Jamaica to direct the show:

Written for and produced by the Jesuits and Bishop Emmett of Jamaica, British West Indies, as a civic show on the hundredth anniversary of religious freedom in Jamaica; presents the spirit and development of Jamaica, not emphasizing the Catholic features merely, but offering rather the patriotic spirit of the island and its emergence as a people and a nation.¹⁰

Synopsis

In the show Jamaica is portrayed as a Native woman.  The arrival of Columbus is presented as a good thing bringing culture and Christianity.  (Lord, though well-educated and very well-read, was typical of many of his time in not knowing the full and brutal story of the arrival of the Spanish in the New World.)

The next scenes show the coming the British; Pirates; Slavery; St. Peter Claver, the Jesuit known as the Patron of Slaves; and William Wilberforce, the Liberator, the British politician who led the fight to abolish slavery.  The show included a dance of slaves, a pagan army, and calypso music.

A young Jesuit, J. M. Krim wrote about the experience:

A cast of four hundred had been rounded up.  This alone meant a combing of all the talent available in a small mission area.  I had finally appealed to the Jewish rabbi for help and he graciously cooperated on the condition that we would not produce the pageant on the Sabbath.  Youth from many of the non-Catholic schools had also joined up.  Just what Father Dan would love!  But what a big question mark remained!  Expenses beyond our means had to be risked.  Good Bishop Emmet and in fact most everyone doubted the outcome.

Then Father Dan appeared.  In three days our six weeks of drudgery and, to us, the colossal job of erecting a 2,000 capacity raised amphitheater and triple stage (plus raising the initial money to get off the ground) had left us limp.  The first dress rehearsal started.  Then it poured!  I could see the gelatine floodlights curling up and the pageant being washed away.  Father Dan quietly ascended the upper stage.  With people from India, Africa, China and heaven knows what other countries represented in their descendants, with British soldiers, Haitian and Cuban students and a few stolid Jamaican Red Stripes (the constabulary) looking up, Father made the sign of the cross.  His three Hail Marys (for even then we were ecumenical) and the Our Father brought the rainbow.¹¹

Pamphlets of 1937

Are You Scrupulous?

I Don’t Like Lent

Prayers Are Always Answered

Thanks to the Communists

They Found Success

Visits to the Blessed Sacrament

We’re Told Religion in Russia Is Free

What’s the Matter with Europe?

The Wisdom of the Wise.

Are You Scrupulous?

Are You Scrupulous? An Interview With Francis J. O’Boyle, S.J. is an interesting discussion of the problem of religious scrupulosity.  However Father Boyle says that religious scruples are only one form and then goes to on to describe things such as germ phobias and other behaviors that today would labeled as OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Boyle states Yet scruples seem to be diseases particularly American.¹²  The surprising thing is that men are more likely to be scrupulous than are women.  Often too, devout priests and religious are excessively scrupulous.¹³

Focusing on religious scrupulosity Boyle states:

A scrupulous person on the other hand does not really know what sin is, at least in his own case.  He is always uncertain.  He is troubled with incessant doubt. . . . . He runs to confession; he makes a confession that is filled with the retailing of sins he is not certain he has committed; and he steps out of the confessional dissatisfied, uncertain, in an agony of fear that his confession has been bad and that his sins are unforgiven.¹⁴

To people like this, God seems like a frightful taskmaster who waits hungrily for poor human mistakes and then like an ugly monster jumps out with a roar of triumph when human strength has failed or human limitation has stood in the way of perfection.  These people are rather hard on God aren’t they?¹⁵

At a time when impure thoughts were considered sinful, Boyle notes that scrupulous people can not see the difference between a thought that just came into the mind and a thought that someone intentionally choose to think about.

Scrupulous people are driven by fear and lose their ability to judge themselves, though they typically lead sinless lies.  Fundamentally they all fail to distinguish between temptation and consent.  Boyle points out: If you are not certain about your consent, you did not consent.¹⁶

Boyle suggests the scrupulous people need to be honest about their condition.  Then they need to trust their confessor.  But he points out that scrupulous people are terribly stubborn.

