Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
We need that women should clear their ideals and realise their public
responsibility for the presentation of them. We need terribly at this
moment insistence on the purity and simplicity of the Holy Mother of
God. One is stunned at the abandonment of the ideal of reserve and
modesty that the last few years have seen. Women seem to take it quite
gaily: men, one notes, take it much more seriously. I have been
consulted by more than one father during the past year as to the
possibility of sending a boy to a school where he would be kept out of
the society of half-naked girls. Have mothers no longer any sense of the
value of purity? Or have they simply abandoned all responsibility that
normally goes with being a mother? One recognises how helpless a man is
under the circumstances, that his intervention in such matters simply
casts him for the part of family tyrant; but why should a mother abandon
her duty simply because her daughter says: "You don't understand. Girls
are not as they were when you were young. All the girls do this. No
other mother takes the line that you do. You are not modern."
One knows, of course, that the whole matter of decline in manners and
morals is but a part of the world-wide revolt against the morality of
Jesus Christ that we are witnessing everywhere. Social and religious
teachers, students of history and social movements have seen the
approach of this revolt for a long time, have been watching its rise and
growth. When they have pointed out the end of the path that we have been
travelling, they have been disposed of by calling them pessimists. These
"pessimists" pointed out long ago that the denial of the obligation to
believe would be followed by an abandonment of all moral standards. They
pointed out to the devotees of "liberal religion" that they are in
reality the leaders of a moral revolt, that if it does not make any
difference what you believe it will soon come to make no difference what
you do. It is a rather silly performance to blow up the dam which holds
back the mass of water of an irrigation system and imagine that no more
water will flow out than you want to flow out. When the Protestant
revolt blew up the restraining dams of the Catholic Religion they had no
right to expect that only so much denial of Catholic truth as it suited
them to dispense with would be the result. Through the broken dams the
whole religion of Christ has been flowing out and it is mere empty
pretence to claim that all that is of any value is left. It is
impossible to maintain anything of the sort now that all the moral
content of the Christian system is openly thrown overboard by vast
numbers of the population of the world, in every country that claims to
be civilised. It is useless to say that there has always been evil in
the world and that the maintenance of the Catholic religion has never
anywhere abolished sin. That is true, but it is not to the present
point. The social situation is one where there are definite religious
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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