Page:O'Donnell - Hail Holy Queen 03 - Mother of Mercy.djvu/4

 when the mothers of a nation are strong and courageous, the nation is strong and spirited. A fair gauge of a nation's strength—that is, of its moral strength, which in the final reckoning is the only kind that really matters—is the regard, or lack of regard, that its people have for the Christian concept of motherhood as ennobled by the Mother of God. Disregard for that concept has marked the first stage of moral decay.

And it is being disregarded today. There has been a surrender to the neo-paganism of the period. Woman has not been dethroned, but she has deliberately descended from the eminent place that is hers, literally by divine right, as well as by right of her inheritance from the Mother of God.

Would it be too severe an indictment to say that in our time too many women hold themselves too cheaply? Surely those women who would willingly revert to the lowly status that was theirs before the advent of Christianity are following a line of reasoning that is nothing if not perverse. Yet one of the saddest signs of the times is the apparent enthusiasm with which so many women are discarding the ideals that make "a good woman a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and to the good under all change: lovely in youthful comeliness, lovely all her lifelong in comeliness of heart."

As one of the great pulpit orators of this century has said: "All good men idealize women, and this is why all men worthy of the name are grieved when women are less ideal than they might be. It is because men want something to look up to, something to admire, to love and to serve with chivalry that they feel so poignantly the desecration of womanhood through thoughtlessness, boldness, coarseness, vulgarity, immodesty, or whatever cheapens and degrades woman."

Yet divorce and birth control—or planned parenthood, as it is fashionably known—are destroying the dignity of womanhood, and as a natural consequence are destroying the sanctity of the home. In many homes there seem to be more dogs and cats than children—and what a breed they are! There is a curious glorification of the multi-married whose current liaisons are faithfully recorded by the daily press. In many cities a ratio of three divorces to one marriage is not uncommon. There is such widespread shirking of parental duties that we are raising a generation of children who even now are reaping the bitter fruit of