The Whirl of the Wind
THE WHIRL OF THE WIND STRAWS in the wind: that rather hackneyed yet still vivid figure of speech so useful for those who discuss the signs of the times, can only be truly significant of the...
...from which the Church came forth endowed with virtue and perpetual strength...
...They retreat, both men and women, in order to fight again, and to advance more vigorously, when the retreat has served its purposes...
...No more active leader of the Catholic Church has appeared during centuries than the present Pope...
...but many other religious orders and congregations, notably the Passionists, are encouraging, building up and directing the retreat movement among the laity...
...so too have many other cities and towns throughout the land...
...In California there is such a place, in the lovely Santa Clara Valley...
...Louis...
...The subject of this letter was the same subject as that discussed by the convention in Detroit...
...For the time of this "retreat" the Pope was devoting himself, in complete silence and isolation, to his "spiritual exercise...
...Nearly all the retreat houses, both for men and for women, report a continuous and increasing number of non-Catholics who are using them...
...When the "retreat" was over, he left the Vatican one morning, and (now linking himself in more than one way to Detroit) entered a motor car (which had been made in Detroit) and rode to the Church of Saint John Lateran, where he celebrated the Sacrifice of the Mass, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest in that historical church...
...It told how the Pope had for a space of days "gone into retreat...
...It will be the subject discussed by another great gathering to be held in Philadelphia early in February...
...The delegates who assembled in Detroit came from organized groups of Catholic men in all parts of the country who have built and who maintain, or who are planning to build and to maintain, houses set apart from the market place, and the business world, and from their own domestic centres, where once a year at least they and their friends, whether or not the latter are members of the Catholic Church, may enter into the solace of silence, may escape from the pressure of work, may give themselves to themselves for a few days at least, and there may meditate, and think, and read, and, if they so will, may pray...
...THE WHIRL OF THE WIND STRAWS in the wind: that rather hackneyed yet still vivid figure of speech so useful for those who discuss the signs of the times, can only be truly significant of the direction and force of the wind when or if the wind itself is something other than a mere eccentric gust or fantastic whirl...
...It will continue to be the subject of similar meetings which conjointly mark the beginnings of what bids fair to become a mighty movement in America and Europe both, namely, the lay retreat...
...But this particular convention in Detroit had for its purpose something quite out of the ordinary...
...But, as his last encyclical letter (Mens Nostra) so forcibly sets forth, he would have all types and modes of organized Catholic life and work grounded in personal, individual participation in, and expressing of, the spiritual life...
...And the straws with which we are here concerned are those which, so we of this paper believe, have not been set in motion by any chance eddy of ephemeral public opinion, but by that mighty force which is the wind of the spirit itself...
...Beneath all political, moral, economic and social happenings and movements, there are springs of action for which the only word we possess, although we cannot understand or fully explain it, is spiritual...
...Once again, in that giganic city of mass production and intense industrialism, Detroit, delegates from all parts of the country have assembled, to dine together, and listen to speeches, and appoint committees, and pass resolutions, and make reports, and all the rest of it...
...In his own words, he would "have the manifold cohorts of the Catholic action polished or cultivated fitly by the spiritual exercises...
...Which is one of the many reasons why the lot of the editorial writer, like unto that of Gilbert's policeman, is not a happy one...
...What that purpose was may perhaps be best indicated by turning to still another item of news which appeared at about the same time as the papers were briefly recording the meeting in Detroit...
...If it were possible correctly to estimate intangible things, it might be true to say that Detroit has done more to build up and make truly rich the life of this country in a time of considerable depression and doubt by the convention of the retreat movement, than has been done or which could be done by all the high-powered advertising of optimistic business slogans which could be devised by the most up-and-coming chamber of commerce in the land...
...Nor are the female orders and societies less active...
...He had withdrawn himself during that time from all his usual duties as executive head of the tremendous world-wide organization known as the Catholic Church: an organization compared with which the most gigantic and complicated of commercial organizations-the Standard Oil Company, or General Motors-are mere trifles...
