EXTRA MATERIAL
Chapter Nine - 1925-1926
Daniel Lord Comes to the Queen’s Work
and Writes The Giantkiller
The Queen’s Work
Father Garesché left for New York to work with the Medical Missions, an order of nursing sisters. The remaining staff included Father Isaac Bosset, an invaluable proofreader. Lord had known him as a teacher at St. Ignatius in Chicago. Father Leo Mullaney stayed around to finish publishing the old version of the magazine.2 Mullaney’s humor helped keep spirits up during that difficult first year.
The Queen’s Work magazine ran ads, including one claiming “Health Restored by Radium.”
Degnen’s Radio-Active Solar Pad is worn next to the body day and night. It pours a constant stream of radio-active energy into the system while you work, play or sleep, helping to build up weakened nerves and tissues to a strong, healthy condition. It creates a vigorous circulation of blood, thus removing congestion, which is the real cause of most diseases.3
Would such a radio-active pad actually be carcinogenic?
Lord’s Thoughts on the Sodality
I had been acquainted with the aspect of personal holiness. That this personal holiness should manifest itself in and be in turn stimulated by a life of intense Catholic activity was the light that broke on my horizon.
...Suddenly I found myself the national organizer of what should be, by very force of its constitution, not a cluster of the devoutly pious but a regiment of the apostolic alert.
...With the first rule in my hands, a deep faith in Catholic young people in my heart...I spent one year traveling about the country.... Everywhere I found within the schools a growing feeling that religious feeling was too theoretical.... The student sat patiently in class.... They needed an immediate outlet for their religious theory and faith.
In parishes I found a widespread conviction that the Sodality was dead.... In general the priests did not believe in the Sodality and were quite willing to see it pass from the scene.4
An Encyclical
In December 1925 Pope Pius XI released his encyclical Quas Primas which established the feast of Christ the King to be celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Sunday before Advent. The encyclical was written in response to rising nationalism and secularism in Europe. The vision of Christ as King was meant to be a unifying vision of humanity as an antidote to the growing divisions in Europe and elsewhere. Joseph Husslein, S.J., would write his book The Reign of Christ in 1928 and explore the concept of the Kingdom of Christ which reigned through the visible church and its moral teachings which alone could address the ills of society.5
Claude Pernin and the Eucharistic Congress
In 1926, in Chicago, George Cardinal Mundelein’s spectacular 28th International Eucharistic Congress unfolded. The Hearst newspapers tapped Claude Pernin to be their American correspondent. He was sent to Europe to interview the dignitaries coming to the Congress and to travel back with them on the ship. He radioed back his accounts which were published by the newspapers.
In Manhattan in June, Pernin took the special train arranged by Mundelein. The New York Central Railroad and the Pullman Company had seven Pullman cars painted Cardinal red and gold to bring Cardinal Bonzano, the Pope’s representative; Cardinal Hayes of the New York; and seven foreign cardinals—all with their entourages—to Chicago. Pernin wrote more reports during the trip.
The congress took place June 20-24, 1926 with the theme: “The Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ”. An estimated 500,000 attended at the newly completed Soldier Field Stadium. Almost a million people attended the closing mass outside of Chicago at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary.
Claude Pernin took the microphone.
As the Eucharistic Congress moved into its thrilling processional’s, Father Pernin stood at the microphone and in one of the first national news broadcasts of all time described for those in the Stadium, the city, the world the magnificent things that were passing under the eyes of the pilgrims. He made the Eucharistic Congress live for millions of Catholics who could not see it. He brought Catholic truth to hundreds of thousands of non-Catholics for the very first time.
During that week his became the best-known radio voice in America.6
The Giantkiller
In 1926 Lord created The Giantkiller: A Musical Mission Masque, an over-the-top religious spectacle for children and adults.
Synopsis
Part I
A boy and girl talk about Fairy Tales. She says, “I can’t remember the heroine of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” but I can’t forget Cinderella.”7 The boy compares Fairy Tale giants to modern giants: “The world is full of giants, ugly, repulsive things—great office buildings swallowing whole thousands in a single gulp; black factories sucking in long lines of men and women.”8 The boy and girl then tell the story of JACK and the GIANT.
Peddlers enter through the audience and do a Ribbon Dance at a Medieval Fair. Soldiers, led by CAPTAIN DASH, enter followed by an OLD CRONE with dancing witches. She tells the people to eat and fatten up for the giant is coming for his tribute of food.
