What AT

The Author Of A New Series Of Articles Starts With An Introductio
By FR. C, C. MARTINDALE, S.J.
The Catholic Herald has already (October 29) said that the translations of Sunday Masses are to be followed by " articles" of about the same length, concerned with the Saints of the Month. In my own little note, I tried to explain how I hoped to write of them. The task isn't very easyit wasn't easy even to broadcast, in a quarter-of-an-hour, and answer to What Are Saints? and to give a description of the saint in question (for we tried to " illustrate by examples," as the old books put it) both briefly, and vividly. To read aloud the paragraphs that are to follow, would take, I think, only about six minutes. All the same, the thing must be tried.
But what saints shall we choose? When
was a young man, a number of people gave me a book called Plain Reasons ctgainst Joining the Church of Rome. It did me more good than any other book save Zola's Lourdes, which several other people gave me, thinking (I suppose) that however immoral a man's books might be, anything was good that might prevent a man's becoming Catholic. It was out of those two books that I learnt my first prayers to Our Lady. Lourdes, of course, made me want to go there, which indeed I did, to make a novena in order to find out what to do with myself : and Plain Reasons was-as even then I could see-either very ignorant or dishonest.
Horrified Hands
But among other absurdities it had this anc which is to our point. Dr. Littledale, its author, held up horrified hands because in Belgium he noticed people praying before statues of the young Saint of Malioes, John Berchmans, whereas there were no statues of, e.g., St. Athanasius, let alone anyone praying to him. . . I don't know that anyone ought to be very distressed because none of you, I expect, pray habitually to St. Athanasins or to St. John Chrysostom, colossal Catholics though they were All the same, I am not quite happy about our devotion to the saints, or knowledge of them, here in England. The whole thing seems to me to have become rather shrunken.
We pray, of course, to Our Lady and to St. Joseph; to St. Anthony (not that tremendous 'Man, St. Anthony of Egypt, who is the real Father of Monks and died on a
ridge near the Red Sea; and, if his life was austere, please notice that he died at 105, his sight and hearing unimpaired, and not having lost a single tooth: well, not that St. Anthony, but him of Padua, or rather, Lisbon, for he was Portuguese); and of course to St. Theirese of Lisieux.
Lack of Devotion to Saints But I don't see many other saints enshrined in our churches and surrounded with active devotion. How very long it took us to desire the canonisation of our martyrs, even More and Fisher! I am not at all sure but that this lack of desire on our part was one of the chief drags on their glorification. Rome is said to have said: The English don't deserve them! " We are beginning, thank God, to revive our old intense devotion to our national Madonnas-Our Lady of Walsinghatn; Our Lady of Willesden; and I look forward to days when Our Lady of Doncaster, of Ipswich, of Penrhys shall be spontaneously pilgrimaged to; and indeed England has produced a devotion (indulgenced by the Holy Father) to Our Lady of Hartley. But in our case there has been a very long interval. St. Frideswide, St. Dunstan. Si. Cuthbert, even St. Edward have for whole centuries dropped out of our imagination. We cannot galvanise dead devotions into activity. Whatever else we are-apathetic, maybe-let us not be artificial!
Therefore we do not propose as it were to force the saints we speak of upon the attention of English readers. We hope to offer certain maybe less-known names to that attention! Let the saint and the soul that he (or she) encounters then make what they can of one another. The saint is as alive as ever; but God may sec that he has done his work in this world, and must " fade out " save where he is, in glory, en-haloed with the " un-fading crown " (as St. Peter says). And again, God may wish Us tO attend to what is nearer us, and to make the most of that.
Our Royal History
All the same, we would wish Catholics to know all that they possibly can about their royal history. We do not get a proper idea of the Church if we cannot picture any but a small extent of her actual domain. This is one reason why we wish the Catholic Film Society could develop rapidly. It is about to display, I believe, a
film of the Mani a Eucharistic congress: may that be seeu by all, and would that earlier congresses, of all sorts had been filmed. It is a piiy if our only idea of the Church elsewhere than in our land be due to Lourdes. Rome and now Lisieux, with
Jerusalem. rare extensions t But if it be Church only in o know her in man mind about her i now doing! So God Himself ma
arrowing to know the e land it is deepening to ages. How thin is our we see only what she is 'C can at least hope that wish the saints of times gone by to " come alive " for us, seeing that they are so very much alive themselves!
We propose to write, during the month of December, abut St. Ambrose of Milan and St. Francis X vier at any rate. There is no difficulty ii seeing why we choose the latter-he is patron of all " foreign missions," and , ission Sunday in October reminded us cne getically how much the Holy Father wis es us all without exception to be in ca cst about the missionsto be niission-mitded. We cannot sit down complacently un er the reproach that we are not. (In par nthesis, I recall the really startling Missio -Sunday exhibition arranged by the Grail in London. It concentrated on Ceylon. It is out of the question that anything so clever and imaginative and excitingly informative should remain confined to three days in one city, We trust that the Grail is being asked to bring it to every big town turn by turn, complete with all its decoriations, its cinema, and its Cinglialese songs)
" Sedentary " St. Peter
But if St. Francis Xavier represents the expansive, apostolic side of the Church, as St. Paul did, so does St. Ambrose represent the "sedentary " St. Peter, " ever giving verdict in the person of his successors "not that St. Ambrose was Pope, but snore than anyone else just then he ruled,. he had been lawyer and judge: he was elected bishop before he had so much as been baptised, yet was recognised as having been as good as a bi4iop even while a layman: in fact an Emperor said that he had never known a truly vorLhy bishop other than St. Ambrose.
But, to me, th essence of his career was the obstinate figiht he put up against the invasion of the sPiritual realm by the State. Today, we have to put up exactly the same fight: eves' in this land, you can see that little by little governments, even borough
, .
councils, want to get all power into their hands-especially over education; of which the latest and werst symptom is the recommendation that all native education in Uganda be secularised, a perfectly damnable suggestion, against which we hope that Catholics here will raise as vigorous a protest at they must should it still be intended' to old the next international [atheist congress in London. Anyhow. we trust that the so1 t of way in which we hope weekly to write an account of some saint is now clear.