An Important Appeal: Sept. 29 to Oct. 7

How weak we are. But - if we choose - we have available the greatest power in the Universe: prayer. We must turn to prayer in order to deal with the difficulties of our world.

Let us, then, make a special novena, to consist of the mysteries of our Lord's Passion and Death, contemplated by means of the Rosary, said for the nine days beginning on St. Michael (September 29) and completing on Our Lady of the Rosary, the anniversary of Lepanto (October 7). Let us include daily Mass if possible, and take this as seriously as if the Pope had asked for this intercession:

And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross...

...because maybe he is asking, and we're too busy to hear.

[This is the statue GKC gave to his parish in Beaconsfield.]

I was looking about for an image of Our Lady which I wished to give to the new church in our neighbourhood ... The colours were traditional; but the colours were not conventional; a wave of green sea had passed through the blue and a shadow of brown earth through the crimson, as in the work of the ancient colourists. The conception was common and more than common, and yet never merely uncommon. She was a peasant and she was a queen, and in that sense she was a lady; but not the sort of sham lady who pretends to be a peasant, nor the sort of sham peasant who pretends to be a lady. She was barefoot like any colleen on the hills; yet there was nothing merely local about her simplicity. I have never known who was the artist and I doubt if anybody knows; I only know that it is Irish, and I almost think that I should have known without being told. I have heard of one other man who felt as I do, and went miles out of his way at intervals to revisit the little church where the image stands. She looks across the little church with an intense earnestness in which there is something of endless youth; and I have sometimes started, as if I had actually heard the words spoken across that emptiness: I am the Mother of God and this is Himself, and He is the boy you will all be wanting at the last. [GKC, Christendom in Dublin]