...For these retreat houses are sanitariums of the soul...
...One of the news items which go to make up these straws, or signs, comes from Detroit, Michigan...
...And, quite apart from the fact that a certain number of non-Catholic individuals personally resort to these sanitariums of the soul, society in general receives the benefit that flows from them, for the tens of thousands of Catholic men and women, business leaders, doctors, lawyers, judges, workmen, clerks, housewives, teachers and women of the more restricted circles of society, who annually make use of the retreat houses, return to their work stronger and more complete men and women, made more truly healthful and helping, serener and surer and, in the best and least sentimental sense of the word, sweeter souls...
...so has St...
...Detroit has one...
...Some of our separated Christian brothers are even showing signs of building such houses of their own...
...Probably most of them are conducted under the auspices of the Jesuit fathers, as is quite natural and proper, for, as the Pope says in the letter to which we have alluded, Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, has been declared by the Church as "the heavenly patron of all spiritual exercises and, therefore, of institutes, sodalities, and bodies of every kind assisting those who are making the spiritual exercises...
...none has been more practical, in the commonly accepted meaning of that term...
...And just as the early Church in the midst of the pagan world by the silent strength of its teachings, as proven in the characters and lives of its children, banished human slavery, and worked a moral transformation of the world around them, so too may the modern Catholic action succeed if the lay retreat movement proves itself, as it promises to do, not a mere fad in an age of fads and fancies, but a sure and stable development of something that began its course in the Church, as the Pope reminds us, in its very earliest time, in the ten days' retreat which the Apostles and disciples of the Founder of the Church made after His death, in that upper chamber of the house in Jerusalem, "which foreshadowed the first spiritual exercises...
...There are tens of thousands of such conventions and conferences held in this busy land of ours every year...
...As Walt Whitman somewhere says, with that occasional wisdom which manifests itself even when he is writing in his most rambling and vaguely pantheistic fashion, "All changes in exterior things are in vain without a change in that which underlies all appearances...
...The job of selecting from among the helter-skelter mass of events daily recorded by the press those items which really indicate the direction and force of the winds of public opinion is by no means the chief of his difficulties...
...In New York there is such a house, Mount Manresa, on Staten Island...
...They are not mere refuges for the defeated, or hiding places for deserters...
...In many convents from the Pacific to the Atlantic thousands of women retreat from the world for a day, or two or three days, or longer...
...none has more thoroughly believed in and promoted the advantages of exterior, organized, active means for propagating the Faith...
...Moreover, further to mark the occasion, he sent out a letter to all the bishops of the Catholic Church...
...They are spiritual dynamos...
...It is concerned with that phenomenon of American life which has been dealt with by all sorts of writers, foreign and American both, as one of the most typical manifestations of our modern, mass-action, "go-getting," practical and materialistic democratic social life: namely, the convention habit...
...The Men of Malvern, as they call themselves, in Philadelphia have such a place...
...They are wells of restoration...
...And he considers the lay retreat movement-the prudent and well-organized use of the spiritual exercises, in especial the Ignatian method- as the chief instrument of Catholic action...
...And more, many more, will be built...
...The national convention of the lay retreat movement in Detroit calls attention to the remarkable growth and vigorous development of this fundamental factor in the Catholic life of the United States-and not merely in the Catholic life, in any sectarian sense, but in the body of American life as a whole...
...A much harder task is that of trying to determine the events which are significant of the movement and strength of those currents of the human spirit which are deeper than what we call public opinion, or the usual happenings which make up the ordinary contents of our newspapers...
...This second item came from Vatican City...
...its motive was something very different to the usual motives and programs which bring Americans together in conventions...
...Catholic action, and again Catholic action, and, once more, Catholic action," seems to be the main theme and maxim at once of all his thoughts, words and deeds...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 12