JACK enters to learn that every year the KING has to send young maidens and men to feed the GIANT. The MAIDENS do the DANCE OF THE LADY VICTIMS. JACK proclaims: “On the morrow the flesh of the Giant will feed the hawks and vultures.”9
The next scene at the Giant’s Cave opens with the DANCE OF THE PIGMIES through the auditorium. They drag in their adult VICTIMS, now played by children to make them small compared to the GIANT. The GIANT throws them into cauldrons.
From the auditorium WILL-O-THE WISPS, GHOSTS, and WITCHES enter followed by JACK, now also played by a small child.
JACK: “You slayer of infants, murderer of maidens, filthy wretch whose hands reek with the blood of thousands, this blow is for the widowed mother, and this for children crying for their father, this for children . . . this stroke that ends it all, for me, for Jack the Giantkiller.”10
JACK kills the GIANT and frees the VICTIMS.
Part II
The boy and girl describe the modern GIANT terrorizing and destroying whole villages, crushing whole peoples: Paganism.
The GIANT is now a pagan GOD. PAGAN PRIESTESSES dance while Chinese and Indian VICTIMS are brought in through the audience. The curtain closes.
With blasts of trumpets and acclamations, FAITH the KING enters: “I am the King of all Crusaders, Faith.” 11 A parade of PRIESTS, BROTHERS, and SISTERS enter. JACK appears dressed as a college student asks what he can do.
FAITH: “There is the pagan world, and there the Giant, Paganism. Jack, seek out the foe, drive deep the sword! Make war for justice!”
JACK: “Let me fight as a young America would fight, may I sire, just with my own brains and my own fists.”12
The curtain reopens on the lair of Paganism as JACK enters to kill the GOD Paganism and free the prisoners: “I am the new Crusader! I am Catholic youth fighting the great Paganism.”13
What Lord meant by ‘paganism’ is not exactly clear. It included religions such as Hinduism and Daoism, but it also included political systems that opposed Christianity and it included ‘economic paganism.’ Lord probably shared the idea of his contemporary Joseph Husslein, S.J. that only the true Christian religion could create just economic systems and that unjust economic systems were fundamentally ‘pagan’.
Lord produced The Giantkiller at the Odeon Theater in St. Louis from November 27 to December 4, 1926 for the Catholic Students’ Mission Crusade. Over fifteen thousand saw the production.14 Lord held five weeks of afterschool rehearsals. A sister described them:
Naturally I expected something like a riot behind the scenes when I contemplated 450 boys and girls of all ages in such close quarters. On the contrary, the order was perfect. Groups in each episode appeared at a stated time, and left the theater immediately after their episode had been played, thus making way for the next group. The dressing rooms were assigned according to schools, the older boys and girls appointed to take care of the younger ones. Transportation of the groups to and from the theater was made easy by the fact that each school appeared only the one episode.15
Photos of the production appeared in the January 1927 issue of The Queen’s Work.
Thoughts on F. Scott Fitzgerald
At some point Lord wrote an unpublished article, “One Part Crow,” in which he comments:
Sometimes a fellow like this Scott Fitzgerald comes along and takes to writing instead of prizefighting, and then heaven help you if you are his friend, especially if you are a woman. He has no more reticence than a hen just after denting the egg shortage. He hasn’t the decency even to try to hide his acquaintances behind flimsy disguises. There they are, friends and foes, those he likes and those he dislikes, those who have done him good and those who have merely done him; let who will 1ook and be amazed. What he learned in drawing room and club he hastens to shout from the housetop. Making friends with him would be like tucking dynamite into your pillow; some day it will go off and make you an interesting specimen for the student of anatomy and constructive surgery. If Scott Fitzgerald lives to the ripe age of thirty it will be because those this side of Paradise have already acquired the forbearance we normally expect of those who have already passed beyond.16
NOTES
- 1 Gavin, 57.
- 2 Florence, 150.
- 3 The Queen’s Work, XXV (December 1925), 25.
- 4 Gavin, 73 quoting Lord, “Sodalities in America and Catholic Action,” Studies (June 1933), 260-61.
- 2 Ibid., 253.
- 5 Joseph C. Husslein, The Reign of Christ: The Immortal King of Ages (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1928).
- 6 Lord, My Greatest Teacher, 54.
- 7 Lord, The Giantkiller, script in Jesuit Archives, 16.
- 8 Ibid., 16.
- 9 Ibid., 28.
- 10 Ibid., 36.
- 11 Ibid., 46.
- 12 Ibid., 48.
- 13 Ibid., 55.
- 14 Barmann, 34.
- 15 Sister M. Eleanore, Certitudes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927), 99, 102. See also Barmann, 78-80. Barmann claims that Lord had 100% attendance at the rehearsals.
- 16 Manuscript in Box 557 in Jesuit Archives.
Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner