Why do I believe? In considering the purposes Our Lord had in mind when instituting this wonderful Sacramental Sacrifice, I shall discover a further motive of credibility, and not the least of them:
1st purpose: To convert every square foot of earth and sea into a Calvary purpled with the steaming Blood of the Lamb. O Lover of this our earthly dwelling, it did not satisfy Thee to shed Thy Blood on one Golgotha, it was Thy desire to turn the whole earth into a Golgotha and an Altar of Thy Sacrifice
2nd purpose: To establish the New Covenant: Novum Testaméntum. The Old Covenant was made for the observance of the Law; the New Covenant was made for the sake of pardoning sins, in virtue of the Redeeming Blood: in remissiónem peccatórum.
3rd purpose: To erect a monument to the greatest of all achievements: Christ’s Passion and Death, the divine work of the Redemption: Hoc fácite in mean commemoratiónem.
For as often as you shall eat this bread and drink this chalice, you shall shew the death of the Lord, until he comes (1 Cor. 11:26).
A monument that will last as long as the human race. It is so natural for the human heart to want to erect lasting monuments! What are those monoliths, menhirs, mausoleums, pyramids, obelisks, and statues in such materials like granite, marble, and iron, erected in every age to kings, travelers, pioneers, and inventors, but the unquenchable human longing to eternalize an achievement, to perpetuate a name? And what monument will the King of Kings erect to His enterprise, the world’s Redemption? Bronze from the old Colossi? Stones from the eternal wonders of Egypt? ... No, Christ’s monument will be unique: His porphyry, His diamonds, His bronze, will be but a tiny consecrated Host – the meager appearances of bread and wine… And the pyramids will crumble, and the colossi will be thrown to the ground, and the marble statues will turn into dust, and the monoliths will be buried by the sands of the centuries; and even if the cataclysm should fail to consume them, there will be the implacable beat of the weather eroding and pulverizing them all. BUT the Monument to the Death of Christ, with all its fragile appearances, remains; with the passing of the years and after every hour It becomes still more gigantic; each Consecration and Communion is a new ashlar that nothing will move.
4th purpose: To infuse into my being the germ of a New Life, the life of grace, eternal life, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost.
St. John, the Priest Model in his Dealings with the Holy Eucharist:
Let us read St. John’s Gospel and his other writings:
So steeped was he in the profound mysteries of his Divine Master’s Heart that, when he takes up the pen to relate the Life-story of Christ, the very first thing that comes to his mind is Christ’s Divinity: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God! How truly this is fulfilled in the beloved Disciple!
We should learn from St. John how to deal with Jesus Christ hidden under the Sacramental Species: The essential purpose of the priest is to offer Sacrifice. There is no priesthood without sacrifice. So the more perfectly [the priest] perform[s] this essential duty the better priests [they] are, and the better priests [they] are the nearer [their] approach to the Holiness and Greatness of the Victim [they] offer and of the Father to Whom It is offered. For the victims and oblations of old have vanished like shadows before the Light of the New Covenant, which, in abrogating them, substituted in their place the One Clean Oblation prophesied by Malachias (1:2), Christ our God, the Holy One born of the Virgin Mary, the Divine Victim of our altars.
Taken from The Priest at Prayer by Fr. Eugenio Escribano
The modern world, that world that calls itself Christian and to which without a doubt belong all your friends, could be compared to a ship that has suffered shipwreck, many damages, and is about to perish. The Church, compared also to a Ship, has always been battered by strong tempests, which have opened huge gaps through which anti-Christian doctrines, uses, practices and tendencies have long been introduced. I give an urgent warning then, not to the Ship, which is imperishable, but to Its passengers, who are not. What has happened? I do not speak of the world that is openly pagan for its shipwreck is already accomplished. I speak about the world that still pretends to be Christian. This world has thrown into the sea everything, or almost everything!
Where’s common prayer in families? Sunk in the sea –Pious readings, meditation? Sunk in the sea –Graces and blessings during meals? Sunk in the sea –Habitual attendance at Holy Mass, the scapular, the Rosary? Sunk in the sea –Where’s the regular worthy reception of the Sacraments, the laws of fasting and abstinence? Sunk in the sea –The spirit of simplicity and mortification in dress and eating? Sunk in the sea –The Crucifix, holy images, holy water in our bedrooms? Sunk in the sea, sunk in the sea. Meanwhile, the ship continues to sink. The Christian spirit decreases; the opposing spirit gains ground very quickly. We go to Low Mass on Sunday, and God knows with what devotion! We go to Sung Mass 3 or 4 times a year; to Vespers, we do not go anymore! We go to spectacles and to dances; we read everything that we get our hands on; we do not share anything except that which we should not even have!!! Behold the fragile ships into which we trust our own salvation! No wonder there are so many shipwrecks! Poor passengers, separated from the Great Ship, how much you have to cry!
Among all the Catholic practices that have been abandoned so imprudently by the modern world, there is ONE, worthy of respect among them all, that I would like to save from shipwreck at any cost! It is that which your peers openly reject without knowing what they are doing: The Sign of the Cross. It is the time to see to its preservation. Go to a church one day and examine the crowd that comes to the House of God. Many do not make the Sign of the Cross: others make It badly, or just pretend to make It. It is a disconcerting fact: Today’s Christians do not make the Sign of the Cross, make It rarely, or make It badly. On this point, as in many others, we do the opposite of what our ancestors, the Christians of the primitive Church did. They made the Sign of the Cross: they made It well, and they made It frequently.
In the East as in the West, in Jerusalem, in Athens, in Rome, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, priests and faithful observed religiously this Tradition. Tertullian says: “At every moment and for everything, on entering and on going out, when bathing, when dressing, when eating, when going to bed, when we do all other things, we make the Sign of the Cross on our foreheads.” They made the Sign of the Cross, not only on their foreheads, but on their eyes, on their mouths, on their breasts. So, if our Christian ancestors made the Sign of the Cross at every moment, we are obliged to conclude that they were obeying an Apostolic recommendation; they lived around the time of the Apostles, who conversed with the Incarnate Word in Person. This closeness in time to the Apostles is one of the reasons to imitate them and make the Sign of the Cross.
A second reason to imitate the early Christians in making the Sign of the Cross is their sanctity. The first Christians were not only better instructed on the doctrine of the Apostles, but they were most faithful in practicing it. The proof is their holy persons. There is no better established fact than the fact that sanctity was the general character of the first Christians. They loved to lose everything, their goods and their lives in the midst of afflictions rather than offend God. Their heroism lasted as long as the persecutions, that is THREE centuries. They were charitable! Heaven and Earth united to make their love for each other a unique praise in the annals of the world. “See how they love each other and how they are always ready to die for each other” exclaimed the pagans. The Fathers of the Church, actual eye-witnesses, have also continued to render the most splendid testimony of their holiness. Tertullian, addressing the judges, praetorians and consuls of the empire, made this solemn challenge: “I appeal to your processes, O you who are in charge of administering justice. Among that multitude of accused people that is brought daily before your tribunals, which is the assassin, the sacrilegious, the corrupt, the thief who is a Christian? Prisons are overcrowded only with your own people.”
In the world, the traditional use of the Redemptive Sign comes down to us in a parallel line. All the great men, those incomparable geniuses of East and West, whom we call the Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, Ambrose, Gregory, Basil, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and so many others, all these respectable beings made the Sign of the Cross, and recommended with ardor to all the Christians to make It at every occasion.
