Rome had spoken, but to many people the news seemed almost too good
to be true, and to others so surprising and "new" as to be unwelcome.
The old idea that frequent communion was only for holy people was
hard to eradicate. Jansenist bugbears about the preparation required
and the responsibility incurred frightened the timid. Much insistence
was necessary before the objection "I am not good enough" was found
to be worthless, but when it was finally done away with the fruits
were at once apparent.
"What a wonderful change there would be," Monsignor de Ségur had
written some forty years earlier, "if frequent communion could be
established in our colleges and schools! Experience shows the
influence of communion on a young man's daily life. There is no vice
that the regular use of the sacraments will not uproot, no moral
resurrection beyond its power to effect." That dream was now on its
way to realization. "Confessions," said a Jesuit who was giving a
retreat to the students of a large public school, "are child's play
now to what they used to be. In the old days they took two or three
days--now nearly all the boys are daily communicants, and the
confessions of the whole college take little more time than an hour."
"Yes," said a young working-girl to a Sacred Heart nun, "I go every
day. I cannot stay till the end of Mass, because I have to get to my
work. But there are several of us who are all daily communicants, who
take the same train to business, and we get into the same carriage
and make our thanksgiving on the way. And we love to think that in
that train, full of people who seldom think of God, there is one
carriage where He is being adored and worshipped. And we find it such
a help in the day's work."
And not girls only. The author will never forget a very early morning
Mass in a big London church. The church was full of working men in
their working clothes. The procession to the altar seemed never
ending, communion was still being given after the Mass was finished.
They had come for help and comfort in their daily toil to One who on
this earth had been a working man like themselves, One who is "rich
unto all that call on Him," and they had learnt the strength of that
union.
Was it not the "man in the street" for whom our Saviour came? Were
not the crowds who followed Him mostly composed of "men in the
street"? And did He not choose from their ranks the Apostles who were
to carry His message throughout the world? "In these days," says the
decree, "when religion and the Catholic faith are attacked on all
sides, and true love of God and genuine piety are lacking in so many
places, it is doubly necessary that the faithful should be
strengthened, and the love of God kindled in their hearts by this
saving practice of daily communion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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