THE SECRET OF CATHOLICISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIV, Issue 26, 23 October 1896, Page 19

THE SECRET OF CATHOLICISM.

In an article on Zola's " Rome " in the National Review for August, Dr. Barry discusses the secret of the power wielded by the Church. We make the following extracts from this powerful contribution :—: — ■• All that M. Zola can grasp is the outside of things ; but he holds it firmly, renders it with power and will stir tip others who can see beyond matter into spirit to ask themselves a question, as new a-s it i* old. which has not lost its fascination, ' What is the secret of Catholicism .' This great volume attacks it on the first page — ' What menage has Rome, or has she any. for the world of science, criticism, culture, for democracy, for the disinherited, for the nation* that will nourish in the new continents to-morrow ? Is she dyinj^ in her purple shroud, or destined again to subdue the barbarian* ' ' To all the^e demands M. Zola returns a peremptory answer : but the significance of his book, as of many that the years have brought forth and seem likely to multiply, is not the solution he proposes, so much as the fact of his deeming it necessary to offer one. There must be some real and potent spell in Catholicism, some deep source of life not yet exhausted. Nothing less will account for these pilgrimages of religious men and women, of artists, philosophers, politicians, of the modern no less than the Christian, to a city which, alone in Europe, where so many things have changed during the last hnndred years, remains what it has been time out of mind, hieratic, supernatural. Rome is yet a temple and a shrine which no disbelief in the miraculous seems capable of overthrowing. What is its charm, then, and how shall we explain it? •■ First, let us hear M. Zola. It is, he tells us confidently, the charm of the visible, the past made present to our senses by a sort of perpetual incantation. M. Zola is not learned, or he might have distilled the essence of all he has seen into those famous words of the English philosopher, ' The Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.' . . . A CHRISTIAN THEOCRACY. ••But the creed that overcame Augustan Rome was not a flaccid, verbal system, the invention of chamber philosophy, or religion diluted into literature. Had it been no more than a school like that of the Stoics or the Academics, it would have dissolved like them into private opinion, too timid and vaporous to aim at the government of mankind. The Roman Empire from Augustus onwards was a pagan theocracy ; the Roman Church as we see it from the first, moves along the path of a Christian theocracy. It is the Empire taken up to a higher plane, with new principles informing it, and the power of the spirit coming upon it. Do we consider Israel, with its prophets and its Messianic golden aj;e, as leading up to the ideals set forth in the New Testament .' Then, in like manner, Rome, when it becomes the Imperial City and draws the nations as if they were tribes in one human family, leads up to Catholicism. The universal religion must have a definite centre, because it spreads out to so vast a circumference. None but the most intense unity, both visible and invisible, will enable the new Theocracy to triumph over the old. On every principle the heart of this world-wide contest, and its issue, must be at Rome. Conquer paganism there, and it is defeated everywhere, as the sequel under Constantine will prove. •■ No religion can deny its past. This is the past of the Christian relit; ion. So far as appears in history, it is a kingdom which embodies the principle of dogma, which acts by authority, and which assimilates all human in the peoples, the philosophies, the laws, and the arts upon which it exercises an influence. It follows the method of reconciliation, not that of iconoclasm. We may trace one line of conduct along the centuries, from the catacombs to the reigning Pope; and it is only the more conspicuous inasmuch as another, parallel indeed, but opposed to it, has never ceased tv pursue its own course — the idea of a Christian Church that should ret use at every price to discriminate between the light and the darkness in Pagan antiquity ; of a Church that denounces matter as evil, philosophy as rationalism, art as idolatrous, and literature as vanity. . . CATHOLICS NOT SUH&ERVIENT FROM FEAR. ■• In the Roman Church, with its peremptory decisions and infallible chair, the Bible, the liturgy, the sacraments, the creeds, remain unaffected by movements which elsewhere have told upon them to their irreparable injury. Nor should we fail to observe that loyal Catholics are by no means subservient from fear ; neither do they chafe under this discipline : when the Pontiff speaks, he is uttering their voice and confirming their prepossessions ; they hold emphatically the very doctrine which he defines ; and they would rise up against any one who should lay a bold hand upon the Mass, or deny the tradition, in which they see their beliefs out&ide them, objective and real. Again M. Zola is scandalised at their passionate fervour, their exuberance in the Faith, their enthusiasm which appears to him so extravagant. Human nature will not change because of the sceptic's dislike to its manifestations in a region where he is petrified. But let him not utter the word tyranny while these repeated acclamations, and plebiscites of instinctive devotion, prove that nothing would be more welcome to Catholics than a Pope whom the kin»s and republics should accept for their supreme arbitrator. Behind the congregations at Rome with their silent machinery is a real and popular religion, spontaneous, free, not manufactured, an instinct deep as life in these innumerable hearts. And it is growing, not diminishing. The great Protestant experiment having been made, and ending, as we see, in disaster, what more natural than that the authority which it supplanted to so little purpose should gain by its defeat / Once more history is asserting its claims, and the ancient institutions of Christendom are emerging from the shade which was cast about them by a speculative system, itself incapable of bringing to a successful issue the uiU-i prise it had snatched from them in an hour of revolt.

