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Sometimes our compassion for someone is not really our own; sometimes, it is God’s. Here is one of Catherine’s many stories from the 1930s, from her first apostolate, Friendship House Toronto

***

The priest who walked through the Blue Door one day was young. He had very blond hair which kept flopping over his eyes.

There was a boyish quality about him that somehow enhanced his earnestness and “priestliness” and cast a strange radiance into the room which, as usual, was filled with Brothers Christopher,* lolling at ease in the fairly hard chairs.

Many stood up when he came in, but he motioned them to remain seated and made straight for my desk. After a brief greeting he laid his problem before me.

It concerned a family in his parish, adjacent to us. The father was a Communist and the mother a practicing Catholic. There were seven children of school age.

The father would not allow them to attend the parochial school and forbade his wife, under threat of bodily injury, to even set foot inside a church. All were reluctant to have recourse to the law because of their love for him.

The man was a Slav. His English was halting, but he spoke Russian. Would I go and see if, with the help of the Holy Spirit, I could do something with him? He, the priest, would then follow up on the situation.

I arose and followed the priest, first through some of the shabby streets of our slum area, then into an alleyway, until we came to a dirty little shack with a beautifully kept garden.

The priest pointed out a man chopping wood by a little shed as the person I was to talk to. Then he left me, with a whispered blessing.

I approached the busy man and greeted him in Russian. He smiled as he answered. We began to talk. But slowly, as the real content of my message began to penetrate his mind, the smile changed into a scowl.

Then anger became a kind of macabre dance in his eyes. Suddenly, he became furious. Raising his axe, he shouted that he would brain me right there and then, if I mentioned God or Church once more.

Gathering all the tatters of my courage that remained, I went on slowly trying to show him what he was doing to his wife and children. He lifted his axe and started for me.

I ran. I ran as I had never run in my life. Past garages and garbage cans that got in my way. Down alleys that seemed, for a moment or two, dead-end traps.

Suddenly I stopped. Why was I running from a man who thought he hated God? God loved him! He had to be made to see that.

I turned around and saw him, panting and disheveled, still holding his axe high, turning into the little back alley where I was. He stopped a short distance from me. We stood there, looking at each other intensely.

Fear had left me. An immense pity had taken possession of me, and I wept unashamedly. Slowly, like a child caught in an act of mischief, he walked closer, shuffling and dragging his feet. Then he stopped, and asked why I was crying.

Was it from fear? I told him no. It was from sorrow and pity for what he was doing to Christ.

Time seemed to stand still. Suddenly he fell to the ground, and sobbed deep-heaved sobs, the tears of a strong man. Strangely enough, I found myself praying to St. Paul, for this figure prostrate in the alley reminded me of Paul of Tarsus.

For what seemed a long time neither of us spoke, neither made any gesture.

Then the man arose and, dropping his axe, stretched out his hand and shook mine. I went home through the labyrinthine ways of the slums. He went back to his home surrounded by flowers.

Several weeks later the eager, boyish priest came to find out how I had persuaded the Communist to send his children to the parochial school and allow them to go back to church. How in the name of all that is holy had I gotten him to the point of even going to church himself?

I did not tell him the whole story. I simply said that it was the pity of God, which for a fleeting instant had taken possession of my heart.

It was the pity of God that had changed his heart and brought him to make those decisions.

*homeless men

From Not Without Parables, (2007), pp.53-55, available from MH Publications

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