Rare Periodicals

The Cross

Media

Part of The Cross

Title

The Cross

Description

Cross National Catholic Magazine Official bi-monthly organ of the KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS in the Philippines, K of C, Gen. Luna cor. Sta. Potenciana St. Intramuros, Manila

Issue Date

Volume III (Issue No.11) October 1948

Publisher

Knights of Columbus

Year

1948

Language

English

Subject

Catholic Church--Philippines--Periodicals.

Rights

Place of publication

Manila

extracted text

ANDO ?J. PMC SAY COLLECTION OCTOBER, 1948 DOBLE CARA THE CROSS IN EVERY HOME DEATH AMONG THE DEAD JAMES B. REUTER, S.J. ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN BY LILY MARLENE r-u h RARY "LA NAVAL" PLUS 300 YEARS SANTIAGO ARTIAGA, Jr. “EAST IS EAST” AMBASSADOR CARLOS P. ROMULO MILITANT YOUTH IN ACTION HERMAN MARTENS, C.I.C.M. WHY DONT PARENTS GROW UP! do YOU KNOW ™E ANSWERS? GIVE THREE OF THE NINE OFFICIAL TITLES OF THE POPE. WHAT IS THE CORRECT NAME? FOR THE? DOMINICAN ORDER? You and your family can have hours of fun and instruction answering hundreds of questions like these found in a new quiz book: A CATHOLIC QUIZ BOOK liy H. .1. Kenny anti G. Keane There are forty-two quizzes in all—enough questions to keep every member of the family busy for hours. Sharpen your wits on questions about the Bible, the Papacy and the Vatican, history, the saints, feasts and fasts and many others. Send for your copy today and see how many questions you can answer. Then turn to the back of the book and check your score. Formerly priced at P4.20, it is now sold at 1’2.95 Add 1’0.10 for postage. . Regina Building 4 15 Banquero & Escolta 4 Manila 4 Tel. No. 2-88-49 READINGS FOR THE MONTH OCTOBER October 15th—Feast of SAINT TERESA OF AVILA In her struggle for sanctity she trampled all the attractiveness of the world beneath her sandaled feet. Her beauty, charm, tenderness and humor vividly give us the woman as well as the saint. .. a woman, who “slept on bare boards like a beggar, yet expelled a princess, talked to duchesses as an equal, and scolded a king”; a saint, whose “power and clarity as a thinker” rank her with Augustine and Aquinas. SAINT TERESA OF AVILA, by William Thomas Walsh .... P12.60 MOTHER OF CARMEL, by E. Allison Peers ............................... 5.26 THE LIFE OF SAINT TERESA OF JESUS, an autobiography 7.90 THE PATER NOSTER OF ST. TERESA, a commentary by St. Teresa ................................................................................................ 3.15 THE WAY OF PERFECTION, by St. Teresa ............................... 5.80 KNOW YOUR KING, reflections on the life of the Saviour by Robert F. Grewen, S. J.................................................................... 4.20 HEART OF THE KING, by Thomas H. Moore, S. J............................55 THE ROSARY OF MARY, the translated letters of Leo XIII.. 4.20 THE SPLENDOR OF THE ROSARY, by Maisie Ward, with prayers by Caryll Houselander, and pictures by Fra Angelico.. 5.25 ROSARY STORIES FOR LITTLE FOLK, by S. Mary Jean, O. P. Here are fifteen short stories based on the mysteries of the Rosary and told in the child’s own language. Beautiful four-colored pictures drawn especially to illustrate each story, enhance the book ............................................................................................80 —MAIL ORDERS ACCEPTED: Add ten centavos for postage for each book— goofcmarfc Regina Building * 15 Banquero & Escolta * Manila * Tel. No. 2-88-49 THE fllliW 0 NATIONAL ,HI" I R 111 \ CATHOLIC I 'll Un magazine Regina Bldg., Escolta, Manila, Philippines TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIALS: Doble Cara ........................................... 3 ARTICLES: “La Naval” Plus 300 Years Santiago Artiaga, Jr........................... 7 Death Among The Dead James B. Reuter, S.J........................ 12 A Foreign Mission For The Philippines .. Jaime Neri, S.J. .. 22 “East Is East” .... Ambassador Carlos P. Romulo............................... 38 Militant Youth In Action Herman Martens, C.I.C.M..................43 Why Don’t Parents Grow Up! Estelle Safier McBride ..................... 46 A-Bomb Plus 3 Years Richard Cronin, S.J..............................49 The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of Mary Tinley Daly ............................. 53 POETRY: Forlorn .......... Federico Moreno .... 34 Presence .. Adoracion C. Trinidad .. 48 DEPARTMENTS: Heart To Heart .... Lily Marlene .. 25 Thinking With The Cross .................. 31 Horse Sense: The Politics of the Rosary .......... 35 Macaulay on the Church ................. 36 Newsmonth ............................................. 56 From the Bookshelves: XXII ........... 60 Cross Currents of Readers Views ... 63 OCTOBER, 1948 Vol. Ill No. 11 Associate Editors Mario Gatbonton Augusto H. Piedad Business Manager Raul C. Reyes Board of Editors Antonio Estrada Hermcnegildo B. Reyes Nicolas ,Zafra Enrique F. Lumba Contributing Editors Salvador Araneta Miguel Cuenco Pacita Santos Renato Arevalo THE CROSS Is a Catholic publication Issued monthly by THE CROSS MAGAZINE with the permission of the ecclesias­ tical authorities. Contributions to the Cross are welcome, pro­ vided they are in line with the policy and standards adopted by this magazine. All submitted manuscripts must be typewritten In duplicate and accompanied by return postage; otherwise no return will be made In case of rejection. Subscription rates: One year — local: P4.00; for­ eign: 93.00. Printed at Cacho Hermanos, Inc. 072 Legarda. Manila. Registered as second class mall matter at the Manila Port Office. —editorial comment-----------------------------------DOBLE CARA We here speak of a startling phenomenon that has intrigued us for quite some time. DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE Let us put it this way: Mr. X is a government official. He is also a Roman Catholic. As such he sends his children to the better known Catholic institutions of learning in Manila. There can be no gainsaying his apparent quiet determination to have his sons and daughters properly instructed and trained in the principles that make for satisfactory Christian lives. Yet mark! This very same man, in his official capacity, would have the As­ sembly Hall Tesound with his objections to having a more extensive teaching) of religion in our public schools. He would deny the little shoeless boy on the street who has to go to public school the right to learn even the bare rudiments of his basic relationship with his Creat­ or. Put it in a different manner. Mr. Z is another government official. As a Roman Catholic he subscribes heartily to the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage —as far as his own is concerned and that of his relatives and friends We had to add the qualification because— Watch! In the short distance that he travels from his house to his office, he undergoes a turnabout. In the latter place he would push through a bill for more lberal divorce laws. There is something uncanny about this. We are sure they do not do it with mirrors. Why this dual personality? Why this double face? Or is it double talk? Herewith we try to explore into the reason behind it all. We may not be able to explain everything fully but the speculations might prove of interest 3 THE CROSS EASY COME, EASY GO To begin with, it could be a weakness in our underlying faith in our religion. There is always the possibility that our adherence to the Church is prompted not so much by a deep-seated belief in her doctrines as by a passive acquiescence to custom. We are there be­ cause the waters around us flowed gently past and carried us. And it is but the goodness of Providence that the current was headed in the right direction. In a child of tender years, we might hope that circumstances be that helpful always. We expect in the growing mind of the young not so much an intellectual grasp of all the dogmas as a trusting faith that may be nurtured in due time and with due care into a truly clear-sighted and reason-bound Catholicism. Trouble is, such politicians as we have described are no longer adolescents. They are already full grown adults. Physically, at least. We sometimes are led to believe that they are still children being wafted towards wherever whimsy decides. We have always had the sneaking suspicion that the 'conversion of the early Filipinos into Roman Catholicism was altogether too easy, too quick. It is axiomatic that whatever comes in easily goes out with equal facility. If anything does stay on, it is but a dim shadow of what it should be. VANITY FAIR In the first case cited, the person seems strong in his faith, seems firmly rooted in his beliefs and shows it by sending his child­ ren to the better known Catholic colleges. That is a legitimate rebut­ tal to our satement that his faith could be weak. On closer examination, however, we are questioning even this evidence. Does it prove his unshakable Catholicism when a man sends his children to expensive Catholic schools? He could be merely striv­ ing for that sense of social importance that a recognized college—it is fancied—gives even to the most ill-born demeanor. It is not un­ heard of to have young men and women attend famous institutions just for the privilege of pasting a distinctive seal on the windshields of their cars. We might be called cynics for this, but our stand remains: that many of our officials are not so steadfast in their principles. Granting then that the faith is weak, the next step in our analy­ sis of the startling phenomenon centers on an erroneous assumption. There can be no doubt but that there is a subconscious assumption amongst us that religion is something that pertains only to specific OCTOBER, 1948 acts of individuals. As a privite citizen, Mr. X feels that he should do what his conscience tells him is proper; as an official of the gov­ ernment, he should do that which the government expects him to do. This does not yet completely explain the duality of personality be­ cause his objection to the teaching of religion in the public schools is an individual act of morality that concerns himself. He cannot get out of that even if he is unaware of it. Neither can Mr. Z This second step, however, bites a little deeper into the question of why the sudden change in attitude from home to office. We can now ask: Why is the government official or employee expected to act in a way contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church? Pushed this far, we are face to face with the ugly fact that our government, in common with most governments of the present world, has a distaste for religion. A prejudice against religion has been in­ sidiously absorbed by our political body from the rabid agnosticism of past years. We have to blame the Masonic movement for one thing. It was once the goal of every aspiring politician who wanted to get ahead fast to be admitted into its ranks. And once in, they outdid each ether in the expression of their profound conviction that they were men of the world and had outgrown the ignorance and superstition of religion. Happily, this is not the case so much now, but the aftertaste lingTHE LUBITCH TOUCH We have to blame too, that worship of the material that has come with some of the exponents of so-called progressive Americanism. Our instinct for imitation is such that we as a people do not stop to pick and choose. And in our haste to put on the borrowed garments, oftentimes, we fail to see what is appropriate and what is not. Certainly we have failed to perceive that the greatness of Amer­ ica has been founded on the observance of strict, puritanical and straightlaced religion, and not on Hollywood chromium-plated materialThis brings us, we think, right up to the case of Mr. Z. His ad­ vocacy of divorce might be just a subconscious attempt to attain that supposedly high degree of sophistication as glamourized by the THE CROSS Lubitch touch. The thought progression goes something like this: “It’s the smart thing to do. The smart people of Beverly Hills do it. Let us be smart too. Why not?” Unconsciously, therefore, our government acquired a definite re­ pulsion towards the Catholic Church that, fortunately, is dying but* has not totally lost all its strength. Taking its place is a rapidly spread­ ing indifference for everything spiritual that is just as bad, for it, as efficiently as the former, still inhibits the flowering of genuine religious fervor in our government officials no matter how sincerely moved they may be to put their faith into practice in the Philip­ pines. LOOKING FORWARD In France, England and the United States, thinking men are slowly awakening to the fact that a return to the appreciation of the right spiritual values is needed if this chaotic world is to be set right again. We will most probably follow suit; but must it be,, as usual, after the other nations have long profited by it? True, there are in our midst some valiant souls who have shown no fear or timidity to put their Catholic principles into practice in their private lives. These are the men who can and who are giving real, lasting solutions to the many irksome problems of our country. But these men are few. The great portion of them are timid and fear-ridden about their faith. Pathetic this, that in their frantic struggle for pre-eminence they should not avail themselves of such an indispensable ingredient to real greatness; that they should unwittingly throw away that powerful factor that would transform them from mere politicians to real statesmen. Modern philosophy defined: A blind man searching in a dark room for what is not there. “Jesus is ideal and wonderful,” said Bara Dada, the philo­ sopher of India, “but you Christians—yob are not like Him.” The story of our people’s fierce devotion to “Santo Rosario” "LA NAVAL" PLUS 300 YEARS By Santiago Artiaga, Jr. THIS is the story of two gal­ leons almost pathetic in their contest against fifteen enemy ves­ sels. This is the story of a peo­ ple, whose nation was to be made secure by the victory achieved by those two galleons. But above all this is the story of a Lady, a grand Lady, beloved of a whole people, who came to the rescue of a small band of devotees and turned the foe away and made him take “to flight with lamps extinguished.” For this is the story of “La Naval de Manila”. A story fash­ ioned by faith, interwoven with legend and made conclusive in old chronicles, dusty with age and voluminous with testimonies. IN 1646 when the Filipino na­ tion was young with the youth of the recently enlightened, there arose a threat to its existence. The waters of Baptism were ba­ rely dry upon its brow when an alien despot made bold to sail in its waters bent on conquest. It was no ordinary matter. It was a shadow cast, not only upon land where the Spanish sun never set, but on the very faith of our fa­ thers. From that contest would emerge a people steeped in the Rosary devotion; a people who annually would flock to the feet of the Virgin of “La Naval’’ to give public testimony of their trust in her. Even as in 1646, bereft of all preparations, the two galleons of legend sailed away confident that their greatest power “was in their spiritual graces and the faith they had in their Mother in Hea­ ven”. The battles were five in number. The dates ranged from March to October, 1646. The disparity between the for­ ces was glaring. The enemy co­ unted “with fifteen new vessels, powerfully armed and manned by eight hundred men”. The Catho­ lic Fleet “was made up of two old galleons “La Encarnacion” and “La Rosario”, with small fire power, manned by some two hundred Spanish-Filipino forces had two other vessels in reserve but these were two measly brigs aided by two Chinese junks and a heavy and unmaneuverable “escort vessel” of doubtful cate­ gory and more doubtful arma­ ment. THE CROSS | T is not easy to describe a sea 1 battle of the 17th century. How vastly different they were from our days of air recon­ naissance, of submarines and ra­ dar-guided topedoes and blow-byblow communiques from a Commander-in-Chief ten thousand miles away! Then, battles were the bloody and gory things that have formed part of the tradition of arms of all self-respecting na­ tions. Contests, in which might and mind found expression in screaming ponderous cannon-balls, in sails raised and cut in the height of conflict, of treacherous "five vessels” creeping towards the foe and the wild exhilarating boarding of his vessel for the last and climatic “man-to-man fight”. It was so in 1646. The first report of the enemy’s approach was received by the authorities at Manila, in March, 1646. The information was to the effect that a powerful enemy fleet was marauding around Philippine waters and fear for the nation’s integrity was expressed in all quarters. Stung to the quick by this challenge to Castilian domin­ ance of the seas of the Philip­ pines, serious-miened high officers of the colonial government decided upon an almost rash venture. The opponent was to be met at sea. There, where he had flung his insolence, would he be hum­ bled. But with what? With two vessels—“La Encamacidn” and “La Rosario”, for every Spanish vessel was the equal of four or even seven of the ships of any nation. Thus, it was that they sailed away — these fashioners of dreams, these early heroes in whose veins flowed the .blood warmed in the sunny lands of Spain and the blood nurtured in the placid emerald isles 'of the Philippines to which one day the Malayan had come. They sailed. Confident “more in their spiritual powers than in the safety of their vessels". In the long nights of the vigil, with the sails billowing in the virgin air of the Philippine skies, with the planks on deck creaking with the added weight of unaccustomed arms, they sailed away—these crusaders of 1646. And the clear, silent evenings were disturbed only by the lapping of the waves on the sides s>i the ships on the alert and by the incense of pray­ ers that rose from both Catholic ships. For in each of them, a nook had been reserved for the the Virgin of the Most Holy Ro­ sary. “The men prayed the Rosary on their knees and in two choirs”, for in spite of their bravery and their determination "they real­ ized that their strength laid in her”. I N the midnight of the 15th of A March, 1646, in the northern passages of Bolinao—so common an avenue for invaders of the OCTOBER, 1948 Philippines—just after the five bells of the hours, the alarm was given. The foe had been sighted. Five powerful vessels, five dots on the horizon, five insults to our love for her approaching inexor­ ably in the inevitableness of bat­ tle. The men took their stations. A feverish waiting ensues as the cannons are divested of their co­ verings, sand poured over the slippery patches of the deck, and the water pails—ominous portent of feared fires—aTe made ready. A silence falls. It is the silence of the moment before the curtain is raised. Then, from the ga­ thered men there comes a voice which the rends the silence. A voice vibrant and manly and yet filled with awe: "The First Mystery....’’ And the men an­ swer: “Hail Mary, full of grace .... ” They come to that most fervent of pleas: “Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, Pray for us”. Then, there is no silence, there are no galleons, there are no men.... there is only a loving, throbbing faith as the men of "La Naval" pray and as the cen­ turies listen. It is only at two in the after­ noon that the ships come within of “La Naval". Two against range. This is the first battle five. A terrific cannonade from the enemy opens the fray. The Rosary galleons answer in kind. In the Catholic ships no man is idle. There is much to be done. Firing incessantly, praying inces­ santly, they fight till seven in the evening when “the enemy takes to flight with lamps extinguish­ ed”. These will be repeated four more times. These lamps that are extinguished and which plunges the opposing fleet into a darkness that is as black as their heresy. There is wild rejoicing on board the two vessels. Their prayers have been answered. Now, the Rosary is in thanksgiving. These, too, will be repeated; this praying in thanksgiving and this lighting of lamps before her altar—lamps whose light is a pale symbol of the white-hot flame of faith that sears men’s souls, makes them pure and lays them at the feet of the Virgin of the Most 'Holy Rosary. Both contenders retire from the fray licking their wounds. The enemy has lost its flagship. The two galleons are badly battered "A man, Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “should keep his friend­ ships in constant repair.” * • ♦ ♦ Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was the fifth.—Clarence Darrow. 10 but sail to greater glories, to write the next chapters of "La Naval”. IT is at Banton and Marinduque, on 29th July, 1646, that the two fleets meet for the second time. The foe has brought to the fight seven new vessels. They have come gaily decorated, al­ most cocky, in the power of their armament and the superiority of their equipment. Had they not bottled up the "two chickens” in the narrow confines of Ticao? For two months the Spanish ves­ sels were at anchor at the cape of Ticao nob venturing to come out while the opponent held them at bay. It was when the alien privateers had turned towards Manila, that the Spanish vessels took to sail on July 25—the Day of Santiago, patron of Spain— and chased the enemy! To the foe this was impudence and he met it with ridicule. Closing in for the battle, at about in the evening, the enemy displayed its flags and had a band on board. How little he knew what awaited him! The “La Encarnacion” and “La Rosa­ rio” had something more. For on board they carried Her who was to be their Protectress and under whose mantle they would sail to victory. That battle lasted until the sunrise of the-next day. But what a change was under­ gone by the enemy! Gone were its flags and silent its bands. Pathetically it took to flight amidst the parring mockery of a Portuguese soldier who shouted at them: “Why don’t you play your flutes? Display your flags, mine brothers!” THE third battle is fought be­ tween the Islands of Maestre de Campo and Mindoro. It lasts from two in the afternoon to “the striking of the Angelus”. Once more the enemy takes to flight and the chronicles begin to call the two galleons—"the gal­ leons of the miracle”. There is justification for such a name. Even before the second battle, while ringed-'in in the Cape of Ticao he men in the Ship of the General take a vow. “The vow consists in going to Santo Domingo barefooted to give public manifestation of their gratitude to the Virgin and of instituting an annual feast in Her honor.” Later, when the Admiral, in the other ship, is informed of this vow he replies "that he has made it even with­ out knowing what was going on in the other ship.” There is a unanimity of faith. This vow is significant. It is the vow of "La Naval”, a vow celebrated annually in Octo­ ber. This is the vow that is the expression of the people’s devo­ tion to the Virgin of the Rosary —the Virgin beloved in their na­ tional annals with the name* of "Santo Rosario”. OCTOBER, 1948 11 ON 24th September, 1646 the two contenders again meet near the islands of Luban and Ambil. For ten hours the battle rages. The enemy is persistent and the men of “La Naval” are confident. They have had time to fulfill their vow. They have visited Santo Domingo and the whole nation knows of their ex­ ploits. When they sallied forth again, at the first indications of the enemy’s return, they an­ swered with a loud, stentorian, “YES” when their Chaplain asked them if they desired to re­ new the vow. The result is inevitable. The “foe takes to flight with lamps extinguished”. THEY meet the enemy, again, for the last time on 3rd Oc­ tober, 1646. It is the month of the Rosary. The miracle that is wrought then places the final note of confirmation on the wonders that had come about. One of the Spanish vessels at anchor is attacked by three enemy ships in front of Mariveles. Tied as she is, the veteran of so many battles, answers to the enemy fire, almost gleefully. It is as if she realizes she is being given an added opportunity of proving the protection of the Queen. For four hours the fights on and the foe gnashes teeth as the Spanish ship opens gaping wounds On his men-of-war. Finally, he gives up and shamelessly runs away never again to bother the Philippine coasts. THIS is the story of two gal­ leons almost pathetic in their contests against fifteen enemy vessels. This is the story of a people whose faith brought them safety. This is the story of a beloved Lady, who came to the rescue of her devotees and turned the enemies of faith away. This is something more. This is also the story of “Santo Rosa­ rio"—of the devotion of the Ro­ sary in the Philippine lands; the story of the Crown of Roses re­ cited in the Filipino home; of the Rosary at Fort Santiago; of the Rosary of the candelit confines of Santo Domingo, the Martyred Church; the Rosary of the so­ lemn processions — the Rosary that is part and parcel, flesh and bone, of Catholic Philippines.— From "Sto. Rosario**. IGNORANCE NOT BLISS The author of this story swears to its truth and uses it to show the effects of Godless education. A newspaper reporter once wrote a story in which he mentioned Mary Magdalene. The Editor was irritated at the reporter for not mentioning who Mary Magdalene was, but his irritation increased ten-fold when he looked her up in “Who’s Who in America” and couldn’t find her listed! DEATH AMONG THE DEAD James B. Reuter, S.J. Condensed from a pamphlet HE DIED in the hold, halfnaked, lying on the floor in the darkness and filth, among men who were too accustomed to death and too near death themselves to make any fuss over him. When he was dead, they stripped the body, giving what clothes he had to the living, and then they drag­ ged the corpse into the patch of light underneath the hatchway. They left it there until six bodies accumulated. Then the boatswain, whose duty it was, tied a running bowline around the knees and a half-hitch around the neck, looked up, and called, “All right. Take it away." The rope tightened, and the body of Carl W. J. Hausmann rose slowly up the shaft of sunlight, gaunt, bronzed, naked, while the men watched dully, wondering when they would go up that way too. The body bumped against the hatch and slid out of sight. They could hear the shuffle of feet and the jabber of Japanese as it was dragged across the deck and stacked near the railing with the other American dead. A sailor said, “It’s tough. He was a good man. He knew Ja­ panese.” Carl Hausmann died as an of­ ficer in the Army of the U. S.; the citation the government even­ tually sent to his mother never mentioned the fact that he was a chaplain, a priest—but he had come down into the tropics as a missionary. He had once been pastor to the lepers on Culion in the Philippines. And it was not only Japanese he knew; he could speak ten languages. When he organized the lepers’ glee club on Culion, the singers could not always understand each other, because they came from dif­ ferent islands and spoke different languages. But they all under­ stood Carl. He was their bond of union. In him they were united. He taught the tenors in Tagalog, the basses in Visayan, the very old in Spanish, and the very young in English. He had a natural gift of tongues. In the prison camps of Minda­ nao, merely by listening to the guards and asking them ques­ tions, he learned a little Japanese. With his Japanese grammar he learned swiftly, because his mind was calm, orderly, peaceful. 12 OCTOBER, 1948 13 After his ordination as a priest of the Society of Jesus he was sent to the tropics. His first job was procurator and teacher of Greek in a Philippine novitiate. It was not quite the way he had dreamed it: studying native dia­ lects at night by the light of a kerosene lamp, stripped to the waist, with a towel around his neck to soak up the sweat; bal­ ancing books and checking over bills before he went to bed; wak­ ing to stare at the white mosquito net and wonder where the money would come from to keep the no­ vitiate going; listening to the lizards on the wall calling, "Gecko! Gecko!” He had not con­ templated Mass before daylight amid a buzzing of bugs, pronoun­ cing the words of Consecration while holding one hand over the chalice to prevent the insects from falling into it; watching roaches at breakfast crawling across the table, climbing up the coffee pot; walking in the morning sun in the white dust of a road, his sweatsoaked cassock plastered against his back, to teach catechism; chop­ ping down the cogon grass with the native laborers, grass that grew to be 12 feet high, and blush­ ing when he paid the men 50 £ a day. He had not looked forward to reading his office on his knees in the chapel in the early after­ noon, regularly, every day, for two years, while the bright sun beat down on the tin roof and the white heat stood still around him—immersed in heat, bathed in it, breathing it, then the darkness and coolness of the rain; teaching Greek in the evening to bright­ eyed young Filipinos while the rain washed the windows and drummed on the bamboo walls— that was nice; waking to the rain for six months on end—the cons­ tant sound and smell of it as it fell steadily night and day, drip­ ping from the roof. But Carl liked the tropics, and the Filipinos liked him, his calm­ ness, the humor in his eyes, his patient grin, his willingness to work and learn, the breadth of his shoulders, his gentleness in the classroom. He was a big, lean man, and strong; but in class he was as understanding as a mother, blaming himself if ever his pupils did not get the matter. The priests who lived with him sometimes sank into chairs in the recreation room and damned the world in general, grumbling about the meals, the monotony, their schedule, rain, heat. This is the privilege of men who are work­ ing hard. They don’t really mean it, and it seems to make them feel better. But in those sessions Carl Hausmann would say nothing at all. He would sit In silence memor­ izing Tagalog or Visayan words from little slips of paper which he carried in all his pockets. He never protested about anything. 14 THE CROSS The only thing he did not like about his job was that it was too easy. He volunteered for Culion. Once he had read an article by a wo­ man traveler who had paid a fly­ ing visit to a leper colony in China. She .reported in a gush of fervor that lepers were the happiest people in the world, because, hav­ ing nothing else to live for, they turned completely to God. He won­ dered...? He arrived at the is­ land, and it was not true. Lepers are like everybody else. Years later his memories of the colony were not all beautiful: the eyes of the old sick ones as they watched a new shipload of patients coming; the shrewdness and greed in their high shrill voices as they tried to establish some distant re­ lationship with a strong small boy, so that they could take him to their hut and have him work for them; the anger of the young men when the nuns set up a protective dor­ mitory for girls; the sallow faces peering in through the bars, cur­ sing the Sisters; the lepers on their beds who laughed at him and said, “If there is a God, then why do we suffer so?”; the leper sit­ ting on the edge of his bed in the early morning, receiving Commu­ nion—the later startling discovery that he had not been to confes­ sion in years, and his indifferent shrug, saying, “Well, why not? You give. I take”; the sullen lepers who went out on the sea in tiny fishing boats, working savagely in the sun, so that the fever would take them and they would die. But there were sweet things, too: his glee club and the orches­ tra; the young lepers who wept for their sins and begged for a great penance because they wanted to be good; giving Communion to the little children whose heads would not come up above the altar rail—they stood with their hands folded across their breasts, with the leprosy in their faces and in­ nocence in their eyes; the grati­ tude of the bad cases..in the hos­ pital when he came to them each day ; the smile of the sick when he spoke to them in their own tongue; the quiet tears when he anointed them; the last pressure of thefr hands on his just before they died; the eyes that followed him through the wards, worship­ ing eyes, so grateful that there were still good men in the world; the sudden deep resolve to pray more, and work harder, to be worthy of these lepers who loved him; back home repairing the roof on his chapel as the sun went down; the little shiver of satis­ faction, the feeling of strength hnd power that comes from working with your own hands; writing the history of the colony in the even­ ing; writing to his mother in-German; reading Greek, because he OCTOBER, 1948 15 liked it; the moonlit nights by the sea, when the children of lepers, bom on the island but born clean, took his hand and asked him ques­ tions about Manila and New York and lands other than Culion. He felt when he went to bed that the work was good, that he was doing something. He prob­ ably would have felt the same to­ ward any souls that came un­ der his care; it just happened that the lepers were assigned to him. Still his heartstrings were all wound around Culion when finally his transfer came. Gaunt, drawn, sick, he did not want to go. Superiors had sent him there, and superiors took him away. He stood in the back of the boat, and the children sang for him on the shore, and he watched the island until it was a line on the face of the sea, until it was gone. Mindanao, which was his des­ tination, is not the largest tropical island in the world, but it is very big. It has an area of 36,000 square miles and a population of nearly >/2. million. Its southern tip lies about 5>/2° north of the equa­ tor. It contains Mohammedan Moros, famous for head-hunting, and wild black dwarfs called Ne­ gritos, famous for poisonous blow­ pipes. The island has cities, of -course, with schools and colleges, hundreds of thousands of good Filipino Catholics. But large chunks of Mindanao are marked on the map as unexplored. Most of the people live in tiny towns and villages called barrios, buried in the hills, and it is a priest’s job to get to them. Some priests are able to rattle cheerfully over the mountains in flivvers which civilization has long since aban­ doned; some ride through the passes on horseback; the Belgians go by bicycle. Carl walked. His new parish was all moun­ tains and jungle, with swamps springing up in the rainy season. He could get to the villages much faster on foot through the forest paths than by the circuitous route of the roads. It was here that the war closed in on him. The first real signs that he saw and heard were Japa­ nese planes roaring low over the trees. For months our army fought on Mindanao coasts with­ out air or artillery support. Then the Americans began a slow, bloody