The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1910-09-24
STRAIGHT FROM THE SHOULDER

Father Vaughan the brilliant Jesuit orator
Whose sermons and addresses were a conspicuous
bfeature in connection with the Montreal Eucharis-
tic Congress- delivered striking and fearless adj
dress to the women who assembled in Stanley hall
Montreal, the third day of the great Congress.
His subject was, "The Eucharistc Life as an Anti
Fdote for Modern Life" and the announcement that
the eloquent English Jesuit would speak attracted
an audience of women that filed the hall from
stage to doors.
Father Vaughan handled the sins and dissipa-
lions of modern life without gloves, and hurled
scathing invectives against the shams mad inf
delities of modern society. He said, in part
eve are livig in day of headlines, snapshots,
taxicabs and music halls; in day when the scram-
bic for the prizes of life has become mad passion
1t is day of fever, fret and fume, when compe-
ttion for earthen toys is so keen, and the margin
Of profit in commerce has become so fine that the
one cry beating through the air is hurry up No
one seems to have time for pause TILL worn out in
the pursuit of gew-gaws and vanities rest cure
becomes imperative, the clock is stopped and all
action, mental well physical, must be pre-
scribed as prohbitive for an eighth part of year
I'VE are living in day when the high ideals
of old fast yielding to the pressure of creature
comforts, when principal is being exchanged for
expediency in a day when self-sacrifcing Catholi-
cism is being battered for self-centered material
ism. when the Christian sense of sin is being re-
garded as bygone superstition; in day when
It matters not what you believe, but only what you
do, and when you may do what you like provided
YOU are not found out; in day when the rela-
tons between the sexes takes one back to Pagan
times, while the garbage on which man and women
feed is foul and oathsome as the stuff over which
they gloat and chatter: in day when marriage
has become so debased and defled that not even the
pledged troth can make it long endurable without
change of prospective partners in life Of legal
lied vice; in day when there is no empty place
but in the cradle, and no room in which to move
but in the churches. Well might leading Partisan
physician up the situation in the word. 'C'est
une pourriture.'
Observe that the cleavage today as in no pre-
vious time since the dawn of Christianity is be-
tween God and mammon; or shall [ say in Ian
guage more definite STILL between Catholicism and
Agnostcism, if not evolutionary materialism it.
read the story of present-day life as it is reflected
in society, it Is mirrored forth on the stage as
it is shown upon the law courts as it is writ large
Oh our book stalls, if you will as it is published
in society Journals in the monthly magazine. in
the weekly pictorial and in the daily press
with mammon thus asserting itself as it does
amid all sections of the community in this twen-
tieth century, with homefe gone, with social life
dcmoralized, with bi-products of materialsm
everywhere rampant, with our marts of industry
like gambling bells, and the very streets like a
nightmare, what [ ask is to lift up and proclaim
the interests of God against the devastating plague
Of frvolity, folly and riot? Before this tidal wave
of paganism stretching from sea to sea and river
to river, everything is going under with one ex-
cepton, and that is our holy religion. The Church
of Christ indissolubly one, infallibly true, indie
structibly good, is the one and only institution
that is holding her own and is semper eadem I'm
changed and Interchangeable Amid all this wreck
age and ruin littering the spaces of the world like
Christ the Church. too, remains yesterday. today
and the forever. Her center of gravity |
never shifts"