Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK " ANY a cask of foamy brew was emptied by long¦ suffering Rhinelanders in honor of an event for which they have prayed hard and unceasingly. General Guillaumat led the remnants of...
...JUDGING from reports, the recent annual meeting of the Catholic Educational Association concerned itself largely with elementary school Catholic problems and opportunities...
...There can be no doubt that the occupation, justified in several respects, was daily becoming a more and more serious blunder...
...But the 15 percent increase in the number of eggs laid in Barnegat can only be implicit in the music: and not even the most determined determinist will believe that music is merely a material force devised by Dame Nature from the beginning as at least potentially related to the production of more eggs...
...and the bizarre attempts to promote separatism in which some of the Parisian politicians indulged were futile and infuriating...
...But the faculty of compressing such meaning into a phrase is denied to them...
...That this program should have aroused fears and stirred doubts in many minds is quite natural...
...IF THE personage who used to be referred to as Dame Nature is still about, we should like to see her face when she reads of the hens of Revolution in Barnegat...
...1 HE retreatants, a mere handful in the beginning, now number perhaps a hundred...
...History merely records the fact that France has triumphed over such things...
...More than 1,500 delegates attended, many of them going to New Orleans from remote parts of the country...
...The attitude of the occupation armies changed profoundly, and the will of the people of France moved even more speedily...
...They are good poems, they are all but poetry, yet the final felicity is somehow withheld...
...In fact, life itself appears to be too short a period for the examination...
...We find a remarkable attempt to do the second in a kindly and What's incisive little book by Charles Williams, Wrong with soon to be noticed in these columns...
...These poets have as much of our ordinary working-day brains as the rest of us...
...others have written complaints...
...We have to cover as much ground in their verse as in our own thoughts, and consequently we tire as soon...
...Observation, dexterity, feeling, they have, but between their experience and their expression the interest has slipped away...
...The difficulty is that the process would necessarily be long and arduous...
...She must be used, by now, _ to having her metes and bounds transBarnegat cended: Burbank alone gave her such a set of stinging reminders of things she forgot to do, that she has probably never really recovered from her chagrin...
...John P. Gonner, not only saw the vision but translated it into reality...
...the epigram in a line or a couplet which is so characteristic of all the greater and many of the lesser poets is almost wholly absent...
...CONTEMPORARY poets have, perhaps, been more ignored than diagnosed...
...Individually and in the mass, we pay our heaviest bills, in the end, for these seemingly easy solutions...
...Any adult intelligence should know that you cannot solve insoluble tragedy by neatly killing off the sufferer...
...But as years went on they saw that Rhenish separatism was a hollow shell, and that their foe was manly, indeed, though beaten...
...their meditations are as subtle, their philosophies no less, but no more, surely based—they remark what we do and turn it into rhythm...
...1 HERE has just been concluded, at the Cenacle of Saint Regis in this city, an event which matches, in power of inspiration, almost anything Piercing the e^se tnat contemporary records, in or Darkness 0Ut °* convents> can snow- It is the annual retreat for the blind conducted by the Cenacle Saint Raphael's Guild...
...More important possibly than the long list of its accomplishments—the publication of the first complete texts of papal encyclicals, of public deliberations of the American hierarchy and available pastoral letters, of exhaustive details of the Mexican and Russian church persecutions...
...there is exempliThe First fied the indifference and the inaccuracy Catholic which so frequently characterizes the Daily press when it deals with Catholic activities and the Catholic attitude...
...Not only is absolute morality against it...
...Human wisdom is against it as well...
...They range from young girls to decrepit old women, and about half of them come from institutions...
...It appears that a number of doctors throughout the country have been canvassed on the subject quite seriously, and that about half of them advocate the practice...
...Briand became the spokesman of pacification and conciliation...
...and which necessarily devolve upon the religious...
...At least one address contained not a little dynamite, making as it did the claim that America's chief educational difficulty "arises because the industrial-commercial system has itself an ideal of life which it tries to impress upon the schools" and which is hostile to traditional aspirations of culture and religion...
