WHEN THE WORLD TURNED AGAINST IT'S MOTHER

WHEN THE WORLD TURNED AGAINST IT'S MOTHER It is difficult to imagine a person who would turn against his own mother — the mother who had brought him into the world, cared for him, taught him his first words, helped him take his first steps, nursed him through his sicknesses, shared his trials and his triumphs. Even hardened criminals usually have a soft spot in their hearts for their mothers. Yes, it is hard to imagine. And yet, four centuries ago, a large part of the world turned against its spiritual Mother. Devotion to Mary reached a peak in the Middle Ages. Henry Adams tells us that the palaces of earthly queens were hovels compared with the palaces — churches and cathedrals — of the heavenly Queen. In the 100 years between 1170 and 1270, the French built 80 cathedrals and nearly 500 large churches of the cathedral class. In today’s currency, these would have cost several billion dollars. Nearly every great church of the Middle Ages belonged to Mary. If it was not dedicated to her outright, it contained a Lady Chapel. When the Cathedral of Chartres was built, theologians, artists, nobles, and common people worked together in honor of the Virgin. They harnessed themselves to wagons and dragged huge blocks of stone and giant tree trunks. Noble ladies helped peasant women mix mortar. All worked in silence and prayed as they worked. No one who thought himself to be in mortal sin dared volunteer. People of that time thought of the Blessed Mother in connection with everything they did. They would not venture upon the simplest undertaking without invoking her aid. That was a joyous time, because our Lady had her proper place in the scheme of things. The world echoed with the songs of St. Francis and the troubadours. True, there were wars then and bickerings and jealosies — man will never achieve a heaven on earth — but the spirit of the times was one of joyousness, as is inevitable when man achieves union with God through our Lady. “Some Catholic historians have conceded to the adverse critics of the Middle Ages that the people of those times were more brutal than the modern man,” says Ed Willock in Integrity. “I think that is conceding too much. . . . At least in the Middle Ages, great caution was taken to safeguard the noncombatant women and children. Ours is the brutality of Hiroshima, where a comparatively well-dressed man, deliberately and with little need for courage, pressed a button which brought screaming death around the ears of grandmothers and babes in arms.” It was in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Protestant Revolt, that millions of people turned away from their heavenly Mother. That revolt was one of the most tragic events of history. The world is still suffering from it. Earlier heresies had kept the Sacrifice of the Mass and the sacraments, the principal source of grace. But the Protestant Revolt resulted in a complete break. It set up a new form of Christianity in which each man was free to start his own church, and hundreds did. The leaders of the Protestant Revolt, in their hatred for everything Catholic, struck especially at our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and at devotion to the Blessed Virgin. These, ironically, are the very things we need most in our struggle for salvation. The reason the early Protestants gave for neglecting Mary was a strange one. “We are Christians,” they said in effect, “and as such we owe our allegiance to Christ. If we honor Mary, we are taking away some of the honor due to Christ.” As if you could honor a Son by ignoring His Mother! And Christ was the perfect Son, because He was perfect God and perfect Man. Jesus had chosen Mary from all eternity to be His Mother. He could have come into the world in any number of ways, but He chose to come through her. He wanted to be carried in her womb for nine months, to be nursed by her, to be brought up and cared for by her, to be subject to her. When He created the angels, He thought of her. When He created the world, He thought of her. When our first parents lost heaven for us, He knew that He would redeem us through her. He preserved her, alone of all creatures, from the stain of original sin, that her body might be a worthy tabernacle for Him. And the leaders of the Protestant Revolt thought to please Him by neglecting her! After the sixteenth century, millions of people were raised with little or no knowledge of the Mother of God. Religion became gloomy, foreboding. Without Mary’s motherly influence, men became calculating, self-seeking. They thought only of themselves and devoted their lives to gaining power and money. Our Lady was neglected even by large numbers of Catholics. Her statues were still in churches, and Catholics continued to pray to her, but she did not play the prominent part in their lives that she should have. The world had truly turned from its Mother. It is Mary’s function to lead us ever closer to God. When she was forgotten, the next step could have been foretold. Thousands of persons turned against God Himself. The revolt against God was led largely by the so-called intellectuals of France, particularly of Paris. In their classrooms, from the lecture platforms and in books, newspapers, and magazines, these men repeated the same refrain: “Look at the progress man has made in science and in other fields. We are on the verge of solving all our problems. A great new era is dawning for mankind. We no longer need a God.” These ideas were widely accepted first by the upper classes, then by the middle classes. Soon they began seeping down to the ordinary workmen and the peasants. France, which had once been so staunchly Catholic, “the eldest daughter of