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PAGE 4—THE BULLETIN, April 28, 1962 ISSUE TAKEN ON CLASSROOM SHORTAGE The Backdrop One of the primary argu ments advanced by advocates for Federal aid to education is the supposed acute short age of classrooms. Various estimates of the number of new classrooms F'^l'UL "*!j needed have lH been pub lished by the H United States Office of Ed ucation, the H National Ed ucation As sociation and other sup porters of the Federal aid proposal. The estimates differ one from the other but they support the common conclusion that school construction has not kept pace with the growth in school population. SPEAKS WITH AUTHORITY Only recently the accuracy of these statistics has been questioned by a man trained in the use of them—Maurice H. Stans, budget director in the Eisenhower administra tion. He found discrepancies in estimates published at dif ferent times by the same ag ency. He suggested that the public was entitled to a lot more facts on what individ ual school districts really r|eed before committing bil lions of dollars of Federal money to a school construc tion program. Proponents of Federal aid have contended that such aid is necessary because the local school districts have fallen down on the job. Undoubted ly, a few have failed to meet their obligations, but Stans attempts to show that by and large the local districts have paced school construction to their needs. The former budget director JOHN C. O'BRIEN cites figures from, the Office of Education to show that during the decade from 1950- 60, more than 600,000 new classrooms were built. During the same period the enroll ment required only 400,000 classrooms. Thus, Stans points out, some 200,000 class rooms were available to re lieve overcrowding. STATISTICS CITED Since 1956, American com munities have been building an average of 70,000 class rooms a year. In the four years from 1956 to 1960 the number of classrooms in creased 23 per cent, while enrollment increased only 15 per cent. And during the same period the number of pupils in a classroom declined from an average of 29 to 27.1. Looking ahead, statisticians estimate that from 1965 to 1970 the average growth in the school population will be about 600,000 a year. If school districts continue to build only 50,000 classrooms a year —a slower rate of increment than prevailed in the last four years of the decade of the 50’s —Stans notes this would pro vide enough facilities to take care of the student growth and give 25,000 classrooms a year to replace old ones or reduce the average pupil count per classroom. Stans also challenges the contention of the advocates of Federal aid that states and local communities are finan cially unable to meet rising educational costs. In the last decade, he points out, states and local communities in creased revenues for school purposes 164 per cent, while enrollment during the same period expanded only 43 per cent. RATE HAS SLOWED Another fact which Stans maintains the advocates of Federal aid conveniently overlook is that the rate of annual increase in the school population has slowed down The peak increase in elemen tary and secondary public school attendance occurred in the fall of 1953, when enroll ment jumped by 1,400,(>00 Since then, the postwar birth rate has subsided so that now the annual increase in school population is about 1,000,00. With the enrollment pres sures lessened and with the expected increase in the gross national product, Stans sug gests that there is no reason to believe the states and local, communities will not be able to raise the revenues to meet their obligations to education Advocates of Federal aid maintain that thousands of school districts have reached the ceiling of the bonding limits for school debt. Yet Stans cites a 1959 statement of the Department of Health Education and Welfare that only 237 of the more than 40,000 school districts had reached the limit of the bor rowing capacity. CLOSER TO PROBLEM Local school districts, in Stans’ opinion, are better able to judge their classroom needs than planners in Wash ington. He cites the case of a school district in Minnesota which voted down a $1,300,000 bond issue for the construction of a new high school. They did so, he notes, not because they were opposed to providing classrooms for their children but because they felt the pro posed school was extrava gantly designed. Six weeks later they enthusiastically voted a $200,000 bond issue to build a school which they felt fully met their needs. BERTRAND RUSSELL’S DRAGON Sum and Substance REV. JOHN B. SHEERIN. C.S.P. President Kennedy painted a bright and cheery picture of the future in his