CAUSES OF THE PRESENT DECHRISTIANISATION OF SOCIETY

New Zealand Tablet, 17 February 1921, Page 17

CAUSES OF THE PRESENT DECHRISTIAN—ISATION OF SOCIETY

(By Archbishop Redwood.)

Catholic theology aptly Sums up in two propositions the state of mankind in consequence of the original fall; faith and the supernatural life,' the result of Christ’s redemption, are absolutely necessary for eternal salvation; faith and the supernatural life are morally necessary for mankind, in order • that they' may know with 'certainty, when needed, the moral and religious truths " intrinsically accessible to natural reason, and in order that they may practise efficaciously the virtues which, considered in themselves, do not exceed their natural, energies. (See Vatican Council de' fide Catholica.) Yes, human nature, wounded by original sin; is like that lame man cured by St. Peter near the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. In the name of the Crucified and Gloriously Risen Jesus Christ, Peter, the future head of the Church, has strengthened" his limbs and poured into them the new .blood of the Redemption: so, verily, there, is no salvation but in Him. (Acts iv. 12.) For having forgotten this fundamental truth society has come to be what it is. In the first age of Christianity, while the Apostles and their immediate disciples were present in the Churches they had founded, Christianity was a living reality, thrilling with energy. Read the writings of the first witnesses of Christianity ; the letters of St. Paul, St. James, St. Peter : the effusions of love of St. John in the fourth Gospel, in his letters, in his Apocalypse ; assist at the first apostolic preachings in the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles ; read also the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the disciple of St. Polycarp, and the story of his martyrdom; the Apology of St. Justin; tlm Didactic, or doctrine of the twelve Apostles, and then tell me whether you do not feel that you are at the very source of Christianity. All is life, light, heat in these inspired pages, pages hallowed by the spirit of Christ. Nothing recalls, in the remotest degree, the formulas of the Ethics of Socrates, or the idealist speculations of Plato, or the elaborate analyses of Aristotle: no abstractions, but the daily intercourse with a living person, the anxiety to share his humiliations in order to share his glory, the continuous presence of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost in the bosom of a family where everything speaks of unity in God and of brotherhood. We are in the bright dawn of Christianity. And how did the first Christians live? They listened to the Apostles telling them what they had seen, heard, touched, handled. Their sole ambition was to know Christ, to gather up the echoes of His discourses, His will, His promises. They partook daily of the Eucharistic Bread which they broke fraternally together. They put their goods in common. They continued daily with one accord in the Temple and breaking bread from house to house; they took their food with gladness and simplicity of heart,’ praising God and haying favor with all people. And the Lord increased daily together such as should he saved. (Acts ii. 46, 47.) Three centuries of persecution put the sincerity of the peoples faith to the test of blood. Their courage before tyrants, the supernatural omnipotence of the strength which sustained them, made them “martyrs,” that is, witnesses of a living reality, of their' life in Christ and Christ’s life in them. After the edict of Constantine, the Church organised in open day her apostolate. While that galaxy of the powerful Doctors of the East and the West—named Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory, Cyril, Hilary ] Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome scrutinised the Scriptures and Apostolic Tradition, quashed the heresies and prepared the unity of faith in the adhesion of Catholic-; ity to the great council definitions,' the bishops, missionaries, and monks conquered the world, converted the barbarians, and gradually set up the civilisation of Christian Rome, in the place of sinking paganism. The

