The Lone Star Catholic (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 47, No. 28, Ed. 1 Sunday, November 9, 1958 Page: 2 of 24
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A
Father Ginder’s views on current events
GOD LOVE YOU
Right Wrone
Most Reverend
Fulton J. Sheen
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November 9, 1958
By your sacrifices you will fill your “lamp” with the
precious “oil” of merit. Then when the Bridegroom cometh
you will be ready, the door will be open, and you will enter
into everlasting marriage with Him in Heaven.
ST. PAUL
GREATEST CONVERT MAKER
The foolish virgins did not pour out the oil in sinful
waste, hence, in this respect they did not sin. Though they
are called “foolish” they are still called “virgins.” The
problem is not what they did but that they did nothing.
They neglected the greater interests of the Bridegroom.
We lose our souls not merely by doing evil, but principally
by neglecting to do good.
65c EACH
5 or more, 60c each.
$28 per 100 plus postage
preached that the Pope
has no more authority in
England than any other
foreign bishop—that the
Bishop of Paris, for in-
stance—and that he could
Cut out this column, pin your sacrifice to it and mail
it to Most Rev. Fulton J. Sheen, National Director of the
Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 366 Fifth Avenue,
New York lx, N. Y. or your Diocesan Director.
se
from the Book Dept.
OUR SUNDAY VISITOR INC.
HUNTINGTON, INDIANA
GOD LOVE YOU to Mrs. J. H. L. for $2. “This is the cost
of my morning paper for a month—I missed it a lot at first.”
. . . to Mr. & Mrs. D. N. for $5. “This is a small offering in
thanksgiving for a great blessing granted us—our adopted son.”
. . . to F. U. for $5. “I won this from a non-Catholic friend in
a golf game. I thought it would do us both good to give it
to the Missions.” ... to Dusty T for 50c. “I am a cub scout
and I earned this 50c for you to use for the children who are
suffering.”
IN our day, it is the bride who keeps the bridegroom wait-
1 ing at the Church. In the days of Our Lord it was the
bridegroom who kept the bride waiting. Hence Our Lord
compared entering heaven to the ten virgins or bridesmaids
who went out to meet the bridegroom who kept everyone
waiting until midnight. Five of the bridesmaids had oil in
their lamps to light the way; five others allowed their oil
to flicker down into extinction. The five who were with-
out oil hurriedly went out to buy, but the markets were
closed. The bridegroom came and the door was shut.
THE LESSON?
Now what does the Church say is the greatest way to gain
merit and to care for the interests of the Bridegroom?
1) It is by aiding the Missions that we serve the greater
interests of the Bridegroom. Pius XI said that: “Charity to
the Missions surpasses all other charities as Heaven surpasses
earth and Eternity, time.”
2) The oil of merit must be replenished daily — by even
a little sacrifice. The sacrifice can be the denial of a cigarette,
or a drink, or a magazine. At the end of the month gather up
the drops of oil and send them to the new Vicar of the Bride-
groom, our new Holy Father.
3) The Holy Father knows better than we do the needs of
the Church in each part of the world. Remember, whenever
you sacrifice to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith
your sacrifice goes to the Vicar of the Bridegroom.
1) The Bridegroom is Our Lord. The Church in its fullness
throughout the world is the Bride. We who await the coming
of the Bridegroom at the hour of death are the bridesmaids.
2) The oil is merit by which we enter heaven. The closed
door is security for those who have merit. But for those who
have no merit the closed door means exclusion. For some it is
the wedding-bell; for others the funeral knell.
3) We may have the oil of the Spirit of Christ at the be-
ginning, but as life ebbs on we may fail to renew or replenish
it. If we have faith without good works we have the “lamp”
of the Catholic but not the “oil” of merit.
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89 0
m, 3 be overruled by a Gen-
S0 ' eral Council of the
M ; Church. All heads of re-
p ligious houses were or-
dmh dered to teach this to
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t e
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again.”—Thus the preface to the edition of
1562.
