Communications
COMMUNICATIONS COMMUNISM AND THE COMMONWEAL Cleveland, O. TO the Editor:—Having some time to spend last Sunday while waiting for a chum in town, I entered the Cleveland Public Library. Through...
...and again there were many people who are lost on, a Sunday afternoon, with nothing to do...
...TO the Editor:—In a number of criticisms, all eulogistic, of Dr...
...Surely a record that will stand for all time...
...The incredibly long list of ghastly murders, past the scenes of which Trotzky and Stalin rode in armored cars...
...On one occasion, when the outlook for the future was rather bleak and hopeless, she wrote the following interesting lines to a friend sympathetic to her cause: "Jacob labored seven years before he obtained a bride and then he slaved seven more years till he got the one he really wanted...
...I said in my article that the Report was sure to be bitterly attacked by the Zionists...
...For instance, I have never said that "Britain has consistently betrayed the Arabs in order to benefit the Jews...
...If I differ with Mr...
...Through the huge marble corridor I wended my way and into the Brett Memorial Reading Room...
...However, the good of the Church in America demands that your paper live...
...There is a figure of speech known in English rhetoric as irony...
...They seem determined to regard me as (to quote Mr...
...It is a clear expression of the Zionist point of view, from which, of course, my comment upon the Palestine Report would not be acceptable...
...I wonder just what proportion of "our complacent, easy-going, bewildered American people" are in reality conscious of similar forebodings, but like the fabled ostrich prefer to hide their heads in the sand and say, "There isn't any lion so long as we refuse to see him coming...
...That the Library was opened on Sunday did not surprise me...
...I regret I cannot multiply this figure by ten...
...When ". . . the populace of Kief arose in protest . . . the Virgin herself appeared to the aged Peter...
...J. J. Laux...
...of which the refrain is "Britons never shall be slaves...
...otherwise it should be hoarded as the miser hoards his gold...
...Its one small chance of ever being adopted rests on the frail support of the habit of our people of today of going from one extreme to another...
...Brailsford, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Mr...
...Ripley to uncork in a future volume of his "incredible and stimulating memorabilia—concerning the phenomena of mankind...
...The section which relates how Anna yielded to the barbarian prince, who in turn had his entire army baptized, was labeled as the "Beautiful Beginning of Holy Russia...
...It read: ". . . after this the horrors of Moscow may be seen as horrors which, by the grace of God, we have as yet been spared...
...Somehow I could not concentrate...
...Oh yeah...
...Nevertheless the happy .thought of having an opportunity to study the stranger resolved itself...
...The benefit to the Jews (if any) is incidental to this operation, and not its object...
...MAINLY ABOUT OURSELVES New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—Today's European mail brought a booklet of little sayings of Mother Angela de Cordier, the foundress of the convent and school for girls known as Nonnenwerth, situated on a beautiful island in the Rhine...
...He seemed to be dozing and yet ever so often I would see him taking notes and scoring various passages...
...It was the issue of March 19...
...I should be glad to supply further details by private correspondence for the next ten or twenty years, but it seems useless to continue the argument in print...
...I sat down to read a magazine...
...Envy of others who have more than we have is perhaps the commonest of the cardinal sins and its penalty of unhappiness is very quick and sure...
...On page 547, under the heading, Christendom on Its Knees, I found the following passage heavily underscored: "Soviet Russia has international cravings...
...I take it that the English translation faithfully reflects the literary garb of the original...
...Now while I do not believe that there is a ghost of a chance that this plan for alleviating the growing discontent and envy among the working people will ever be carried out in full, anyone who so desires may adopt it in part and so do his share in averting trouble...
...Continuing in the same paragraph, I discovered a certain passage boxed...
...George J. Reid...
...If all the money spent for public improvements went into the hands of the working-man, the gain might equal the loss entailed, but this is not the case, and the man who pays only a poll tax directly, pays indirectly a portion of his share at least in higher rents and cost of living generally...