retreat back into the inte­ rior hills. In a town called Impulatao they set up a base hos­ pital, to which they carried the wounded from Digos, Davao, and Zamboanga. The chief surgeon was Doctor Davis, newly enlisted in the army. He had been a civi­ lian, practicing in Negros, until the war swept over the islands. The hospital had no chaplain at all. Then one morning as he was driving in toward the town, the 16 THE CROSS doctor saw a tall, lean figure striding along the road ahead of him, dressed in a white cassock. The doctor pulled up alongside, and said, “Where to?” “Hospital,” said Carl. “What do you want to go to the hospital for?” “I thought that they might need a priest.” They did need him badly, be­ cause the Americans were losing on all fronts; more wounded were pouring into the hospital than the staff could handle, and he was the only priest. Eventually, at the request of the hospital com­ manding officer and with the per­ mission of his own superior, he became a regular military cha­ plain. They inducted him form­ ally. Two days later the army surrendered, the Japanese came in, and he was a prisoner of war. Carl’s career as a captive be­ gan when the stocky, confident, slant-eyed little guards marched all the Americans into a barbed­ wire pen at Impulatao in Minda­ nao. It wasn't so bad at first. Carl had never set much stock on food. He didn’t mind the rice. He built a wooden altar in the barracks, with tabernacle, and said Mass for the men every morning. But then they were transferred to the penal colony at Davao to work in the rice fields. This was not so good: rations down to rice and greens; constant hunger; long days in the sun, no water to bathe in, not enough water to drink; skin disease and dysentery—dy­ sentery, the curse of every prison camp in the tropics, wasting'big men down to bony frames with yellow skin and sunken eyes; hun­ dreds of sweating men sleeping close together like galley slaves; roll call tn the morning, the burial of the dead. Here Carl began to put wine into his chalice with an eyedrop­ per, pronouncing the words of Consecration over a small host, giving the men tiny fragments for Communion. He tried to stretch the hosts and wine, because no one knew how long the war would last. It was two years already. Then the altar breads ran out, and Mass stopped altogether. The labor crews went into the rice fields in orderly rotation, so that each man would have regular days to rest. The major in charge of Carl's barracks, who later died with him on the boat, noticed that Carl was always in the fields, substituting on his rest days for other men. The major didn’t like it. He himself was in charge of assigning men to work details, be­ cause the Japanese merely de­ manded a certain amount of work from each barracks, and they didn’t care who did it. Because OCTOBER, 1948 17 the major thought he had made a just distribution of labor, he questioned Carl about those whose places he was taking. “They’re sick,” said Carl, "and they can’t work.” “He said they were sick,” the major repeated, months later, in the hold of the ship, “and my God, you should have seen him! His body was a mass of festering scabs from rice rash.” Late in June, 1944, the Davao prisoners were shipped north to Cabanatuan on Luzon. It was a big camp, filled with the survivors of Bataan and Corregidor. They worked on a Japanese airdrome. Carl was bearded and bronze as a native now, indistinguishable in the truckloads of half-naked men who were carried at dawn each day from the camp to the airfield. He was just another laborer in a crowd of laborers, pushing a wheelbarrow in the sun. He was just another bent back shoveling shale, one more mouth in the rice line, one more hungry American soldier climbing back into the Jap­ anese truck at night, standing, waiting while the others packed in too, until their bodies pressed close together, jolting back to the barracks in the darkness with his arms thrown across the shoulders of his fellow prisoners, too tired to talk. At night he was like every­ one else too: he prayed for free­ dom and dreamed of food. But there was an altar at Ca­ banatuan, and hosts and wine, and every morning by candlelight he said Mass. That made him dif­ ferent. It left a glow within him which lasted through the day. He said Mass so reverently that even the other priests were impressed, and non-Catholics came to watch him. Catholics called him “St. Joseph.” Non-Catholics called him “the Holy Ghost.” They did not mean to be irreverent. It was merely their way of indicating that to them he stood for the whole of Christianity, for religion in general, for God. When men met him, they began immediately to think of heaven and hell and their own private sins. One survivor who knew him only slightly said, “Maybe he was too much at home with God. He was so thoroughly in the state of grace that it made the rest of us feel unclean, uncomfortable. It’s not natural for a man to give away his food when he is starv­ ing, to work for someone else when he himself can hardly stand up. Holiness is an easy thing to hate, and he was holy, but we liked him." He never complained, fought back, nor cursed his captors. He never even lost his temper with the kleptomaniac in the camp who stole his Mass kit and offered to sell it back to him piece by piece. 18 THE CROSS He obeyed superior officers im­ mediately and without question. General Sharp testifies that he was a splendid soldier. Once he resisted the guards. It was a gray morning late in No­ vember, 1944, in the stone court­ yard of Old Bilibid penitentiary, Manila. He was saying Mass. It was his fourth prison camp and his 31st month as a prisoner. He had no shoes, but he still had vest­ ments and a missal, and a Filipina woman had sent wine and hosts through a Japanese colonel. Bare­ foot, bearded, with the men kneel­ ing behind him on the stones, and his corporal spread on a packing box, he had just begun the Con­ secration when the siren sounded. It meant they were under air raid, that American planes were over the city, and prisoners should get to their cells. The men scattered reluctantly, while Carl went on with the Mass. A guard barked at him, but he stood with his eyes on the Host and did not move. The guard came up, barked again, and struck him with the butt of his rifle. Carl would not move. A seaman who saw the thing says the guard flew into a sudden wild rage and began to club the priest, beating him with the rifle butt for a full ten minutes. The sailor’s estimate of time during a crisis like that is probably not reliable; such a tenminute beating should have killed him. Other prisoners ran shout­ ing into the courtyard, and the angry guard left the altar to drive them back. When he had gone, Carl finished the Consecration of the chalice, consumed the Body and Blood, and went back to his cell. Toward mid-December, 1944, the Japanese shipped 1,619 prisoners of war out of Manila bay, out into the China sea, in a liner called the Oroyku Maru. It was bound for Japan, but American subma­ rines sighted it before it had clear­ ed the mouth of the harbor. American planes bombed and strafed it for a night And a day, driving it in toward shore, until it ran aground off Olongapo in Subic bay. There the planes came in low and planted three bombs squarely in the rear hold. There was panic below decks, and the prisoners made a bolt for the ladders, swarming one over the other up to the hatchway. The terrified Japanese turned machine guns on them, firing point-blank, forcing them back into the bowels of the ship. Then the Oroyku Maru caught fire, the ammunition exploded, and the Japanese began to push off,in lifeboats. At last the prisoners were allowed to abandon ship too, and they poured up into the morn­ ing sunlight, wild-eyed, half­ starved, most of them wounded. They went over the side into the OCTOBER, 1948 19 sea. The water was cool, calm, green in the tropic sun, and Carl Hausmann swam easily through the oil and wreckage, feeling the smart of the- salt water in his wounds, cheering as the American planes dove and fountains of flame sprang from the Oroyku Maru. It was a swim of only 500 yards, and some of the men dreamed of escape into the hinterland. But a division of Japanese infantry was encamped on shore. When Carl crawled up on the beach, they had already set up a perim­ eter around the strip of white sand; and wherever he looked, little yellow men sat silently be­ hind their .machine guns, waiting for someone to make a break. It was sinister and dramatic, like a moving picture, only it was real. After a while, they were march­ ed off to a tennis court, where they stayed for a week without cover, roasting in the sun by day and shivering on the cement by night in the swift temperature change common in the tropics. The heat and cold seemed only a little thing, but it is what those who went through it remember most. It was worse than hunger and thirst. Four times during the seven days each man received one tablespoonful of raw rice. There was no other food and very little water. They buried their dead in the soft dirt beBide the court. The living were packed into a freighter; Carl was assigned to a spot low in the stern, above the propeller shaft. It was a lucky position. Off Takao in Formosa the bom­ bers came again, and scored a direct hit in the forward hold. The Japanese looked down at the bloody mess, at the welter of wounded and dying and dead In the hold. Then they locked the hatch and kept it locked for 48 hours as the ship limped into port. The forward hold was filed with agony. At night it was pitch black, with the living pinned be­ neath the corpses, and the blood of the dead running down over them, and the wounded crying for help, and no one able to help any­ one else. At dawn the light trickled through cracks in the deck; but with it came the sight of bodies, the sight of open wounds and the faces of the dying. With the sun came the heat and the stench. Men wept with pain and crept up the steel ladder and beat on the cover of the hatch, begging to be released. That is why the papers called thi6 a hell ship. There was no relief for ten days. Then in the harbor a barge came alongside with a boom and tackle and cargo net, and the Ja­ panese opened the hatch. Of the 600 men who were in that hold, only seven were still alive. 20 THE CHOSE Carl lay on the deck in the sun­ light and watched the wire net rise out of the hold, filled with the naked bodies of his friends. The net swung over the side and down to the barge, dumping its load in a tangle of arms and legs and upturned faces. It came back empty, throwing its shadow across the deck, and dipped again into the hold. The barge was overloaded when finally it made for shore, where the prisoners who were liv­ ing tied ropes around the ankles of the dead and dragged them up on the beach, leaving them there for Japanese cremation. Actually the rest of the voyage was so ghastly that solid, sober citizens have to read four accounts of it by independent witnesses be­ fore they begin to believe it. The deliberate starvation, each man receiving every three days half a cup of rice and a quarter of a cup of water; naked men sleeping in sitting posture, with their heads down and their arms around their knees like Indian fakirs praying; the boatswain making the rounds in the gray light of morning, put­ ting his hands on each man to see if he was alive or dead; the bo­ dies being hauled out of the hold; old grudges coming to the fore in the darkness; suicide and murder. A young pharmacist’s mate crept over to a cluster of warrant officers and said, "Look. I’ve lost my nerve. The fellows in my bay are plotting to kill me.” They told him it was his imagination, a case of nerves, that he must follow the general order and go back to his bay. He shook his head and said, "It's not my imagination.” But he went back. And in the morn­ ing they found him dead, with his stomach slit open. A navy chaplain kept reading aloud from his Bible. If ever you have had this done to you when you were under strain, hour after hour, you know what a torture it is. The men around him cursed and gritted their teeth and stop­ ped their ears. But suddenly the chaplain screamed, began to tear the pages out of the book, and throw them around the hold, wild­ ly. He bolted for the ladder and got halfway up before the men pulled him back and tied him down. A sailor tried to slip up that ladder at night. There were three quick shots from the guard, and the body slumped back into the hold. Flies and stench and festering wounds. The four cans which the Japanese had given them to use, as latrines were filled and flow­ ing over, dysentery, diarrhea, filth everywhere. Father Cummings standing up in the hold, strong and praying; Father CummingB too weak to pray any more; Fa­ OCTOBER, 1948 21 ther Cummings dead, his body being hauled out of the hold, up into the light; Father Duffy deli­ rious in a corner, demanding they bring him ham and eggs; heat, suffocation, fever—a man going mad with thirst and knifing his neighbor, slashing his wrists and sucking his blood before the boy was dead; the bodies being hauled out of the hold—hunger and thirst, madness and blank despair. It was in this dark hold, where he had absolved so many sinners, that Father Hausmann made his own last confession, was sorry for all his sins, blessed himself, and died. In the pocket of his ragged shorts, after the body had been hauled up on deck, they found his rosary and his stole, the only things he had saved. It is not certain that he was buried in the Japanese sea. At one moment the corpses were stacked near the railing; a little later, when one of the men was brought up on deck, they were gone. There was no sign of them, not even in the sea. Some of the bodies were long dead and should have floated. The man saw streaks on the deck from the spot near the railing to the hatch which led to the boiler room. Perhaps the Japanese, who needed fuel badly, used the bodies to stoke the ship on toward Japan. It was a strange ending for such a gentle, quiet priest. MISSION UNACCOMPLISHED The class, composed mainly of veterans, was taking a psychology exam. One Bright Boy, who literally knew all the answers, began tapping them out in Morse code. But seconds later on answering tapping came from the instructor’s desk. “Too bad, boys; I was in the Army, too.*’ The Mundelein College Review ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ Joe Stalin reported his pipe had been stolen. The next morning the secret-police chief announced with pride that 12 suspects had been arrested. “Well,” said Joe, “I found the pipe in my other coat, so you can release the lot.” “But we can’t,” said the police chief in horror, “they’ve all confessed.” —Ceylon Messenger An appraisal of our nation’s spiritual destiny A FOREIGN MISSION FOR THE PHILIPPINES Jaime Neri, S.J. To some readers the title of this article may prove confusing, for the Philippines has always been considered a mission field. And rightly so, for countless thousands who never heard the name of Christ still dwell in these isles. This holds true for the Moros who live along the southwestern coast of Mindanao and the Sulu Islands, as well as for the pagans in the hinterlands of Luzon, Mindanao, Mindoro, and Palawan. The problem of sending mission­ aries to these non-christians is made more acute by the demand for apostles among the Christians themselves. There are simply not enough priests. Indeed a large proportion of the priests are for­ eign missionaries who are active­ ly engaged in educational and pa­ rish work. Only a handful of these missionaries are working exclu­ sively among the heathens. Hence, the term "mission” has a double meaning for the Philippines — the Non-Christian mission and the mission to the Christian people. Both missions are in grave need of workers. “With all these pressing de­ mands, why should the Philippines turn her eyes elsewhere?” one may well ask. To answer -this quite legitimate inquiry, several considerations must be weighed:— HISTORICALLY — the Philip­ pines once had a foreign mission. True, she had been the object and the crowning glory of Spain’s spi­ ritual conquest in the Orient. But not long thereafter, she began to share Spain’s glorious efforts in pushing forward the rim of Christ­ endom in Asia; in fact, she more than did her share in shattering the outer bourne of the Moham­ medan crescent. Mustered into the missionary squadrons of Europe and Mexico, her sons helped to establish spi­ ritual beacheads on the mainland of Asia and the Pacific Islands. For in her heyday, the Philippines was the springboard of Christian­ ity in the Far East. China, Ja­ pan, Indochina, and the Marianas felt the missionary zeal which ra­ diated from this Christian light­ house off the coast of Asia. GEOGRAPHICALLY—the Phil­ ippines lies at the very heart of the lands washed by the western waters of the Pacific and the Chi22 OCTOBER. 