...To these services must be added the real work of the retreat, the readings and consultations which are an indispensable accessory to the chapel conferences (memorably fine this year under the Reverend Charles F. Connor, S.J...
...Of still greater importance, however, was the fact that the occupation, a symbol of bondage and a source of social and economic annoyance, blocked almost every move to restore amity between the Reich and the Republique...
...Perhaps nothing ever did greater damage to French prestige than the behavior of African troops quartered in Rhenish towns...
...NEVERTHELESS one thinks the action is as real a tribute to the French as any of their martial victories...
...In so far as intelligence tests are mechanical, they can measure only those activities of the personality which are relatively mechanical—the acuteness of sense perception, the alacrity of response and similar matters...
...It is no wonder, then, that in spite of the lay volunteers who never fail, the whole community simply suspends its other activities...
...Obviously this critique seems to the point...
...The Tribune has merited well...
...It exists as a pioneer and an example...
...Intelligences Charles M- Stebbins, a highly respected 6 member of the Brooklyn high school faculty, has boldly answered in the negative on the basis of experience...
...Why are there no books so good from this point of view as spiritual directors have written for the treatment of souls...
...We liked best of all Monsignor Macelwane's outspoken condemnation of the practice of exacting forced public apologies from children...
...W HETHER pedagogical science has invented scales equipped to measure intelligence is a question we should not ourselves presume to decide...
...Perhaps a more complete psychology could do a better job of measuring...
...This month the Tribune, the first and only Catholic daily in America, is celebrating its tenth anniversary...
...Specifically, how can any doctor miss the fact that that dedication which is the pride and the crown of his profession depends directly upon the dogma of the sacredness of human life...
...IN THE reporter's story of the bishop who advanced to the pulpit "an acolyte swinging from each shoulder" is more than humor...
...Meanwhile, the mere childishness of "mercy murder" prompts a kind of wonder at the compassionate and shortsighted men who can advocate it...
...It Poetry...
...The Catholic Daily Tribune, of Dubuque, Iowa, is their answer to those who admitted the need of such an enterprise but doubted the possibility of the success...
...Many -vj .. speakers emphasized anew the moral Education , . ,f . ,. value of religious teaching in an age characterized by the triumph of disruptive influences...
...There is no such thing as an intelligence test," he declared, "because it is impossible by any mechanical process to determine the mental status of pupils...
...nas been said, and not wholly unjustly, that the younger contemporary poets have only one fault—dullness," he remarks...
...The resultant divisions of children into supernormal and subnormal groups has (in his opinion) fostered worse mental diseases than the educators had set out to cure...
...The improvement that follows it is implicit in the original species...
...It is not, of course, startling by Mercy reason of its novelty...
...These modern poems do not come from a corrupt following of some dying school...
...they are sincere, but their sincerity is of no importance, or they are insincere and we are not excited enough to protest...
...the elimination of scandalous and sensational items from news accounts...
...Each communicant is attended to the altar at Mass, and in the concluding procession through the Cenacle grounds—the real climax of the occasion, for it has been triumphantly discovered that the blind love to march and sing—each marcher has her own guide also...
...For practically all of these fifteen years, also, the whole material cost of the work has been borne by a New York laywoman who has dedicated her fortune to numberless (and where it is possible, anonymous) works of mercy...
...only a few have recognized the need of Catholic newspapers edited from the Catholic standpoint...
...The religious of the Cenacle are known throughout the country for their share in the promotion of the general retreat movement among women...
...they have not lost originality or grace or charm or knowledge...
...A RATHER startling paper appears in Plain Talk under the title, Why Permit the Hopelessly Sick to Live...
...Crossfertilization is, after all, only a new combination of factors already there...
...It is the first real festival east of the Rhine since the war began, and the memory of it is bound to last during several generations...
...We don't know what she will do about it, but if the radio companies fail to seize the advertising opportunity, they are duller than we think...
...This antediluvian form of torture is not merely bad pedagogy but exceedingly bad morals...
