This Brother's Keeper

...The writer, a shiftless, improvident, mentally and emotionally unstable young fellow, sometimes pitied and aided by those who have known or even loved him, recites a narrative of failure in which all the blame is thrown from his own weak self upon the "system" which exacted more than he could give...

...But the primary necessity is some compact group of men and women, in religion or out of it, who will take the mandate of charity as seriously as the Lord intended it to be taken and as Saint Paul expounded it...

...Again it is an article in a supposedly intelligent magazine professing to "expose" conditions in a seminary, as the author claims to have experienced them...

...In an age when the power of Rome seemed at least a threat, here was one man (they said) who balked at this power and turned his back upon it...

...What...

...And there were others...

...To us it is still Browning's world, so far as we are concerned...

...His books and magazine articles, now accumulated in considerable number, were piquant for a time...

...And it seems to us the cause may well be a dearth of genuine charity, a willingness to forget the stranger robbed on the way to Jericho or the woman whose offenses outnumbered the sand's grains...

...What we must be sure of always, however, is that the shift really means advancement toward perfection...

...Naturally enough it is to a man's credit if, realizing the deficiencies of his associations and environment, he seeks out fields and pastures new...

...One way, of which Catholics are becoming increasingly conscious, is writing by the disgruntled in criticism of groups to which they have once belonged...

...Another is a former priest...

...The world might scoff at them, their deeds and their prayers...

...Many sensed a bruised, proud spirit who forgot no human weakness in those who may once have lorded it over him and who were, now, pilloried in page after page...

...And if their mood is bitterness rather than charity, the result is likely to be a caricature of the grossest sort...

...Wrath and just repudiation...

...But who knows if the darkness in these hearts is really not more deserving of mercy than our own self-satisfaction...

...The mood in which such effusions are read is often one of righteous anger...

...But though the jungles of Burma are scoured for heathen to be instructed in the way of the cross, our highways know no sleuths...

...These are desirable and can be developed...

...Yes...

...An indifference extraordinary in character and effect seems on the verge of prevailing...

...Cast off from all his ancient attachments, even the glory of the chrism which had once given his fingers a power believed ineffable, he suddenly understood, with what dismal joy we cannot divine, that his company could now include all who had tumbled by the way—drunkards and weaklings, victims of corporate religious injustice and of their own impaled ambitions...

...But gradually the writer's position changed...

...To those who know the facts, the thing seems to have been tossed off for a few venal dollars...

...He became an unfailing source of supply to all those who wanted, for publicity purposes, the kind of scandal which can be relied upon to send Catholics into a rage...

...And we know also of at least one splendid old priest who, if in his kindness he had been delegated to deal with them, would (under God) have brought all three ships securely into harbor...

...and if the heathens had never become Christians, or the sinners saints, the story of religion would have ended long ago in a catalogue of superstitions and vices...

...and one thinks the best possible attitude is thankfulness to heaven for not having sent us for our scourging a greater man...

...Finally he, now banned from pulpits, learned the full dimensions of that parcel for venom which is the pamphlet...

...They coaxed and coaxed...

...Anyhow it is as worth trying now as it was divinely said to be worth trying 2,000 years ago...

...But he sits feverishly mixing and distributing his poisons...

...Progress is really change, up to a given point...

...Contented with having the cold water on tap, we cannot be bothered with passing it around...

...Witness, for example, the recent work of men formerly in the Catholic priesthood or the Catholic seminary...

...But there is a side of all these tales which we too frequently ignore...

...Unfolding a swiftly moving panorama of fallen priests and rash declarations, he must have felt his interior gloom expanding into a grin...

...The disgruntled can be unfair as well as incisive...

...What America needs from the Catholic point of view is not primarily an evidence guild or a league of full-fledged apologists...

...It is not his competence that matters, for he has no competence...

...But they might eventually astonish everybody by doing something now apparently impossible—their ability to bring home again even a strayed priest or a weak and silly ex-seminarian...

...Can a magazine editor be found willing to publish such perversive stuff as this ? Or again it is one of indignation over a soul which could so far debase itself as to lie—not only to others but also to that residue of God's grace which still dissociates it from the utterly ignominious and the fallen...

...In one case it is a sheer diatribe against old superiors and companions, written in a mood of pique and published under the basest auspices...

...When a disease like this breaks out —for it is a disease, morbid and malignant—the cause is usually social as well as individual...

...We have, for instance, some knowledge of all the cases mentioned...