In this article I address those who, like myself, are outside the communion of the Roman Catholic Church. If I could, I wotdd persuade the average decent citizen (irrespective of theological position or lack of one) that in general social action it is not only wise but morally right for him to co6perate with Roman Catholics. Alas, one is continually meeting people in full sympathy with the ends sought by Catholic action in our society who nevertheless permit theological disagreement to keep them hostile to the great army which is fighting for that which they themselves cherish. Were all of us confronted by no peril, then this attitude of theirs would matter little. Unfortunately such is not the case. On all sides, the foundations of our society, or of any conceivable civilized society, are attacked.
The threat of political revolution is perhaps that one of the attacks which comes first to Mind. But it is not the only one. Not content with threatening property (the cnly possible support of personal and corporate liberty) not content with tearing family life to tatters, our generation has already achieved the most destructive war in history. As if all this were not enough, so that no field of human action might remain secure, those who would destroy us have gone on to attack reason Itself. It might be wrong to say that our would-be disintegrators have set up unreason as a sacred dogma, but it would not be far wrong. Not one of the elementary laws of thought or even the axioms of geometry has been safe from them. Inability to distinguish between proof and hypothesis has left our scientists as bankrupt of truth as supernationalism has left Europe's treasuries empty of money. Meanwhile, for want of something better to do, we Americans have cooked up a very promising beginning of religious war.
Before entering upon my labor, it would be base indeed not to remember the great Frenchman whose pen has reaped such golden harvest in these same fields.
Come, Maurras, Master and Captain of the Allies of the Church, be propitious to me. Forget, if only for a moment, the folly and the sorrow of thine own dear country in order to inspire us here. Lend me something of thy dear spirit, thy rapier logic, and thy serene ardor, for thou hast enough and to spare. Lend me of thy love for the age-long sanctities wherein thou dost not believe. As for the Doric loveliness of thy style, I ask it not—for it is thine own and immortal, and it could row under no other hand. If thou wilt inspire me then I will shrink from no task.
To it then: The Roman Catholic Church is a fact. It is the most numerous and at the same time the most widely distributed of all Christian bodies. We may reject its claims or its manner of stating than; our it rejection does not wipe the organization out of existence. And for every one of the maladies of our society, it has a dear and definite remedy to prescribe.
Taking first the question of local versus universal allegiances, most thinking men see dearly the need of our world for a sound internationalism not to destroy but to transcend local loyalties. Mere nationalism, the so-called religion of the modem man, is not enough. It is too easily capable of serving collective greed and the unlimited desire for power. Worse still, it demands too many human sacrifices. Now, internationalism implies somewhere a central body, an organ. What then are the active international forces of our day and what hope is to be found in them? Obviously, we must begin by ruling out the international revolutionaries and the 'equally international bankers. The revolutionaries promise us no stability but only a series of bloody convulsions, and the bankers, although they seek stability of a sort, seem to have heretoforc failcd to inspire that degree of affection necessary to a stable and healthy authority.
How about the League of Nations then? Well the League, if it is ever to amount to anything, must use either force or persuasion, i.e., moral authority. Even in using force, if its action is to be more than a mere tyranny, it must do so in the service of acknowledged right. Now what is right? What is justice? Can the corrupt little gangs of shady fellows which constitute most modern governments, can they nominate a committee capable of defining in morals? To ask the question is to answer it. My contention is not that the League is worthless, I say only that its inability to define in morals must permanently limit its usefulness, for only agreement in morals permanently unites man to man. If another man adopts my religion that religion is not less but more. If he takes my possessions then I have not more but less than before. Material interests can only divide.
Consider now the Papacy. It sets forth a morality which claims to be universal. It is a centre of reverence for perhaps two hundred million people all over the world. Granted, if you will, that in our own day it has often failed to act, and that when it has done so its action has been timid or ill-judgeo. Granted, anything you please, still the Papacy remains an organ of cone structive internationalism which our world cannot afford to despise or to neglect.
Having considered the Roman Church in reIndon to international war, let us now consider its relation to the class war. Among those who aftac~ the institution of property there is an unreconciled contradiction. On their negative side they appeal to the spirit of chaos, and on the positive side their omnapatent state would reduce its subjects to something very like slavery. rfo all this Rome replies, by the mouth of Pope Leo XIII, that property is a natural right, that it is thc chief earthly support of individuals and associations of individuals against the capricca of the powerful, that if you wcaken it you weaken liberty, and if you destroy it you have destroyed liberty. What other religious body has said as much?
