St Barnabas High School - Immaculata Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

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LIBRARY

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greetings 1 MY DEAR GRADUATES! A decisive period in your adolescence has arrived. You are at the crossroads of life. Varying sign posts mark the paths before you. Bewilderment confronts you. A World bedeviled by paganism with its offsprings of unmorality, immorality, wickedness, brutality and barbarism is demoralizing humanity. Man, the handiwork of God's almighty genius, created a little less than the angels, has been made, in many countries, a slave, a vassal of the State. His personal rights, his property rights, his religious rights have been stolen from him entirely, as witness the ideologies of the day, or, have been ridiculed unto contempt. XVhy? Because God has been robbed of the reverence, wor- ship, obedience and fidelity due Him. His Name has been blotted out of the councils of nations. His doctrines have been confounded by the arrogance and selective policy of preachers. His Name has been blasphemed in the courts of justiceg ignored in colleges and universities. His moral code has been desecrated even in the sanctuary of the home. It borders almost on pessimism even to allude to so horrible a debacle at the joyful period of your high school graduation. But your religious education has begotten a defi- nite responsibility for you in the crisis. Reconstruction and rehabilitation is the full job of all humanity. You must do your share. A solidarity of thought and action under God can only function when each personal unit contributes his or her share in faith, prayer and holy living. Human forces have wrestled with the products of the demoralization but have failed. Because God has not been restored to His rightful place in the hearts and minds of men. Science has given the finesse of its inventive genius. Money has been poured forth with bewildering profligacy. Armaments have wreaked their destruction on monuments and peoples. Diplomacy has exhausted its resourcefulness. And yet slaughter and wanton destruction have not ceased. The best blood of the nations is being poured forth in profusion. What yet remains to be done? Two things-prayer and fasting-the very indispensable implements Jesus reminded His Apostles to use in order to cast out devils. These are available to all of us and unavoidably incumbent on all of us. Only through them, under God, can justice, permanent peace and reconstruction be secured. Dear graduates you and your kind are the real fashioners of the world's destiny. You have the only solution to the world's problems-viz.: true Christian spirituality. In the twelve years of your education every subject has been interpreted in the terms of God and morality. These are the chastening powers of life. An Atlantic Charter, Teheran and Yalta Conferences, San Francisco forums will prosper or fail proportion- ately to their sanction or discard of these-God and morality. Man must be spiritualized before he is fully civilized. It was this thought that caused Doctor Carrel of glorious memory to declare that the greatest and most successful men or women in the world are the saints. They are the truly just persons because they give God and neighbor and themselves what is their respective due. God must be worshiped in truth. Man's dig- nity, personal rights must be respected. The saints themselves must be daily purified by prayer and fasting. What part will you play? The world's or God's? Will you become saints or just remain sinners? If saints the very atmosphere of your environment will be purified and ennobled. The leavening influence of your lives will beget self-sacrificing peoples similar to yourselves. The highway to permanent peace will be paved with your virtues and theirs. God's and neighbor's rights will be restored, peace will reign supreme. If sin- ners, the miasma of deviltry, your lives will exude, will be a curse to the very space you occupy. The tragedy of war will never cease. God help you all to become saints and thus be true to God, to yourselves, to humanity and upbuilders of God's lasting house of peace and justice. Your devoted pastor, K Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1945. I