Open the gates

Media

Part of The Cross

Title
Open the gates
Language
English
Year
1950
Rights
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
Fulltext
Open 7)ke Qate$ HOLY YEAR COLUMN Father Keller, MM, in his book, Three Minute* o Day, tells the story of on overworked businessman who come home one day hoping to enjoy a quiet evening with the newspapers. But just as he sat down to start reading, his six-year-old son come up to him and began asking him an endless line of questions which greatly peeved him. In a fit of exasperation, the businessman got a map of the world from a nearby table and tore it to small pieces ond told his son to put it back together again. In ten minutes, his son returned, the tqsk completed. Greatly astonished by the speed of the work, since his son knew no Geography, the Father asked the little tot how he did it. "All I did," said the boy, "was to put the mon right. When I did that, the world came out right." The Father did not know that at the back of the mop wos the picture of o mon which the boy strove to piSce together, and in so doing, put the map back together again. The problem of the world is the problem of mon. Bock of the conflict and endless wranglings that we see in the world today, is the evident, but not easily admitted, conflict which existed in man; and the jigsaw puzzling must be done there first, if we hope the world to come out right. Thus Monsignor Sheen writes in the opening lines of his well-known book, Peace of Soul, "World wars are only projections of the conflicts waged inside the souls of modem men, for nothing happens in the external world thot has not first happened within a soul.... Unless souls ore saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace unless there is soul peace." Thus is explained the unprecedented interest in religious books and the awakening to an awareness of God which the publishers and booksellers noted during the past year and the marked tendency in the present-doy leaders of thought to work on the basic problems of the individual as the only way of arriving at a solution to the problems of the world. 60 MAY, 1950 61 And thot is ths reason, too, why the Pope has summoned the world to a crusade of prayer and penance and declared this year a Holy Year because, as he said, only by a return of man to God and by sincere repentance can the crisis of the world be solved. Mon has employed every means science has invented to help him maintain peace, and at the end of it all, he finds himself closer to trouble and world annihilation than when he started. But what is the problem of man? Father Martindale, ottempts to onswer that question by stating that the problem of man is himself. Within each mon's soul, sin finds allies and to combat these and all that should make him traitor to his determination, man needs to wage o war of penance. Only when man con set his face like flint against resistance ond carry out the dictates of clear reason without flagging, can he be truly master of his household And that means a lot of ruthless and persistent pressure on his unruly desires. And so, ultimately, the big bottle of our day is over mon. Put the man right and you have a well-ordered universe. Put the mon right, and you save his soul. And no matter how far removed from Christ one moy be at present, he or she is never too far away to begin. OF SISTERS AND A TURKEY Sister Moura Kieran of the Maryknoll convent in Calacala, Bolivia, had told the house girl, Rafaela, to kill the Thonksgiving turkey. But soft-hearted Rafaela cried ot the thought of harming such a beautiful bird, Rafaela finally thought of o solution. She disappeared and returned with a glass of strong wine. "I'll get him drunk first, ond he won't know what's happening," she explained. After dinner, all the Sisters agreed that Rafaela's turkey had made on especially tasty meal. PATHETIC? Francois Mauriac on his visit to Oxford for his honorary degree was immensely impressed, as a Catholic must be, with the religious tragedy preserved in the ploce built by and for Catholics. He was standing in one of the medieval chapels looking at the woll, when a person spoke to him. "I was thinking," said Mauriac, "how in Catholic times that wall would hove had a fresco on it." ."Oh," said the other, "We are going to put a text here, from Holy Scripture." "What will it be?" said Mauriac. "The words of Mary Magdalene?" And when asked which words, he replied, "They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him." —London Tablet