Does this mean that she sees nothing in Communism? By no means. The only genuine Communists of past or present times have been monks or nuns. Neither does it mean that she takes a merely complacent view of things as they arc. Far from it. In the days of her greatest power the rich were not irresponsible as thcy are today. They were compelled by custom to maintain and lead the local police force, to serve as local magistrates, and to perform a host of other exacting duties. In those times the business man, that imperious master of our society, was kept continually in mind of his obligation to the community by means of an elaborate and logical system of economic morality. By her doctrIne of the "Just Price" the Church was never weary of restraining the destructive swings of the economic pcndulum between boom times and slack times. Trade and industry were organized into guilds for the precise purpose of preventing the growth of a degraded proletariat such as that which befouls our cities. When President Coolidge says—"He who builds a factory builds a temple, and he who works there worships there," he is talking pure mediaeval Catholicism.
Even more fundamental than the struggle for a sound internationalism or for a softening of dass warfare, is the effort to preserve the first and deepest of all human loyalties, that of marriage. Among us Americans the evil of divorce has reached such a pass that it is hard to find words for it. Here the difficulty in finding a remedy is not mere bewilderment as it is in the matter of international or interdass hatred. The monster can be seen in all his hideousness. The divorce rate of these United States cries to Heaven, and in the teeth of it only venerable survivors of the past (like a-President Eliot of my own proud Univenity of Harvard) can maintain the superior happiness of American home life to that of other countries. In the matter of divorce the trouble is not to diagnose the disease but to find physicians able to persuade people to take the only remedy—of forbearance and self-mastery. Here, again, Rome stands like a great rock. Her own people are all but hnniuric to this plague that strikes down its twa of thousands among the rest of us. WIthout her where would our divorce legislation and our divorce rate be today?
After such great matters, it is hard to go on without anti-climax. And yet there is one more province of life, that of educttion and scholarahip, wherein the Roman church has a great word to say. All educated men worthy of the name revere the past. Only schoolboys and "self-made" barbarians chatter of any progress not rooted in tradition. Most of our culture comes down to us from the ancient clank world. Our own time with its German philosophy, industrialism, free verse, and new art, is bleak and ugly enough. Think what it would be without its artistic, cultural links with the past. It is an instinct vital to our society that makes the wisest among us ding to the study of the classics. Without the Roman Catholic insistence upon Latin their struggle would be hopeless.
Let us, for a moment, imagine the future at its worst Let us suppose mankind (shepherded by Nietzsche, Freud, Ct al.) returning meekly to a pagan worshipping of its own mere appetites. Even so, will not such a folly be gone the sooner if the poor creatures can be shown the satiety and despair of thc antique world? How could this be done without Latin?
Again, it may well be the temper begotten by familiarity with the solid, definite, Latin phrase which has helped Roman Catholic scholars to resist thc fashionable habit of telling learned fairy tales and labelling them science. They refuse to mx up suggestion and possibility with proof. Take their immunity to the evolutionary gabble. Granted that bones of "higher" animals have been found in rocks, granted further that presumably older rocks have yielded traces of "lower" types, they refuse to find in this suggestive fact any proof that simpler types begat the more cornpier. It may have been so, but the thing remains hypothesis—supposition.
Does this line of reasoning mean that this church trains her scholars to lean too heavily upon formal logic? By no means. She must ever insist that reason, although supreme within its own province, has limits beyond which it cannot rule. Take her reply to the intellectually fashionable sophistrics of Kant. The old cobweb spinner of Koenigsburg was out to deny any definite proof of the existence of God. Therefore he insisted, and what he said was true enough as far as it went, that no man could iogicaiiy demonstrate the existence of the external world. The Church's icarned scholastics only smiled and answercd—"These things arc too serious to be joked about. You, Herr Kant, like any other sane man, are forced to assume that the external world exists. If in your heart you really de. nied it, the asylum doors would gape for you. Back in the twelfth century our prcdeccssors had that matter out with the subtle Jewish disintegrator, Maimonides."
I conclude. The mere existence of thc Papacy helps us to hope for better international undcrstanding. In her economic morality, and in the record of the Catholie Middic Ages, the Church has a great word to say for social justice. Without hcr the struggle for the right of property and the sanctity of marriage would be dcupcratc indeed. By her Latin she helps us to prescrvc the heritage of the antique Mediterranean world out of which came all our culture. No fad can drive her .cholara either from reason or from nmity. If we cannot give her allegiance, at least we owe her respect
