p. 23The Church and Home

The Church represents Jesus Christ; and therefore she must have substantially the same relations with home that He had. Let us look around us and we shall find it so. There is in the present day an unnatural and cruel invasion of the rights of home, made by almost every known civilized government. Fathers have been cajoled into voting for it; mothers, keen-sighted and easily aroused in other matters relating to their children, have been blind to it, and have permitted it; no one but the Church has raised a voice against it. This invasion consists in the usurpation by the State of the education of the young. Scarcely have they grown too large for their cradles, when they are taken in charge by an official system called National Education, whose iron grasp is never unloosed until the seeds of infidelity are sown and watered and matured in their young souls. Christian faith is being thus rooted out of Catholic and Protestant countries alike. Parents stand by and look on. They see in their children the same physical beings as always, and they perceive in them a gratifying intellectual development that conceals from their sight the noxious undergrowth of infidelity I have mentioned. The moral and spiritual evils of this usurpation are chiefly threefold: society is rearing up for itself citizens without any sense of conscientious duty: parents are rearing up children without affection, that will be a curse to them in their old age: and the children themselves are being robbed of their one chance of eternal salvation, in losing all loyal adhesion to the teaching and discipline of the true Church.

The Vicar and Representative of Jesus Christ has from the beginning of the evil spoken out in clear ringing tones of warning against this invasion of home. He has in our own day denounced it by formally condemning the opinion: “that domestic society or the family derives its whole raison d’être solely from civil law; and therefore all the rights of parents over their children, especially those of providing for their training and education, flow from and depend on the civil law only.” The Catholic Bishops throughout the world, have in their respective sees, echoed the denunciation, and some of them have been exiled in consequence. At home, we all know the determined stand that has been and is being made to save to parents their inalienable right over their children; and most of us have practical experience of trying sacrifices made by priests and people alike to resist the tide of Godless education.

But there is another and a still more sacred right of home for which the Church has fought against the world for the last eighteen centuries and a half. This is the sanctity of Christian marriage. The world would make woman the slave of man’s passions and caprices: it would make marriage a mercantile contract, like buying and selling, except, indeed, that this latter would have much the more binding power: it would, in a word, impiously lay hands on that bond that unites by divine authority man and woman until death, and is the only security of their own and their children’s happiness. It is needless to say how strenuously the Church has defended the Sacrament of marriage, and the true rights of woman and the sanctity of home against these pernicious errors. If the tide of barbarism that rolled back before the march of Christianity has not yet swept in again on the rescued world: if civil and domestic society is still more than a memory and a name: if woman remains enthroned as queen in the realm of home; these results are solely due to the faithful, determined stand our Church has made and is making, against those kings of the earth and those leaders of infidel thought, who have taken counsel together against the Lord and against His Christ, and have determined to break their bonds asunder and cast away their yoke from them.

But let us descend from these general views of the action of the Church in relation to the family, and let us examine what is its action in our own immediate neighbourhood. In your parish Church, dear reader, there are three fixtures very closely connected with home life. They are the confessional, the pulpit, and the Altar. Every week a large number of your neighbours, yourself probably among them, crowd round that confessional, to lay before the Priest of Jesus Christ who sits there, your sins and shortcomings, your neglect of duty, your want of patience, your uncharitable conversations, &c. Now put all that you have to confess together and take from the sum whatever is connected with home obligations, and what will remain? Your conscience tells you, very little indeed. The words of advice too which the Priest speaks before he pronounces the absolution are mostly about those same home obligations. He tells you how to practise patience in your relations with parents, children, brothers, sisters, according to your position; how to be just and charitable to others in your thoughts and words; how to sanctify your daily life by prayer, by habitual intercourse with God, and by the direction of all that you think, say, and do to His honour and glory. The confessional, then, may be considered as the spiritual guardian of home, and faithfully does it perform its office. Heaven alone keeps the diary of its world-wide influence; and it will be only when that diary will be unrolled at the great Judgment, that men will perceive not only the immense treasures of grace dispensed through it, but also the countless social blessings it conferred on individuals and families. Peace, contentment, patience, cheerfulness under trials, resignation in sorrow and misfortune, these are some of its ministering angels that it sends back with us to our homes according to our requirements; and their unseen presence is felt in the harsh word checked and left unsaid, in the cruel treatment meekly borne, in cheerful brightness of look and manner, and perhaps most of all, in the fortitude and hope it inspires when death comes into our home-circle and takes away some one that—well some one from whom we were not prepared to part.

