Communications
THE COMMONWEAL February 24^ 1926 COMMUNICATIONS THE IRISH FOUNDERS Holy Cross, Mass. TO the Editor:—The generous space which you accorded in a recent number of The Commonweal to Volume...
...It is no wonder that from among such that which is American has drawn some of its most steadfast defenders...
...who consider as a ghost story the documented facts about the Irish contribution in men and means during the colonial and revolutionary years of our country...
...At its golden jubilee in 1923, statistics revealed that sixty-six percent of its graduates—and it is one of the largest colleges in the country—were either ordained priests or were then studying for the priesthood...
...Eugene Callahan of the Holy Name Society and the writer...
...Americans, not of Irish lineage, who have come to know of his studies, are prompt to praise his patriotic labors...
...And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High...
...Dr...
...TO the Editor:—C...
...Fur fee in his instructive article seems, like others, to confuse the idea of a college and a university...
...As an example with which I am familiar, I propose Columbia College in Iowa...
...Another consideration that has not been stressed in the past as regards the small college is its commendably iconoclastic work in wrecking "intellectual" careers...
...and of George Ironside, also a member of the Episcopal church...
...O'Brien in his notable book, the service of that vast percentage of Irish in our early American history is a hidden phase...
...And that thread from an Irish loom of the Faith became a leading-string for other notable ecclesiastics in Massachusetts—Thayer, Bodfish, Baxter, and Metcalf...
...and is it heresy to say that his, too, is the voice of the church...
...However...
...Lathrop (Rose Hawthorne) in their record of the Georgetown Visitation—A Story of Courage—relate an incident of one who subsequently became a Visitandine in Georgetown: "Miss Julia Pearce, a Bostonian, a scion of old Puritan stock...
...Especially is it sometimes claimed by those seeking such changes that these new arrivals and men of their race and ideas had no hand in the making of our country, and that it was formed by those who were hostile to them and, therefore, they owe it no support...
...When she was received into the Church her joy was so exuberant that she felt she must communicate her happiness to some sympathizing person...
...Whatever may be the condition in relation to others, and whatever ignorance and bigotry may imagine, such arguments do not apply to those of the race and blood so prominent in this assemblage...
...CallahanJs letter appears in full in our issue dated February 10, and which was on sale February 5. The only reason it was not printed sooner was that we were not aware he desired it published...
...Callahan, who has, I judge, made public my private letter to him without either securing my permission or notifying me of his action...
...What unrecorded episodes of heroic resistance marked the process will never, perhaps, be known, though there are gleams and glimpses of it in ancient town records...
...a sacerdotal order is Egyptian...
...They are interested in all things Catholic—from theories of theology to liturgical improvement, from parochial schools to foreign missions, from> plain chant to Peter's pence...
...Here in the heart of the Bay State their numerous names are not forgotten, though one longs to know how those gallant fellows fared in a territory that lacked the ministrations of the Faith...
...Keeley, an Episcopal clergyman, rector of Saint George's Chapel, New York...
...I haven't the least objection to his having done so, and cheerfully forgive him...
...As Cardinal Newman in his characteristic way says in one place: "It was the gracious condescension of our Lord Himself, not to substitute Christianity for Judaism by any violent revolution, but to develop Judaism into Christianity, as the Jews might bear it...
...to other Americans, I mean of Irish ancestry, who hang on the window-sills of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon castle party, Mr...
...Bruce...
...They sometimes take the form of a claim that our institutions were founded long ago...
...the university with truth and the relations of truth or with training for a vocation...
...Remembrance that is touched with wistfulness reads their names on the monument here in Worcester...
...sitting in the midst of the doctors both hearing them and asking them questions...
...One of these "vestiges" I used to look at with wonderment when, as a little child in my native Massachusetts village, I went to visit our museum of historical relics...
...The school has for its aim conveying of certain elemental facts...
...E. Dougherty's objection to the divine electicism of Christianity as assumed by Professor Carleton J. H. Hayes, is so patently in contradiction to the facts of historical development that one is reminded of Wilfred Ward's eloquent analysis of Cardinal Newman's anticipations by half a century of the trend of philosophical scepticism...
