When I heard this story it stirred me to the
very fountain depths, but I have seen so much of this fine spirit of
service in the Y. M. C. A. since then that I have come to know that as
far as the Y. M. C. A. is concerned all barriers of church narrowness
are entirely swept away.
I have had most delightful comradeship since I have been in France in
one great area as religious director with two Knights of Columbus
secretaries and one father--Chaplain Davis--all of whom say freely and
eagerly: "We have never had anything but the finest spirit of
co-operation and friendship from the Y. M. C. A."
"Why," added Chaplain Davis, a Catholic priest, "why, the first Sunday
I was here, when I had no place to take my boys for mass, a secretary
came to me and offered me the hut. It has always been that way."
The story of the French priest who confessed a dying Catholic boy
through a Y. M. C. A. Protestant secretary interpreter, in a Y. M. C.
A. hut, has been told far and wide, but it is only illustrative of the
broadening lines of Catholicism and the wider fraternal relations of
all professed Christians.
The marvellous story that my friend, the French chaplain, tells of
being marooned in a shell-hole at Verdun for several days with a
Catholic priest, and of their discussion of religion and life there
under shell-fire, and the tenderness with which the Catholic priest
kissed the hand of the Protestant French chaplain when the two had
agreed that, after all, there was one common God for a common,
suffering nation of people, and that this war would break all church
barriers down, and that out of it would come a new spirit in the
Catholic church, a new brotherhood for all.
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