The pulpit, too, like the confessional, exercises a powerful influence on you and your neighbours. Its range is indeed wider, its teaching fuller, its exhortations more formal. It speaks to the people in the aggregate, while the confessional addresses each one individually; but the voices of both, like two harmonized sounds, have the same end and purpose, and they mutually help each other to attain it. The Sunday sermon often haunts the guilty conscience of the drunken father or the unnatural mother or the undutiful child, following it with an importuning cry, and coming between it and its guilty pleasures. In solitary moments also, its echo in the heart thrills it through and through, until the resolution is sincerely formed of turning by a good confession to our patiently expectant, loving Father in Heaven. Thus the pulpit points and leads to the confessional, both co-operating in the work of individual sanctification, and each exercising its own distinct influence on home.

But confessional and pulpit converge to one common centre, namely, to the Tabernacle on the Altar. There is the true centre of spiritual life in every parish, and mission, and home throughout the Catholic world; for there is our incarnate God, looking out on us through the white veil He has drawn around Himself, and loving us with the same first love that brought Him down from His Father among us, and that makes it His delight to be with the children of men. Oh, blessed for ever be this everlasting love—the ever burning love of His Sacred Heart! He seems to have resumed His hidden life on earth, and to have made every altar of the Church another Nazareth, and to have resolved on staying in our midst, although we treat Him worse than the coarse, ill-conditioned Nazarenes of old.

And now what effect has this earthly residence of our incarnate God on our home-life? Does He interfere and mix with it? Does He help to brighten it, to keep it pure and holy, to lead it onwards and upwards until it merges for each of us in the eternal home-life of our Father in Heaven? To answer these questions for a small minority of my readers, I shall have to trespass on the patience of those who know already what my answer is to be.

I say then, that Jesus in the Tabernacle exercises a profound influence on Catholic home life. Whenever He is received with proper dispositions, as, thank God, He generally is, there must always be a thorough renunciation of sin and sinful habits. Therefore whatever is amiss in our home relations must be set right before we can venture to invite Him into our souls. This is much; but the grace, and strength, and light, He brings with Him when He comes, are a great deal more. Unfortunately those outside our Church (and perhaps some few who call themselves Catholics), do not understand this influence. They think it the outcome of an excited imagination,—unreal, exaggerated, unintelligible. We cannot, however, feel surprised at their incredulity regarding the effect, seeing that they have no faith in the cause. But let them ask any missionary Priest, if he perceive a marked difference between the home-life of a man or woman, young or old, who receives Holy Communion frequently, and the home-life of one who receives It seldom or does not receive It at all. Let them ask those Sisters of Charity, or those Sisters of Mercy, or any of the other numerous Sisterhoods that bring the Church into communication with so many disordered homes, what is the invariable result when they get members of families to go to Confession and Communion. Let them ask, in fine, that helpless old woman who is supported by her daughter’s weekly earnings; and not supported alone, but made comfortable and happy by her child’s patient attention and love; to what does she attribute that daughter’s fidelity to her often troublesome charge? The answer of each will point towards the Tabernacle. The priest will tell them that the frequent reception of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, even by one member of a household, remodels it beyond knowing; that it restores peace where there had been only bickering and dissension; order, where there had been confusion; love, where previously all manner of bad passions reigned. So too, the Sisters will tell them, that as long as the Sacraments are frequented, there is nothing to be feared for the home: the son will give no trouble to the parents; the daughter will guard herself from the social dangers around her; the drunken father will no longer come home drunk; and the wife and mother will not only know her responsible duties better, but she will perform them with greater fidelity. That old woman, too, knowing that her daughter makes time to attend Mass every morning after setting all things right in their simple home, that she receives the Holy Communion regularly every Sunday, that she seems, in fact, to divide her life between home, the Church, and her place of work,—that old woman, I say, will have but one cause to which she can attribute the saintliness of her daughter’s life, and that will be the strength she receives, in her Communions and visits, from Jesus in the most holy Sacrament.

The Church, then, has many most important relations with the family, the beneficial effects of which are manifest to the world. Unfortunately, however, the world closes its eyes, and insists that it does not see them; and so, its rulers, and statesmen, and theorists, push the Church, with the brute force at their command, from the home and the school which they turn into state institutions. There will be, however, one day, a twofold retribution of this unjust and unnatural action. The parental instinct will take the alarm, and recall the usurped control of the family; and He who promised to His Church victory over the powers of darkness, and who gave her the commission to teach the nations of the earth, will rise in His might, and snap asunder the bonds that vain men would put upon her hands, and leave her free and untrammelled, as of old, to run her divinely appointed course. In looking forward prayerfully and patiently to this coming time, let us not lose sight of the duty of the hour; but let each one do faithfully and well what Heaven has given him to do, in the circle in which he moves.