the Church,” now had thousands of freethinkers, agnostics, and even atheists. The leaders of the French Revolution were so anti-Catholic that they drove priests and Sisters from the country or put them to death. The great cathedral of our Lady in Paris was converted into a temple to the goddess of reason. The Revolution eventually collapsed as a political force, but its antireligious spirit lived on. From France, the revolt against God spread throughout the world, like a great insidious cancer. Catholic and Protestant countries alike were affected by it and are still suffering from its effects. It became unfashionable to talk about God. The only things that mattered were the things of this world. The nineteenth century was the century of materialism. No great cathedrals were built in the nineteenth century, because man had lost his convictions and had only opinions. Cathedrals are not built on opinions, but only on deep convictions. For a brief time the God haters seemed to suffer a setback. When Napoleon Bonaparte bacame First Consul of France he said he intended to restore the Church. Paris was agog. The city had witnessed the Reign of Terror, the triumph of “Reason” over “superstition,” was to see a return of the Church. Mass was to be celebrated in the churches that had so recently been plundered and defiled. Napoleon made himself Emperor of France and extended his rule over much of Europe. As was inevitable with a dictator who sought to bend all institutions to his will, he eventually came into conflict with the Church. Religion suffered in all the lands he dominated. “What does the Pope mean by the threat of excommunication?” Napoleon scoffed in 1807. “Does he think the world has gone back a thousand years? Does he think the arms will fall from my soldier’s hands?” In the war between God and man, Napoleon had chosen the side of man. In 1809, he imprisoned the frail and elderly Pope Pius VII. Four years later Napoleon marched against Russia. Cold, hunger and disease almost wiped out his army. He actually watched the guns falling from the stiffening hands of his soldiers. The Napoleonic era ended in 1815. All over Europe there was a period in which various political groups struggled for power. There was revolution and reaction. Through it all, the enemies of religion seemed to make steady progress. Meanwhile another great change was taking place in the Western World. The invention of the steam engine was altering the habits of centuries. Formerly, men had worked at their trades in their own homes or in small shops. They took great pride in their work and had the feeling of contentment and the satisfaction that go with such pride. They were close to their families, even when they were working. They had sufficient food and clothing, and leisure time in which to worship God and take part in innocent amusements. Then factories appeared as ugly blotches on the green countryside, poisoning the air with their heavy black smoke. The small craftsman was ruined. He could not hope to compete with the factory and its great machines. He and his family were forced to move to a city and work for the factory that had put him out of business. Every morning the factory bell rang, summoning men, women and children to work. They labored 12 to 15 hours a day at wages averaging less than a dollar a day. They worked, went home and slept, and then trudged off to work again. They lived like animals in disease-infested slums. They took no pride in their work; often they did not know exactly what they were doing. There was little time for recreation or for going to church. There is, of course, nothing wrong with factories in themselves. The machine age was sure to come, bringing its inevitable changes. If it had come in a spiritual age, however, its effects would have been softened. The factory owners would have recognized their workmen as being created in the image and likeness of God. They would have had some concern for their spiritual and temporal welfare. But the Industrial Revolution came in the age of materialism when the only concern of many was acquiring power and wealth. The best way to do that, the owners reasoned, was to work their employees as long as possible and pay them as little as possible. Many of the workers, in their great distress, were ready to follow such false prophets as Karl Marx, who was to come along in the middle of the nineteenth century. His solution was an uprising of the workers, class warfare. When our Blessed Mother looked down at the world of 1830, she saw a world that had revolted against her, against the Church, against God Himself. There were some exceptions. The people of Ireland, for example, and the Belgians, and the people in the region around Lourdes had clung to their faith despite all persecutions. There were good people in every country. But religion was everywhere on the defensive. Thousands who considered themselves Catholics were affected by this spirit of irreligion. They attended Mass on Sunday and received the sacraments on rare occasions, but they scarcely thought of God as they went about their daily work. As a loving Mother, Mary had never ceased to pray for her children and to try to lead them back to God. In 1830, she made the first of a series of dramatic moves to win the modern world back to Christ. It is interesting to note that she began the campaign in the heart of the enemy’s territory — in Paris. Ctto: THE WOMAN SHALL CONQUER Don Sharkey When the World Turned Against Its Mother Page 6-11 ALL SAINTS PRESS edition published October, 1961 Ist printing....……………August, 1961 NIHIL OBSTAT: John A. Schuliet, , S.T.D. Censor Librorum IMPRIMATUR: Moyses E. Kiley Archiepiscopus Milwauchiensis January 24, 1952