...Some have brought influence to bear on owners and editors...
...That it is blessed, and the patroness who makes the work possible is blessed, a hundredfold, cannot be doubted...
...Of these the late Nicholas Gonner and his brother, Mr...
...So deeply is the event appreciated that not a few observers predict that June 30, the day of the evacuation, will become the German national holiday...
...They show that the Catholic teaching system, vast and maintained at a heavy cost of personnel and money, is well engineered and radiant with vitality...
...General Guillaumat led the remnants of a once Rhineland mighty French garrison over the border, Makes the dream of Stresemann came true, and Merry virtually the last physical vestiges of wartime bitterness disappeared...
...There were many interesting practical suggestions, among them Father George Johnson's plea for a larger number of priests to give instruction in the Faith and Father Paul Furfey's advocacy of recreational activities...
...Public opinion staunchly upheld the principle that continued military domination of the continent was neither possible nor practicable, and that the "will to rebuild" so strong in all peoples must be accepted as a pledge of the future...
...Increasing one's egg crop by turning the radio upon one's unsuspecting hens is not the same sort of thing as crossfertilizing flora or fauna...
...The English muse has known times of mediocrity before now, but this is a mediocrity of a different kind...
...At any rate the treaty had given them the right to remain until 1935, to supervise Germany's fulfilment of its obligations and to forestall possible new martial endeavors...
...Sometimes it seems as if this were due to a lack of poetic intellect...
...Many have raised their voices against such conditions...
...For three days it gives itself solely to making this spiritual holiday of the blind as joyful and perfect as possible...
...All Germany rose like a congregation, thrilled by a sign that freedom had come once again even as it had followed upon the retreat of Napoleon...
...It is the incidental information conveyed by the paper which is remarkable...
...If 25 percent or even 12^ percent of our practising physicians believe they are justified in allowing deficient children to die at birth, or in giving suffering incurables a deadly overdose of drugs, that is no longer a theory which the rightminded among us can refute, but a fact from which any of us might suffer...
...A chain of Catholic dailies, of similar character, which would reach Catholics in every corner of the land would be of great value to the Church...
...We all felicitate its staff and hope for its uninterrupted success...
...Euthanasia is Murders one of the most venerable sophistries Once More m tne history of human thought...
...In 1919 they marched across the proud stream, embittered by the losses and sorrows of four years and determined to lame the power of their formidable rival...
...Yet the New Jersey poulterer, it seems to us, takes a different and more deadly liberty with her...
...Cars must be sent, volunteers must bring in individual retreatants...
...They tell us of their imaginations and we do not care to know...
...You will look in vain for educational literature comparable with what the confessor can read anent either lax or scrupulous penitents...
...An imponderable has been introduced into her calculations...
...If this proportion is even half right for doctors as a whole, the matter is no longer merely academic...
...The complicated and exacting external detail of a three-day retreat held under these circumstances gives, to the outsider, one measure of the devotion behind it...
...All in all the records of this meeting are of very great interest to educators and to parents...
...In the unfamiliar surroundings of the Cenacle, most of the waking moments of the guests must be guided...
...Both because of the tragic need which it so beautifully serves, and because of the religious devotion and lay charity which are combined to render that service, it is a kind of model of what the grace of giving can be...
...It is Measuring certainly significant, however, that Dr...
...A breach has been made in her immutable laws by the esthetic and the psychological...
...Admittedly, however, wise and painstaking educators might diagnose the intellectual equipment of a youngster hopefully if they regarded him as a person and made due allowance for purely spiritual factors...
...its attention to all phases of Catholic lay and clerical activities—is the mere fact of its successful progress...
...It is not too much to say, however, that for the last fifteen years their first enthusiasm and their choicest zeal have gone to studying the spiritual needs of the sightless, and the technique of approach which will give this period of withdrawal its maximum of help and consolation for them...
...Dreams of adding these fair regions to the patrimony of France stirred in many hearts and sanctioned an interpretation of history more patriotic than practical...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 11