talk at the University of California J^e saw the power of Com munism- -waning: “No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single do g m a t i c creed but the libera tion of the diverse energies of free na tions and free men.” He went on to say that in spite of the fact that the threat of therm onuclear war will continue to hang over mankind, “we can have a new confidence today in the direction in which history is moving.” It is good to hear an op timistic note at this time when the Soviets are rattl ing their rockets once again. But I confess that the Pres ident’s talk left me cold. He rested all his hopes for a bet ter future on the acquisition of knowledge, citing our uni versities as reservoirs of cre ative ideas and repositories cf “the long view of the shore dimly seen.” I realize he was speaking to a predominantly academic audience and that he was ex pected to emphasize the in tellectuals’ contribution to future peace and progress. But he need not have put all his eggs in one basket. Mere knowledge is no cure-all for the world’s ills. HEART MUST MELLOW MIND Knowledge is one of God’s greatest gifts but the true in tellectual knows it is limited in its scope. On the very day on which the President was giving his California talk, President De Gaulle was an nouncing that he intended to “crush without pity” the armed insurrection in Al geria. The hate in the hearts of those ruthless O.A.S. ter rorists is not something that can be cured by mere know ledge. In fact, this “most educat ed century” is also the cen tury that has known more diabolic hate than any other. Unless man’s heart mellows as his mind increases in knowledge, he is only in creasing his capacity for evil. Religion is the force that mellows the heart and dis ciplines its unruly passion. The word culture comes from “cultura,” the tilling of the soil, but in its profoundest sense the word connotes a harrowing of the heart. Without religion, the educat ed barbarian (like the Nazi scientists) is only a few steps away from the jungle. Recently I was browsing through a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. I came across the following line: “It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.” Why does he regard religion as a dragon? Because he feels that fear is the foundation of all religion and that religion perpetuates those inhumani ties the world should out grow. FALSE CONCEPT But I found that Russell has a mistaken concept of religion, a concept rife in the palmy days of Victorian ra tionalism. He sees the whole idea of God as one borrowed from Oriental despotisms and he claims that religion teaches men to fear the world and be terrified by it. Therefore he would kill the dragon that stands at the door to progress. Yet it seems to me that Bertrand Russell is a Christian in spi rit in spite of his condemna tion of religion. He is seeking for a force that will induce men to love each other. He asserts that fear can be erad icated from human life by means of education and re form of economic and poli tical institutions. He really means that love can remake the world. Unconsciously he yearns for the loving Christ he claims to despise. He is so preoccupied with the faults of individual Christians (the Inquisition and all that), that he does not really see into the essence of Christianity, the love of God and love of man for the sake of God. MARK OF CHRISTIANS We individual Christians are to blame. We often give non-believers the impression ours is a religion of fear. We obey the Commandments but we lack love and outsiders sense the fact. Like the fool ish virgins in the parable we carry lamps but there is no oil of life in them. Being members of the Mystical Body we are present at the wedding feast but we wear no wedding garment of love. Christ said that the dis tinguishing mark of the Christian is “that you have love for another.” If we put this in practice, Bertrand Russell’s dragon will become an angel of light. He Is Risen, He Is Here y «. ' AY C ■0 r ’i0‘ SW’ T A '■ PUBLIC SCHOOL AND GOD It Seems to Me CHURCH'S DIVINE ORIGIN WINS MORMON Sharing Our Treasure I would like to share my holy Faith with a non-Cath- olic friend but I don’t know how to go about it.” Such is what many Catholics . say. You Too Can Win Souls, pub lished by The Macmillan Company, New York ($3.50), will help them. It embodies the most effective methods of kindling the non-Catholic’s interest. One of these is bringing a non-Catholic to a Catholic service o r even to visit the church. The fruitful ness of this method is il lustrated in the conversion of REY. JOHN A. O'BRIEN Mrs. Maxine Bierlein of Pas saic, New Jersey. “I was raised,” related