1948 23 na Sea. She is the very center of the bowl formed by the south­ eastern periphery of Asia and the great chain of West Pacific Is­ lands. When her greatest hero, Rizal, proclaimed the Philippines to be the “Perla del mar del Oriente”, he had in mind this natural geographic centrality rather than the luxurious abundance of natu­ ral beauty which God lavished upon her. POLITICALLY—World War II decidedly placed the Philippines on the map. Until then, the Philip­ pines was to the rest of the world, an abode of “leisure-loving South Sea Islanders”. And in America the seeming champions of her fight for political freedom were in reality lobbyists for their own na­ tive sugar and margarine inte­ rest! But the heroic struggle of Filipinos side by side with Amer­ icans on Bataan and Corregidor, focussed the attention of the world on the Filipinos’ fight for freedom. It was only fitting then, that she who sacrificed the flower of her youth for freedom’s cause, should enjoy that freedom as her own. Her Declaration of Inde­ pendence in 1946 has become a loadstone attracting the eyes of other oriental nations, still under the domination of the Occident. India, Burma, Indonesia, Indo­ china, Malayan-all look to the Philippines as a cynosure. She has managed well her first falter­ ing steps, as Democracy’s first­ born in the Far East, and despite appalling difficulties, is pressing bravely forward. SPIRITUALLY—Filipino Catho­ licism has not the glorious history of the Church in Japan which in 60 short a time bloomed with mar­ tyrs, then underwent a winter of existence comparable only to the days of the Catacombs. But the Philippines has kept the Faith for the last four centuries and more in spite of heavy odds from within and from without. To this day she remains the only Christian nation in the Orient. For she too lives in the frame­ work of that civilization which ever turns Romeward. May we not then hope that the political prestige of the new Republic may lend to Filipino Catholicism a new dignity and interest in the eyes of her Oriental Neighbors? HER OBLIGATION — Charity demands that as the recipient of the great gift of Faith, she should share it with the less fortunate of her Oriental brethren. To them she must serve as the bea­ con of Gospel Truth to light the darkness of paganism around her. Are not the words of Christ to Peter applicable to her? "But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith shall fail not: and thou be­ ing once converted, confirm thy brethren.” She must not hide her 24 THE CROSS lamp in a bushel, for her hour has come to swing into action in the foreign field. She must take her share of the work of the Church in these perilous times, and her sons should look beyond the confines of her boundaries and hasten to assist the Church legions now battling against tremendous odds among her Asiatic brethren. One of the glories of the Church in America lies in this, that while she could make good use in her own home missions of all missionaries she has sent abroad, still her generosity prompted her to be mindful of the less fortu­ nate people of other lands. For this magnanimity God has blessed her immensely. And the Philip­ pines will be the recipient of si­ milar blessings from the hands of God, if she too heeds the fall. And to those spiritual isolationists who tenaciously cling to the old adage that charity begins at home, we can reply in the words of Boston’s Mission-minded Arch­ bishop, “If we are generous to the missions, God will be generous to us at home”. TAMING OF THE SHREW? The bishop came each year for Confirmation and in his preliminary quiz always asked the same questions of the children. The shrewd nun had noticed this and coached her charges accordingly. The first boy would be asked, “Who made you?” The second boy would be asked “Who were our first parents?” This year the bishop came late and the first boy had to leave the room. Hence when the bishop arrived the second boy was ffrst. “Who made you?” the Bishop asked of this lad. “Adam and Eve,” stoutly affirmed the boy. “No, no,” said the Bishop. “Think hard! Who made you?” “Adam and Eve,” reiterated the youngster with convic­ tion. “Come, come,” said the Bishop smiling. “You know better than that Didn’t God make you?" “No, Your Excellency,” responded the boy. “The little boy whom God made left the room.” HEART TO HEART Advice to the lovelorn by Lily Marlene Angeles, Pampanga Dear Miss Marlene, I am a girl in my early twenties. A young man of good family stock has been going after me for sometime now. My friends believe that we are already engaged. But we aren’t. My family seems to take for granted that I have fallen for him and that I am going to marry him. He is a very intelligent young man, no doubt, with a very com­ fortable income. I confess I have a “feeling” for him, as we can chat intimately for hours. If that is saying that I love him, then I guess I do love him. But there is one thing that prevents me from giving my “yes” to his proposing. He drinks regularly altho I must say that he can take it. And the kind of company he keeps does not speak well of him. He goes around and about too much, I think. He goes to bars and night clubs. Besides he hasn’t got a steady job and I suspect he depends upon his parents. I haven’t given him my final word. But I know I love him. Do you think he will change if I marry him? Do you think I can reform him by marrying him? Please help me. I have no one to turn to for advice. Pit wait for your answer in the coming issue of your magazine. Sincerely, Mary Dear Mary: It ia a great mistake to believe that one can “reform” a person by marrying him. If there is any reforming to be done, the time is before marriage and not after, when the vows have been made and there can be no backing out. You may* influence his behavior to a great 25 THE CROSS extent, but you cannot change him. If you are certain that he loves the bottle unduly, that he asso­ ciates with objectionable persons and frequents objectionable places, that he is undependable and refuses to work, then you are certainly taking a big chance if you marry him, hoping to change him after­ wards. If he really loves you, now is the time for him to prove it by trying his best to measure up to your expectations. If he is not strong enough and man enough before marriage, it is almost a dead cer­ tainty that he will not become so after marriage. II Manila August 23, 1948 Dear Lily Marlene: I am a girl 23 years old. A year ago I had to undergo an opera­ tion which will make me incapable of bearing children. I am very much in love with a young man. He is a very good man, kind and humble, and I know that he cares for me too. What I want to know, Lily Marlene, is this: Have I any right to encourage this man to marry me, knowing that I will not make a good wife because I can't have children? He is very fond of children. Another thing: Knowing that God’s purpose of marriage is the pro­ creation of children, have I any right to let anyone marry me? Please help me, Lily Marlene, I love him so deeply, and the thought of myself makes me very unhappy, desperately unhappy. Thanking you and assuring you of my prayers for you. Lourdes Dear Lourdes: I shall give you Father Daniel Lord’s advice: “If 8 girl is capable of exercising the martial act, she may mar­ ry, even if she knows that there will be no children of the union. Children are however a very important factor in the happiness of marriage. A marriage that does not result in the birth of children is a marriage that is handicapped. Hence it would surely be folly if a woman who knew .herself to be incapable of bearing children did not reveal that fact to the man who asked her to marry him. In most cases where people are really in love the fact of sterility does not interfere with their desire for marriage. Honesty and a decent OCTOBER. 1948 27 regard for the future however seem to demand candor on this most important subject.” Ill Dear Miss Marlene, For a year and a half I have been engaged with a neighbor of ours—to whom I have given all my love, faith and devotion. She has been a devoted Catholic since childhood and knowing her love for me, I knew she is worth while trusting. Thus we have trusted each other, shared each other’s joys and sorrows and done nice things for each other as true lovers do. But time went on. Now I feel that she has changed a lot in her acts she had recently been showing me. And I know well that it was only after she went to a certain place for a vacation that she changed thus. Since then I have always thought and feared that she has been caught in a net which seems to her too hard to escape from. I have been crossing her paths, trying to find out the truth of my makebelieve. As luck would have it I was able to find something which I believe is enough to prove my doubts. Just then I went to her and asked her the truth. She denied me fully and ignored all the findings I’ve made. Because of my great love, faith and trust in her I believed her denials, though in my heart was left the feeling of jealousy. Not long afterwards I again found a more convincing note that she really is in love with the man I’m jealous of. I then could no longer hold myself from accusing her of unfaithfulness. I now ask and plead for your help, Miss Marlene, to suggest to me the right thing to do. A lover as few had ever loved is tortured by the unfaithfulness of his ideal girl. I hate her to have deceived me, but I feel I can’t part from her inspite of what she has done. That’s the trouble I’m in with my dear girl. Please give me sugges­ tions with which I could get rid of my worries and could once more live in the realms of love, peace and happiness with her if that?8 still possible. I thank you in advance. Gratefully yours, Someone in Distress Dear Someone in Distress: Are you sure you are not making a mountain out of the prov­ erbial mole-hill? Have you been paying too much attention to gossip and idie-talk? Perhaps you have allowed your jealousy and suspicions 28 THE CROSS run away with your better judgement. Instead of brooding and wor­ rying yourself into your present state of distress and confusion, I’d suggest you ask her for a real showdown. Get her final and definite an­ swer to your proposal. If she loves you, she will consent to marry you, if she loves someone else, then the sooner you realize that, the better for your peace of mind. One cannot force one’s affections, so if such is the case, try and “fall out of love.” It can be done. IV Sept. 1, 1948 Dear Mies Marlene, 1 am writing you this letter to ask your advice on the problem of my most intimate friend. I found her problem to be so extraordinary that having asked her permission I decided to write and ask you about it. This is the problem. For almost two years now she had a strange feeling within herself which she later realised was love. However she was greatly puzzled, for this love of hers was given to a nun. The nun concerned doesn't know anything about it since my friend never showed or expressed these feelings to anyone except me. My friend, now is anxious to know whether this is only one of those "crushes?’, a girl, may sometimes feel toward another girl of the same sex, re­ gardless of their station in life, or is a religious calling? Unfortunately this friend of mine, although inclined to a religious life, has not the health to embrace that state. Must she therefore fully forget this feeling and enter society where she can meet people and associate with them? She knows that the spirit of the world is contrary to the spirit of a religious. Yet must she hope for a religious life which seems impossible to her at present, or must she be in the world and yet remain poor in spirit? Please kindly help her and answer this letter that she may know what to do. Thank you so much. Your sister in Mary, Dear Sister in Mary: You and your friend seem to be quite confused about a number of things. As a general rule, one may say that the invitation to perfection embodied in the religious state is intended to any Catholic who has the right intention — which means a firm resolution to serve God in the OCTOBER, 1948 29 religious state, and is mentally, morally, and physically fit for the duties of that state of life. Since your friend lacks the necessary health, then obviously God does not require her services in the cloister. Regarding the “feeling of love” she entertains for a nun, it would be advisable for her to try and forget the entire business. Nothing wholesome or helpful can ever result from such affections, only the contrary may be expected. And certainly that is no sign of an inclina­ tion to embracing the religious life. Perhaps the whole situation stems from the fact that your friend insists on shutting herself up, away from normal and wholesome friendships and associations. She should be encouraged to come out of her shell, be a good mixer, meet people, and enjoy the companionship and recreation of young people of her age. Contrary to what your friend thinks, the ability to deal with people is one of the greatest as­ sets a religious should try to acquire. V Gapan, N. E. Dear Miss Marlene, I love a girl. I have promised to love her dearly and forever. Being frank, I have told her everything regarding my love. She asked me to wait and said that I will know her answer sometime. When the day came, she told me that I was too late, that she IS already engaged. But she added if 1 can wait it’s alright. I asked her if I have hope and she answered: "Yes, you have.’’ 1 think she loves me, she goes on dates with me. The thing is she doesn't want to be a double-crosser to the one engaged with her, What shall I do, Mam, shall I continue my love for her. Is it not bad to win her love from somebody who owns her already? Of course I love her very much for she is always in my mind almost day and night. Do you think, Mam, that she will give up their engagement and instead will be mine forever? How can I be sure she is positively mine already? That’s all, Miss Marlene. Thank you in advance. Sincerely, PEPU V Dear Pepu: Obviously your girl can’t seem to make up her mind. If she really loves you, and knew all along you were awaiting her answer, why did 30 THE CROSS she engage herself to another? However, if you believe that she does love you (going on dates with you is no proof though) there’s no harm in finding out. In fairness to the three of you, the sooner she makes up her mind, the better for all concerned. She ipn’t married yet, and if she loves you and not the man she’s engaged to, then what are you waiting for? VI Bayombong, N. Viscaya July 13, 1948 Dear Mies Marlene, I have been in love with a girl named S... for almost three years now. I have written her about 30 times, but she never cared to an­ swer my pleadings. Yet her actions and attitude spoke of her love for me. The trouble is I never had a chance to speak to her. Not having answered my last letter (Jan. 8, 1948) I made up my mind to forget her for awhile and to love another. In no time 1 fell in love with C... studying at present at FEU. I was rather successful in the attempt, for after 3 months, C... surrendered her love to me and recently has requested me to get engaged with her. Now my questions are-. (1) What shall I do? Shall I heed the request of C...? (2) Shall I forget all about S...? (3) What shall I do to forget one of them? (4) Shall I forsake them both and look for another one? (5) Whom shall I choose in case both S... and C... are sincere to me? These are all my questions which trouble mo day and night and so I hope that thru your kindness you will send me your advice. Yours in Christ, V.M.C. Dear V.M.C.: You alone can answer these questions. You know these girls better than I do. I can only give you a sort of a standard which any God-fear­ ing man expects of his wife. Who, according to your honest judgement, would make yon a better wife, a faithful and pleasant companion) in yonr journey thru life? Who can inspire you to a nobler and holier life? Above all, who can return your love for love, sharing your joys and sufferings, your better and your worse until death do you part? In the last analysis these are the things that really count in a successful mar­ riage—and not money or beauty or popularity. THINKING WITH THE CROSS Cross featurettes SERVING WITH GLADNESS A man was walking by a con­ struction job. He paused to ask the nearest workman. “What are you doing?” The man sighed. “Digging a hole!” he said, disgustedly. “Ev­ ery houT I’m here I shovel out dirt.” The workman went on with his work while his ques­ tioner stood by a moment won­ dering about his reply. Was the j-.b really so bad? His eyes 'rested on another man doing the same jub. He walked to his side thoughtfully. “What are you doing?” he asked. The man looked up surprised. His whole face lighted. “Why," he said, proudly, “I am digging thp foundations for a cathedral,” It is the spirit in which we perform our everyday tasks that decides whether we look upon them as hard labor, or enjoyable, heart-lifting service. For service, if we have learned to love it, is done joyfully and willingly, eagerly and easily. But labor is hard and monotonous, irksome and fatiguing. If you would take the strain and monotony out of the tasks you perform day in and day out, begin thinking of your work as a service of devo­ tion to a great cause. Our work should not mean drudgery, distaste and dullness. When it does, we have forgotten how to serve with gladness, how to enjoy our work and thus make it a success. The everyday work which we learn to perform today with a light heart and a glad, smiling face, in the spirit of devotion to a cause, will become a needed refuge and help in the time of trouble. How many great men have made their sorrow only an excuse to work harder to give the world something worthwhile. In so turning to the spiritual uplift of their work, they found their sorrow bearable. For to learn pleasure in work is to find contentment. Everyone of us is blessed if we have work to do. Inefficient, in­ competent people are not trusted with a job. If you have been given a work to perform, it is because someone has decided you 31 32 THE CliO&S were worthy of responsibility. When we see it as a privilege, serving with gladness is a natu­ ral result. WRONG DIAGNOSIS Like most violent reformers, Communists reform the wrong thing. They forget that there is no magic in the transfer of pro­ perty from a few Capitalists to a few Red CommissaTs. The cause of our ills is not in property, but in the person who owns it; hence there will never be a radical transformation of society unless there is a spiritual regeneration of persons, through a rebirth of charity and Justice. By outlawing Religion, Commun­ ism makes this impossible. Thinking that if we transfer private property to a few Red Commissars we will do away with economic injustice, greed and ex­ ploitation, is like thinking that if you build your house in Manila instead of Bulacan, it will neveT burn down I Communication of property does not end greed and injustice, for Communists can still struggle for the privilege of controlling that property. If wealth is acquired by the injustice of confiscation, is it logical to think that it will be distributed through the virtue of justice? Bank robbers do not betome philanthropists nor are murderers conspicuous for love of the poor! WATCH THAT HUNGER Ball rooms, bars, shows and other places of amusement all over the islands are over-crowd­ ed. The hunt for pleasure has reached fever pitch. It would be pleasant to be able to say that at last after years of terror and austerity during the war, people are again happy and gay. But such is not the case. The people who frequent these places are not really happy. Life to them is just a succes­ sion of amusement unfortunately interrupted by intervals of neces­ sary work and duty. They dislike the work and shirk the duty. Their days are divided into 8 hours of boredom in office, home or factory, 6 hours of pleasure seeking in dancehalls or bars, and a few hours of exhausted sleep to prepare them for another un­ satisfactory day. Poor misled people! Thej mistake pleasure for happiness. And they are heading the wrong way. Comes a time when this craving for pleasure will demand of them even what is sinful. Then they would turn in rebel­ lion against their Creator to satisfy themselves. To return to basic principles, parties and lawful pleasures aTe OCTOBER, 1948 38 desirable at times to break the routine of our work-a-day world. But the man who has made these the end-all and the be-all of his life, is miserable indeed. WHERE’S OUR DECENT PRESS CRUSADE? An enlightening number of the ACOLYTE magazine contains the Report of the National Organiza­ tion of Decent Literature. The Report reveals many things. First, the great need there was for the Decent Press Campaign. The huge number of magazines listed, and the titles they flaunt, disclose the existence of an evil that is as widespread as the social di­ seases and far more dangerous. The second thing that is re­ vealed by the Report, is the huge profit it derived from this traffic. The principal distributors of these magazines do a business of P330,000,000 a year! The third thing that is reveal­ ed is that the Decent Press Drive gets Tesults. A few weeks after its inception more than a dozen dirty publications went out of business. The publishers of many others became alarmed at the threat to their income and wrote to the Committee promising to introduce whatever reforms were necessary. Once upon a time we had our own Decent Press Crusade in the Islands. And as far as we know it too produced some consoling results. But has it gone the way of all “ningas cogon” organiza­ tions? The excesses of which our local papers and magazines have been, (and still are!) guilty in detailed writeups of sex crimes, in adver­ tising, especially of offensive theatrical productions, and the growing shamelessness of their comics (?), are fast convincing decent people that they are a serious threat to public morality. When will Catholics get serious about this assault upon Christian virtue? PIUS XI ON FILMS Everyone knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sins, they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glori­ fying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage and affec­ tion for the family. They are capable also of creating prejudi­ ces among individuals misunder­ standing among nations, among social classes, and among entire races. On the other hand, good motion pictures are capable of exercising a profoundly moral influence upon those who see them. In addition to affording recreation, they aTe able to arouse noble ideals of life, to communicate valuable concep­ tions, to impart better knowledge 34 THE CROSS of the history and beauties of the fatherland and other countries, to present truth and understand­ ing among nations, social classes and races, to champion the cause of justice, to give new life to the claims of virtue, to contribute positively to the genesis of a just social order in the world. —PIUS XI FORLORN By Federico Moreno The earthly light dies with a weary glance Upon the waves which in their foamy dance Toss up the cares of day, the gloom of night, The biting-pangs of fading, dying light. A silent cheek beams with the dimming glow To trace the somber shades, the evening flow, To feel the rush of darkness, rushing arm’d Unto her soul in struggle, poinards swarm’d Bears she the anguished stab of solitude, The cruel wound of painful interlude; A woman’s heart is doomed a thousand ways and one To die a thousand death and not be done. When St Leonard of Port Maurice was preaching a Mis­ sion, some of the wealthier ladies came to the sermon dressed in “air conditioned” gowns. He advocated a little more mod­ esty in dress, but they returned next night in similar costumes, and sat right beneath the pulpit. St Leonard announced a collection for the poor of the Paris and especially to buy clothing for “some young ladies who have come to the sermon, but haven’t enough clothing to cover their poor old shoulders.” - —HORSE SENSETHE POLITICS OF THE ROSARY Whenever somebody recites the rosary, people who do not know what it all means are apt to question—"Why mumble over a few pieces of glass strung together?” Here is an attempt to explain the performance in everyday terms. The beads, made of glass, plastic, wood, nuts or what have you, are nothing but a serviceable and convenient means of keeping tract of what we are doing. We want to say a certain number of prayers, so, in order to keep our count right, we have a tally board, an adding machine, a score sheet or whatever you wish to call it. Catholics call it a rosary. It is divided into five parts—“decades”. Within each part is a group of ten beads where we count the ten Hail Marys we wish to say for that decade. Preceding each group is a single bead where we say the Our Father after enunciating the particular thought, the mystery, that we wish to keep in mind for that decade. The whole Rosary is meant to be addressed to the Mother of God. Sometimes we like to think of her as a joyful mother. So we say the Joyful Mysteries. Sometimes our mood is such that we would like to address her as the Sorrowful Mother,—hence the Sorrowful Mys­ teries. When the time or the mood is festive, we generally say the Glorious Mysteries. It is up to the individual who recites the rosary. There have been cases of gloomy fellows who keep saying the Sorrow­ ful Mysteries. Now for the main prayer—the Hail Mary. Here again, it is quite simple. The object in saying these prayers is to get nearer the Most Im­ portant Personage—God. What better way than to use a little politics and get there by going to the person nearest to this Most Important Personage—His mother? So we say to the mother: “Hail Mary.” We greet her affably first. “Full of grace.” Who is the woman who does not feel kindly to35 THE CROSS wards anyone who call her gracious, immaculate, beautiful? “The Lord is with thee.” It is always best to mention anybody’s greatest honor. “Blessed art thou amongst women.” Here again, who is the wo­ man who would not listen to this? "And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Her greatest honor again. Remember, mothers are always easy to talk to if we keep on the subject of their son, especially an only son, an only child. Here we pause to take a deep breath—because we are next going to slip in the petition we have been warming up to all along. “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” We give a short address. Then: “Pray for us sinners.” We are now asking her to put in a good word for us to the Most Important Personage. “Now and at the hour of our death.” Now and at the most crucial time of our lives when we either get a position in the heavenly firm or get rejected. Simple? Of eourse. MACAULAY ON THE CHURCH “There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing, which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pan­ theon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphi­ theater. "The proudest royal houses are of but yesterday, when compared with the line of Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in un­ broken series from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the’ twilight fable. “The Republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the Republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the Republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy OCTOBER, 1948 37 remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youth­ ful vigor. "The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the furthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine; and still confronting hostile Kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. "The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn—countries which, a century hence may not improbably contain as large a population as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it would be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amounted to a hundred and twenty millions. "Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all gov­ ernments and of all ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she i6 not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain—before the Frank had passed the Rhine—when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch—when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in un­ diminished vigor, when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on the broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. —(Edinburg Review, Oct 1840) LEARN OF ME As a certain ecclesiastic dignitary was about to ascend the pulpit, one of his acolytes stepped on the train of his robe. Angrily swinging about, the dignitary administered a resound­ ing cuff to the unfortunate bungler. The next moment he an­ nounced his text: “Learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart.” "EAST IS EAST” By Ambassador Carlos P. Romulo The Oriental mind has ever been an insoluble mystery to the white man. And in turn, the white man’s ways are equally as perplexing to the Oriental. This mutual mystery must be solved if understanding is to be brought about between East and West. I know that many a white man is prone to blanket the Oriental under the damning conclusion: "He is a liar. You can’t trust him. He is slippery.” That white man might be as­ tonished to learn that the Orien­ tal condemns him in almost the same words, The white man should mcdify his criticism. In­ stead of saying the Oriental does not tell the truth, he should say, “If he does not tell the truth to me, it is because he suspects me.” For Dearly all Orientals are suspicious, with good reason, cf all white men. A dog, a child, a man cringes when afraid. The dog Shows his teeth if he dates. The child and the man will die in self-defense. The Oriental regards the white man as a slippery character who will get the better of him in the end, because this has always been the rule in the Orient. The white man, according to the Oriental, comes to him in the guise, of being a civilizing influence, and proceeds to grab everything in sight. The Oriental is not evasive and given to subterfuge with his fel­ low Orientals. He has no reason to mistrust hia own people; and Oriental is never untruthful, un­ less he is driven to direct refuge from fear. The Oriental is not mysterious. He operates on age-old simple patterns and believes in simple precepts of behavior centuries old. Chinese, Hindoo, Indone­ sian, and Japanese hold to the basic Oriental- thought pattern with minor differences. In the Japanese these differences have become intensified with tragic results. Even the westernized Filipino has retained certain character­ istics that are basically Oriental. In the Philippines we cherish a Tagalog saying handed down from our Malayan ancestors': “Life is short, and well I know it is only a minute long. There­ fore, I want thia minute to stay 38 OCTOBER, 1948 39 with me as long as it can, for who knows what may happen to me t-morrow?” Th:s sums up the un'versal Oriental objection to any harte. Haste is an in­ dignity. The Oriental js not racing against time, for why should he? Time, he knows will beat him in the end. The white man wonders at the serene and unlined faces of elder­ ly Orientals. Their look is serene because, no matter how hard their outward life has been, in­ wardly they are at peace. The white man’s incessant “chop­ chop!” or demand for hurry, is a constant affront to the dignity of the Oriental soul. Happiness, if you exam'ne the fundamentals of his belief, is a reflect:on of the s ul. No mat­ ter what bod ly discomforts are his, if the soul is at peace, the Oriental is content. No wonder the Occidental finds this difficult to understand! He must have conveniences and even luxuries to be content. The average white man plans his life around a car, a home, a radio, an electric re­ frigerator,' two movies a week, and “a chicken in every pot.” John Chang, h:s Oriental pro­ totype, does not know about these things. He is happy without material comforts, money, or progress in the Occidental sense, because to him happiness is not measured in terms of comfort but in the inward satisfaction which is his a;m in existence. He can be happy if he has a bamboc bed to sleep upon, a dish of rice and vegetables to share with his family. His fam'ly is his universe, and his happiness depends upon its- un'ty. He reaches the apex of his day seated with h's household around the common bowl of rice. In th s patriarchal state he is the su­ preme ruler, the s're, the head of h's wretched but b e 1 : v e d dynasty. This is carried to an unpleasant extreme by the Jap­ anese in the Shinto, where the entire nation is one family and the emperor is supreme father of all. The Oriental is hypersensitive and th n-skinned, courteous to the point of appearing to fawn. H's very courtesy makes him out a liar to the white man. And his reluctance to rush against eternity is a trait the Occidental mistakes for laziness. The Occidental bids you “Goodby,” and- the Oriental, “God be with you.’.’ . The Occidental says, "thank -you," and the Oriental, “God repay you.* 'These are minor differences. In the Orien­ tal they hark back to his inner trust, his placing of even small matters in the hands of God. Bahala naf Bahala na—leave it to God! It is an expression that covers many needs. The pest of THE CROSS grasshoppers arrives, but the Filipino does not throw up h:s hands in despair. He c-llects the pests in baskets and roasts them; they aTe as delectable as Bhrimps. Bahala na! The river rises and the flood washes away the houses of the village. The people do not wail. Houses can be rebuilt. The peo­ ple take to their bancas, the river is bobbing with river boats, the swains row their girls, as they all sing. It is like a festival, but an unexpected one. Bahala na! Bahala na, the Filipino’s maiiana, his selah, and so what! This is not indolence, but faith and a placing of ill luck in the lap of providence. But the white man frowns upon such Oriental resignation to fate. He thinks it a symptom cf laziness and a lack of respect for material values. The Oriental always prefers avoiding of the moment. So, in­ stead of telling you he cannot meet you on the morrow, he says, “I may see you tomorrow.” For the moment he has spared your feelings- He has protected your soul. If he is in your employ and for some reason desires to leave you, he will not come out with a reason that might embarrass you both. Therefore, his mother is sick, or he is going to visit his cousin, or he needs a vacation. You part with kind words and plans for a speedy reunion. But you both know, if you, too, are versed in Oriental ways, that he will not return. Something has gone wrong between you. But since it would hurt your feelings to explain, why should he ex­ plain? The Filipino could not bring himself to condemn the opinions of a guest. He had placed con­ sideration for his guest’s feelings above his own. This the white man can never understand. There are many things he fails to comprehend about the Orient. One cf his blindest spots is the white man himself. The Occidental is very sure his is the superior type of civil­ ization. To prove his contention, he conquers entire nations and introduces into them govern­ ments, business methods, auto­ mobiles, airplanes, electric refri­ gerators, and radios. The Oriental has nothing to show but his soul. But the Oriental, rightly or not, believes that his civilization is based upen the eternal spirit and the Oc­ cidental’s upon a transient ma­ terialism. He holds the physical to be incidental and the spiritual supreme. Behind him innumer­ able ages of Oriental logic uphold his faith in the supremacy of the OCTOBER, 1948 41 soul. Therefore, the Oriental concludes, his is the superior civilization. The white man, not knowing this, and positive in his belief in his own civilized superiority, is willing, if need be, to enforce his claim with violence. This has been done many times in the Orient, and has g’ven rise to many misunderstandings and susp'ckn, and even hatred. The wh'te man has done much to make h mself hated by the touchy Oriental, who is touchy because he has been under white domination for centuries and has never failed to regent that domi­ nation. The well-fed white man looks from automobile or rickshaw upon the wretched native, in scenes of unbelevable humiliaticn. The Or’ental, watching from the dust, sees the unmoved in­ terest of this sightseer. He thinks, “He has no soul." He sees the white man’s trained police beating up helpless natives with clubs, and concludes that the white masters who order such brutalities are without souls. Imagine the feelings of the Chi­ nese, that proud and sensitive race whc6e civilization is the oldest in the world, who read, posted in Chinese characters be­ fore parks in their own native land, the order: “Dogs and Ch’nese Not Allowed!" Let John Doe p'eture t? himself such signs posted to keep lrm out of his own Central Park! In the Philippines, during the early days of the American occupat on, it was punishable by imprisonment for the Filipinos to play their national anthem or display the Filipino flag. This insult to us as a nation was deep­ ly resented and loudly protested. But this was not a personal in­ dignity. And we were not only permitted to protest, we were net thrown in to jail for protest­ ing; and we were eventually per­ mitted to display our own red, golden rayed sun and three stars beside the American Stars and Stripes. We have, in Tagalog, another saying: “His face is money!” This >8 the way the average Oriental looks upon the white man. To him the white face ex­ presses greed, cunning—a soulless desire to bleed him, the helpless native, of his last drop of blood. As a Filipino I was proud of my nationality. As a nationalist I had faith in the genius of my people. I set cut to visit the other countries of the Far East; to gather tde opinions of fellow Orientals whose languages I could not speak and whose ways 42 THE CROSS I did not share. But I expected them to show pride in their nat­ ionality. I waited their saying with Oriental dignity and pride: I am Burmese, or Indonesian, or Malay! Instead, I found them ashamed to speak. The very mention cf nationalism was taboo. It was disgraceful to be a native in Asiatic countries controlled by Holland, France, or England. These people were living in such misery as I had never kncwn existed. The Occidental is- well aware that 17 million Filipinos did not stand by the American flag in the Philippines only through a sense of personal devotion to America. But Americans and Filipinos alike were willing to die together for a principle. That principle, democracy, was never presented more magnific­ ently as an ideal for men to live by than within this century in the Philippines. It is because of a promised independence, because' the need for it was implanted in Filipino hearts by America, that we fought on Bataan. Why, in the Philippines, did we fight against America? Why, 42 years later, did we fight beside America? For the same purpose: freedom. The essence of our world strug­ gle is that all men shall be free. The Atlantic Charter laid dcwn the premise of that world free­ dom, binding its signatories “to respect the rights of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.” The merits of this principle were proven by America in the Phil­ ippines. Through that example we know that educational ad­ vantages, fair dealing, good will, and the infiltration of’’the prin­ ciples of democracy will end the We have learned that there are no economic or spiritual wastes so great as those caused by war. We- know, or should know by now, that to create peace we must devote to it the same enthusiasm and industry we have shown in our prepara­ tions for war. Condensed from “Mother America" THOUGHT FOR THE WEAK Face powder can attract a man, but it takes baking powder to keep him a happy hubby. A New World Thru a New Youth YOU have no doubt heard something about the Y.C.W. —the Young Christian Workers’ Movement. You may have heard how it came to the rescue of tens of thousands of young workers in Belgium since its formation there in 1925 and how it spread rapidly to France and from there to 52 other nations of the world. Y.C.W. members in Europe were key men in the resistance movements in occupied countries during the war. Its members brought relief to co-prisoners in German concentration camps. The Y.C.W. in France and BelA few years after his ar­ rival in the Philippines, the author has laid down the foundation of the Young Christian Workers Movement, also known as the Jocist, in the parish of Paco, Manila. So encouraging were the re­ sults of his first efforts that he is now ready to induct the third group of candidates in­ to the movement. Another Belgian Father is at present engaged in establishing an­ other branch among the miners in Baguio. —Eds. gium has been the inspiring force in preventing communist domination of those countries since the war. Perhaps you have heard of these things and wondered if they could bo true. If you doubt them, you are, so to speak, still on the outside. The Y.C.W. is a mass-move­ ment for all young workers be­ tween the ages of 14 and 25 living in cities and large towns. In the Y.C.W we concern our­ selves with all young workers. We are not a movement of nice, good fellows, keeping apart from the rest. We do not fear to soil ourselves by contact with the less fortunate chaps who are a bit cruder, who are “less respect­ able,” who perhaps don’t go to Mass regularly. We are not Pha­ risees, we do not “thank God that we are not as other men." Our great ambition is to bring these fellows particularly into the Y.C.W. It removes the workers of 14 to 25 from their isolation and enrolls them in a powerful mass organization. This organization is their school, where by practical me­ thods of the inquiry system, they 43 THE CROSS study the solution that Christian­ ity offers for all the positive problems they may meet in the whole of their daily life; a school too, where they learn to influence and conquer to their ideal the whole environment in which they live, and the whole crowd of young workers among whom their life is spent. The Y.C.W. does not train boys to keep off the streets. It trains them to go ‘tm to the streets and into the workshops to carry out an apostolate among their fellow workers. The Y.C.W. is not only a training school, but is also a social service. Persons holding some respon­ sibility towards youth often make a mistake of thinking they have done their duty by merely teach­ ing them the right sort of ideals and conduct. It is not enough. Teaching is only half the task, for it is also necessary to help them by every possible means to translate teaching into action. It is no use telling young workers not to spend their evenings hang­ ing around lampposts, unless we also provide some alternative oc­ cupation for them. The problems of youth cannot be solved by any organization which is content to be a training school and nothing more. In the first place, if the young worker is to make the best of his possibilities, he needs certain institutions to help him; but many of these are lacking in society today. In the second place, there al­ ready exist 'institutions which, far from helping the individual to attain perfection, are on the contrary an obstacle to it. The influence of the cinema is "nor­ mally in favor of money, selfish­ ness and “a good time”; the values it preaches or assumes are not those which build up a strong or great character. The ultimate aim of the Y.C.W must be to suppress institutions which are entirely harmful, and to re­ form others in a Christian spirit. In the third place, society al­ ready provides some,, excellent social services which the young worker does not make sufficient use of, through failing to realize the help they could afford him. Thus the Y.C.W. educates its members to see the value to them­ selves of these institutions. Among the services normally provided by the Y.C.W. are the following: (a) Sections try to prepare schoolboys for their working life by organizing special meetings, visits to factories and finding suitable jobs. (b) The YjCIW. prepares its members for service in the Armfed Forces, keeps contact with them there and publishes articles in its own and other papers on their problems. (c) It assists those out of work OCTOBER, 1948 45 to find jobs. (d) It educates the worker by articles, films, photographs and other publications to appreciate the need for hygiene, prevention of industrial accidents, technical education, etc. (e) In each locality it under­ takes a service for sick young workers. (f) It provides a review of current films. (g) It advises members on matters of industrial legislation. (h) It issues publications on the movement itself; on the si­ tuation and needs of the young workers at any given moment, as seen from the inquiries of the movement. The Y.C.W. is also a represen­ tative body. Youth must have a voice to gain its rights. That voice comes through unity. The Y.C.W. is a representative body of young workers striving to implant in the Philippines the principles of Christ’s honesty, justice and charity. Even going further, the worldwide Y.C.W. (this organization is now exist­ ing in 68 different countries) is a representative body through­ out the world. Pope Pius XII is most anxious for an international worldwide movement. He said: "I want for the future of the Church a very strong internatio­ nal organization of young Chris­ tian workers in every country." The Y.C.W. stands outside all party groupings. Fully under­ standing the duty the young worker owes his country, it be­ lieves he will best fulfill it at this stage by preparing himself to play his full part later on as a Christian member of his fam­ ily, his profession and his coun­ try. “Above politics” is a principle of the Y.C.W. With this qualifi­ cation it labors to build a more human and Christian industrial system, to restore to the working class a sense of its own dignity, to render it healthier in body and soul and consequently, more contented and happy. The Y.C.W. wants to make thousands >upon thousands of militant lay-missionaries, young working boys and girls who are the representatives of the Church in their working environment. The YjC.W. looks forward to “A New World through a New Youth,’ a youth that shall be “proud, pure, joyful and con­ quering." Its members are already proud at being chosen by God as cham­ pions of this new crusade; pure, not merely of body, but with the moral purity their .apostolate de­ mands; joyful, because through their movement a new dawn shines, and because already it is a reality; conquering, because they are ready to sacrifice every­ thing they have and are, so as to conquer the modern world and lay it at the feet of Christ. WHY DON'T PARENTS GROW UP! By Estelle Safier McBride If someone should ask whether your parents were good to you, chances are you would answer, “Well—yes, sure.” But if he were numb-brained enough to ask, "Are they too good to you?” you’d probably reply sharply, "Don’t be silly. How could parents be too good?" Actually, you’ve probably never thought much about it. It’s true that your parents have been on the giving side ever since you were born. Come to think of it, a few crocodile tears or a bit of high-pressure coaxing always seemed to get you what you wanted. True, there are some peo­ ple who think you’re spoiled, but you don’t believe it for a minute. As far as you’re concerned, your parents have just been behaving like parents. They love you and show it. There’s nothing extra special about that! How can you tell whether your mother and father are the "my child can do no wrong” variety? Well, let’s take a look at the ty­ pical too-good mother. She won’t let you do a fair share of work around the house; she wants you to have nothing but fun while you’re young. She scrimps and denies herself so that you can have an extra party dress. She smiles tenderly when you fret that your allowance is gone by Wednesday—and dishes out more money when dad isn’t looking. She soaks you in singing lessons, dancing lessons, skating lessons, sessions at the hairdresser’—any­ thing your little heart desires. She joins with you in verbally mauling the teacher when you come home with low-gear grades. (This description does’ not fit your mother? Good!) There are fathers who try to fix things for their young, too. Son thinks it would be a good idea to get a job in the bank during the summer. Dad says, "You just sit tight, son.” Then father sees somebody who knows somebody who did a favor for somebody at the bank—and, chances are, sonny gets the job without lifting a finger. Then there’s the father who has a way of covering up for his chil­ dren. John or Jane gets intb a scrape; dad puts on his most affable "well, kids will be kids” manner and works it so that John 46 OCTOBER, 1948 47 or Jane avoids the curative after­ math. Offhand, it sounds as if any teen who has parents like those is Miss Lucky (or Mr. Lucky) in the flesh. But it isn’t so. Parents who make it too easy for you when you’re young make it too hard for you when you’re older. The girl and boy who are consistently al­ lowed to shirk responsibilities, squeeze out of jams and generally get their own way at home, often go to pieces when they meet up with the outside world, because the world can’t be bothered cater­ ing to them the way mother and dad do. Coaxing won’t make a math teacher give you a passing grade when your work doesn’t entitle you to it. A future employer won’t smile tenderly if you decide to take the afternoon off because there’s something you’d rather do than work.- Department stores won’t laugh it off if you forget to pay your bills. We know that your parents be­ lieve they’re doing their best for you. They’re simply misdirected. And there’s a reason for it. Father may have had a struggle in life. Maybe he was denied an educa­ tion or had to work so hard for it that he missed the fun of be­ ing young. Now his greatest am­ bition is to see that you have all the good things he missed. So he makes it easy for you. He doesn’t want you, his daughter, to work after school or during the sum­ mer. He doesn’t want brother to struggle for a "good” job later in life, so he builds up a business that son can walk right into after college. He’s all for handing out success, ready-made. But father’s early experience is blinding him. He is giving you only half a loaf, just as he had only half a loaf. His was all dif­ ficulty. Yours is all ease. But what you and everyone needs is a balanced diet to grow strong and happy on. Then there’s mother. Perhaps she wasn’t as pretty and popular as some of the girls. Perhaps her family was poor and she rarely had the thrill of a new dress. It’s easy to understand why she is willing to scrape and squeeze, so that you, her daughter, can get all the glamour out of life that she missed. For in a way, mother is trying to relive her youth through you. Alas, it can't be done, and her heavy dose of kindness may merely clog up your life. Obviously we’re not talking about parents who help you out of an occasional, innocent jam— who sympathize when you don’t make the basketball team, who hand out some extra cash once in a while when you’ve burnt up 48 THE CROS6 your weekly stipend in a day. We’re talking about parents who take all the starch out of you by trying to make your life one long feather bed. What can any of us do about these confused, well-meaning pa­ rents? We—and you—can encour­ age mother to be more kind to herself and not overly kind to you. You can startle dad by tell­ ing him that from now on you’ll fight your own battles, get out of your own scrapes. You can explain that, although you’re grateful for his help and gen­ erosity, you’d like to stretch your own muscles a bit. He and mother may be momentarily hurt (because the protector loves his role), but once they’re over the shock, they’ll be awfully proud of you. And you’ll be proud of yourself. “Catholic Digest” PRESENCE By Adoration C. Trinidad All paths lead to Thee. I walked the way of laughter Down to its shining end. I found Thy Face. I turned to trace a path of tears Across what keen wound-edge of grief To stop at last, transfixed. (Long, long ago You wept As only God can weep.) All songs fly to Thee. Once I loved a red rose so I sang its hue away, Only to find Thy Heart, Love-broken, Bleeding “red” for me! And in the lean blue realm of aloneness Where no tears flow, no laughters ring And songs die young, Before their moon-tipped wings begin to grow, Even here where loneliness is food I could not run away. I found That loneliness was You. A-BOMB PLUS 3 YEARS Richard Cronin, S.J. “Auguste Comte invented the Atom Bomb." That statement would undoubtedly meet with a varied response. Nine-tenths of the people might justly ask, “Who is Auguste Comte?"; and the other tenth who know the quiet French