" Rome, therefore, is theocratic, because the religion she expounds is something more than speculation. But theocracy, with all its pomp and splendour, is a means to an end : and the end is a supernatural life, or religion as a mystic union of man with the Divine. Those who enlarge, admiringly or otherwise, upon the vision of the Eternal City, forget too often that the picture is only the surface ; they imagine aesthetic aims where quite another -pint has been brooding over the deep and drawing tortli from it -hapes of loveliness. The liturgy which satisfies the soul of Moi-liip in ux may be dwelt upon as an achievement of art supreme i» its kind; but the kind is spiritual, and its hidden meaning far beyond its expression. That, too, has grown by a long development, by taking to itself the precious things of the past ; it goes back to the Apostolic age, indeed we may perceive in its elements a symbolism as ancient as man ; but still it is new, and not a beautiful antique : and all the ways of religion centre in it, and the life of Catholicism goes out from it. " Not preaching but sacrifice ; not the meeting but the altar : not that which I can do for myself, but the power which flows out from an ordinance upon me ; such is the charm, the grace of this undoubtedly historical faith. And preaching has grown wearisome, ineffective, or, at last, dangerous to belief, where the Liturgy did not inspire and bear it up on heavenly wings. A presence that should have filled the house with glory was not there ; men talked to one another of an absent God, and went away downcast. No casual or deliberate words of a preacher could work upon the spirit with a sweetness bo penetrating as the ordered action, fraught with significance beyond speech, addressing itself to our whole nature, and impressing all alike, which had for its divinely -appointed purpose to bring heaven and earth together to evoke the Eternal — a marvellous thought, in the grandeur of which every modern religion pales and grows silent. . . . THE SECRET : CATHOLICISM BUPEKXATUKAI-. " This, at last, is the secret of Catholicism. It is supernatural in the world and rising beyond it, immanent that it may cnilise. transcendant that it may redeem. Every Church calling itself Christian which has done, or is doing, a work among men capable of resisting the fire, will be seen, on close view, to have kept from the wreck o'i" Christendom some one or other principle, whereby a living authority applies to circumstances what else had been a phantom of the truth. Here it is the sacerdotal principle, there the sacramental : with certain bold spirits the Church's freedom from State interference : with their neighbours, perchance more spiritual, the tradition of the inward life ; with another kind still— and the whole Eastern world is here included— the inflexibility of dogma and proscription. But historians candidly marking the various phenomena, will, it I may trust my own reading, allow that Rome has excelled in meeting the demands of so many-sided a mission. Elsewhere, either the Christian dogma is in peril, or it cannot defend itself against internal yet open heterodoxy, or it is stereotyped and gives no reply to modern questions. The Roman Church seems to be at once consistent and progressive. It is taking its own deliberate view of all that lies implicit in the sciences, the democracies, the socialisms of the age. even as sixteen hundred years ago it was judging and selecting from the Greek and Roman world, adapting to its ser\ ice whatever appeared to be susceptible of regeneration and slow to cast aught away until trial had been made of it. On the other hand, no inducement will persuade the Holy See to forego its principles or be merged in a foreign system. It assimilates" from without ; it cannot surrender irom within. It is rooted and founded in the idea of a theocracy whose credentials aie held to be Di\nie and therefore unchangeable. It has an all-pervadin» spirit, a stern logic, a language peculiar to itself, a tradition immemorial, a power of adaptation to circumstances, an endless fertility of resources and institutions, v place which none other can pretend to occupy, an empire at once visible and spiritual, and a sovereign city into which all periods and civilisations have brought their treasure-*. There is no second Rome : and. when all is said, there can be but one Catholic Church. Moreover, the shrine of the supernatural is the meeting - place of history. AVho knows that it may not piove once auain the beginning ot a new and less dolorous period in the progress of mankind .'