294 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



believes that in Holy Communion, by a miracle of God's love, 

 he comes into blessed contact with the very physical presence 

 of his Saviour. To receive Holy Communion with serious sin 

 in his soul would be, he knows, an unspeakable sacrilege. ►It 

 is these considerations, as a corrective of sin and an inspiration 

 for a holy life, which the Church offers her children every 

 day, and by means of which they are enabled to strive to over- 

 come all that drags them down from manhood, purity and 

 heaven. 



In the Sacrament of Matrimony, the Catholic Church has 

 pronounced the holiest blessings upon the union of man and 

 wife. The union of man and woman may have been a con- 

 tract before — and it was a slippery, evasive, indefinable con- 

 tract, varying with caprice from divorce after divorce, on the 

 one hand, to unlimited polygamy on the other — but Our Lord 

 made it a sacrament and indissoluble. The Catholic Church 

 recognizes no divorce. She stands for the family, the home 

 and the sanctity of the marriage tie. And she has ever stood 

 for that, as some of the most notable events on the pages of 

 history have shown. And she will unceasingly cry out against 

 any legislation or any teaching which tends to disintegrate the 

 home and disrupt the family relation. We stand shoulder to 

 shoulder with any set or society of men — in or out of the 

 Church, if they mean it — who strive to promote purity, domes- 

 tic happiness and moral health, whether we agree with them 

 in belief or not, and the Catholic Church will always protect 

 the marriage relation and keep the family together against all 

 comers. It is the only human foundation upon which the 

 Church and State alike can build together, and it is one that 

 needs the grace of God to keep it pure and stable. 



From the beginning of her history the Church has enjoined 

 upon all her children obedience and loyalty to the lawfully 

 constituted authorities in their respective countries. She 

 teaches that as the Church is God's representative in the su- 

 pernatural order to lead men to a supernatural end in union 

 with Him, so the State is God's representative in the natural 

 order to bring men to the end for which society was ordained 

 — the temporal happiness and progress of the race. Disobedi- 

 ence, then, to the State in any matter which is within the 

 State's competence is disobedience to God. Obedience to 