Mrs. Bierlein, “as a member of the Reorganized Latter Day Saints, whose headquarters are at Zion, Illinois. I attend ed church services and Sun day School regularly and lat er became a Sunday school teacher. I married David Bierlein who, although raised in a Catholic foster home, had never been baptized. I made it clear that any chil dren we might have would be raised in my Church. “A casual acquaintance in vited my sister-in-law and me to visit the Shrine of St. Therese on our way shop ping. This beautiful church on the south side of Chicago was only a few blocks from our apartment. It was the first time I had ever enetered a Catholic church, and I was strangely moved by a feeling of awe in the presence of great holiness. Tears came to my eyes. My sister-in-1 a w shook me angrily and told me to quit acting like a fool. “I was similarly affected when my husband and I went with our friends, Mr. and Mrs. John Lambert, to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I seemed to sense the presence of God. While Dav id was away during World War II, I began to search for the true Church. In holy Scripture I read the warning against false prophets, and I 'continued on page 5) There are those who say that religious knowledge is the business of the home and the church, not of the school at least not the public (gov ernment-sponsored) school. Three facts make that attitude un tenable. First: in < world men ! aced by com munism armed and p r opaganda strong god lessness, the spiritual defens es of freedom and human rights cannot be too sturdy. The school should be the powerful ally of the church and the home. Second: schooling emptied of theological insight and in spiration is a deadly danger, in the long run, to the home the church and the nation. Third: such schooling is a menace to education itself. Inevitably, education loses direction, cohesiveness and force in the absence of vision about the purpose of life. WITHOUT THE spiritual values that religion fosters, education loses the soul that is its deepest vitality. The re sult is a gradual, crumbling of the foundations of civiliza tion in morality and civic virtue. In our time in particular, nothing other than religious truth and motivation can permanently direct man’s awesome new powers into the ways of peace, and away from nuclear self-extermina tion. Communism drives this home to us with great force, by reverse logic. Precisely because it is ir religious, communism keeps the world in turmoil with its threats, plots, falsehoods and hideous degradation of hu man dignity. WHO DOES NOT want to see communism replaced by religion? Who would deny that a re turn of communists to God, and to the spiritual concept of existence, would be like the removal of a knife from the heart of mankind, and the healing of a terrible wound? There is really no wisdom —there has never been any wisdom—in neutrality in the endless struggle between re ligion and irreligion in the affairs of humankind. Communist education in atheistic materialism and brute imperialism should be vigorously countered by free world education in the things of the spirit, and in the in alienable nobility of human beings as creatures of God. FURTHER, the free world ought to educate against the errors that menace it from within — secularism which acts as if God didn’t matter; paganism which blinds one to everything but the flesh and the appetities; indifference which won’t bother about the splendid truths that set us free. JOSEPH BREIG Public schools should be making their great contribu tion to the religious—and right—view of mankind and mankind’s future. But how, it is asked, can they do so, seeing that they are supported by the taxes— and educate the children—of widely differing citizens— some religious, some unreli gious and a few anti-reli gious? That this is a knotty prob lem, no one denies. But that it is impossible of solution is not true. IT WILL REMAIN unsolv ed only if people who care unselfishly about the future of the world allow them selves to be bemused by the propaganda that nothing can be attempted because “sepa ration of church and state” forbids it. True separation—the sepa ration intended, for instance, by America’s Founding Fath ers—does not forbid it at all. Only a false and distorted notion of separation ties our hands. People who see the gravity of the need must correct that distorted notion. They must begin to act, with wisdom, prudence, dedication, and reverence for the rights of every one. THE RIGHTS of religious citizens must not be thrown on the scrap heap merely be cause unreligious or anti-re ligious people are vocal about THEIR rights. In simple justice, public schools have a duty to serve the religious parent, as well as the irreligious. Further, re ligious schools are entitled to respect, encouragement and help in the great service they give to the free world. It is a serious mistake to allow the slogan, “separation of church and state,” to be misused in such a fashion as to let irreligious parents bend the public schools to their will, while court decision aft er court decision spurns the rights of the vast majority of citizens who are religious. A 'MYSTICAL ECCENTRIC’ WRITES Jottings By BARBARA C. JENCKS “Jesus I praise You because I have known sickness and pain. I praise You because I have known poverty, failure and contempt. I praise You because I have suf fered the parting of death . . . Grant that I may al ways sip from Thy Chalice, I am unworthy to drink from, and support me every moment with the strong enfolding arms of Your love.” Caryll Houselander * * * * • HAVING JUST READ and reviewed Caryll House- lander's remarkable biography, I am inspired in all di rections with the material within. It does not often hap pen ^ that one can find a biography which is spiritual, inspirational and at the same time entirely entertaining and engrossing. More and more, we find that we are not lonely sufferers. The things we once imagined peculiar only to ourselves, we find again and again in others. We are not apart from the Mystical Body but very much in volved with it. Our experiences are not unique, our thoughts, our aspirations are found over and over in others. As a result of reading Caryll Houselander's story, I have five pages of single-typewritten-spaced quotes culled from the nearly 400 pages. I find myself reading biographies and novels with a pencil in hand to catch particularly poignant passages, and those to which my heart and mind answer: "ah, I have felt like that. I know exactly what she means." And so I would share a few of Caryll Houselander's quotations in a column today, hoping some readers may find them inspirational, helpful and in some cases identifiable with their own thoughts, even as I did. uncharilableness. Caryll in her humaness spent the day after a party writing letters trying to unsay the uncharitable remarks ,she had made. She said that the sure cure for a person you -do not like is to pray and do penance for that person and love will grow in perspective. She tells the story of talking one day uncharitably with a priest: “I was running someone down, saying beastly things of them. Suddenly I noticed that his eyes were shut. You are not listening, I said. He replied, ‘I cannot listen to that; you see we are both present at Mass. While you were trying to make me think ill of X, Christ Our Lord was offering Himself to redeem them.’ But we are not at Mass, I said, and he said, ‘when your thoughts are hard or bitter or sad, let the sanctuary bell silence them. It is always ringing somewhere.” • HERE IS HER CURE for "the blues." She writes: "I know that every time I try for a job and fail, every time my headache comes violently and makes me lie in bed useless, every time I try to show out God's meaning and it all goes wrong, it is none the less on every occasion a ~ (continued on page 5) Parental Neglect San Juan, P R - Lack of parental affection and a "sex ual whirlwind” atmosphere are among factors responsible for the large number of adolescent marriages and illegitimate children here, says “ElPiloto” weekly Catholic newspaper. Charging 11,000 children were born in a single year to mothers aged 15 to 19,-half of them unmarried-the paper said, “A third part of the girls who marry between 14 and 18 . . . are already pregnant at that time . . . Thus youngsters are cast into the social and sexual whirlwind at an age when they feel insecure to handle thefn- sleves.” Schools Threatened Colombo, Ceylon - Ceylon’s top Catholic newspaper charged that some Buddhist members of the Nativnal Education Com mission appear intent on a ‘‘quick death” for all Christian schools. The Messenger, weekly of the Colombo archdiocese, spoke-out against a commiss on |slib- committee’s move for govern ment seizure of the remain- Training Program Washington - Training pro grams designed to prepare priests, religious and laymen for apostolic work among Spanish-speaking persons will be offered this summer at the Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The courses will be conducted by the University’s Institute for Inter - Cultural Formation, which was founded in 1947 under the patronage of Francis Car dinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York. Movie Condemed New York - The Italian-made movie, ‘‘Bell’ Antonio” dis tributed by Embassy corpora tion has been placed