"Storm-Tossed"

Hardy coal-miners of Gillespie, Ill. paid 25-c- apiece last Sunday to enter the local cinemansion, behold a theatrical enterprise presented under church auspices. It was written and directed by a priest, but if the miners expected a Biblical drama with cheesecloth and false whiskers, they were disappointed. On the Gillespie stage fists flew, guns roared, young lovers embraced, a mortgage was foreclosed, thugs and drunks swore, strikers rioted, a bomb went off and at one point the whole thing seemed about to go up in smoke & flame. The play: Storm-Tossed. Its author: Rev. Daniel Aloysius Lord, 47, of the Society of Jesus.

Husky, lusty, greying Jesuit Lord is one of the dozen ablest, best-known Catholic priests in the U. S. A onetime English professor at Jesuit St. Louis University, he became in 1925 U. S. organizer of the Sodality of Our Lady, a band of 1,000,000 young Catholics, and editor of a Catholic paper called The Queen's Work, whose circulation he ran from 12,000 up to 83,000. Father Lord is also the nation's No. 1 Catholic pamphleteer, author of 5-c- tracts on subjects like Shall I Be a Nun?, My Friend the Pastor, Fashionable Sin, Christ Lives On, which have sold 3,500,000 copies. The St. John the Baptist of the Legion of Decency movement, Father Lord drew up the morality code which Cinema Tsar Will H. Hays's office adopted in 1930 and which is supposed to ban from Hollywood films such subjects as sexual perversion, nudity, irreverent treatment of the clergy, miscegenation, etc.

Storm-Tossed, Father Lord's 22nd play, reflects the vigorous Jesuit's latest attempt to dramatize the sociological ideals of papal encyclicals. Moral of Storm-Tossed is that the solution of economic troubles lies in "the revolution of which Jesus Christ is the leader ... so Red . . . that it has never been tried yet." The play was given five performances in St. Louis last fortnight, cleared $1,300. Its 85 actors took busses to Gillespie last week at the behest of a miners' priest named Rev. John Goff, who had been preaching anti-Communist sermons in restive Macoupin County, Ill., had been bombed out of bed for his pains. Father Goff thought that Storm-Tossed showed the Church had something better to offer than Communism.

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