Looking back: The Monitor, April 17, 1959

A screenshot of Page 1 of The Monitor, Vol. C1, No, 51, April 17, 1959. The Monitor was published from 1858 to 1984 as the newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The Catholic News Archive, a project of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance, has an online library of historic Catholic publications including 326 issues of The Monitor from Jan. 3, 1958, to Nov. 25, 1965, spanning the Vatican II era. Visit https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org.

April 9, 2019
Catholic San Francisco

Looking Back: The Monitor, April 17, 1959.

‘Too Little’ Knowledge Of Liturgy
Cardinal Would Spread Word by Training Youth

GENOA, Italy (NC) —Teaching boys and young men the meaning of the Church’s Liturgy has been stressed by Cardinal Slri, Archbishop of Genoa, as the best means of bringing all people back to an understanding of the sacred rites.

Cardinal Siri, in opening the Genoa liturgical congress, deplored the fact that Catholics often attend the Mass and other rites only physically. This should be fought, he said, because “it ultimately leads to the decadence of spiritual life, to decadence of tradition and also to the loss of faith.”

The Cardinal said that half of the faithful have a superficial knowledge of the liturgy restricted to the Mass and Benediction.

Pope Lauds Women as 'Strong Sex’

VATICAN CITY - Pope John XXIII paid the women of Italian Catholic Action a compliment He hailed them as not the “weaker sex,” but the “strong sex” because of their religious fervor. Speaking to more than 8,000 women at a general audience in St Peter’s Basilica, the Pope called the feminine movement “a great phenomenon in the history of the modern Church.”

Rome Condemns Vote for Red Sympathizers

VATICAN CITY (NC) - The Holy See has ruled it sinful for Catholics to vote for any candidate, Communist or not, who is known to support the Reds or their activities. The ruling, the strongest anti-Communist action taken by the Holy See in 10 years, came in the form of a resolution passed by the Cardinals of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office and approved by Pope John XXIII. As published here in L’Osservatore Romano, the resolution used the term “notlawful” to describe support given to any “representative of the people” who backs the Reds. Use of this term makes the resolution dearly legislative and thus the term means "sinful.”

The resolution quoted the substance of the Holy Office decree of 1949 excommunicating Communists or those who support Communism. 

The Little Lambs 

Pope John XXIII receives two lambs as a gift from some of the 30,000 persons, mostly Italian foodmarket workers, who crowded into St. Peter's Basilica during a recent Mass audience. The gathering included United States policemen, German singers and blind Belgians on a pilgrimage to Rome.

Sister-Scholar Studies St. Agnes, S.F.

The article concerns a study of the demographics of St. Agnes Parish by Presentation Sister Bernadette, who was finishing her master's at Gonzaga University.

The important new element Is the racial change. St. Agnes School received its first [African American] pupil In 1948, and now it has 54 nonwhites in an enrollment of 435. In 1950 only 2.5 per cent of the parishioners were nonwhites; today the figure is 15.8 per cent, and among children, it’s 25.8 per cent. What do these data spell out to St. Agnes? According to Sifter Bernadette, “Although the parish is changing, it is not dying or even declining. There remains a big Job for the Church to do.

“It means adapting to the social changes taking place. It means setting an example of good racial relations, for one thing. It means making more use of lay apostles to contact non-Catholics In the rapidly shifting population. It means adjusting the parish program, financial and otherwise, to the indicated income and social and educational level of the parishioners."

?Question Mark?
Father Mark Hurley

Father Mark J. Hurley, later a San Francisco auxiliary bishop and Bishop of Santa Rosa, and an author whose books included  "The Unholy Ghost: Anti-Catholicism in the American Experience," wrote a learned Q&A column for The Monitor. In this issue, he defended the sainthood of St. Patrick from the slings of Irish detractors and explained the many writings of early Christians that did not make it into the Bible.

Question: I draw your attention to a clipping which appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, concerning our beloved patron, St. Patrick. It says, “St. Patrick was not Irish; was not a saint, ever; his name was not originally Patrick; he was not born on March 17; he did not drive the frogs and the snakes out of Ireland. The celebration is a gleaning from the period when the South Ireland Irish believed that the spirit of their gods lived in trees.” How can people be so dumb?—J.M.M.

Answer: The letter to the editor of the Sun Times was clearly calculated to twit the Irish-Americans of Chicago during their St Patrick’s Day festivities The Irish are well able to take care of the obviously hostile attack, a racial and religious one at that But what about the question of sainthood? Actually St Patrick Is one of the very few saints in heaven whose feast day is celebrated as a holy day of obligation in any country, viz., in Ireland itself. It is singular testimony to the saint

The play on words that St Patrick was not a saint usually revolves around the fact that he was" not formally canonized by solemn process in Rome. The first solemn canonization by formal process presided over by the Pope was that of St Ulrich in 993 by Pope John XV. It is quite plain that most of tht great saints have not been the subject of solemn canonization; so why single out St Patrick?

Question: In discovering the. lost Gospel of St. Thomas, Professor Cullman speaks of the “rejected books of the Bible ” What about these other books; can we read them?—R.L.

Answer: It would be most enlightening for people to read the so-called “apocrypha,” for they lend much informetlon on the meaning of and distinctions between Sacred Scripture itself, the writings of Catholic authors of the first centuries, and the works of heretics and schismatics who were contemporaries of the early Church writers. The word "apocrypha” has been used in several senses. use the word "apocrypha,” which literally means "secret teachings” to refer to those aix books of the Old Testament which were rejected at the time of Martin Luther. All the Christian world until the 16th century accepted the 45 books of the Old Testament in the Bible; the Protestants then rejected six, making their total 39. The six art: Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and two books of Machabees.

The word "apocrypha" also refers to those books written before the time of Christ as sort of addenda to the Old Testament. These make fascinating reading: The books of Adam and Eve, the Apocalypse of Moses, the Lost Book of Noah, the Vision of Baruch, the Story of Ahikar. A third and entirely different class of "apocrypha” consists of tales surrounding the narrative of the New Testament. Some seem based on the gospel story itself; others were undoubtedly "common talk” among people.

The Catholic Church rejected these books as "inspired" and refused to put them into the New Testament. However, this refusal to include these books in the Bible did not mean that the tales given were necessarily false. They are simply classed as "apocrypha” or books of unknown origin. Some books of this class are as old as the four Gospels; some have great authority, whereas others are almost pure fabrication. The early Church dearly labeled them and was not at all gullible. JBut all make interesting reading: The Original Gospel of SL James (A.D. 150); (he Gospel of Thomas the Doubter (AJ). 200); the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (AD. 400); the Greek Gospel of Ni cod emus (AJ). 400). The Harrowing of Hell, the Acts and Letters of Pontius Pilate pique curiosity and exdte speculation. Apocrypha then may be of many gradations, from the splendor of genius and religious sincerity down to shallow stupidities or crafty frauds. The lost gospel of St Thomas, described recently by Prof. Cullman, has been put at the bottom of this scale by the equally expert Msgr. Skehan.