The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [219]
He touched his bald head; he waited until the self-conscious, restrained laughter subsided.
“I know what it means to be young. I know that Satan rides about through the night, like a witch in Sleepy Hollow, planning traps and temptations with which to beset the young. I know that when you are eighteen, nineteen, twenty-one, even twenty-five, you cannot be expected to live the kind of life that a crabby, old maid aunt would desire you to live. I know that you want good times, I believe, uncategorically, that you should have good times. (His pitch rose.)... But I do say that they should be clean good times, clean fun, decent pleasures that will not rob you of your soul, your mind, even your body and your health. Thus, I want you to realize that I am coming here as your friend, attempting to understand you, and to be sympathetic with you in the problems you must face, and the temptations which you must resist.”
He paused, permitting his eyes to rove about the church. “I fail to see any sleepers. That, I take, as a good augury.”
He waited again, while there was a quiet outburst of laughing.
“My young friends, modern youth (his voice became explosive) in that quest for joy and amusement and fun, which is the perennial quest of youth, has drunk deeply from the muddy fountains of sham sophistication. Modern youth, therefore —and I do not exclude many Catholic boys and girls of this nation—must, under the pain of serious and eternal consequences, eject this soiled, germ-ridden, sin-ridden sham sophistication from its minds and its souls. And the sooner young people realize that the only lasting purgatives to perform this task of spiritual catharsis are the Sacraments and teachings of Holy Mother Church, the better off they will be, the better off this great nation will be, the better off this world will be.
“Today, we live in a world (he sneered and his voice sharpened) that is debauched with paganism of the vilest kind. For in pagan Greece, and even in pagan Rome, there was a measure of spiritual and intellectual accomplishment that is lacking in our own times. We live in an age of growing laxity, of sin (his face and voice intensified), ugly sin that is the cancer destroying immortal souls that have been made in the image and likeness of God Almighty. Our modern jazz age of freedom and untrammelled unconventionality is characterized by immorality, vice, disease... spiritual cowardice. Today, there are afoot movements started by vicious men and women who philander with the souls of youth in order that they will receive their paltry profit, and their cheap, ephemeral notoriety. I refer to such movements as jazz, atheism, free-love, companion-ate marriage, birth-control. These, and similarly miscalled tendencies, are murdering the souls of youth (he slapped his hand on the pulpit).”
(His voice broke into lamentation.) “Oh, how closely, how closely, my young friends, does not hell yawn to the youth of America!
‘Weep, oh, weep for Adonais!’ if I might quote that misguided poet, Shelley.”
(His voice became calm and normal.) “I travel through this great, wide-flung country extensively. In the course of every year, I go from coast to coast. I contact these tendencies. I see their evil effects, the young people they ruin, the homes they wreck, the sadness they cause in the hearts of God-fearing mothers and fathers. I see how (his pitch rose) those seats of the godless—the universities—those iniquitous incubators of vice, cheapness, and trash—the movies; (he sneered) those imitation Anti-Christs, modern authors whose books perfume the vilest of sins—how all these take their toll in lives, in souls. In short, my young friends, I can perceive clearly (with dolorousness) oh, how clearly, Satan is making a powerful offensive, with all his artillery and machinery of stratagems, bribes, craftiness, seductive lies and promises, upon this so-called modern world of ours.