In the religious orders and communities the Catholic Church possesses a
very ancient auxiliary force that has rendered incalculable help during
the century. By their numbers, their strong inherited traditions, their
central government, their willing obedience, and their other resources
they have come everywhere to the aid of the bishops and the diocesan
clergy. Often they bore alone and for a long time, and at great
sacrifices, the whole burden of religion. Their praise is rightly
on all sides, and their works speak for them, when their modesty and
humility forbid them to praise themselves. The missions of Catholicism
in this century, as in others, have largely fallen to them. They stood
in the breach for the cause of education when the churches were too
poor and few to open colleges. They have given countless missions and
retreats, and in general have not spared themselves when called upon
for works of general utility. They and their works are of the essence
of Catholicism, and they ought rightly to flourish in any land where
they are free to live according to the precepts and the spirit of their
founders, who are often canonized saints of the Catholic Church.
I shall not be saying too much when I assert that among the invaluable
services rendered to the Church by Catholic women of all conditions of
life—no unique thing in the history of Catholicism—those rendered
by the women of religious communities are of the first rank of merit.
Primary Catholic education, in the United States, at least, would have
been almost impossible without their devotion. It is owing to them that
the orphans have been collected and cared for, the sick housed and
sheltered, the poor and helpless and aged, the crippled and the blind,
looked after regularly and lovingly. They surely walk in the footsteps
of Jesus, doing good wherever they go. The perennial note of sanctity
in the Catholic Church shines especially in them. Content with food and
clothing and shelter, they devote their lives, often in the very flower
of youth and health and beauty, to the weak and needful members of
Christian society. He must needs be a Divine Master who can so steadily
charm into His service the purest and the most affectionate of hearts,
and cause them to put aside deliberately for love of Him even the most
justifiable of human attachments. This argument for Christianity is
not new; it was urged by Saint Justin the Martyr on the libertine world
of the Antonines.