A third motive to make the Sign of the Cross is that the Church uses It. As centuries go by, men change with the times, Laws, habits, fashions, languages, ways of thinking, seeing and judging. The Church alone does not change. Immutable as truth itself, of which She is the Teacher, that which She taught and did yesterday, teaches and does today, will teach and will do tomorrow and always. What are Her thoughts, Her conduct regarding the Sign of the Cross? There is no point on which Her divine immutability is more splendidly visible! For 21 centuries up to today, it could be said that the Church lives with the Sign of the Cross; there’s no instant in which She stops using It. She starts, continues, and undertakes everything with this Sign (†).
Among all Her practices, the Sign of the Cross is the principal one, the most common, the most familiar. It is the soul of Her exorcisms, of Her prayers, of Her blessings. That which we see Her do before our own eyes in our churches, She did in the catacombs before the eyes of our forefathers in the Faith. She takes possession of everything through the Sign of the Cross. Everything She uses: water, salt, bread, wine, fire, rocks, wood, oils, balsam, bronze, precious metals, houses, camps, everything is blessed with the Sign of the Cross. Observe above all the conduct of the Church with respect to man who is a living temple of the Trinity. The first thing She does over him, as he comes out of his mother’s womb, is the Sign of the Cross. The last thing, when he re-enters the womb of the earth, is still the Sign of the Cross. This is Her first salutation and also Her last good-bye towards Her dear children.
In the interval between the cradle and the grave how many Signs of the Cross are made over man! At baptism, through which we become children of God, the Sign of the Cross; at Confirmation, through which we are made soldiers of virtue, the Sign of the Cross; in receiving the Eucharist, when we are nourished with the Bread of Angels, the Sign of the Cross; in Confession, through which we recover divine life, the Sign of the Cross; when we receive Extreme Unction, through which we are fortified for the last battle, the Sign of the Cross; at Ordination and Holy Matrimony, through which we become associated to the paternity of God Himself, the Sign of the Cross. Always and everywhere, today as in other times, in the East as in the West, the Sign of the Cross is made over men.
Taken from Il Segno della Croce by Msgr Gaume
St. Bernadette
IN THE NAME of the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I, a poor, unhappy sinner, make this solemn declaration before thee, O beloved Angel, who has been given me as a protector by the Divine Majesty:
1. I desire to die in the Faith which the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church adheres to and defends, in which all the Saints of the New Testament have died. I pray thee provide that I may not depart out of this life before the Holy Sacraments of that Church have been administered to me.
2. I pray that I may depart from this life under thy holy protection and guidance, and I beseech thee, therefore, to assist me at the hour of my death and to propitiate the Eternal judge, whose Sacred Heart was inflamed with most ardent love for sinners upon the Cross.
3. With my whole heart I long to be made a partaker of the merits of Jesus Christ and His holy Mother Mary, thine exalted Queen, and I pray thee, through the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross, to mitigate the agonies of my death and to move the Queen of Heaven to cast her loving glance upon me, a poor sinner, in that dreadful hour, for my sweetest consolation.
O my dearest Guardian Angel! Let my soul be placed in thy charge, and when it has gone forth from the prison of this body, do thou deliver it into the hands of its Creator and Redeemer, that with thee and all the Saints, it may gaze upon Him in the bliss of Heaven, love Him perfectly and find its blessedness in Him throughout eternity. Amen.
O Lord, my God, I now, at this moment, readily and willingly accept at Thy hand whatever kind of death it may please Thee to send me, with all its pains, penalties, and sorrows.
O Lord Jesus, God of goodness and Father of mercies, I approach Thee with a contrite and humble heart; to Thee I recommend my last hour, and that which then awaits me.
When my feet, now motionless, shall admonish me that my mortal course is drawing to and end;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my hands, trembling and benumbed, no longer able to hold Thy crucified Image, shall let It fall from their feeble grasp upon my bed of pain;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my eyes, dim and troubled at the horror of approaching death, shall fix on Thee their languish and expiring looks;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my cheeks, pale and vivid, shall inspire the beholders with pity and dismay; and my hair, bathed in the sweat of death, and stiffening on my head, shall forbode my approaching end;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my ears, soon to be for ever shut to the discourse of men, shall open to hear Thy voice pronounce the irrevocable decree, which shall decide my lot for eternity;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my imagination, agitated by horrid and terrifying phantoms, shall be sunk in mortal anguish; when my soul, affrighted at the sight of my iniquities and the terrors of Thy judgment, shall have to fight against the angel of darkness, who will endeavor to conceal Thy mercies from my eyes, and plunge me into despair;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my poor heart, oppressed with the pains of sickness, and exhausted by its struggles against the enemies of its salvation, shall be seized with the pangs of death;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When the last tears, forerunners of my dissolution, shall drop from my eyes, receive them as a sacrifice of expiation for my sins, that I may die the victim of penance, and in that dreadful moment;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my friends and relations, encircling my bed, shall shed the tear of pity over me, and invoke Thy clemency in my behalf;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When I shall have lost the use of my senses, and the world shall have vanished from my sight; when I shall groan with anguish in my last agony and in the sorrows of death;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my last sighs shall summon my soul to go forth from my body, receive them as the effects of a holy impatienceto fly to Thee; and in that moment;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When my soul, trembling on my lips, shall bid adieu to the world, and leave my body lifeless, pale, and cold, receive this separation as a homage, which I willingly pay to the Divine Majesty; and in that last moment of my mortal life;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
When at length my soul, admitted to Thy presence, shall first behold first behold with terror Thy awful Majesty, reject me not, but receive me into Thy bosom, where I may for ever sing Thy praises, and in that moment when eternity shall begin for me;
R. Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.
By MSGR. FULTON J. SHEEN
The proudest boast of Communism is that it has finally emancipated the woman. Marx writes: "Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity. All are instruments of labor." The key word here is instrument which reduces a human being to the dignity of a monkey wrench. The assumption was that woman was free as soon as she became available for production. One of the paradoxes of our irrational world is that woman today is glorified when she produces an Atomic Bomb, but not when she can produce life. It is like praising violinists for producing sewer pipes instead of melodies.
At the very beginning of the Communist Revolution in Russia a decree was passed declaring that all women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two became the property of the State, and that the rights of husbands were abolished (Novaia Zhizn, No. 54, 1918 p. 2). In keeping with the idea that liberation means working in a factory rather than in a home, we read in a Soviet book published in 1935: "Women's labor has become one of the main sources from which industry could draw fresh supplies of workers. During the earlier years of the first Five Year Plan [in Russia], there were about six million housewives in the towns (Shaburova, Woman is a Great Power, 1935 edition, p. 32)." The women refused to accept what the Communists called "the emancipation for women from depressing domestic atmosphere" but they were ultimately forced into "emancipation" and began working in mines, sewers, and in the manipulation of pneumatic drills.
This idea of the emancipation of women through industrialization is not altogether a Communist idea, but like many others has been derived from Western bourgeois capitalistic civilization which thought of the liberation of woman in terms of equality with men. The only difference is that the Communist merely carried the idea to its logical extreme, and if it scandalizes us now it is because our bourgeois world never understood the full implication of its error. The two basic errors of both Communism and a capitalistic liberal civilization on this subject were: 1) Women were never emancipated until modern times. Religion particularly kept them in servitude; 2) Equality means the right of a woman to do a man's work.
First, it is not true that women began to be emancipated in modern times and in direct proportion to the decline of religion. The fact is that woman's subjection began in the seventeenth century with the break-up of Christendom and took on a positive form at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Under the Christian civilization women enjoyed rights, privileges, honors and dignities which have since been swallowed up by the machine age. In eighty-five Guilds in England during the Middle Ages, seventy-two had women members on an equal basis with men in such professions as barbers and sailors. They were probably just as outspoken as men because one of the rules of the Guilds was that "the sister as well as the brethren" may not engage in disorderly or contumacious debates. In Paris there were fifteen guilds reserved exclusively for women, while eighty of the Parisian guilds were mixed. Nothing is more erroneous historically than the belief that it was our modern age which recognized women in the professions.
The records of these Christian times reveal the names of thousands upon thousands of women who influenced society and whose names are now enrolled in the catalogue of saints, Catherine of Sienna [a woman] alone leaving eleven large volumes of her writings. Up until the seventeenth century in England, women functioned in business perhaps even more than today. In fact, so many were in business that it was provided by law that the husband should not be responsible for her debts. Between 1553 and 1640 ten percent of the publishing in England was done by women. Because the homes did their own weaving, cooking and laundry it has been estimated that women in pre-industrial days were producing half the goods required by society. In the Middle Ages women were as well educated as men and it was not until the seventeenth century that women were barred from education. Then at the time of the Industrial Revolution all the activities and freedom of women were curtailed as the machine took over the business of production and men moved into the factory. As these disabilities continued woman felt the loss of her freedom, and rightly so, because she felt she had been hurt by man who robbed her of her legal rights, and she fell into the error of believing that she ought to proclaim herself the equal of man, forgetful that a certain superiority was already hers because of her functional difference from man. Equality then came to mean negatively, the destruction of all privileges enjoyed by specific persons or classes, and positively, as absolute and unconditioned sex equality with all men.
This brings us to the second error in the bourgeois-capitalistic theory of women, namely, the failure to make distinction between mathematical and proportional equality. Mathematical equality implies exactness of remuneration; for example, two men who work at the same job at the same factory should receive equal pay. Proportional equality means that each should receive his pay according to his function. In a family, for example, all children should be cared for by the parents, but it does not mean that because sixteen year old Mary gets an evening gown with an organdy trim the parents should give seventeen year old Johnnie the same thing. Women in seeking to regain some of the rights and privileges they had in Christian civilization thought of equality in mathematical terms or in terms of sex. Feeling themselves overcome by a monster called "man" they identified freedom and equality with the right to do a man's job. All the psychological, social and other advantages which were peculiar to women were ignored until the inanities of the bourgeois world reached their climax in Communism where a woman was emancipated the moment she went to work in a mine. The result has been that woman's imitation of man and her flight from motherhood has developed neuroses and psychoses which have reached alarming proportions.
The Christian civilization never stressed equality in a mathematical sense, but only in the proportional sense, for equality is wrong when it makes the woman a poor imitation of man. Once she became man's mathematical equal, he no longer stood when she came into a room, no longer gave her a seat in a bus, and no longer took off his hat in an elevator. The other day in a New York subway a man gave a woman his seat and she fainted. When she was revived she thanked him, and he fainted.
Modern woman has been made equal with man, but she has not been made happy. She has been emancipated from a clock and thereby no longer free to swing, or as a flower has been emancipated from its roots, only to wither and die. She has been cheapened in her search for mathematical equality in two ways: by becoming a victim to man by becoming only the instrument of his pleasure, ministering to his needs in a sterile exchange of egotism. A victim to the machine by subordinating the creative principle of life to the production of non-living things, which is the essence of Communism. This is not a condemnation of a professional woman, because the important question is not whether a woman finds favor in the eyes of a man, but whether she can satisfy the basic instincts of womanhood. If it were the man that made a difference to a woman and all that wifehood and motherhood entail, then the least womanly of all women would be found in convents.
The fact is, however, that nowhere else are more normal and certainly happier women to be found on this earth. One might add also, that nowhere else are there so many young women, for a peculiar quality about the spiritual life is that it keeps a woman young. Cosmetics, mud baths, sneezeless soaps are lacking, but they manage to keep young and unwrinkled because they are at peace. What makes the difference in woman is not therefore a man, but whether a certain God-given qualities which are specifically hers are given adequate and full expression. These qualities are principally, devotion, sacrifice and love. They need not necessarily be expressed in a family, or even in a convent. They can find an outlet in the social world, in the care of the sick, the poor, the ignorant —in a word— in the seven corporal works of mercy. It is sometimes said that the professional woman is hard. This may in a few instances be true, but it is not because she is in a profession, but because she has alienated her profession from contact with human beings in a way to satisfy the deeper cravings of her heart. It may very well be that the revolt against morality, and the exaltation of sensuous pleasure as the purpose of life, are due to the loss of the spiritual fulfillment of existence. Having been frustrated and disillusioned, such souls first become bored, then cynical, and finally, suicidal. Wherein lies the solution? In a return to the Christian concept wherein stress is placed not on equality but equity.
Equity is love, mercy, understanding, sympathy — consideration of details, appeals, and departures from the fixed rules of courts which law has not yet embraced. Applying this to women, we are saying that equity rather than equality should be the basis of all the claims of women. It goes beyond equality by claiming superiority in certain aspects of life. Equity is the perfection of equality, not a substitute. It has the advantages of recognizing the specific difference between man and woman, which equality does not have. As a matter of fact, they are not equal in sex; they are quite unequal, and it is only because they are unequal that they complement [complete] one another. The violin and the bow are not equal. Each has a superiority of function. Man and woman are equal inasmuch as they have the same rights and liberties, the same final goal of life and both have been redeemed by the Blood of Our Divine Savior -- but they are different in function. It is that truth which solves the problem.
One of the greatest of the Old Testament stories reveals this difference. While the Jews were under Persian captivity, Aman, the prime minister of King Assuerus, asked his master to slay the Jews because they obeyed the law of God rather than the Persian law. When the order went out that the Jews were to be massacred, Esther was asked to approach the wicked King and plead for her people. There was a law that no one should enter the King's presence under the penalty of death, unless the King extended his scepter as a permission to approach the throne. That was the law. But Esther said: "I will go in to the King, against the law, not being called, and expose myself to death and to danger (Esther 4: 6)." Esther fasted an prayed and then approached the throne. Would the scepter be lowered? The King held tout the golden scepter, and Esther drew near and kissed the top of it, and the King said to her: "What wilt thou, Queen Esther? What is thy request? (Esther 5:3)."
This story has been interpreted through the Christian ages as meaning that God will reserve to Himself the reign of justice and law, but to Mary, His Mother will be given the reign of mercy. During the Christian ages, Our Blessed Mother bore a title which has been forgotten, but it is revived in two modern non-Catholic writers, Henry Adams and Mary R. Beard. Adams described the Lady of Equity in the Cathedral of Chartres. Over the main altar sits the Virgin Mary, the Lady of Equity, with the Holy Child on her knees, presiding over the courts, listening serenely to pleas for mercy in behalf of their sins. As Mary Beard beautifully put it: "The Virgin signified to the people moral, human or humane power, as against the stern mandates of God's law." And we might add, this is the woman's special glory — mercy, pity, understanding, intuition of human needs, call it anything you please. When women step down from the role of the Lady of Equity and her prototype Esther, and insist only on equality, they lose their greatest opportunity to change the world. Law has broken down today. Jurists no longer believe in a Divine Judge behind Law. Obligations are no longer sacred. Even peace is based upon the power of Three Nations rather than on the Justice of God.
Shall women, in this day of the collapse of justice equate themselves with men in rigid exactness, or shall they rally to Equity, to mercy and love and give to a cruel and lawless world something that equality cannot give? Whence shall come a devotion to causes, if women who are capable of greater devotion than men, insist on a cold equality? How shall wars be stopped and the taking of young life, if women, like men, trust only in law? If women recognized the truth hidden in the Lady of Equity, love might be restored to homes and families. The reason there is little love now is because in the human order there is never any love between equals. There may be justice, but no affection. If man is the equal of woman, then she has rights, but, what heart ever lived on rights? All love demands inequality or superiority. The lover is always on his knees, the beloved must always be on a pedestal. Whether it be man or woman, the one must always consider himself or herself as undeserving of the other. Even God humbled Himself in His Love to win man, saying He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And man, in his turn approaches that loving Savior in Communion with the words: "Lord, I am not worthy." Not then because women enter professions do some harden and become frustrated. Professional careers do not of themselves defeminize women; otherwise the Church would not have raised political women to sainthood, as was the case with St. Elizabeth and St. Clotilde.
The cause of tragedy in woman today is that by stressing equality, they have lost those specifically feminine qualities which have given her superiority of function. These qualities are devotedness and creativeness. No woman is happy unless she has someone for whom she can sacrifice herself, not in a servile way but in the way of love. Added to the devotedness is her love of creativeness. A man is afraid of dying, but a woman is afraid of not living. Life to a man is personal; life to a woman is otherness. She thinks less in terms of perpetuation of self and more in terms of perpetuation of others — so much so that in devotedness she is willing to sacrifice herself for others. To the extent that a career gives no opportunity for either she becomes de-feminized. If these qualities cannot be given an outlet in a home and a family, they can nevertheless find other substitutions in works of charity, in the defense of virtuous living, in the defense of right as other Claudias when their political husbands as Pilates rely only on expediency, then her work as a money earner becomes a prelude and a condition for the display of equity which is her greatest glory.
The level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. This is because there is a basic difference between knowing and loving. In knowing something you bring it down to the level of your understanding. But in loving we always go up to meet the demand of the one loved. If you love music you have to submit to its laws and disciplines. When man loves woman, it follows the nobler the woman the nobler the love; the higher the demands by the woman, the more worthy a man must be. That is why a woman is the measure of the level of our civilization. It is for our age to decide whether woman shall claim equality in sex and the right to work at the same lathe, or whether she will claim equity and give to the world that which no man can give. In these pagan [irreligious] days when women want to be only equal with men, they have lost respect.
In Christian days when men were strongest, woman was respected. As the author of Mont. St. Michel puts it: "The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history — these Plantagenets; these Scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods, and Marco Polos; these crusaders who planted their enormous fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield harvests — all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman. Explain it how you will! Men rushed like sheep to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer . . ." As Abelard said of her: "After the Trinity you are our only hope . . . you are placed there as our advocate; all of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother who is logically compelled to intercede for us and stands in the place of a mother to the guilty." To the Lady of Equity once again modern women must look, as even those who have the Faith must see fulfilled in her those spiritual functions which no priest can perform; queen, mother and woman.
If woman wants to be ever a revolutionist , then the Lady is her guide for she sang the most revolutionary song ever written — The Magnificat, the burden of which was the abolition of principalities and powers, and the exaltation of the humble. She breaks the shell of woman's isolation from the world and puts woman back into the wide ocean of humanity as she who is the Cosmopolitan Woman gives the Cosmopolitan Man, for which giving all generations shall call her blessed. But she was the inspiration to womanhood, not because She claimed there was equality in sex, for peculiarly enough this was the one equality she ignored, but because of a transcendence in function which made her superior to a man inasmuch as she could encompass a man, as Isaias foretold.
Great men we need like Saint Paul with a two-edged sword to cut away the bonds that tie down the energies of the world, and men like Saint Peter who will let the broad stroke of their challenge ring out on the shield of the world's hypocrisy, and great men like Saint John who with a loud voice will arouse men from the sleek dream of unheroic repose. But we need woman still more; women like Mary of Cleophas who will raise sons to lift up white hosts to a Heavenly Father; women like Saint Magdalene who will take hold of the tangled skeins of a seemingly wrecked and ruined life and weave out of them the beautiful tapestry of saintliness and holiness; and women, above all, like Mary, the Lady of Equity, who will leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross where saints are made. When women of this kind return to save a world with equity, then we shall toast them, we shall salute them not as the modern woman, once our superior now our equal, but as the Christian woman — closest to the Cross on Good Friday, and first at the tomb on Easter Morning. God loves you!