Lord ends the pamphlet stating:

Christ is never annoyed with us.  But if He could be annoyed, I think He would be annoyed with those of us who doubt His love and His willingness to forgive.¹⁷

To people of the pre-Vatican II era when there was such an emphasis on sin and the details of sin it is not surprising that religious scrupulosity was a serious problem.  Do priests in the current age encounter this problem very often?

Lord told this story.

I was reminded of the story of the scrupulous priest who used to stand at the foot of the altar and grit his teeth as he made his intention. Volo missam celebrare (I wish to say Mass), he would say grimly.  Then one day it occurred to him that there were two Latin verbs which had the form volo.  There is the form volo which has the infinitive velle, which means, to intend, to wish.  But volo whose infinitive is volare means, I fly.  That realization threw him into consternation.  Suppose God thinks that I am saying, not ‘I intend to say Mass,’ but ‘I fly to say Mass’?

After all if he was flying to say Mass, he must want to say Mass.  But that thought never occurred to him; he was taking no chances that things weren’t perfectly clear to God.  From the time of that realization he would say at the foot of the altar, Volo missam celebrare, and add immediately, by that I mean volo—velle, not volo—volare.  And even then he wasn’t sure that God understood.¹⁸

I Don’t Like Lent

Lord’s sets I Don’t Like Lent at a small party at the Bradley’s home with Father Hall as a guest.  Dick and Sue are out.  When one of the young guests says, I don’t like Lent, a discussion ensues.  Father Hall defends the practice of making sacrifices by giving of things for Lent.  His arguments are not based on rules or duties or even as penance for sins.  Rather Lord sees Lenten sacrifices as loving gifts offered to God.  If it is hard to give up something in particular, then that thing is valuable to the person and thus giving it up is a valuable gift to God.  It is an act of love.

Father Hall defends Lent from the charge that Lent is a medieval practice that shows a rejection of the world.  The guest, non-Catholic Dr. Allenby, voices the skeptic’s view.  Lord answers that the Saints saw the world as good, but they chose to give up parts of the world out of love for God.  During Lent we imitate the Saints just a little.  We train ourselves to give up the good things of the world just to prove that we can.  Good things have a way of mastering us¹⁹

Father Hall even wonders whether the Lenten fast of cutting down on meat: eating smaller meals; and avoiding sweets, tobacco, and liquor might actually have health benefits.  He also comments I’ve never heard a fellow brag about drink (that he could take it or leave it alone) who ever left it alone.²⁰

Lord wrote Prayers are Always Answered to encourage faith in the efficacy of prayer.  As always, Lord sees the ideal and thus does not tackle the issue of prayers that are sincerely offered and do not seem to be answered, or the experience of people who feel abandoned by God.  What one would like to know is what advice Lord gave in the confessional or in letters to those who felt their prayers were unanswered.

Prayers are Always Answered would sell over 280,000 copies and go through 33 printings by 1963 printings.  It would be Lord’s fifth highest selling pamphlet.

In They Found Success Daniel Lord tells the story of Tom and Isabel Henderson: newlyweds on a cruise ship out of New York to South America where they meet Emmet Deane.  Deane is about to inherit his father’s oil fortune and has a plan for how to use the money.  Deane invites Tom and Isabel to join him in his vision and they decide . . . .

The rest of this story and the lesson Lord draws from it are left to the reader who tracks down the pamphlet to read.  The pamphlet is a great example of Lord’s ability as a short story writer.²¹

Thanks to the Communists

So I must risk the charge of heavy-handed irony.  Even if I seem to dip my pencil point in the acid of sarcasm, I must admit we owe much, extremely much, to the modern communist.²²

Lord wrote Thanks to the Communists in 1937: two years before World War II, before the Cold War, and at a time when the Communist Party is American was still active.  This is an interesting and thought-provoking pamphlet.

