MARY AND ENGLAND'S CONVERSION

Prayer, Penance and Preaching
by F. A.
FULFORD
ENGLAND, returning to Wal
singham, is still a mile awayat the Slipper Chapel. The last mite is a painful one, to be done penitentially. Once it is covered, then Our Lady will come back to England.
The Bishop of Northampton told 5,000 Walsingham supporters in Westminster Cathedral
this year that the Walsingham we. are beekoded to wills the loving smtle of the Heavenly Queen ot chivalrous hearts of Catholic Britishers may turn out to be anywhere in England, save Walsingham in Norfolk itself.
" In this industrial era." Ills Lordship said, " it may be anywhere else."
At Lourdes she chose to appear in an untidy cave; the Fatima scene of her comings was not less uninspiring, and bearing in mind that in this she closely follows the example of her Donne Son, who decided on a stable, our chivalry wilt readily pay her homage if the Queen should choose in the ages of Faith to establish her new shrine within this her dowry in a slum parish of loyal Lancashire, for instance, where hearts are of gold, where devotion to her is childlike, where her Rosary beautifies the gnarled hands of toil-worn labourers and their wives and mothers-who have no other prayer-book but this.
a Looking Forward Rather than build anew, we older Catholics are anxious to restore the past, and reconsecrate the desecrated. A hundred years ago we yearned for our old cathedrals and abbeys, we felt disappointment that the old see of Canterbury was not revived, and that names of ugly new industrial centres were chosen for our new Hierarchy, venerable titles of old being passed by through expediency. To-day the academic-minded among us the historians, the aesthetes, continue to feel that way. To-morrow the Catholic youth of to-day, born in an age that shattered past values with the first atom bomb dropped before their eyes, will have forgotten much of the past, so engrossed will it be trying to infuse Christianity into a new economic and social system demanding every ounce of their strength to stave off the encroachments on their souls with which the system threatens then). A German bomb on the beautiful stone vaulting of Exeter Cathedral caused little sorrow to Catholics of the nineteen forties; it woUld have shattered Pugin's heart in the eighteen forties.
It is a dangerous thing to love Our Lady, for sooner or later she will ask something of us.
I am told by priests, who ought to know because they know men's souls so well, that nothing is tenderer than the individual love of the English Catholic for his Heavenly Mother. My experience and observation tell me that nothing is more sacred than the look of utmost reverence and filial devotion to be seen in a quick glance on the face of the City man saying his Rosary in the shadows of the crypt of St. Ethelreda's, Ely Place. Nothing inspires one so much as when all that individual devotion is canalised and co-ordinated, in a mass Marian rally at Westminster Cathedral, or at Walsingham.
Penance and Conversion What Our Lady. asks from her English devotee, IS Penance-and she smilingly invites him to walk that last holy Mile to Walsingham barefoot. It is the price of the Conversion of England.
Her apparitions, both at Lourdes and Fatima. bear the characteristic note of a call to Penance; when we were given to her as children, it was done under the shadow of the Cross, where she was then undergoing her own greatest Penance.
Said Fr. Faber, writing in 1862: " Here, in England. Mary is trot half enough preached. Devotion to her is low and thin and poor. It is frightened out of its wits by the sneers of heresy. It is always invoking human respect and carnal prud
ence. wishing to make Mary so little of t Mary that Protestants may feel at ease about her."
Amazed as we are that such indignities were said of our Catholic grandfathers, we are relieved to know that things are different to-day. Since then their children, and our fathers, have walked with Fr. Fletcher from Horsham to Our Lady's Shrine in West Grinstead, in his newly-established Ransom Pilgrimages, and the dung-slinging of onlookers was of no avail. As children they walked in pretty sashes around the slum streets of London on the Sundays in May when they honoured Our Lady in outdoor processions. Onlookers got used to these and numerous other public manifestations of growing and courageous devotion. Their heroism is our inheritance.
To-day Our Lady invites us to more heroism, more Penance in order to hasten the day we all desire, the Conversion of England.1 he call now is to reach the summit with her, to be at her side on Calvary itself, to take a suffering England along with us and bid her be really the Mother of our compatriots as well.
Helping Protestants Protestants, as we know, have many of them a sincere devotion to Mary. The child in every man of us seeks, in his anxious moment, the understanding sympathy of a mother. The Protestant, and the unbeliever, (retell faced when past middle life with doubts about the future. and knowing in his heart of hearts the truth of the gentleness of Providence towards him, would love to believe in Our Lady as so many of his Catho lic acquaintances do. He craves for motherliness. We can help him.
Have you ever tried offering your non-Catholic friend a Rosary and asking him, or her, to keep it and value it just for your sake 7 When a degree of intimacy has been reached, such a gift will not be refused. Our Lady will do the rest; you may not see results this side of the grave. Why worry on that score ?