According to the Homilies, the old re-
ligion is “the idolatrous church . . . being
indeed not only a harlot (as the Scripture
calleth her) but also a foul, filthy, old,
withered, harlot (for she is indeed of an-
cient years) ... the foulest and filthiest
harlot that ever was seen . . . the great
strumpet of all strumpets, the mother of
whoredom set forth by St. John in his
Revelation . . .”
The Homilies harp on “the Pope’s in-
tolerable pride”: “What our Saviour Christ
pronounced of the Scribes and Pharisees in
the Gospel, the same may we boldly and
with safe conscience pronounce of the
Bishops of Rome, namely that they have
forsaken, and daily do forsake, the com-
mandments of God, to erect and set up their
own constitutions . . .”
“And against all this flood of propa-
ganda,” says Father Hughes, “the other side
had, of course, comparatively little imme-
diate remedy. The pulpits were entirely in
the control of the Reform party, and in
this matter the pulpits were all but every-
thing: it was an age when half the popu-
lation could neither read nor write. The
press was censored; printers were few,
well-known, and well-supervised; not a
book could be printed without the leave of
the bishops.”
ordered the bishops to
have it everywhere
2 OUR SUNDAY VISITOR
Towering above all the Apostles
and disciples is the mighty figure
of St. Paul. With the help of
modern research we shall try to
bring this many-sided genius to
life again, to see the drama that
transformed him from an arch-
enemy of Christ into His daunt-
less champion. It is a fascinating
story by Father John A. O’Brien,
replete with adventure, pulsing
with inspiration and rich in
spiritual values.
NOTHER powerful instrument
supporting the official mythology was The
Book of Martyrs by John Foxe. First pub-
lished in 1563, it soon became a household
classic among the English. It was Foxe who
tagged Mary Tudor as “Bloody Mary” and
made it stick. It was he who converted “The
Fires of Smithfield” into a catchword that
to this day has the same effect on the
average Englishman as “Magna Carta” or
“1066.”
Now it is a commonplace that Henry
VIII executed Thomas More and John
Fisher and 25 others besides, not counting
Baptists. He also hung Robert Aske and 216
of his followers for rebelling against the
new religion.
“Good” Queen Bess would later exe-
cute innumerable priests, many of them
Jesuits, ordering them to be hanged, drawn,
and quartered at Tyburn, a name as evo-
cative among English Catholics as its
counterpart, the Fires of Smithfield among
Protestants. She also condemned 82 women
for witchcraft. Indeed, in Presbyterian
Scotland with a total population of a mil-
lion at most, 8,000 women were burned as
witches between 1560 and 1600.
It was the spirit of the times. As H. F.
M. Prescott writes in her biography of
Mary Tudor: “The reply to the challenge
of heresy was the same from either party
■—‘Burn the heretic.’ What Catholic sover-
eigns did to Protestants, Protestants did to
Anabaptists. Calvin himself advisedly and
deliberately declared that it was the duty of
the Christian to destroy preachers of false
gods.”
Nevertheless, it was John Foxe more
than anyone else who gave currency to the
fallacy that bloodthirstiness is the special
prerogative of the Catholic Church.
A careful count shows that Queen
Mary burned 273 heretics in the four years
of her reign. No Catholic today would de-
fend her action. She should not have done
it. But Foxe, completely ignoring the reli-
gious murders of Henry and Elizabeth,
wrote up Mary’s executions in partisan
style, using repeated adjectives to pound
home his message. Thus, it is always
“Bloody Bonner” and “Bloody Gardiner”
(two Catholic bishops) attacking Protestant
victims, who inevitably stand as “poor,
meek, innocent lambs.”
This spurious version of history, im-
posed originally by the British Crown, per-
sists in our midst to this day. It is still
found in our college textbooks. It cropped
out most recently in Winston Churchill’?
“History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”
It is the basis of most anti-Catholic propa-
ganda, the stereotyped attitude of the
white Protestant toward the Church in the
deep South, and it is buried deep down in
the thinking processes of most doctrinaire
Protestants everywhere else in the country.