in the con demned class by the National Legion of Decency. Said the Legion, “Morally obscure in the development of its theme (Impotency), this film in effect condones male prom iscuity as a mark of manli ness.” Fair Wages Buffalo, N Y. - The pay a worker receives should be de termined by principles of equality and justice and not by market price alone, the direc tor of the Buffalo Diocesan Labor College said here. He said, however, that “it is important to remember that pay must equal the contribution of the individual.” ‘ ‘The market price alone can not determine renumeration, but equality and justice should determine it,” he stated. K. of C. Praised Washington - Rep. M Blaine Peterson of Utah, in a state ment placed in the Congression al Record April 18th praised the Knights of Columbus, who are this year observing their organization's 80th anniver sary. Peterson said the K. of C. has been active in “safeguard ing of Christian morality, in culcating ideals of American patriotism, promoting the ad vance of tolerance, concern for the education of youth and other humanitarian ends.” RFE Easter Broadcasts i New York - Special Easter programs, including a broad cast of the Pope’s Easter mes sage, were beamed behind the Iron Curtain during the Easter season by Radio Free Europe. RFE spokesmen here said the Easter broadcasts to com munist-ruled East Europe be gan on Holy Thursday and con tinued through the Easter sea son. ing private schools of Ceylon. Endorsement of the subcom mittee recommendation by a large majority of the full com mission was seen highly probable. Lay Help London - A plan to give lay men some responsibility in the administration of parish and diocesan funds has been ad vanced by a pastor in Liver pool. Funds collected in each parish would be sent to a cen tral Diocesan pool for redis tribution to the parishes on the basis of need. Pastors would be relieved 'of responsibility for raising funds. Soviet Children Berlin - Soviet Russia’s con stitutional guarantees of “free dom of conscience” do not apply to children, according to the top Soviet youth organizer. “Our deepest responsibility is to shield children from the influence of parents and rela tives who are believers,” Sergei P. Pavlov told a con vention in Moscow of Komso mol, the Soviet league of young communists, according to re ports reaching here. Pavlov is the League’s first secre tary. Saints Lives Rome - A contract to pub lish an English version of the “Bibliotheca Sanctorum,” a collection of biographies of saints produced by scholars of the Pontifical Lateran Univer sity here, has been agreed on. The first volume of the Eng lish edition is scheduled,to be published by Hawthorn Books, Inc., of New York in 1963. Free Too Fast Beira, Mozambique - The rapidity with which former Af rican colonies have been grant ed independence is a serious danger to Catholic territories on this continent, a Portugese bishop has warned here Bishop Sebastio Soares de Resende of Beira spoke in a pastoral letter calling on the Catholics of his diocese to start a “Crusade for a Better World. ” He declared, “Everyone knows that the present moment in Africa and in Mozambique is a particularly difficult one. The just and necessary evolu tion of the peoples of this con tinent has often not developed with the balanced care which would have been of the great est advantage to all. “Alarming rapidity has been preferred and resource to brutal violence, which has not only sacrificed irreplaceable values but has facilitated a return to savagery which pleases no one and gravely im perils Catholic territories which by their human, econom ic and social development were filled with promise for the future.” 416 8TH ST.. AUGUSTA, GA. Published fortnightly by the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia, Inc., with the Approbation of the Most Reverend Bishop of Savannah; and the Most Reverend Archbishop of Atlanta. Subscription price $3.00 per year. Subscription in cluded in membership in Catholic Laymen’s Association. Second class mail privileges authorized at Monroe, Ga. Send notice of change of address to P. O. Box 320, Monroe, Ga. Rev. Francis J. Donohue Rev. R. Donald Kiernan Editor Savannah Edition Editor Atlanta Edition John Mark waiter, Managing Editor Rev. Lawrence Lucree, Rev. John Fitzpatrick Associate Editors, Savannah Edition Vol. 42 Saturday, April 28, 1962 No. 24 ASSOCIATION OFFICERS GEORGE GINGELL, Columbus President MRS. DAN HARRIS, Macon Vice-President NICK CAMERIO, Macon Secretary JOHN T. BUCKLEY, Augusta Treasurer ALVIN M. McAULIFFE, Augusta Auditor JOHN MARKWALTER, Augusta Executive Secretary MISS CECILE FERRY, Augusta Financial Secretary