A poltergeist requests Masses

From Shane Leslie's Ghost Book

Fr Faber on recreation, chess, and St Charles Borromeo

Everyone remembers the story of St. Charles Borromeo and his game of chess. When others were saying what they would forthwith begin to do if they knew they should die within an hour, the saint said he should go on with his chess; for he had begun it simply for God's glory, and he desired nothing better than to be called away in the midst of an action begun for the glory of God.

All For Jesus

Fr Vincent McNabb writes to "The Tablet"

Just browsing the Tablet archive,  I found this gem:

6th May 1911

THE FEEBLE-MINDED

 

SIR,—In your issue of April 15, mention is made of a Home for Feeble-minded girls over 16 years of age, to be opened at High Wycombe. It will be under the charge of the White Sisters (daughters of the Holy Spirit) and an organising Committee. Nothing but thanks could be offered to the Sisters and the Committee for their timely effort to deal with a social problem. May their zeal receive the better thanks of imitation elsewhere throughout the country.

 

I wish every other contribution of your correspondent merited the like gratitude.

 

Let me set down some statements that seem to me to be pernicious.

It is hoped that girls will remain in the Home for the greater part of their lives for this very grave reason : when a feeble-minded girl arrives at maturity, and is not under organised supervision, she becomes a danger to herself and to the community, ending in the workhouse, an inebriate reformatory, a rescue home or a jail. Liberty to the feeble-minded is only liberty to lead a life of misery and degradation, whereas segregation means a life of happiness and utility. Without this segregation the British public must in time consist of more mentally deficient than normal people as the feeble-minded give the world more children than do the normal in the ratio of 7'3 to 4. This is a mathematical fact from which there is no escape.  

This is such an unveiled "casting of stones" at a self-defenceless class of the community that I, their brother, may be allowed on their behalf to call a spade a spade—with emphasis.

 

I. From internal evidence I conclude that your correspondent is either not a "White Sister—a daughter of the Holy Spirit," or she has forgotten of what spirit, and colour, she is. Her voice may be the voice of a daughter of the Holy Spirit, but her words are the wearisome fallacies of the Eugenists.

 

II. There is a confusion between the " feeble-minded " and the "sexually feeble-willed." To argue that the feeble-minded are a danger to the community lays your correspondent open to an overwhelming tu quoque. It would be such a display of lack-logic that a defender of the poor might be pardoned for calling it "feeble-minded." A witty defender of the poor might even suggest humorously that your correspondent's mental state deserves permanent custodial treatment—as a danger to the community.

 

III. I have underlined the passage beginning "without this segregation." A few days ago Mr. Chesterton, on a memorable occasion expressed our thoughts and relieved our feelings by the monosyllable "Bosh !" On reading the passage underlined, I fly for shelter to leeward of Mr. Chesterton's strong sense—and vocabulary.

 

IV. Your ordinary run of readers will be swayed by the "7'3 to 4," with its delicate air of scholarly precision. All the terrier within me yearns to rise up and worry this appalling assumption. Instead of anger I will be content with authority. Many might be brought to bear ; one will do my work.

 

In his evidence before the Royal Commission on the care and control of the feeble-minded, Sir J. Crichton Browne said :

No definite opinion can be expressed as to whether the number of idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, feeble-minded, and defective persons is increasing out of proportion to the population. . . . A consideration of the causes of mental defects might lead us to infer that they are a diminishing quantity ; for they are undoubtedly of more frequent occurrence where there is a low standard of health dependent on poverty and insanitary conditions. (Report of Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded. Vol. I.)

I confess to the feeling that Sir J. Crichton Browne's wise ignorance is a more scholarly attitude than the precise "7'3 to 4."

 

V. I will end with two grave thoughts. If this custodial treatment and enforced celibacy bad been meted out to all the feeble-minded of the past century, how many of our reigning sovereigns would be in existence ?

 

To be quite consequent your correspondent would have given Francis Thompson permanent custodial treatment at Storrington, years before he went there to find himself a poet. We should thus have been without the "Hound of Heaven" ; though I agree we should have had the proceedings of the Eugenist societies and the long paralogisms on heredity.

 

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,

VINCENT MCNABB, O.P.

Holy Cross Priory, Leicester.

 

 

The article Fr McNabb's letter refers to is here.

There's a further letter from him here.

St Philip Neri on anger

"He who continues in anger, strife, and a bitter spirit, has a taste of the air of hell."

St Philip Neri on adversity

"There is no surer or clearer proof of the love of God than adversity."

GKC foresees Assisi

Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broad-mindedness and. the brotherhood of all religions.

 The Everlasting Man

 

Pope Pius XII on wars of aggression

Every war of aggression against any ordinance which God gives to man in the interests of peace and bids him respect and endorse, preserve and defend, is a sin and a crime. It is an attack upon the Majesty of God, the Creator and Orderer of the World. If any people threatened with, or already the victim of, an unjust aggression be minded to think and act in a Christian way, it cannot remain in a passive indifference. All the more does the solidarity of the family of peoples forbid the other members to behave like simple onlookers in an attitude of unconcerned neutrality.

Who can ever measure the harm done in the past by such indifference, so far removed from Christian feeling, towards aggressive wars? How pointedly it has given proof of the lack of security among the "great" and, above all, among the "little". Has it, on the other hand, brought any advantage at all? On the contrary, It has only reassured and encouraged the authors and favourers of aggression, by forcing single peoples, abandoned to themselves, to a necessary and indefinite increase of their armaments.

Resting upon God and upon the order established by Him, the Christian will for peace is, accordingly, strong as steel. It is of a temper very different from the mere humanitarian sentiment, too often nothing but a sensitiveness which detests war only because of its horrors and atrocities, its havoc and its dire results, but not also because of its injustice.

In such a sentiment, hedonistic and utilitarian in character, and materialistic in origin, there is wanting the firm foundation of a strict and unconditional obligation. It forms the kind of soul in which the empty sham of compromise takes root, the attempt to save oneself at the cost of others, and in every case the success of the aggressor.

So true is this that neither the consideration of the sorrows and evils following from war, by itself, nor the exact balancing of action and advantage, suffice for a final decision whether it is morally lawful or, in a given concrete case, morally binding, to resist the aggressor (supposing always a well-founded likelihood of success).

One thing is certain: the precept of peace is of Divine right. Its end is the protection of things that constitute the good of mankind, in so far as it is the good of the Creator. Now among these are some so important for human society that their defence against unjust aggression is beyond question fully lawful. The United Nations as a body are bound to defend them, having the duty not to forsake the nation assaulted.

Guide For Living