The Little Church

...The pews are straight-backed and strict, and when they were fashioned there was no thought of comfort in the mind of their maker...

...Every day with the exception of Sundays Confessions are heard at noon in the little church, and all day Thursday there is Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament...

...It is common knowledge among the members of the underworld that a Catholic church makes an ideal hiding place, but when a poor rascal is dragged from my little church by the long and strong arm of the law, I like to put a different construction on his attempt to hide...

...So it was that we were not shocked one day to discover a rather corpulent madam calmly reading a four-page comic sheet...

...On another day came the tall lady, evidently not of the Faith, who wanted to burn a candle to good Saint Anthony and was worried about the business involved...

...She might well have been for the lighting of a votive candle in the little church is no simple matter...

...But for all of its ugliness, griminess, squatness, lack of paint and worn steps, this little church of Saint Aloysius is very, very beautiful...

...There is no better place to rest, for it is quiet and peaceful here, as it should be...

...It is the people who are forever there that make it understandable...

...Hard and full of unkind and distracting knots are these benches...

...There are the many who sit and seem to do nothing...

...I tried to point out to him that the right kind of prayer cannot be called garish, not by the wildest stretching of words and that prayer is but the lifting of one's heart to God, as I understand it...

...The candles are always falling out and burning themselves up in the pan at the bottom...

...I am sure about these last for the poor boxes are not infrequently robbed, and is there not a sign in the vestibule warning the unwary to be careful of their valuables...

...He did not understand, I am afraid, but he should have...

...At any rate we were in and out of the little church very often, and even in its sacred peace there was adventure, quiet and churchly...

...That is but one thing which is wrong with it-its steeple...

...But my one-time friend is not of the tradition and much should be forgiven him because of his lack...

...Catholicity is, in its way, a great and joyous adventure and I was not surprised...

...You have a notion that at any moment you may find yourself, still praying it is to be hoped, in the cavernous cellars below...

...Because of its beauty men and women are constantly passing through its doors, doors which are cracked, cranky and at times hard to open...

...And, though it does not appear to be anyone's business, it might be added that the favor was granted...

...They are meditating, perhaps, or just resting...

...The candle stand is none too secure...

...Long ago, in the unregenerate days when work on a morning newspaper necessitated ungodly hours, there was a Sunday printer's Mass, said at the ghostly hour of four in the morning...

...About him was an air more pungent than saintly and the suspicion was strong, as strong as the atmosphere, that he had been making a night of it...

...Then you will come to the best-lighted boulevard in the world, and if you know what you are about you will turn north...

...A quondam friend of mine once told me that what with its many and colored votive lights, its multiplicity of candles, its Stations of the Cross, and its frequent statues my little church was garish...

...For all about it are sky-reaching and awful structures, expressive of the dominant note in our architecture, which is height...

...And the little church seems in some way to be trying to withdraw its head...

...The floor, beneath its kneeling benches, is patched in many places and inclined to sag...

...And those candles that manage to stand up do so at a slant...

...I would think that he is seeking sanctuary, guided by some instinct inherited from a long dead ancestor, who was, no doubt, himself a cut-purse in the middle-ages...

...Inside it is little better...

...He was very happy in the House of Him Who said, "Suffer little children to come unto Me...

...Nor were we inclined to be pharisaical, on a rather cold morning, to find the disheveled individual sleeping the sleep of the just, with his arms on the pew in front of him and his head on his arms...

...Across the road-if I may call the best-lighted boulevard in the world a road- is the little church...

...And it was here, though I confess it with some shame, as I was old enough to have realized it long before, that the universality of the Church was borne in upon me...

...But this explains only part of the attractiveness that is in this ugly, old structure...

...And the little lad was praying...

...Rich men there are, poor men, and beggar men (ever so many) and not infrequently thieves...

...It was an appreciated favor...

...They smoke and the smoke gets in one's eyes...

...She had a look of dejection and sourness in the eye, and the thought came that she, also, was at prayer...

...For a boy whom I mistakenly classed as a Jap (I afterward learned that he was a Filipino) served the printer's Mass, and a colored man and a Chinese were wont to receive communion together...

...At a much later date when a favor was sought, a favor earthly and in all respects temporal, which involved a deal of praying, we turned to the little church...

...And there you have it...

...And it is these people who light up the interior of my little church despite its grim and unpainted walls...

...And it is the downtown church of a great and flourishing metropolis...

...The little pegs which are good-naturedly supposed to hold the candles upright are treacherous and inclined to fail one...

...So, if I am to locate the little church for you with any exactness, I must tell you first to walk westward, three squares along the longest street in our part of the continent, having started at the intersection of the longest street, in our part of the continent, with the second busiest avenue in the Middle-West...

...If he had said gaudy I might not have taken offense for there is a note of joy in the word gaudy...

...I told him that everyone and everything in my little church was praying...

...It stands some five feet back from the building line as if shrinking from its tall and stately neighbors...

...But he may have been doing penance, poor fellow, and I am sure there is more than one publican...

...The whole business is sort of drunken...

...Certain it is that its steeple is very squat and by no means high...

...For as we stood in the vestibule looking into the little church, a Negro boy about seven years old was racing up and down the aisles in high glee, while his robust mother was about the serious business of confessing her sins...

...asking and seeking the holy and human gift of laughter...

...Its bricks are dirty and its stone steps are worn hollow by the feet of its many worshipers...

...After all beauty is in the eye and the mind of him who perceives it...

...Its walls are dim with age and would be infinitely the better for a coat of paint or two...

...Not that Saint Anthony would mind- he is not that kind of a saint, but it is a bit embarrassing to explain to a lady and a heretic in the bargain...

...He pretends, with no little effort, to be a member of a select intelligentsia and that is the word he used-garish...

...A gentleman with a mustache and imperial who looks like a white-headed and -bearded Louis Napoleon kneels on the steps of the rail before the high altar and is lost in meditation and prayer...

...Another thing is its outward shabbiness...

...As you make the turn you pass the fourth, or maybe it is the fifth, greatest hotel in these United States, and anon you come to the site of what will in the future be the tallest office building on this earth...

...The poor fellows are welcome surely but it does seem that no self-respecting thief would stoop to the robbing of a poor box...

...There is something queer about all great cities and the churches that are in them cannot escape...

...Kneeling on these benches, one has a delightful sense of insecurity, which may or may not add to one's devotions...

...Old folk sit upon the hard benches of the little church and everlastingly tell their beads...