Salesmen of Faith

"What's happened?" exclaimed a businessman as he stepped through the revolving doors of Chicago's Sheraton Hotel one day last week. The familiar lobby looked like the setting of a religious pageant; bishops and priests conversed discreetly in twos & threes where traveling salesmen had been wont to swap the latest tales of the road; nuns in flowing habits swept up & down the stairs. Everyone in sight seemed to be dressed in black, and this was just a handful of the 10,000 delegates, lay and clerical, to the Ninth National Congress of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.

The confraternity, founded in the 16th Century as a counter-Reformation measure, is the spearhead of the Roman Catholic layman's movement in the U.S.; Catholic leaders are setting more store by it today than ever before. "The clergy you see here all over the place are really just the window trimmings of this meeting," said Dr. Robert S. Shea, executive secretary of New Orleans' Xavier University. The church, he explained, is more & more looking to its layman as an effective "salesman for the faith" in the workaday world of trade and politics, as "fishers," helpers, teachers, discussion leaders, parent-educators and "apostles of good will" to non-Catholics.

The approach to non-Catholics was the subject of one of the chief speakers of the five-day meeting, Author Clare Boothe Luce, who became a Catholic in 1946. Speaking on "Understanding the Non-Catholic Mind," she advised her listeners not to bear down too heavily on intellectual arguments with prospective converts. Speaker Luce reminded her listeners that "an open Catholic purse, a ready Catholic shoulder, a helping Catholic hand and a loving Catholic heart are Catholic doctrine--in action. Words stir--but actions will move people to the Faith. Let us remember . . . that the errors that historically split Christendom were Protestant intellectual errors--but Catholic errors in the order of Charity. It is, therefore, necessary to repair with love the historic damage done by lovelessness. We Catholics must first root out of ourselves all loveless prejudice and criticism against those of other faiths, if we wish others to do likewise."

Pleading for more volunteer educators for schoolchildren, Dr. Ellamay Horan, longtime professor of education at De Paul University, declared that "current thinking is profoundly concerned, and rightly so, with the topic of human rights, yet the first and basic right of man is to know God who created him."

When it was all over, most of the 40-50,000 faithful who had turned out for the confraternity's 66 sessions were happy but tired. Said one weary priest to another in an elevator in the hotel: "I thought I would see some of my Chicago relatives while I was here. But I just had to phone them and say I was folding up."

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