...I looked at my watch...
...I regard Zionism as a profound and disastrous mistake, dangerous to the Jews and unjust to the Arabs...
...Richards's interesting letter needs no detailed reply...
...As Saint Pedro was inquisitor for only about a year, and as there are only 8,760 hours in a year, he had to burn about four and a half persons each hour of the day and the night in order to reach the grand total ascribed to him by Mr...
...But it is only relatively true...
...I can see one perfectly simple and reliable, yet perfectly impossible, remedy for the present state of dangerous discontent and anger among the poor and unemployed...
...THE PALESTINE REPORT New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—Mr...
...I selected one at random...
...A good many Jews agree with me...
...By ironic reference to this anthem, I said in the conclusion of my article: "One is left with the assurance that Britons, at least, never will be slaves...
...William L. Petro...
...I smiled again as I thought of the man who had compared this picturesque description to the money-crazy United States...
...And yet when I read further on I fairly smiled...
...Rev...
...When I read that I thought of your editorial in The Commonweal of March 26...
...I knew there were hundreds of taxpayers who perhaps had no religious tendency and required the place to be open every day...
...For whatever it may be worth I will set it down as follows: Let us all, rich, poor and middle classes, stop spending for anything except the plain necessities of life and above all things avoid display of wealth and the contemptible striving to outshine or even live up to the standard of our neighbors...
...The word "holy" in the heading was penciled through and a noticeable question mark hovered nearby...
...Lloyd George, and other eminent politicos, what of it...
...Ripley, burnt at the stake...
...I still had an hour and a quarter to wait...
...Even more surprising legends were current in Jerusalem last autumn...
...There is also an English national anthem called Rule, Britannia...
...William Everett Cram...
...I do not know whether you are still working to get Lya or whether you are on the second lap—for Rachel...
...I returned the magazine to the librarian and went in search of my chum...
...but modern research has reduced the list of those burnt by Torquemada to about 2,000 (See Encyclopedia Britannica...
...This is a new puzzler for Mr...
...something that we do not associate with works of German scholarship, and which, I think, has no equal in Catholic religious writings in English, outside of Newman and Bishop Bellord...
...Also there were no expenses for private automobiles to be considered, while a few bushels of potatoes would pay the farmer's tax on land and real estate, which now may call for two seasons' crop or more...
...If, to use Llorente's figures, ten thousand persons were executed in the whole of Spain from 1481 to 1498, where do the 40,000 (forty thousand) come in that Saint Pedro Arbues, according to Mr...
...My personal position is not very important, one way or the other, but those who are interested in it might read a correspondence on the subject in the Jewish Daily Bulletin of January 5, 1930...
...Vincent Sheean...
...Richards) "an agent of the grand mufti...
...It surely must have leaked out by now, even among the most convinced partizans, that there is a difference of opinion on this subject...
...In Paul Brown's article, I Hunt for a Job, the three words, "What for ? Pray" were penciled in...
...I stopped here...
...A series of outbursts in all parts of the world, engineered by apostles of the new Utopia and shared by hundreds of disaffected workers, prove too well the priority which many people concede to the values of material well-being...
...UNDER THE SURFACE Hampton Falls, N. H. TO the Editor:—Reading in The Commonweal for April 9 your article entitled Under the Surface, I was conscious from the first line to the last of having my own vague and apparently groundless misgivings of things to come, corroborated by those who know...
...On September 15, 1485, he was murdered at Saragossa while praying in a church...
...The passage, evidently referred to, read: "To say that religion in Russia has been corrupt and emasculated may be permissible in part...
...There appeared a close resemblance between the two...
...In 1484 he was appointed inquisitor for Aragon by Torquemada...
...May 2i, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 79 Russia's Holy Shrines by Catherine Radziwill was next on the program...
...Perhaps it might be on a table, I thought, so I went in search of it...
...I was not in suspense very long...
...In 1476 he became a canon regular at Saragossa...
...There were several of the lesser-read periodicals on hand, but the space reserved for The Commonweal was empty...
...R. BOCKELMAN...
...Those of your readers who are interested might reread the article to which Mr...
...marked the height of sarcasm or bitterness in the individual who ill-used that poor little defenseless pencil to such unfair advantage...
...By this I meant that no matter what the future holds in store for the unhappy inhabitants of Palestine, Arab and Jewish, the British are sure to come out on top...
...Every thousand dollars kept out of circulation makes the poor man's dollar worth just so much more in proportion...
...When Grover Cleveland was President he was severely criticized for maintaining that $1.00 a day was good pay for the working-man, though at that time those working for that wage could fairly well support their families and lay be something for the future...
...A sickly looking man with wan features seated in an entirely unnatural pose was reading The Commonweal...
...Richards is objecting...
...I looked on the rack for a good Catholic magazine...
...A minute later the young lady in charge returned with about a half-dozen copies...
...The intellectual class of laymen and priests need The Commonweal...
...The money saved in this way might well be used for charity, or to defray town debts and expenses whenever this can be safely and wisely done...
...Karl Adam's The Spirit of Catholicism, I have seen none which notices one of the most salient merits of the work, its style...
...the one important thing being to keep it out of circulation...
...I might have added that so is everything else with which they disagree...
...I wondered whether he had read any previous issues of the same magazine, and if so, which passages irritated him, which made him feel somehow commentatory...
...Perhaps it was just my fool luck to select the issue of March 19 to read...
...as if style were a negligible quality in theological literature...
...Be nice," the note read and naturally I wanted to know why The Commonweal should be nice at that particular spot...
...They will see that he misunderstands it in several important respects...
...One of the past issues of The Commonweal, please...
...Richards appears to miss entirely: that whatever happens to Arabs and Jews, Britons never will be slaves...
...As a token of good-will I am enclosing a check of $70 —$10 for each of the first seven years...
...Saint Pedro de Arbues was born in 1442 at Epila in Aragon, Spain...
...I do not know how long you have worked and slaved under handicaps and difficulties...
...As to my personal position, I am a little weary of explaining it to incredulous Zionists...
...TO the Editor:—The greatest marvel listed in Believe It or Not, by Robert L. Ripley, is undoubtedly the following: "The grand inquisitor, Peter Arbuez, who burned 40,000 people at the stake, was made a saint by the Pope in i860...
...The wealthy may in the privacy of their homes enjoy luxury to their heart's content so long as they confine it there, but if they truly desire to remove all temptation to envy from the paths of others, they must wear their old clothes on the street and see to it that their cars are kept in a state of unrepair outside, however luxuriously they may be upholstered within, and the same with everything concerning public display...
...the only trouble with this remedy being that it is utterly opposed to the point of view of the world at large...
...These are Llorente's figures...
...Such was the result of civilization the world over...
...In fact the whole point of my comment was something which Mr...
...Ripley...
...the chronicle of torture and rapine, of hunger and foul disease, of infamous hysteria and enforced cringing—all this nightmare enduring throughout a decade can be dispelled by no opiate...
...Accordingly the style of The Spirit of Catholicism is flowing, musical, of a restrained eloquence...
...THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLICISM Clarksville, Tex...
...Prefixes and suffixes were thumbed out at random...
...During the eighteen years that Torquemada was grand inquisitor of Spain, it is said that he burnt 10,220 persons for heresy and other crimes...
...A penciled note appeared: "They're O. K." The next quotation which I read had the recent subtitle "Mammon-Crazed U. S." inserted while the section referred to was temporarily enclosed in brackets...
...I could not read further...
...Let us work seven years as the humblest handmaids of the Lord, and if God wants it, let us add seven more...
...Turning the page a notation near the top caught my attention...
...BELIEVE IT OR NOT" Covington, Ky...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 3
