[2] “The Universe” the great Catholic Weekly of England, had in its editorial notes the following remarks on this suggestion of ours: 

A “DESK-POLICY” OF APOSTLESHIP

The Catholic Church in Canada possesses a Home Missionary problem of the extent of which we can scarcely form an idea.  In making his appeal from the West to the East of the vast Dominion, Father Daly, C.S.S.R., who has just issued a pamphlet on the subject through the Church Extension Press, Toronto, brings out some salient truths on the subject of co-operation and organization which Catholics all the world over can well take to heart and apply to themselves.  “Two conditions (he says) made united action possible—­uniform plan and authoritative leadership.  To readjust our methods to conditions as we find them means efficiency with the least waste of energy, and acting on this principle Father Daly advocates a ‘survey’ of membership and conditions of the Catholic Church in unorganized districts as the one means of getting at lapsed Catholics.  ‘Too often,’ he observes, ’we are waiting for the fallen away to come to us.’  This is true indeed.  Protestant proselytizers in the west of Canada have the whole ‘survey’ scheme worked out on a scientific basis.  Father Daly is more willing to learn from them.  “I am a firm believer,” he writes, “in what I would call the Catholicization of modern methods that have proved beneficial in any cause.”  The problem of unorganized districts and of a scattered Catholic population in our own case is, of course, minute compared with that of Canada; but it is there, and sufficiently in evidence to justify the Redemptorist Father’s “desk-policy of apostleship.”  There is no reason, in short, why the interorganization of the members of the most perfect organization in the world should be committed to a kind of spiritual rule of thumb.”

[3] The following letter prompted by the reading of this very article was received by the President of the Church Extension, dated, March 14, 1919, at a point of Saskatchewan we know quite well; it is illustrative of conditions prevailing in many districts of our Great West: 

Very Reverend and dear Father,—­

I have just read your article in the Febr., 15 issue and I am so pleased with your suggestion for relieving the situation for scattered Catholics throughout the West that I must write my appreciation.  I am sure that very few people in the East realize what a veritable necessity those Free Lances you spoke of are to so many Western people, or what a God-send those auto-chapels would be.  Western homesteaders do not stray far from home for two very good reasons, lack of transportation facilities and lack of funds.