...And I like to think that many notable conversions to the Catholic Church in early New England were occasioned by the proximity of these Irish, whether warrior lads or servant girls, to the non-Catholic society of the day...
...the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian...
...Callahan gave no hint of any such wish until he did so in a subsequent note to me...
...of Reverend Calvin White of Connecticut, and others...
...NEWMAN ON THE CHURCH Pittsburgh, Pa...
...What wonder if their eyes become astigmatic before bad architecture, tawdry glass, or clumsy ceremonial...
...CATHOLIC COLLEGES AND SCHOLARSHIP Washington, D. C. TO the Editor:—Precise thinking involves precise terminology...
...If there has been any ethical transgression in the matter,, it seems to me that it lies with Dr...
...Older playmates of the time, feeling the temper of the environment, may have imagined that "the beads" had been set there in ridicule...
...What wonder if their nerves are jarred by our musical acolytes performing on Westminster chimes at the trice solemn Sanctus, or by triple fire gongs at the Supreme Moment of the Mass...
...that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness...
...The congregation of all the faithful"' would never fit in choir stalls...
...O'Brien deserved the encomium which your editorial and book review gave to him...
...Maurice S. Sheehy...
...and Thomas More is as large a figure ii> history as the Bishop of Rochester...
...the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian...
...The college does not pretend to be a university or to be equipped either materially or intellectually for research as a primary work...
...this is partly in evidence in stressing the research feature...
...Rev...
...I believe it was Socrates who said: "The worst form of injustice is to treat unequals as equals...
...Barber entering the Georgetown Viistation, and later Superior there...
...The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic...
...But how was she to find one in Boston, and fifty years ago, too, who would or could sympathize with a Catholic convert...
...All honor to the laity, all praise to the patience in the pewt Rev...
...claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching...
...James J. Walsh and Michael J. O'Brien, the historian of the Irish American Society, has demonstrated that a generous portion of the rank and file of the men who fought in the Revolution and supported those who framed our institutions was not alien to those who are represented here...
...Barber and his son, Samuel, becoming Jesuits...
...Ward might have cited Newman's divination that the day was not far distant when a J. M. Robertson would write a book debasing Christianity to a conglomeration of ancient myths, customs, and rituals...
...She used to tell an ancedote of herself, which illustrates her spirit...
...In our larger universities where "souls" do not exist they might be outcasts, but because their names are not engraved in Who's Who or do not head the classical investigation does not by any means indicate that the college which they attended has not fulfilled its intellectual as well as its spiritual mission...
...Today the people are propagandists...
...And of issues to the Barber sequence, Father Fitton (who laid the foundations of the present Holy Cross in the 'thirties of that century) writes: "The conversion of Father Barber was not without producing the happiest results otherwise, as it laid the way to the conversion of the Reverend Dr...
...What wonder if their ears ache during "musical Masses" by choirswho ought to have their throats cut...
...One other instance out of those local catacombs: George Parsons Lathrop and the then Mrs...
...Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East country, and the luxury of Sheba...
...Who shall ever enumerate the casual remarks, the "asides"—often like a sentence from a Kempis—freighted with supernatural wisdom, that dropped from the lips of these exiles, and became the meditation for many a longing soul seeking spiritual enlightenment in the environment...
...so is the rite of sacrifice...
...THE POOR LAYMAN New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—Welcome are the sprightly pages of The Commonweal...
...Stuart will awaken interest in those chapters of American history, and, perhaps, dispel to some extent the shrug-shoulder apathy of Irish-named Americans themselves, who are content to imagine that the Irish influx to our shores began in the famine days of the 'forties...
...The ideal college he points out as midway between these: "It is concerned with the student...
...Out of the abundant testimony from Americans, who are of no castle party, let us be content to quote one, in the very first rank of American thought and expression—President Coolidge...
...The layman has come to the fore where he belongs...
...Doubtless many of your readers know of the wonderful sequences of that investigation of the simple Irish prayer-book— the remarkable conversion and religious vocations of the Barber family—Mr...
