Religion: Words of the Week

“Live an ordered, respectable life, not without discipline and sacrifice, and the reward is peace! But is that the peace Jesus speaks of? Or is it a smug peace anticipating the hereafter? . . .

“Our way, if we are fully Christian in intention, is to … be patient and courageous, not in ourselves, but in Him. To face, not halfway, not turning back, but to face toward the year 1952. Not to divide the world into the elect who . . . have the answers . . . and the sots who are foolish enough not to be so sure. To know that Fascist and Communist, capitalist and socialist, Hindu and American, leaders and masses, are all in the same boat—the earth. That 2,000 years ago Jesus started something that did not reach its climax in the 13th Century, that did not go wrong in the 16th Century, and that must face what is true in nuclear physics and psychoanalysis, as it tried to face the Arab threat with hylomorphism and Aristotelian dialectics.

“The greatest sin of our age is impatience and its child is the short cut—in politics, in economics—and in Reno. Whether we bring salvation depends on our endurance and the readiness to accept the fact that we are cross-bearing pilgrims.”

—The Rev. H. A. Reinhold in the current issue of the Roman Catholic monthly, Orate Fratres.