Daily Prayer, 31 March

While I admit this tie-in might be a bit of a stretch, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that speaking the truth has become surprisingly difficult to do any more. Ironically, though young people say they value authenticity, they don’t see a contradiction in lying when the motive is deemed appropriate. We don’t want to make anyone feel bad, so what’s the harm? The difficulties this produces in a military environment, where one depends on the other to do what he says, should be obvious, but they aren’t. Even people of faith seem to prefer to preserve feelings rather than the truth, but, while not everything that’s true needs to be said, we must resolve to never lie. That is, if we aren’t lying when we say we serve the God who is Truth incarnate.

Caz was a good boy, if just a touch crazy. Good and pious enough that he wished to become a priest, and crazy enough to do so over the objections of his father. He objected to having to serve in the armed forces of his native Poland, so after his ecclesiastical education in Rome he was shipped west to help care for a large parish in Chicago. Not long after he moved to the Windy City, its mayor, Carter Harrison, was assassinated, gunned down on the steps of his home. Brother Caz decided that something had to be done. Mayor Harrison was only the most recent of an apparently interminable string of assassinations in the late 19^th century, and the good Catholic wanted to protect people. So he got to work.

He developed a bullet-catching material made from silk fibers, but in spite of his extensive testing, critics still doubted that such a thing would really be effective on a living human being. So on 10 July 1897, on the rooftop of a nurses training clinic on Ogden Avenue, Fr. Caz put his bullet-proof vest to the ultimate test. He stood draped in his bullet-catching fabric while two 0.32, one 0.38, and one 0.44 caliber bullets were fired at him from close range. The effect was no worse, he said, than “if a person had given him a light poke with a cane.”

Convincingly shown the effectiveness of his idea, potential backers were now easy to find to produce his material and to make protective vests with it. Casimir Zeglen, Catholic priest and Polish immigrant, had invented the bullet-proof vest.

Fr. Zeglen convinced doubters to trust his product by trusting it himself. It’s always easier to convince others that something is true if you believe in it yourself, because what’s true is true. Especially when someone is shooting at you.

LET US PRAY

Lord, help us to be truthful always, even when—especially when—the truth is frightening. When it feels like we are under fire, remind us to wear a breastplate of righteousness as our bullet-proof vest that quenches the fiery darts of our enemy, and that such a vest is fastened with a belt of truth. Give us the wisdom to always be honest with ourselves and with each other, and thereby dwell in the protection of the shadow of your wings. For You are the God of truth and You are our strength, our foundation, and our redeemer, now and forever, and to the ages of ages.

AMEN