In the matter of English history, then,
we Catholics have been revisionists for
over 400 years. Surely, we should under-
stand the mentality and problems of our
presentday revisionists, and at least give a
hearing to their version of current history,
for—certainly—we want no official my-
thology in this country. We Catholics have
suffered far too much from that sort of
thing in the past.
Mee
NEW INSPIRATIONAL BOOK ABOUT
the greatest convert maker
Falsifying the facts:
a case history
W HEN King Henry VIII of England
quarreled with the Pope, he did a smear
job on our Church that persists to this day.
Henry was the first dictator in history
with access to the printing press, and his
crafty mind anticipated the presentday
technique of the “hard sell.” He settled on a
few key phrases and hammered them into
the consciousness of his subjects with the
persistence of a Red Chinese brainwashing
— a batch of peasants.
In December, 1533, he
their communities.
Fr. Ginder Next, handbills were
printed and posted on every church door
in England, telling the people of the king’?
appeal from the Pope to a General Council
and thus preparing them for schism.
A key phrase, repeated again and
again like the refrain in "Alouette," was
“the usurped authority of the Bishop of
Rome.” Now the Pope’s authority in Tudor
England was no more usurped than it is
today in Philadelphia. A. F. Pollard could
hardly be called partial to the Catholic
Church, and yet in his Life of Cranmer
even he observes that “the primacy of
Rome was as legitimate and natural a de-
velopment as the Royal Supremacy; the
one was no more usurped than the other.”
In 1534, a tract came from the king’s
printer: A Little Treatise against the Mut-
tering of some Papists in corners. Father
Philip Hughes summarizes it as follows:
“The Royal Supremacy—this was its gen-
eral message—had really nothing to do
with religion. It was not a change in reli-
gion, it was insinuated (though very care-
fully not said), but a matter of politics, the
ending of a monstrous usurpation that had
been very profitable to the usurper but
never justified—a usurpation always
grudged in England and ruinous to the
realm.”
The king had everything his own way.
In our day we are jaded, sophisticated at
the least, as far as the printed word is
concerned. But Henry’s was a pioneering
venture and the subject matter was topical.
Further, there was no revisionist press, for
the underground printer had not yet been
heard of and the king alone could command
a printer.
Henry was now a Protestant busily at
work turning England Protestant, for, as
Father Hughes summarizes the situation, to
cease being a Catholic, “it sufficed to re-
pudiate—not papal infallibility, a later
business—but the age-long belief that the
pope is, as St. Peter’s successor, the divine-
ly appointed ruler of the whole Church
of Christ: to repudiate where one has be-
lieved.”
To insure a following and the continu-
ation of his policy, the king seized a total
of 908 abbeys, monasteries, and convents,
and handed them over to his nobility, there-
by implicating them in his own crime, and
creating a vested interest. Now any at-
tempt at restoring the Catholic Church in
England might mean that the rich and
powerful nobles would have to disgorge
their fat estates. They became known a?
“church millionaires,” from the origin of
their wealth.
Thus, Edward VI and Elizabeth con-
tinued Henry’s Protestantizing policy and
with it the shameless smearing of the Pope
and the Catholic Church. The Primer now
included the invocation: “From the ty-
ranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his
detestable enormities, O Lord, deliver us!”
B UT the main part of the brainwash-
ing was accomplished by the Book of Ho-
milies, published under Edward VI in 1547.
These were sermons to be read to the
people by their priests, week in and week
out, Sunday after Sunday, year in and year
out—“And when the aforesaid book of ho-
milies is read over, her majesty’s pleasure
is, that the same be repeated and read
MAebeessee"D)
OEM
How He Won Souls for Christ
.REV. JOHN A. O'BRIEN, ..........................................
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Francis, Dale. The Lone Star Catholic (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 47, No. 28, Ed. 1 Sunday, November 9, 1958, newspaper, November 9, 1958; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1528529/m1/2/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting St. Edward’s University.