...Some measure of truth assuredly was developed before the advent of Christ and what that truth was the divine authority of the Church determined and selectively incorporated...
...It has, therefore, occasioned me much surprise that in the voluminous contributions on Catholic Colleges and Scholarship no one has taken the trouble to define what he or she meant by the term "college...
...But is there a world in which they may do research and which is as real as the visible creation...
...Peter Moran...
...Again, he says of Saint Paul: "While he strenuously opposes all that is idolatrous, immoral, and profane, in their creed, he will profess to be leading them on to perfection, and to be recovering and purifying, rather than reversing the essential principles of their belief...
...While the Holy Cross roster of over a thousand students is like a "cross section" of the American community—the varied names of different racial origins—His Excellency knew that the Celt predominated "in this assemblage...
...Are they intellectual pariahs because their investigation must henceforth do with the souls of men and the process of soul salvation...
...the university has for its aim either the discovery of truth or the giving of professional training...
...Your own editorial pen touched the quick of pathos when you wrote: "To the American Catholic the loss of the Faith to the earlier Irish immigrants will never present itself as anything save a tragedy...
...and the daughters of the family also religious in the Visitation and the Ursulines (a unique chapter February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 439 in American Catholic history, to be duly noted in the Life of Eishop Fenwick...
...TO the Editor:—The generous space which you accorded in a recent number of The Commonweal to Volume XXIV of the American Irish Historical Society is a judicious and eloquent tribute to the scholarship of those historiographers and to the American worth of their revealed researches...
...The learned and patriotic research of men of the education of Dr...
...Alas...
...Many of them are specialists— where we of the clergy are not even amateurs—in sculpture, in* music, in architecture, in stained glass, in mural decoration...
...Like other careful editors, those of the New Republic are not in the habit of printing communications unless they have some reason to believe that the author desires this to be done...
...I like it for its Catholicity...
...It is patriotism to contribute to our national education these historical chapters about the Aeneid-days of our country...
...She began in Chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canaanites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, until she rested in her own land...
...Scripture bears us out in saying," he writes, "that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent...
...John Kannaday, sergeant...
...All of them are concerned that the church receive the fullest and the best...
...There is a possibility that the Catholic "college" is still a few steps ahead of intellectual bankruptcy proceedings although without violence to its mission it might emphasize a little more the minor idea of research...
...To establish this it were but necessary to cite eleven of the fifty-five signers of the Declaration of Independence and recall that on the roll of Washington's generals were Sullivan, Knox, Wayne, and the gallant son of Trinity College, Dublin, who fell at Quebec at the head of his troops—Richard Montgomery...
...It is rather a pity that Mr...
...of a divine kingdom is Judaic...
...who, in dread of being associated with forbears who drank a wholesome "mornin's mornin' in Shanahan's ould shebeen," never dared to learn that earlier forbcirs were men and women of academic culture (see the list of early Irish schoolmasters in our colonies) who, therefore, prone to wilt in an environment which was unsympathetic to that American-Irish chapter, uttered with facility the supercilious question of their kind in all ages and in all nations: "What good can come out of Nazareth ?" It is, indeed, a hidden phase of American history, as Mr...
...The doctrine of a Trinity," he writes, "is found both in the East and in the West: so is the ceremony of washing...
...Bliven'a sense of fair play did not extend to letting [the public] be the judge by printing the whole correspondence...
...BLIVEN EXPLAINS New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—In your issue of February 10, you refer to an exchange of letters between Dr...
...It was a rosary...
...counted on its sturdy roll the names of John Smith, lieutenant...
...And he, it is seen, had been studious of a hidden phase: "It is not unusual to hear arguments against our institutions and our government, addressed particularly to recent arrivals and the sons of recent arrivals to our shores...
...Cardinal Newman has many a rich passage throughout his expository writing explaining that our "cult and theology were partially borrowed from paganism" as Professor Hayes contends...
...of angels and demons is Magian...
...the text of the address is in his book of speeches, Have Faith in Massachusetts...