Lord expresses gratitude that Communism has created a new generation of martyrs.  He quotes the early Christian writer Tertullian: The blood of the martyrs is the seed for the Church.  Lord then notes: I am grateful because they have given to me as a debater the arguments that are Russia, Mexico, China, Hungary, and Spain.²³  Rather than argue about a theoretical future Communism of what will be, Lord talked about the current examples.

Lord goes on to note that Communism proves that you cannot get rid of religion.  Instead it becomes the dogma-bound religion in the world without the supernatural.  Communism is a Complete Religion:

Let’s see.  Communism has its bible, Capital.  It has its Moses, Karl Marx.  It has its Messiah, Lenin, who lies in state in the mock holy sepulcher of Moscow’s Red Square.  It has its infallible Pope, Stalin, surrounded by a small hierarchy of ruling powers.  Its elect are the party members.  Its god is the state, that must be served with an unswerving devotion, a blind zeal, and the sacrifice of life and property and personal liberty never demanded by any God since the ancient days of Moloch of Carthage.  It has martyrs enshrined in martyr’s tombs.²⁴

For Lord, as for Husslein and others, Moloch was seen as paganism as its worst because it practiced child sacrifice.  (There is some debate today among academics about the existence or the extent of child sacrifice in ancient Carthage.)

Lord describes the dogma of communism:

That one system of economics is so perfect that anyone who disagrees with it deserves to be shot, and that one political party is so completely infallible that the rest of the citizenry are merely permitted to bow their heads in humble acceptance of its candidates, its platform, its pronouncement and discipline.²⁵

Today one could also cite the near-religious devotion shown to Maz Zedong during his life, with his pictures everywhere and his Red Book treated as inerrant.

Lord notes that the challenge of Communism has forced Christianity to face its complacency.

But for the average man our tendency has been to make religion a little sweet and perhaps a trifle too easy.  Do sweet and easy things really win the hearts of men?  Christ didn’t feel that way when He talked in terms of bearing a cross, and taking up a yoke, and burning with a great zeal, and laying down one’s life for a friend.  He never suggested that religion was easy.  It was glorious because, like all great professions—art, war, medicine, music, the law, authorship, science—it was a thing that demanded hard work, unremitting labor, and great personal sacrifice.

Yet we had come to think that perhaps people would be won to the church if we made things very, very easy. . . . Religion was a sort of holiday pastime of the average man, the profession and vocation only of the man and woman specially consecrated to God.²⁶

Lord notes that Communists and also Nazis have been calling for the same demands of Christianity: sacrifice, self-renunciation, zeal, and service.

Communists have driven Catholics back into public life.

A short time ago I asked the great Father John Ryan how people reacted when he began to preach the living wage, labor unions, the right to strike, and social legislation.  He answered emphatically that they were shocked.  It seemed to them, Catholics notably but Protestants and unbelievers as well, that all this was none of a priest’s business.  His only work was to say mass, give absolution, and preach an occasional novena to the Sacred Heart.²⁷

John A. Ryan (1869-1945) was the most important Catholic social thinker of his time.  The same sentiments were expressed by critics when in 1986 The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued the groundbreaking and biblically prophetic, but now largely forgotten, economic pastoral, Economic Justice For All.

Communists criticize the Church for not speaking out on social issues.  Now the great cry is, ‘Why in thunder didn’t the church do something about all this mess?  Why doesn’t it do something now?’²⁸  Lord points out that the church had been excluded from having a voice on politics and economics.  In other writings Lord would cite the example of Pope Benedict XV who offered proposals to end World War I but was rebuffed and ignored.

For Spain goes up a cry: Why didn’t the church do something for the laboring man?  Why didn’t it rebuke the great landowners and curb their power?

