Summering at Cliff Haven
Walsh, James J.
666 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, I929 After the battle, in which Count d'Estaing was among the wounded and the famous Sergeant Jasper killed, Pulaski was conveyed to the brig Wasp, a pri-...
...Pulaski's religion was not forgotten...
...October 3 ~ , I929 THE COMMONWEAL 667 The experience of the Catholic Summer School, now approaching its fortieth year, has been that the average man and woman can find grateful stimulation for mind and body under the conditions that have been developed at Cliff Haven...
...Most of those outside the Church who have seen Miller's Angelus would very probably be inclined to think tl~at this bending of the head in reverence while the Angelus bell rings from the distant town is all right for peasants--is something appropriate to the French countryside as a reminiscence of the faith of the middle-ages, but hardly in place in the everyday life of modern Americans...
...At the same time he lives in a Catholic atmosphere that brings home to him better than anything else could the true meaning of Catholicity in modern life...
...This monument was never completed, but twenty-eight years later, on Pulaski Day in 1853, the original corner-stone and records were removed to Monterey Square and a new monument begun...
...The Catholic of the street and the train wants to be of help to his neighbor in the understanding of Catholicity...
...Teachers who have spent tedious years in a city environment, find the sylvan conditions of University Extension at Cliff Haven ideal...
...Further exercises included a great military parade, with local and national military units from posts in the Southeast participating...
...There is an atmosphere of intellectualism, an atmosphere of devotion, an environment that is impregnated with the true Catholic spirit...
...But I am not afraid at all, I stand as a man should, For I have worsted my enemy Alone in the lonely wood...
...CLIFF HAVEN By JAMES TER the most successful session of its history, the Catholic Summer School of America in its annual meetings on Lake Champlain promises now more than ever before to exemplify why the Greeks used to express leisure, the term that is the root of our word for school...
...Congress delegated to the city the Pulaski sesquicentennial committee...
...His friend doubts whether such places would serve the average man, "the man one sees at ball games and lodge meetings and hotel lobbies and suburban trains...
...Until the twentieth century, indeed it might be said until after the great war, it was the custom among the English-speaking peoples for those not of the Church to ignore Catholicity or to consider that it was a decadent form of Christianity sooner or later destined to disappear...
...it was completed two years later...
...One can scarcely pick up a serious magazine that does not contain an article making some reference to the Church, and usually in a way that indicates that special attention is being focused on it...
...After the death of General Pulaski, Congress voted to erect a monument to him, but it was not until I9~o that the money was appropriated and the monument dedicated in Washington...
...a program of addresses...
...There probably never was a time when Catholics so felt the need to know all that they could possibly know about their religion as they do at present...
...The date of October 9 was retained by the city this year for its local celebration, thereby affording the distinguished visitors who attended it an opportunity to be present at the exercises at the national Capitol on October II...
...October 9, the date of the battle itself, has been Savannah's Pulaski Day...
...People refused to read Catholic books because they felt that there was nothing that could be said from that standpoint that had not been said before...
...The man in the street, the man on the train, wants to know more about this religion which his immediate forefathers used to condemn so bitterly and which is now being discussed from so many different standpoints...
...There have been those in recent years who have suggested that the spirit of play was triumphing over the spirit of study at the Summer School, but anyone who saw the University Extension courses in action during July would realize that this departure alone has proved quite sufficient to vindicate the studious significance of the Summer School...
...Despite the best attention of the surgeons of the French army, he breathed his last as the vessel was leaving the Savannah River for the open sea on its way to Charleston...
...666 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, I929 After the battle, in which Count d'Estaing was among the wounded and the famous Sergeant Jasper killed, Pulaski was conveyed to the brig Wasp, a privately owned vessel...
...The building in which most of the classrooms are situated is embowered in a pine grove which stretches along the lake front for a quarter of a mile, so that between the coolness afforded by the trees and the breeze off the lake, there is no possibility of the insufferable heat which afflicts the cities during the summertime...
...Manifestly the grounds will be crowded in future during all the nine weeks as they always have been during August...
...Manifestly Mr...
...Men who seem dull and commonplace are often so only because of the soul-killing conditions under which they must live...
...When day comes I shall go again To the old work and the old way, But I think I shall not fight again Whatever the world may say...
...It has often been said that you can learn more about a man by finding out how he spends his leisure than in any other way...
...This is, however, one of the striking experiences that the visitor to Cliff Haven is impressed by...