...but I have since been persuaded that the rosary, one of many that must have been in that countryside, was found among the "effects" of some old great-great-grandfather before his interment in non-Catholic ground...
...and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine...
...For a long time the laity has been content to fill the pews,, and pay the bills...
...Just as an illustration, I quote from the works of Charles Franklin Thwing, who served for many years in executive capacity as both college and university president: "The ideal college is neither the ideal school nor the ideal university...
...What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world...
...This monstrously fanciful theory would ride roughshod over C. E. Dougherty's walled-in garden, but is halted at once by Newman's historical vision and theological 440 THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 192& penetration...
...it seeks to enlarge and enrich his character, but by the interpretation and application of truth...
...All the martyrs were not clerics...
...O'Brien and his collaborators are still what Matthew Arnold said in description of the great and heroic Eugene O'Curry, "the obscure Scaliger of a despised literature...
...I like it because it is the voice of the layman...
...John Hair, Joseph Pierce, fifers...
...Dr...
...Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece...
...Whether some universities are the quantitative expansion of the college idea is another question...
...and in saying" that could higher praise be given...
...The school is concerned with the student...
...and in the line, Philip Donohue, Jonathan Gleason, James Taylor, Edward Hair, William Miles, Thomas Nichols, Joseph Cunningham, Nicholas Powers, and Thomas Drury...
...But scholarship has answered ignorance...
...Those men are almost ex officio and for all time prohibited from the offices of dissecting bugs or examining gangrenous psychological exhibits or conducting extensive geological surveys...
...In this country especially, there seems to be a basis for a clean-cut distinction between the idea of university and of college...
...wild plants, indeed, but living...
...Someone might have written this lay «of the layman: "Come all ye faithful and bring your duplex envelopes...
...I was then a Protestant minister, but I was sincere...
...The conflicts of the church should not be waged by religious orders only...
...and honors to the dead are a polytheism...
...She knew of no one who would rejoice with her except a good old Irish washerwoman, and so she hurried off to her, and threw her arms around her neck, and then danced up and down, exclaiming: 'We are Catholics!' " In another sense, therefore, than that intended by Mr...
...belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean...
...and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there...
...The supreme passage, however—one of those beloved by Newmanites—radiantly and richly brings home the wisdom of God's governance of His world and His Church and, by the way, would confirm the premise of Professor Hayes...
...Even though all these Celtic names are now inscribed on stones in non-Catholic cemeteries, we Americans can pray over them, adapting a verse of Lionel Johnson's: God rest you, rest you, rest you, Ireland's dead, Peace be upon you shed: Peace from the glory of the Crucified, You who for America died...
...and it hung at full length in one of the stout show-cases...
...It is encouraging to find defenders of the Faith whose name^ are not tailed with a section of the alphabet...
...Michael J. O'Brien entitled his preceding volume of scholarly testimony upon the subject...
...You say: "For reasons best known to the editor of the liberal weekly [the New Republic] the letters have not received the hospitality of its printed columns...
...Michael Earls, SJ...
...celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin...
...If the period was a mild form of Babylonian captivity, these ardent devotees of patriotism and the Faith sang their songs of Zion courageously in an alien environment...
...that changed conditions require that they now be changed...
...For on the very evening of the battle of Lexington, as soon as the news reached these hills, the company that rushed forth toward Concord under Timothy Bigelow—and the exhortation and invocation were given by the Reverend Thaddeus Maccarty, a Presbyterian minister (God bless the mark...
...The excerpt is taken from a commencement address at Holy Cross when he was governor of Massachusetts in 1919...
...the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic...
...C.S.P...
...So far, then, from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to 'suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.' Elmer Kenyon...
...His letter was published immediately, in the next issue in which it was physically possible to do so...
...Both your leading editorial and the keen review of the volume by Mr...
...A happy curiosity which was undoubtedly an effect of divine grace, made me open and examine that little book...
...An instance: early in the last century, almost at the very beginning of the century, Virgil Barber wrote after his conversion to the Faith: "I had in my house a good Catholic Irish servant girl, whom I often noticed using a certain prayerbook...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 16