Well, the church could hardly do that if its sole business was to tend the votive candles and preach an occasional ferverino in honor of St. James of Compostela.  The church had been told with emphasis to stay out of the affairs of industry and agriculture and labor unions and banking.²⁹

According to Lord, Communists have forced Catholics to look at their tradition of social justice.  In the section Stolen Truths Lord shows that many communist ideas are actually Christian:

Well, all that really appeals to the hearts of men in communism the communists stole right out of the New Testament and Thomas Aquinas.  The brotherhood of man, a classless society, internationalism, contempt for property and the abnegation of wealth, love of peace, respect for the working man who follows in the footsteps of the carpenter of Nazareth, justice for all, whether strong or weak—these are the things which the communistic propagandist has stressed.³⁰

I think that they have reintroduced them to many a Catholic.³¹

The brotherhood of man is a lovely theory of life, even when it is made meaningless by the communist rejection of the Fatherhood of God.  A classless world is an idea that comes close to the Christian ideal of human equality before God and in the church.  The world was so in love with money and property that perhaps it needed the drastic rejection of all money and property as preached by the communists before it could appreciate Christ’s lovely theories about money and the consul of poverty he urged upon his own followers.³²

According to Lord, the challenge of Communism has awakened many a sleeping Catholic.  And the communist has driven us back with a new fever of enthusiasm toward our Christian democracy. . . . We needed an opponent to make us vigorous and keep us fit.³³

In his numerous writings against Communism Lord was never jingoistic or pushing patriotism.  Lord would never have supported the later Joseph McCarthy and HUAC witch-hunts.  Lord thought the way to fight communism was to make sure workers rights were protected; that workers received decent pay and had decent working conditions.  He believed that a just economic system following Christian principles would remove the need for workers to consider alternative systems.

We’re Told Religion in Russia is Free is a short pamphlet of poetry with cartoon drawings.

The great dictator Stalin, in a merry mood, one day

Announced a Constitution with a whoop and hip-hooray!

And all the little Communists, pale pink and bloody red,

Politely cheered.  (They’d better cheer most everything he said.)

Behold, said Stal, religious rites in Russia shall be free,

As likewise anti-Godlessness and atheism.  See?

Religious rites, you’ll please observe, are what God is allowed.

But powerful propaganda—That goes to the Godless crowd.³⁴

The poem then goes on to illustrate the total lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union.

        

NOTES

•   ¹ That Made Me Smile, 36.
•   ² Lord, Money Runs or Ruins the Home, (QW, 1942.), 8.
•   ³ Ibid., 16.
•   ⁴ Ibid., 19.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 22.
•   ⁶ Ibid., 24.
•   ⁷ Ibid., 28.
•   ⁸ Ibid., 31-32.
•   ⁹ Ibid., 33.
• ¹⁰ Gavin, 213.
• ¹¹ Ibid, 122-23.
• ¹² Lord, Are You Scrupulous? (QW, 1937), 1. Some copies have a 1932 publication date.
• ¹³ Ibid., 2.
• ¹⁴ Ibid., 3.
• ¹⁵ Ibid., 9.
• ¹⁶ Ibid., 14.
• ¹⁷ Ibid., 32
• ¹⁸ Ibid., 8.
• ¹⁹ Lord, I Don’t Like Lent (QW, 1937), 20.
• ²⁰ Ibid., 28.
• ²¹ Lord, They Found Success (QW, 1937.)
• ²² Lord, Thanks to the Communists (QW, 1937). 3-4.
• ²³ Ibid., 6.
• ²⁴ Ibid., 11.
• ²⁵ Ibid., 13.
• ²⁶ Ibid., 14-15.
• ²⁷ Ibid., 16.
• ²⁸ Ibid., 20.
• ²⁹ Ibid., 21.
• ³⁰ Ibid., 29
• ³¹ Ibid., 24.
• ³² Ibid., 30.
• ³³ Ibid., 33, 35.
• ³⁴ Lord, (We’re Told) Religion in Russia is Free (QW, 1937); first published as Religion in Russia is Free?.

Chapter 19    Chapter 21

Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner