Modern Guildsmen
Sheed, F. J.
MODERN GUILDSMEN By F. T. SHEED THE Catholic Evidence Guild is the easiest thing in the world to misunderstand: it is not in the least like what an outsider would expect, because it is not in the...
...the better part of sanity still holds, if precariously...
...To drop metaphor: by wind and sky I mean the outdoor crowd with its intricate needs- without consideration of that the Guild would be valueless : by the life within I mean the will of the bishop- without that the Guild would be dead...
...That is why it is a mistake to imagine the Guild as a set of high-spirited youths rushing whooping to the attack: still less as wild-eyed apostles with souls at their belts...
...Strange, laughable things happen, but at long intervals: conversions come, but tantalizingly (and fortunately) untraceable to any individual effort: optimism seems the last tragic lunacy of broken minds...
...There is the still greater temptation to regard the questioners as fools-which is unreasonable (for what would Saint Thomas Aquinas think of us...
...Then the speaker needs humility, because he is continually bumping against the narrow boundary wall of his own knowledge...
...But assume the normal-that a rather mixed crowd stays to listen...
...And they may behave very oddly indeed...
...It has grown into its present shape very much as an oak tree grows into its shape-for the Guild, too, is a plant that grows in the open air, the life within it making its own incalculable composition with wind and sky...
...No one of them receives any payment...
...But that wears off...
...They may make a very considerable noise...
...MODERN GUILDSMEN By F. T. SHEED THE Catholic Evidence Guild is the easiest thing in the world to misunderstand: it is not in the least like what an outsider would expect, because it is not in the least like what its original members did expect...
...The instruction of the non-Catholic world is what we exist for, and results in that sphere are simply astounding...
...Yet converts are not the object of the Guild's work, and are therefore not the measure of its success...
...not the difficulty, nor "winter and rough weather," nor repeated failures...
...At the end of a year nothing much has happened: the same questioners are asking the same questions: the training class, blandly ignoring the vast fields of Catholic doctrine still unexplored by you, sets you for the third time to cover ground you are sure you know: there is no longer even the miserable excitement that comes from nervousness...
...not of course the danger for there is none-but simply the dulness...
...and a certain light-heartedness, because even to the crowd he makes no claim of universal knowledge and there is an astonishing amount of good fellowship to be brought into being by cheerful, unresentful admission of ignorance where ignorance is...
...And the crowd can do one worse thing even than stay away-they can go away...
...Excitement is all very well in the early days when enthusiasm runs hot and Catholic teaching, never before so well understood, seems to course through the veins like strong wine, and a man feels that this splendid stuff has only to be shown to the crowd to set them clamoring for admission to the Church...
...Life is not so easy that people will sacrifice their spare time to no purpose...
...But what are the results ? Converts come in growing numbers...
...If his faith remains authentically Catholic, then the outdoor platform is a thing he cannot easily avoid, once he knows that his bishop has entrusted him with the work...
...Obviously then, those who are doing the work are convinced at first hand of its value...
...Worst of all, there is the temptation to preach-I say "worst of all," because a preaching layman is an impertinence, and the work of the Guild is teaching, not preaching...
...There are now in England some six hundred laymen and laywomen giving their spare time to the work...
...Once that is set firmly upon its feet, other places in the same neighborhood can send some of their people to learn from it, and so a whole new area can be "guilded...
...It is then, with the first enthusiasm gone, that the Guildsman is made...
...Worse-they may stay away altogether-every Guildsman has had the dismal experience of gazing over the top of a platform and seeing no human thing between himself and the horizon...
...So much is this so that at the present day, when the Guild is beginning in a new section of the country, the method is for an experienced speaker from another Guild to devote three months' hard labor to the establishment of the work in one place of the new area...
...At the end of all things, is it worth while...
...It is possible, of course, for a Catholic so to leave them: to say in word or act that he, at any rate, is all right: but only if his own religion has begun to have a taint of theirs...
...and ruinous to the work, for you can do no good to the soul of a man you despise...
...There is, for instance, the temptation to lose one's temper...
...Of that work of teaching hundreds of things clamor to be said, but there is no space to say them here: which is as well since most of them, like all else about the Guild, are the fruit of ten years in the open, are strongly marked with that unexpectedness which I mentioned at the beginning, and would need, therefore, a good deal of explanation...
...The ideal Guild character is not a glum pessimist with a sense of duty: that might keep a man in the work but would scarcely recommend his message to the crowd...
...The first half-hour is not the worst-not by any means the worst...
...For that, it is vital that the crowd, however they behave, should feel his "humanity...
...But the first step should always be the living teacher, if at all possible...
...Of the deeper currents of this unexpectedness there is no space to speak here-and indeed it is one of the tragedies of the Guild propagandist's life that words cannot really convey the Guild at all: he can only say "come and live with us"-or "try it yourself...
...The humility and the light-heartedness save the speaker from a variety of temptations...
...But one rather superficial example may be given: the enemy that is always tempting the Guild speaker to give up is the dulness of the work...
...If he stays on-and in nine cases out of ten he does stay on-it is because he can see no way out of the only real argument for the Guild's existence: that given a large non-Catholic mass, you must either go out to them where they may be found or else leave them to their own devices: the atheist to his foolish taunting of the God Who made him and will one day judge him, the Protestant to his pathetic struggling for the light upon which he has turned his back, the indifferentist to his sheer unconsciousness of all that matters most...
...And beyond that is the result never envisaged at all at the Guild's foundation, yet easily its most important work, the regaining of lapsed Catholics...
...In large tracts of England the exact meaning of papal infallibility is matter of common knowledge and the ghost of Maria Monk is laid-to choose two examples illustrative of the work in hand...
...They are men and women seasoned, or on the way to being seasoned, by years of work: not in the least expecting quick results: pessimists, as one Guildsman put it, who hang on...
...Yet perhaps I am giving only half the picture...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 5