...The courses were given under the auspices of Fordham University and represent manifestly only the beginning of what is to be accomplished in this line...
...CoT/~7/ger 0r My enemies have fled from me, They dropped their weapons and ran...
...It becomes such a commonplace after a few days that he scarcely notices itmexcept to fall in with it himself...
...An official delegation from the republic of Poland had come from SUMMERING AT Warsaw, and there were also representatives from the embassies of Poland, France and Czecho-Slovakia, chief executives of many of the states, officials of national Polish organizations and other notables, and Americans of Polish extraction from numerous cities of the East and Middle-West...
...He secures that information quietly, pleasantly and in stimulating surroundings that make it all the more readily available...
...Hall does not mean quite what would be intended by the word retreat as we use it, for he wants a place more like the Summer School, where men could throw off all care, and study to know themselves...
...The great Atlantic, which he had crossed for freedom's sake, was his last resting-place...
...When Standish O'Grady, the distinguished Irish scholar, was visiting this country, he reminded us that twice in the world's history when men did things that the race will never willingly forget--in the fifth century before Christ in Greece, and in the thirteenth century of our era--they spent more than one-third of their time at leisure, that is in the celebration of religous mysteries of various kinds...
...his reply was Themselves...
...His friend is quite sure that "the average man could be neither persuaded nor bribed to visit one of them...
...Give them room to expand, to breathe freely and naturally, and they throw off lethargy as though it were an old coat...
...the placing of a wreath on the Pulaski monument...
...At the request of the mayor's committee, the bishop of Savannah had arranged that a Solemn Pontifical Mass should open the day's program...
...He finds in the agreeable leisure of the Catholic Summer School the opportunity to secure a fund of information on the burning topics of the hour that enables him to understand and appreciate the faith that is in him and at the same time supplies him with an armamentarium of response to questions that develop from his contacts with men and women for the rest of the year...
...the city's first Pulaski Day was March 25, I825, when Lafayette laid the corner-stone of a monument to him at Chippewa Square...
...Savannah did not wait until this day and time to honor him and them, and it is with joyful appreciation that it learns of the plan of Americans of Polish extraction as well as citizens of Poland itself to erect on Georgia soil a greater monument to keep green the memory of his achievements and ideals...
...To take but one incident...
...LOUISE DRISCOLL...
...These opportunities must mean very much in these critical days when so many intellectual people insist that all forms of Christianity are dwindling in influence, and that only the Catholic Church is maintaining its hold upon the affections and the reverence of its people...
...James Norman Hall, who has had most varied experiences as a war correspondent and traveler, culminating with ten years on the island of Tahiti, suggested in an article in the Atlantic Monthly (September, t929) that it was a great pity that the distracted J. WALSH and harassed average man, the man whom one meets on the streets of our busy cities or sits beside on the suburban trains, "might not have some places of silence where he could go into retreat as the Catholics do...
...These University Extension courses combined with the regular lectures, many of which during August were crowded to capacity, represent a climax of interest in the Summer School far beyond preceding years...
...They could be as solitary as they chose, their privacy would be scrupulously respected, but for those who wished or perhaps lacked it in their ordinary lives, there would be evenings of stimulating conversation...
...and the conveying of official visitors down the harbor on the coast guard patrol Pulaski, to scatter flowers on the waters where the patrol's namesake was buried a century and a half ago...
...The ideal of the Summer School has been not only maintained, but advanced, and Catholics are securing under these conditions of peace and quiet in a Catholic atmosphere opportunities for the absorption of information and inspiration with regard to their faith...
...The stars came out in their old-time places, The noises of night began, A wail here and a whirr there And a little slipping sound, The snap of a twig as a padded foot Softly presses the ground...
...It is not inappropriate that along the coast of Georgia, reddened by the blood of Franciscan and Jesuit martyrs to the cause of religion generations before Plymouth, the remains of Pulaski and his hundreds of Catholic companion martyrs to the cause of liberty should rest...
...To a friend who asked, "And who would do the stimulating...
...It is when they are working, as Goethe said, "Ohne Hast ohne Rast," that men have the peace of mind to think deeply enough so as to get at the supreme significance of their thoughts...
...We have changed all that...
...Catholicity was a religion for the poor and the ignorant, not one that needed to be taken seriously by those gifted with intelligence, especially if they had had any opportunity to develop that intelligence...
...When the Angelus bell rings, all the Summer Schoolers stop in the midst of whatever they are doing--talking or walking or studying or playing--and bow their heads in a few minutes of recollection and prayer...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 26