philosopher of the last century might, quite as justly deny the statement emphatically. In a real sense, they would be right, be­ cause Auguste Comte did not ac­ tually invent the atom bomb which fell on Hiroshima three years ago. But in another sense, he had a great deal to do with it because he crystalized the philo­ sophy which led up to it. In 1843, his book, Positive Philosophy, was published. At first glance, it was just a quiet book by an unassuming inspector of schools. But there was more to it than that. Like Rousseau, Comte summed up the spirit of a whole movement in the capsule form of a single book. What The Social Contract was to the French Revolution, Comte’s book was to the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Age to follow. His book was the catechism of the experi­ mental method whose peak of achievement was the atom bomb. Several of his conclusions, as we shall see, were wrong, but we must not think him a shallow or insincere thinker. The man who devoted himself to philosophy at the age of twenty and held the great Greek thinker, Socrates, as his model may have made mis­ takes in his reasoning, but his sincere desire and persevering search for the truth are unques­ tionable. Comte held that truth can be discovered only in the la­ boratory by the experimental me­ thod. He denied that philosophy could arrive at metaphysical truth by reason alone, such facts as one’s own existence or that a thing cannot “exist” and “not exist" at the same time. To Comte the only way to arrive at truth was through the senses. If a thing could not be charted on a graph or seen through a micros­ cope, for Comte, it was of no value. The platform of the Posi­ tivists, as Comte’s followers were called, might have been summed up in the slogan, for an answer, trudging along, hands in pockets. “If you can’t see it, you can’t believe it”. The scholastic and realistic phil. osophers have not denied that the laboratory was an efficient way to solve many problems, (it would be rather difficult to deny this in the face of modern ad­ vancement), but they have denied emphatically that the solution to 49 50 THE CROSS all problems, especially those deal­ ing with human relations, could be found in the laboratory. If you want to find the cause of hydro­ phobia you will have to go into the laboratory and you will have to work as hard as Pasteur did when you get there. But if you you want to find the first cause of the person who has the hydro­ phobia, or the purpose of his life, or the norm he should hold in his dealing with other men, the labo­ ratory cannot give the answer. You will have to sit down some­ where and reason it out philoso­ phically from first principles. So the issue between the philosophers and the positivits is not over the truth of scientific findings but the exclusiveness of them. To most people the argument seemed mostly a debate of the schools with nothing ■ much at stake. The philosophers chal­ lenged the positivists to prove ex­ perimentally the rock-bottom foun­ dations of human relationships, but they couldn’t. What is just­ ice? What is just war? How can you determine that by the scien­ tific method? But the Positivists were by no means chagrined. "Perhaps the scientific method at its present stage of development could not fully cope with these problems, but it was developing. Give it time and in the near fu­ ture it might be able to. Look at the vast strides already made in the fields of Experimental Psy­ chology, Psychoanalysis, and Sta­ tistics,—strides which were made by the experimental method and which had cleared up problems which fifty years ago were con­ sidered unsolvable. The experi­ mental method would find the answer; all it needed was time. Besides, there was no need to hurry.’ But a recent event made the situation take an abrupt about-face. When the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, there very de­ finitely was a need to burry in' order to find out how to control it, and the failure of the United Nations Atomic Commission has still left the problem to be solved. The atom bomb by no means exhausts the arguments that phil­ osophy could use to prove its point. The philosopher’s position in claiming that the laboratory can­ not solve all problems was as strong the day after Comte pub­ lished his work as it is today. However, the atom bomb is a fact of such importance to all think­ ing persons, that it proves a time­ ly test-case for an old argument. The scientist built the atom bomb by working in the labora­ tory. Through a step-by-step pro­ cess he revealed the secret of the tiny atom with all its gigantic effects. It was the crowning achievement of the experimental process; the furthest advance in science that men had ever made. OCTOBER, 1948 SI But then comes along the all-im­ portant question, "How are we go­ ing to control it? What are we going to do with it?" There is no doubt that the atom bomb is a fact; there is no doubt that the scientists have found the true key to atomic energy. No one in his right mind would deny it. But what everyone wants to know, and wants to know very definitely, is how we are to make use of this fact. And it is exactly at this point that the laboratory bogs down. The scientist can tell you how they made the atom bomb and the discoveries that led up to it, but he cannot tell you how to use it rightly, because the right use of the atom bomb, or anything else, cannot be measured in a test tube. If you want to learn the answer you have to leave the la­ boratory and settle down for a little solid thinking. It’s no longer a matter of in­ difference that can be passed off with a shrug of the shoulders or sidetracked with a cynical "Who knows?” Anyone who has seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or has read the results, of Bikini has passed that stage. If the Positivists still maintain the only way to solve the problem is in the laboratory, we can brand them with their own favorite epithet, “old fashioned”. The world is faced with a problem, and science by itself does not have the answer. The fact is, however, that many scientists realize the inadequacy of science to solve the problem and are appealing along with the philosophers for a whole­ hearted effort to establish true principles for using the bomb and to eliminate false ones. Professor Einstein in One World or None says, “The construction of the atom bomb has brought about the effect that all people living in cities are threatened, everywhere and constantly, with sudden destruction. There is no doubt that this condition has to be abolished if man is to prove himself worthy, at least to some extent, of the self-chosen name of homo sapiens, or man of wisdom.” And again President Truman’s Commission on Education quotes Professor Einstein to point out the gravity of the situation, “Be­ ing an ingenious people, Amer­ icans find it hard to believe there is no forseeable defense against atomic bombs. But this iB a basic fact Scientists do not know of any field which promises us any adequate hope of defense . . . our defense is in international law and order.” The Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists, which was formed just to treat the problem of atomic energy, makes the fol­ lowing statement about proposals to control the bomb, “Proposals 52 THE CROSS which on the one hand imply no material change and require no working staff cannot succeed; proposals which, on the other hand, seek to partition among the bureaus the problem of a decade hence cannot succeed either. The problem is a problem of living men and a developing phenomenon. The solution cannot be written wholly on paper." From these statements it is evident that a solution to the whys and wherefores of the atom bomb is more subtle than science can handle by itself. Chesterton once said that when the practical man gets confused he goes to the “im­ practical” man to get straight­ ened out on fundamental princi­ ples. Perhaps this is the pre­ scription men are looking for. They have tried the laboratory and it doesn’t have the answer, and there is no time to wait, so they are turning to philosophy. Of course, there is no friction between the true scientist and the true philosopher. It is only when science limits truth exclusively to the laboratory, as Comte and his followers have tried to do, that the philosophers are forced to oppose them. The problem of controlling the atom bomb and the need for a speedy solution to it have badly shaken the Positivist position. The world is asking “What about the atom bomb?”, and the Positivist has to say that there is no right answer because he cannot test it in the laboratory to find out whether it is true or false. How­ ever, the world has sunk far too much in this last war to be put off so easily. If the Positivists do not have the answer we have to go back to solid ethical princi­ ples as revealed by reason and strengthened by faith. True peace is not the outcome of a formula, or a graph, or a Gallup Poll. It is the outcome of justice and charity, as the Vicar of Christ has said so often. When men de­ sire these, the problem of the atom bomb will not be unsolveable. As things stand now, many people are convinced that philosophy is not as antedated as they had thought Sound ethics are needed as never before. But philosophy must remember, as Maurice Blondel says, that its problem to­ day is to define and clarify the irreducible reality that belongs to values, to give values a degree of transcendence without localizing them in an artificial firmament of the mind. Whether and when phil­ osophy will meet the problem suc­ cessfully the future alone will re­ veal; but there is one thing cer­ tain at present,—that the labora­ tory alone, the strictly scientific method, cannot measure up to the problem by itself. THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Mary Tinley Daly “What kind of a man did you dream of when you were a little girl, Mom?” asked twelve-yearold Eileen as we were washing dishes the other night. "Well, let’s see,” I hesitated. “My notions changed—but I al­ ways thought I’d like a tall man...” “Didn’t you want a handsome, intelligent, kind, thoughtful man— like Tyrone Power?” “Those sound like good quali­ ties,” I said, rinsing the last glass. “And is Tyrone Power your idea of such a person?” “Tyrone’s girl thinks so,” Eileen said. “She says he’s everything she dreamed of when she was a little girl.” “Well, Annabella should know,” I said. “She is Tyrone Power’s wife, isn’t she?” “Oh, yes, Annabella’s his wife,” said Eileen, “but It’s his fiancee that says he’s all those things. She’s Linda Christian and she’s going to marry Tyrone as soon as he gets his divorce from Anna* bella. They had a blazing romance in Italy last summer....” I looked at Eileen sternly. “You’ve been reading movie maga­ zines again,” I accused her. “I thought I had forbidden you to read them.” Eileen dropped the glass she was drying. “Oh, no, I haven’t, Mom,” she said, sweeping up pieces of glass into the dustpan, “I haven’t read a movie mag since you told me not to. Cross my heart. I got this dope from the Sunday paper that you and Daddy read.” Sure enough, in the sedate paper read by the whole family was a movie column out of Holly­ wood, containing an interview with Tyrone Power’s newest conquest, a rising young movie star by the name of Linda Christian. Any adult would pass over the piece of fluff as silly press-agentry, particularly since the column­ ist said of Miss Christian—later in the column—that “four major studios are waving fancy contracts before her pretty nose,” and went on to tell the names of the pictures in which she has appeared. To movie-star worshipers like our pre-teen-agers, such a column contains poisonous implications. Writings like this are common in the publicity organs of movie ma­ gazines. The romantic slant they 53 54 THE CROSS give to the succession of mates taken on and cast off by movie heroes and heroines is the very reason such magazines have been banned at our house. But here was the same kind of drivel prin­ ted in a sound, respectable family newspaper. Let me quote from this particular column: “When I was a little girl," says Linda, a luscious, greeneyed red-head of twenty-three, “I hoped like all other little girls that one day I’d meet a hand­ some, intelligent, kind, thought­ ful man, and when I met Ty, I was completely overcome." Actually Linda wasn’t at all overcome the first time she trained her beautiful eyes on the future man of her dreams. Two years ago, in Hollywood, she went to a party Mr. and Mrs. Power (Annabella) gave for Mrs. Vincent Astor, and the extent of the impression that either Linda or Ty made on each other is this—Linda only just remembers that first meeting. Ty doesn’t at all! It was in Rome last summer that Linda had her second—but first in importance—meeting with Tyrone. The romance took a blazing turn immediately. All indications—at present—point to a wedding in Italy at the end of January, when Ty’s divorce from Annabella will be finaL I asked Linda if she and her movie star fiance ever will make a picture together. “I’d love to,” she replied, “but I don’t want any one to think I’m rid­ ing to fame on Ty’s name. When I get to be a big star myself, it will be different." What an honest person this re­ luctance to ride to fame on Ty’s name makes Linda! Our children are taught that marriage is a serious thing, not to be entered into lightly, that it is "till death do us part.” They are taught these things. They see homes and families established on these principles. But it all ap­ pears pretty stodgy and humdrum compared with the glamorous life led by the idols of the motion­ picture screen. Their successive affairs of the heart are written up as great re­ curring romances. "Friendly” di­ vorces are glorified as the way “civilized” people do things in this age of enlightenment. “We’re still the best of friends,” is the tenor of such commeht after every divorce, “but two artistic temperaments like ours just couldn’t exist together. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us. He (or she) is a grand person and I hope that he (or she) finds true love as I did.” Thus endeth the interview. OCTOBER, 1948 55 Of course, the next “true love” usually ends the same way as tlje last—but the build-up is always the same. Mature minds are shocked and revolted by such a display of bad taste—to say nothing of bad mo­ rals—but insidious implications are planted in the innocent minds and imaginations of our growing children. Years of listening to children’s discussion of movies and movie stars—and these discussions go on for hours on end—have convinced me that the children are more deeply influenced by the propa­ ganda about lhe private lives and loves of the stars than they are by the stories enacted on the screen. One particular incident will il­ lustrate this point. As a birth­ day-party treat, our girls and a group of neighborhood children attended a movie—a fine, whole­ some story on the A list. During the ice-cream-and-cake session that followed the movie, conversation turned to what they had seen. “That was a good picture," said Kay, “and did you know that the man is going to marry the girl who took the part of the wife? He used to be married to the other girl—the cne that was so funny.” “Gee, no wonder they kissed like that!” chimed in Eileen. "Just waiting for the divorce to go through, I guess.” And we naively believe that the story is the thing! —From “America” AYE, THE RUB.... In years of Hollywood reporting I have met not more than two. stars whom I could truthfully call happy. The rest are victims of a neurotic dissatisfaction that seems to defy rea­ son. And the bigger and richer and more famous they become, the more dissatisfied they seem to be. I think the real trouble is egoism... They are utterly miserable when someone else has the floor.—Hollywood Newspaper Reporter. Protestants used to say that the honor given Mary and the saints was an obstacle to the worship due to God. The only places now where God receives any honor worth of the name is precisely in those places where Mary and the saints are honored.—Protestant minister cited in L’Ami du Clerge. LARGEST MILL IN P. I. The Philippines, considered the most dominant factor in the world copra export trade, can now boast of the largest and finest copra mill in the world. Right by the Pasig estero in Paco is the giant mill which took the Philippine Refining Company one year to rehabilitate at a cost of P4,000,000. The new plant has two storage houses capable of storing 15,000 tons of copra. When operating in full blast the mill will have a daily processing capacity of 150 tons of oil, or a crushing capacity of 250 tons of copra per day. CENSUS ON The arduous and exhaustive task of digging up and recording all facts and figures about the Phil­ ippines started October 1 when the government started the census. This is the first census of the Philippine Republic and the first in the last nine years in the coun­ try, the last being in 1939. Some 80,000 "enumerators” are engaged in this work of detailed inquiry, for which the government has set aside 7 million pesos. There are 1,180 municipal district super­ visors, one in each of the farflung municipalities throughout the 7,000 islands. NEW CABINET President Quirino completed the reorganization of his cabinet Sep­ tember 22 when the 7 new mem­ bers and one new undersecretary took their oath of office at Malacanan. The following are the new members: Secretary of Interior— Sotero Baluyot, Secretary of Jus­ tice—Sabino Padilla, Secretary of Education—Prudencio Langcauon, Secretary of Labor—Primitivo Lovina, Secretary of Commerce and Industry — Cornelio Balmaceda, Executive Secretary — Teodoro Evangelista, Commissioner of Pub­ lic Welfare—Mrs. Asuncion Perez and Acting . Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs—Felino Neri. BIG DEAL The Philippine government stands to gain Pl,861,540, plus 60 per cent of gold, silver coins, cur­ rencies specie, and other valuable cargo in a contract with the Charles Choy Ltd., for the clear­ ing or salvaging of scrap metals, vessels and other craft in Philip­ pine waters. The contractors will also build in the Philippines at an investment of Pl,000,000 a re56 OCTOBER, 1948 57 rolling steel mill to reprocess 32,000 tons of scrap. About 11,000 tons of these will be finished as reinforcing steel rods and bars and will be sold to the Philippine government at the fixed price of 1*232.43. The current landed cost in Manila per ton of such articles in 1*316.57. OUTLAW COMMUNISM Congress will outlaw com­ munism in the Philippines unless its adherents prove beyond reason­ able doubt that they do not aim to destroy the established order, according to Speaker Eugenio Perez. If their aim, however, is merely to spread the communistic ideology within a democratic gov­ ernment, he added, Congress will introduce suitable legislation to combat the movement Meanwhile Congressman Cornelio Villareal, head of the Committee on Un­ Filipino Activities is directing the vast congressional probe of sub­ versive movements in the Philip­ pines. RICE MONOPOLY The establishment of a govern­ ment monopoly on rice as the most effective solution to the present food problem was approved in principle by the newly created Rice Commission in their first meeting. The proposed monopoly, which will cover the procurement and distribution of the grain, will eventually give way to the organization of producers’ coopera­ tives. These cooperatives will be formed mostly of small farmers who will be given ample partici­ pation in the control and manage­ ment of rice mills, rice warehouses, and distributing agencies. NATIONALIZATION The convention of provincial governors and city mayors approv­ ed unanimously a resolution na­ tionalizing the rice and corn busi­ ness in the Philippines. The reso­ lution urged the enactment of a law providing for the immediate and absolute nationalization of the rice and corn trade by prohibiting alien residents of whatever natio­ nality from engaging directly or indirectly in the buying and selling of the two Philippine staple pro­ ducts. The object of the proposal is to keep rice and corn business in the hands of Filipinos and to prevent aliens from profiteering in the products. TARUC ELUSIVE Hopes of capturing Huk Su­ premo Luis Taruc who is the main objective of the current PC-USAFFE guerrilla campaign faded as the Huk leader success­ fully slipped away from his island headquarters in Mandili in the Candaba swamps. The govern­ ment farces however were able to ascertan the presence of Taruc in Mandili when they came upon a prize trophy: the supremo’s jacket, which he wore in his am­ nesty campaigns. Meanwhile the 58 government forces fighting the Huks have been reinforced with Moro troops and guerrilla forces under Col. Marking. PNB ANOMALY Government auditors have blown off the lid on anomalies in the Philippine National Bank in connection with the issuance of market and big loans involving mere than P74.000. Bank aud­ itors came upon the first startling discovery of falsification papers filed in the name of members of a market vendors association in Manila. The amount involved in this case is P64,000. Because of the unearthed anomaly, the grant­ ing of market loans in Manila was suspended Tecently by the bank administration. CRIPPLED FRANCE Over a half million coal miners and public service workers were idle in labor protests against the inflated cost of living in France. Some 200,000 garbage collectors, waterworks employees, and other government workers left their jobs for a one-day demonstration for a 15 per cent wage increase, Oct. 5. France’s 350,000 coal miners continued their strike which started the previous day and closed down all coal mines. There were no disorders in the coal fields 'as police guards and army troops in full battle kit prepared for possible trouble. CHURCH TO STOCKROOM The only remaining Catholic church in the city of Koenigberg, Germany, has been converted into a stockroom by the Soviets. This church, located in the Rosenau district, is the only Catholic one left standing; all others were destroyed during the war. Ori­ ginally the Soviet authorities promised to respect the Tight of the Catholic community to keep their remaining sanctuary under their jurisdiction. Now they are prevented from holding services there even on Sundays. A tem­ porary shelter in Benheimsche street is t he only plpce left to them to gather for worship. MACARTHUR STRIKES Because of last winter’s dif­ ficulty involving certain Japanese school texts expressing antiChristian sentiment, General MacArthur has named a commit­ tee to scan all future publications for objectionable sections. The ministry of education late last year issued a history of Europe which contained many references, derogatory to Christianity and particularly to the Catholic Church. Investigation showed that it had been approved >as written by a loweT echelon of the occupation's educational depart­ ment. When the General, who has frequently extolled Chris­ tianity as an inseparable element and even the keystone of demoOCTOBER, 1948 59 South Africa, (9) The trustee­ ship councils report. BREAK WITH USSR Yugoslavia communists assert­ ed recently that they have cut all cultural ties with Russia and the comrnform nations, but denied Soviet charges that Yugoslavia is joining the “imperialist camp.” The Belgrade Communist organ, Borba, stressed that the nation is bound to the eastern bloc in war or peace. It added however that it intended to carry out “Maxism and Leninism to our special con­ ditions” and said that all cultural and youth links with Russia and the cominform already have been cut SLAMS AT RUSSIA General MacArthur bluntly ac­ cused Russia Sept. 17 of violating the Potsdam declaration by keep­ ing half a million Japanese war prisoners under forced labor "to increase the Soviet war poten­ tial.” He pointed out that these prisoners have not yet been re­ turned to their homes in Japan despite the fact that World War II came to an end more than three years ago. Declared he: “No segment of Japanese society has been afforded more liberal, gains since the surrender than has Japanese labor. Its main poten­ tial danger lies in its absorption and ultimate destruction by the communists who seek to exploit it to spread disorder, anarchy and revolution.” cracy itself, learned of the mat­ ter, he named his board of review. MEDIATOR KILLED Count Folke Bernadotte, U.N. Palestine mediator, was assasinated Sept. 17 by four men in Jewish uniform in Jerusalem. Israeli police and government forces made mass arrests among the Stem Gang and Irgun Leumi extremuts in their search for the assasin. Bernadotte's death hit Jerusalem as Jews prepared for the sabbath. The U.N. mediator, who was the head of the Swedish Red Cross, was shot down in the Jewish sector while on an official truce inspection. He had gone there in spite of anonymous warning that he would be fired upon, and had continued even af­ ter a sniper’s bullet struck his automobile. "I will not be fright­ ened,” he had declared. CRUCIAL MEETING With more than 60 topics on the agenda delegates to the United Nations assembly started the most crucial session in U.N. history Sept. 21. Grouped in their various departments are' some of the world's top problems. Among the topics taken by the representatives of the 58 member nations are: (1) Control of atomic energy, (2) Continuation of the little assembly, (3) The Korean question, (4) Palestine, (5) The Balkan situation, center­ ing on Greece, (6) India-Pakis­ tan, (7) The veto, (8) Indians in THE FAMILY FOR FAMILIES By Francis L. Filas, S. J. Here is a simply written book about the home at Nazareth, with many applications to the modern family. It will be read with profit by both parents and newlyweds, and will prove helpful to directors of family retreats. The young Jesuit author has been encouraged by response to his earlier work on St. Joseph (The Man Nearest to Christ) further to explore the daily rou­ tine at Nazareth for hints to everyday sanctity. His sources have been solidly reliable: the gospels plus historical and arch­ eological research into the pattern of living in ancient Palestine. He has also made use of what is known of the life of contemporary Palestinians in regions as yet almost unchanged by modern in­ fluences. Though his approach is at times didactic and his applications per­ haps a bit elaborate, the reader nevertheless is made to feel the authenticity of the setting and the pertinence of the lessons. Each of the chapters is introduced by an attractive line-cut which entices the eye to the printed matter. One may hazard a guess that Father Filas’ little book will have more than passing value. C. M. Dewis, S.J. WINDOWS WESTWARD: Rome, Russia and Reunion By Very Rev. Stephen C. Gulovich, S.T.D., Ph.D. This is a book that is bound to arouse controversy. Liturgical ex­ perts will take exception to some of the author’s theories on the relative antiquity of the rites; some historians of the Slav Ca­ tholics in America will wish a rein­ terpretation of the reasons why there now exist here two exar­ chates for the Catholics of the same rite; literary people may see defects of style and arrange­ ment. But Oriental enthusiasts will be able to bridge these difficulties and to welcome the book as an ad60 OCTOBER, 1948 61 dition to the all-too-meager lite­ rature on the subject, as an ac­ curate presentation of the major religious problem of our day. They- will find here a calm but objective rebuke to those Catho­ lics who never seem to realize why there must be different rites in the Church, variety in unity and not uniformity. With more than half of all the Eastern Catholics in the world in the new catacombs of Russian-occupied territories, it is essential that we do our part to make the non-Latin rites grow and flourish in this land of free­ dom. Indeed, to the readers of Dr. Gulovich’s pages, the very existence of these rites will appear as nothing short of providential. If he had done this and nothing more, the author would have ren­ dered a distinct service to the Church. Yet, to our mind, the importance of Windows Westward comes not from its clear picture of the past and present of the great Byzantine Slavonic family, but from its accurate analysis of the point of view which Orthodoxy opposes to Catholicism. Russia has, in our time and to our amazement, re-established the Patriarchate of Moscow and made it the spear­ head of its Pan-Slavism. With the eyes of the Catholic world now fixed on the manifestations of Our Lady at Fatima, we like to see in Stalin's act of restoration an unwitting preparation for the ful­ fillment of Mary's assertion that Russia would be converted and consecrated to her Immaculate Heart. There can be no lasting peace on earth until men walk once more in religious unity, the only real tie that can bind them together in thought and action, in this Babel-like world. Dr. Gulovich ex­ plores the obstacles to unity on the part of Russia. He recalls the laments of Feodor Dostoyevski, the Russian novelist of seventy years ago. As this writer viewed the contempt m which his land was then held, he maintained that Orthodoxy was the only hope for the East and that the Westerniz­ ing influence of Catholicism had failed in its mission. Since the Orthodoxy of Dostoyevski's day was strongest in Russia, he claimed for his nation the leader­ ship in effecting the unity of the human race. Dostoyevski could not have dreamed that the history of our own generation would be domin­ ated by Russia and that the Rus­ sian Revolution would be termed by many as “perhaps the most sig­ nificant event in the history of mankind since the fall of the Ro­ man Empire.” Yet that is the patent fact, and it will be to the eternal glory of our day if the only fundamental rapprochement with Russia can be achieved, name­ ly, religious reunion in the one Church of Christ. That is why Dr. Gulovich quotes in its entirety the eirenic 62 THE CROSS Memorandum submitted by the Russian convert, Vladimir Solo­ viev, to Pope Leo XIII. In this truly epochal document we have the key, historically and religious­ ly, to the problem of reunion be­ tween Rome and Russia. Soloviev breathes all the optimism of Christ’s prayer for unity at the First Mass: In our midst one will find a number of people who desire unity, but they fear Latiniza­ tion. It is necessary, therefore, to assure them that if the Oriental Church will return to Catholic unity, if she will re­ cognize in the Holy See the power granted and willed to it by Our Lord in the person of St. Peter, in order that unity, solidarity and the- legitimate progress of Christianity might be safeguarded, she (the Orien­ tal Church) will conserve not only her rite (which is under­ stood) but also the autonomy of organization and administra­ tion as exercised in the East prior to the separation of the Churches. For presenting to us these points of view, we judge Windows West­ ward a basic book. The ample bi­ bliography provided for each chap­ ter enhances its value as a guide for further study. Thomas J. McMahon NONSENSE, SON A boy was about to make his first Communion. As he was leaving the house his father noticed him and said: “Where are you going, son?” “Today is Sunday, Papa. I’m going to Mass.” “Oh, Mass iB all right for your mother and sister, for women. But you, you’re too big for that. You come with me for a walk.” The boy was almost in tears. “But, papa, it isn’t merely for women, God gave “everybody” the command: ‘Remember Thou keep the Sabbath day.’” “Nonsense,” answered the father sharply. The boy was shocked by the blasphemy. “Nonsense? And the next commandment which follows it, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother*, is that also nonsense?” The father surrendered the field to his precocious son. WHOSE JOB? UST Sept. 26, 1948 Dear Sir: I have always been wandering why THE CROSS is not mon widespread as it ought to be. It is indeed a pity for those unfor­ tunate persons who miss every issue of your wonderful magasine. I hope you will give mon impetus to your work so that it may be able to reach every nook of the Islands. May your Catholic organ live up always to be a militant instru­ ment of our Catholic faith. Respectfully, Rafael J. Serra Eds. How about every Catholic giving impetus to OUR common work? NOT ALONE Nag a, Camarinss Swr September 25, 1948 Dear Editon: I should like to pat yon on the back, that at long last your ton­ gue was lot loose and you spoke out what you could not conceal: your stand on the Huhs. It is very refreshing to find a pretty good amount of fearlessness and moral courage in our “militant organ of Catholic thought.” l'ou are not alone in your stand. With you an millions of Filipinos who hate Communism for what it is and for what it will mean to them, if... You an not however the fint to be fearless enough to speak out. An editorial of Manila Bulletin (Dec. 18, 1947) asserts that “the Communistic nature of their (i.e. tbe Hulcbalahaps) ritual and beliefs has been exposed many times”, and does not mines words in branding “the Hukbalahap movement as subversive. in char­ acter and aims at the ultimate overthrow of the democratic form of government adopted by this Republic." I hope the spectn of fear does not make our militant organ less militant than it should be. May I pat you again, and may ths Holy Ghost give you fortitude—the virtue a modem Catholic journal­ ist needs most. Very sineenly, T. C. Pads, CM. Eds. Thanks, Father. It is very encouraging to remember that we are not alone. No air, never «3 64 THE CROSS alone. MORE PATS 128 Libertad, Rizal City September 27, 1948 Dear sir, I am proud to be one of the readers and admirers of your magazine, THE CROSS. THE CROSS is the most educational magazine published in the coun­ try; its articles are favorable, de­ cent, vigorous. When I first read the articles in THE CROSS, I was pleased and satisfied by their standard, their dignified character. Your magazine means to me an inex­ haustible fountain of life and love. I tried to embrace its contents as the guide of every man for the attainment of his final goal: the perfect happiness—GOD. I would like to extend my best regards and gratitude to you and members of your staff in their accomplishment—which is the sal­ vation of many souls. I hope that THE CROSS ma­ gazine with God's Divince Pro­ vidence reign triumphantly all over the world. Respectfully yours, Abelardo E. Rogation Eds. WOW!!! SPECIAL SOUVENIRS FREE FOR SPREADING YOUR FAVORITE MAGAZINE FIGHT JUVENILE DELINQUENCY THE CATECHISTS’ WAY: WITH The Only National Catholic Tagalog Bi-Weekly HAS THE ANSWER — to the dire need of decent recretation — to the alarming problem of youth crimes — to the confused thinking of the present OFFERING ONE AND ALL * clean, interesting reading matter * sound moral principles and truths * understanding and practice of the spiritual life! SPREAD FILIPINAS AND FIGHT CRIME THE EFFECTIVE WAY. . .!