A three-point plan for the Conversion of England is therefore Prayer, Penance and Preaching, numbers one and two being suitably combined; for instance, in accepting in a debonair spirit the present inconveniences of our English life and asking Our Lady to collect them, hallow them, and join them to the sacrifices of the Martyrs pleading before the Throne of God. Another is to accept with resignation the fact that at Walsinghten itself there is as yet no church, and scarcely any amenities, to cheer the pilgrim on his arrival. It is desolate, and will remain so, till the day of fulfilment dawns.
Moreover, the spirit to be found there is not what it should he: there is a tendency at Walsingham to see the possibility of material gain in the coming of pilgrims. Will not that retard the Conversion of England?
A "New Look" to Marvel At Prior to the Reformation we may have been a demonstrative race. It is said ii we are not so now thanks are due to puritanism, whose influence even Catholics to some extent succumb to. It takes a Latin. like the Venerable Dominic, to walk English streets in a religious habit and withstand resulting insdlts. But
our soldiers, sailors and airmen have often seen in recent years the religious habit on Continental streets, and they have seen in it the uniform of a Service higher than the one they were in.
It is time. surely • for our 1948 Dominies• to appear once more in Oxford Street in the gleaming white of their Dbminican habits, for the Passionists with the Cross. for the Capuchins in their sandals.
Theirs would be a New Look to marvel at, to praise, to extol, to emulate, as well in the Protestant countryside of East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Wales, where the time has come to fan with True Religion the dying embers of Protestantism.
An upsurge is needed in the rankand-file of English Catholics devoted to Our Lady to call upon our leaders to encourage us in renewed fervour; to supplicate nationally, as Continental countries have done, the Common Father of all to define
the Doctrine of the Assumption; to institute in all dioceses the Feast ot Our Lady, Mediatrix of All Graces, on May 31, a Feast so far observed. I understand, in Leeds and Cardiff, and among some Orders as well; to discourage liturgical extremists from limiting Sunday evening services to the Christo-centric type, forgetting thereby that our popular Benediction service originated in a laudable French custom of singing hymns in honour of Our Lady while the Blessed Sacrament is exposed.
As I write this I learn that the Bishops have agreed that Cardinal Griffin shall dedicate England and Wales to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the conclusion of the great pilgrimage of prayer and penance at Walsingham on July 16. Should we not repeat the consecration prayer in our own homes, and schools and churches on that des, Feast of Mount Carmel. as well?
All of us are far too fervent in our devotion to Our Lady to permit the suggestion that, to recall Faber's above-mentioned charge, we are heading towards a non-Marian Catholicism, for our teachers tea us that Mary had a necessary part to play in our redemption just as Eve had in our fall. Devotion to Our Lord, and to Our Lady, are consequently closely knit.
So closely knit are they indeed, that the ancient Liturgy of the major part of Eastern Christianity, places immediately after the Consecration of the Bread and Wine a short " Preface " directed to Mary herself.
I close quoting it in full, trusting that readers will never hesitate to bring her high prerogatives to the notice of their non-Catholic friends in an endeavour to bring nearer the day when at Walsingham, or elsewhere in this country, shesis universally hailed Queen returned to her Dowry.
" Meet indeed it is to bless thee. Mother of (;od, ever blessed and most sinless Mother of oar God. Honoured above-the Cherubim. infinitely more glorious than the Seraphim, iviro didst bear God the Word ivithout stain. Mother of God in truth. thee we magnify."-(From the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Stanbrook translation).
BOOKS RECEIVED I
Most Worthy of All Praise, by Vincent P. McCorry, S.J. (Mercier Press, IN. 6d.) is mainly concerned with the mysteries, rewards and trials of the religious vocation for women. The book is written for nuns and the writer makes a kindly understanding effort to clear some of those unfortunate clouds and atmospheres that only too often seem to exist between nuns themselves and between nuns and priests.
In By Jacob's Well (M'gr. Leen, trs. Edward Leen, B.O.W., 12s. bd.) we have the fruits of Irish piety enriched by French culture. Apart from the rather fanciful and superfluous " praetices" suggested in connection with the Divine Office (la. 247) the Ten Days' Retreat is theological, liturgical, and devo tional. Printing and format excellent.
The first part of The Catholic Schools Assembly Book, by Fr. E. H. Drinkwater (Walker, 6s.), is an excellent compendium of vernacular prayers, liturgical and devotional, chosen with unerring taste. The second, compiled from the usual vernacular hymn sources, begins with a had misprint " Christ is Night," has a poor translation of " Stille Nacht," expects children to sing about " things in hell's abyss abhorred." invites them to " follow close " the footprints of the Sacred Heart, moelaims them as " the worst of .sons" of their Guardian Angel, and timidly changes " 0 Mother I " to " 0 Mother Mary, holy mirth." Realising the difficulties, we yet think that this section is unworthy of the rest.