The Catholic times. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1951-current, 1959-05-01
JOSEPH BREIC-
Joseph Model
For Workers

The feast of st. Joseph the Worker will come into
its own when men become as responsible as their
wives and mothers about the things of God. For long
and bitter years, the worlds tragedy has been that
men left religion to women and children. This is less
true, | think of America than of Europe; which
would go far toward explaining the greater stability
America has known.
1t is the particular work of women to apply reIi-
gion in the internal and intimate sphere-to the home,
to the child, to personal spiritual development, to the
easing OF afflction and pain. Men should carry faith
and mortality across the earth like an army with BAN
nerS flying, or like knights sent forth to destroy evil
whenever found.
Humanity's w~ell-being demands the religious
courage, daring, audacity, enterprise and resourceful-
ness of the male. 1t demands his religious strength,
too. Man is the ~initiator and the inventor. His intel
lectual gaze is capable of taking in all the world and
OF seeing far into the future. He is the principle max
er of civilizations, the c%onqueror of wild nature.
WHEN MAN is RELIGIOUS, as he ought to be if
he is to be fully a man, there can be no reducing of re-
lgion to terms merely of security and consolation.
True religion tenaciouslly preserves precious values,
but 1t 1t is masculine it is also an adventurous, hardy.
exploring and creating thing. 1t is good that religion
is womanly in women and childlike in children; but in
men it ought to be manly.
All this is not to suggest that women have no role
to play In the Transforming of customs, systems and in
situations in order that the earth may become fit for
humanity to call its home under Gods heaven. They
do have roles-very great roles-and they are meet
Ing the challenge more and more as governments are
altered to permit them to do so. But the remaking of
the world will always be principally the duty of men.
II law, national Law and above all inter-
national law-will not be made to conform fully to
the religious vision unless men r%eligiously work for
that end. Nor will medicine, or politics, or industry, or
labor, or entertainment or the arts and sciences, or
literature or the thousand other concerns that affect
each of us profoundly.
1t is the exceptional woman who is not essential
ly the conservor. 1t is the exception man who is not
at heart, and at least in his dreams, the restless pio-
neer, the experimenter, the seeker after the new and
hpftpr mQthnd tho cparohpr for q hriohfor vicinn
Much of the colossal good that religion can accom-
plsh for all of us is left undone when men are pre-
occupied with the material to the exclusion of the
spiritual.
MEN, ! THINK, must take the lions sharesof the
blame for the catastrophes of fascism, nazism and
communism. Hitler could not have menaced all that
a thousand years of effort had established if men had
been relglously cleareyed, filled with virtue and ha-
tired OF wrong, able to see right through the prepos-
ferrous posturings and lies of the nazi megalomaniac.
The religious man does not run after every pass
ing pretender and thumper of tubs. The religious man
is a responsible man who will not be led by other men
unless the principles and purposes proposed are right
and good. Nor is the religious man easily cowed by
threats. Had Germany and Europe been manfully re-
ligious, Hitler would have been put over one of his
beer hall barrels and padded.
NEITHER Is THE religious man the dupe of the
smooth-talking confidence man, the communist, with
his mouth full of lies and his hand on a gun or a
knife. It is profoundly interesting to note that few
women have been deceived by communism and drawn
into the slaviSh service of the Stains and Krushchevs,
The religious sense OF women perceived the cunning
and cruel falsity of communism because communism
abhors religion.
If the feast of St. Joseph the Worker is to mean
to the world what Plus XII meant it to mean when he
established it, men will have to return to vigorous re-
lgiousness. In the address in which he announced the
new holy day, Pope Plus challenged a vast throng in
st. Peter Square to measure up to the strong and en-
ergetic demands of real religion.
With the iron manliness that underlay his great
ness, Plus XII pointed to Joseph as the model Of all
who work together with hands or with abstract think
ing. He gave us the feast to arouse us to action; out
of it he wished to see now the determination of brave
men to bring our nuclear and space age under the
rule of firm morality lest it end in holocaust.