Joseph McCabe

“ In point of fact there are few who are not keenly concerned about the material success of their function—their singing, their deportment and appearance. At such a time as Holy Week, for instance, the feverish anxiety for the success of the extraordinary services runs so high that one may safely say they are quite unattended with religious feeling in the sanctuary: ceremonies and music are practised for weeks in advance, and, when the time comes, celebrants are too busy and too nervous to think of more than the merely mechanical or theatrical part of the devotions. ”

“ As a priest, however young he may be, says mass daily from the day of his ordination, the anxiety of the superior to see him ordained appeals to our sympathy; a student is an onus on the community, he must be made productive as soon as possible. ”

“ Certainly in the Franciscan Order students were prematurely advanced to the priesthood for the sake of earning money by their masses. A mass, of course, cannot be sold; that would be simony. But a priest will say mass for you or your intention if you make him a present of half-a-crown. He may say it gratuitously if he pleases (secular priests generally do, I think) , but the bishops have decreed that if a priest accepts a ‘stipend’ at all he must not take less than half-a-crown; the Church, being socialistic, does not encourage competition. ”

“ Before he reaches the age of twenty-four the student has traversed the whole vast and profound system of scholastic philosophy and theology with its innumerable side-issues and controversies; he has his opinions formed upon every serious subject, and knows what to think of every philosophical and religious system that has ever been invented. ”

“ There are deeply religious preachers whose only serious thought is for the good of their hearers, as they conceive it; there are preachers who think only of making a flattering impression on their audience, or who are utterly indifferent what effect or impression they produce: the vast majority strive to benefit their hearers, and are not unassisted in their efforts by a very natural modicum of self-interest. ”

“ The High Mass only differs from the daily Low Mass in the number of assistants and the musical rendering. It is supremely incongruous, from a purely religious point of view, for the celebrant to interrupt his solemn rites whilst he and his congregation listen to the florid strains of Haydn or Gounod, operatically rendered by soulless singers who have no idea of the meaning of their words, and are very frequently non-Catholics. ”

“ If the priest has an educated congregation he usually prepares his sermon with care. The sermons are rarely original, for there is a vast library of sermonnaires at the disposal of the Catholic priest, but it is often written out in full, though it is never read from the pulpit, as is done in Anglican congregations. ”

“ Monastic priests are usually bound to say daily mass by their constitutions, though there is no doubt that it would be much more conducive to true religion if they were allowed liberty of choice. Priests soon contract the habit of hurrying through their Mass at a speed which ill harmonises with their belief in its most solemn character. ”

“ A perusal of the scheme of study which has been described would lead to the impression that Roman Catholic priests must be in a highly satisfactory condition of intellectual equipment. No other priesthood has, or ever had, a longer and more systematic course of training. For ten years, on the average, the candidate is under the exclusive control of the ecclesiastical authorities; authorities who have the advantage of an indefinitely long and world-wide experience in training their neophytes and of a religious authority over them. ”

“ There are many other functions in which the priest finds it difficult to sustain the becoming attitude: confession will be treated in the next chapter; extreme unction is a ceremony in which only a keen faith, keener than usually flourishes in the nineteenth century, can take a religious interest. But it is in the ceremony of baptism, especially, that the most unreasonable rites survive and the most diverting incidents occur. ”

“ No doubt a priest works up to a high rate of speed largely out of anxiety to meet the wishes of his congregation, yet the sight is distressing to one who knows how much is squeezed into the twenty minutes. ”

“ Hence it is not surprising to find that there is a vast amount of empty formalism and purely dramatic effect in sanctuary work. One cannot, of course, attach much importance to the grave and devout expressions of the ministers, for it is part of their discipline: from their earliest years they have been accustomed to a close supervision from superiors, and in the course of time the countenance comes to adapt itself automatically to the occupation. ”

“ Good preaching is, however, rather the exception than the rule: though the age of martyrs has passed away, a Catholic can always find a sufficient test of his faith in the shape of an indifferent preacher who insists on thinking that he needs two three-quarters of an hour sermons every Sunday. ”

“ It is true that scores of priests are sent to entertain the natives of Borneo, or bargain with their Anglican brothers over the facetious Ugandians, and that herculean efforts are made to touch the consciences of respectable Anglicans; the fact remains that in East London many thousands of poor Catholics have drifted for want of priests. Pressure and confusion in the seminaries and colleges is the inevitable result. ”

“ Students are usually in a state of terror about the numerous possibilities of the invalidity of their ordination, and even bishops betray much nervous anxiety in the matter: the ceremony is sometimes repeated for general satisfaction. A curious story is told of a French bishop in illustration of the strange contingencies that affect the validity of orders. ”

“ Numbers of young priests are turned out annually upon humanity with full powers to condemn and anathematise, and an intense itching to do so. They soon find that the 'crude and undigested mass' they have 'intussuscepted' is a burden to themselves and a source of pain to their long-suffering audience. ”

“ During the long hours which monks and nuns devote to prayer every day it is impossible to expect a continuous ecstasy on their part; and, since most of the psalms do not vary from day to day, the very monotony of the services would stand in the way of any very serious devotion. ”

“ At nineteen, when they should still be polishing their wit on Homer, or Tacitus, or Euclid, they are gravely attacking the profoundest problems of metaphysics; a well-educated man of thirty-two who had a brief course of philosophy under F. David, told me that he felt as if he were handling blocks of granite which he fondly wished to penetrate—our usual students never even realised that they were handling ‘blocks of granite.’ Out of many generations of students who passed through my hands only one boy had an idea of the meaning of philosophy ”

“ There was an asterisk, too, in the middle of each verse which occasioned much distraction; one of our friars received the permanent title of ‘The star’ in connection with it. F. Cuthbert, an amiable and excellent old friar, was superior of the small friary at Stratford; one member of the community was a stone-deaf old friar who had naturally dropped into the habit of going straight ahead with his share of the chanting, in sweet unconsciousness of the doings of his colleagues. ”

“ Now every friar is bound to say mass for his superior’s intention, and the superior, having to provide for the community, secures as many and as ‘fat’ stipends as he possibly can. As a friar is bound to say mass every morning he is worth at least 1l. ”

“ Every diocese and nearly every monastic congregation in England is insufficiently manned; thousands of baptized Catholics are wholly neglected for want of priests, and I have known bishops to accept priests who had been practically expelled from other dioceses or congregations. ”

“ Jerome, an expert Hebraist, offered an excellent translation in his classical Latin, but the monks knew the old Psalter by heart and would not change; hence the first translation of the psalms, into bad Latin by very imperfect Hebrew scholars, endures to this day. Some of the psalms—notably the 58th—contain unmitigated absurdities; the verse ‘Kings of armies have fled, have fled’ is rendered, ‘King of virtues, beloved, beloved’; verse 13 runs, ‘If you sleep in the middle of the lots, the wings of the dove are silvered,’ &c. ”