13th century and the beginning of the 14th, Innocent 111., Innocent IV., Boniface VIII., mark the apogee of this era of conquests. The laws of the Church were the laws of the State. The Papacy was the arbiter in the quarrels between sovereigns and their subjects. The unity of Christian society was as complete as one could wish here below. But success intoxicates, and rivalries rend asunder. And, as though it were written that peoples as well as individuals should, after reaching the summit, aspire to descend, the culminating point of the ascendant power of the Papacy was the starting-point of the revolt of peoples against it. And no wonder. Had not the Holy Ghost foretold, by the mouths of Simeon, that Christ was “set up for the fall and the resurrection of many and for a sign which shall be contradicted”? (Luke ii., 34.) The Renaissance would have been irreproachable had it confined itself to require, from Latin and Greek antiquity, models of artistic' beauty and literary perfection; but with literature and art, pagan morals and the elegant scepticism of ancient society, brought into the Renaissance the leaves of corruption and revolt. Luther, on the plea of “reforming” the Papacy and the Church, broke with both. In lieu of the principles of obedience to authority divinely constituted —the safeguard of Catholic unity he substituted the principle of “free inquiry,” the agent of dislocation and revolution. The era of decadence set in : follow its stages. Protestantism, the negation of the divine authority of the Church, pretended nevertheless to maintain the integrity of dogma and unity of belief, under the invisible breath of the Holy Spirit. But, for want of authorised direction and judicial supremacy, doctrinal differences fatally degenerated into irreducible conflicts, to the profit of unbelief and indifference. Today there is not a single dogma on which all Protetant denominations agree. There is not one professor of theology in the Lutheran universities of Germany that believes in the Divinity of Christ. Naturalism, in the intellectual order, is more especially called Rationalism, In the moral order it is Independent Morality; in the social order, Liberalism. It is the inheritor of pagan Renaissance and Protestant rebellion. Originally it was not atheistic. Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau paid homage to the Deity; the French Revolution rejected the Supreme Being, and, about the year 1850, Jules Simon, in his lielipio'u Naturelle, Victor Cousin, in his work Da Mai, da Beau, et du Bleu, wrote impressive pages in honor of the God of reason. But reason, without faith, is short-sighted ; the will, without grace, is lame. Human nature, left to its own weakness, slides down the slope of decadence; philosophers, oblivious of the social mission assigned to them by Plato, in the government of public affairs, yielded to .the vanity of exalting the originality of their own thought, instead, of. devoting it to the service of truth. Many mockingly said with Pilate: “What is truth? Does • truth exist ?” . In the moral, intellectual, family, and social do-; main we touch, it seems, the extreme limits of the desertion of order. The official constitution of States is atheistic. The ethics of public instruction are morality independent, not only of Christ and His Gospel, but avowedly independent of God. Education is determined to be godless. A word has been forged laicisation, to translate (very awkardly indeed) this systematic exclusion of the divine authority from all domains. So the stability of the family is shaken marriage becomes an association of pleasure or interests ; caprice breaks it up-.just as'it made it; paternity dread Mr "*??',*' j dens - the married couple dread the birth of a child , and, if -they consent to have awful n„td.i i° bje p .° f V t'" ty or ' caprice., Hence the Legion are of general,immorality and blasphemy. thf °taO £° S „ e ,° ; 111 the novel or the.novelette, on tne stage, in popular songs, in the newspapers the *eam pN’b " , th i r St SOlemH works philosophy! ertv nJ he .l b ®°! Ute emancipation of individual lib eUy. Hence the immoral talk so prevalent,' like cur-

rent daily coin: ‘‘l want to live my life”; “I want to live” ; “youth must have its day” “nature must have its own”; ‘‘l must have a good time”— and so forth. r/ive your life! That is, grow up a human tree! Spread! out. Away with any limitations! Away with the) gardener to lop off the greedy branches ! To set the* stem in a determined direction ... to guide the; sap into splendid fruit! The tree exists for the tree, and not for its fruit.. Man exists for man ; neither religion, nor his neighbor, , noi goodness, nor society has any right to set barriers to his appetites! Hence the alarming desertion of religious duties ; hence the unbridled passion for pleasuie, the abuse of the sacred laws of matrimony, the upheavals, of rebellion in the lower strata of society.. Popular good sense used to say: “that can’t last.” No that cannot last, and that has not lasted; the arm of the offended Almighty has stricken the world. Man fancied that life was a continuous feast, and organised themselves for enjoyment, respectable, if yon like, but still enjoyment. The war has taught them the law of sacrifice: its teaching was stern but invaluable. In the domain of doctrine we were living, or rather wo were dying, of conventions, that is, compromises. Man spoke of religious “opinions” ; man refrained for the sake of others, from affirming their convictions; the atmosphere of good society was composed of a benevolent neutrality, which put domestic truth to; silence, let in error alongside of it, and made it as respected as truth. Man went on the high road topractical atheism, not only in private life, but in the; home and family. The great culprit in this universal decadence, the great perverter of nineteenth-century ideas, was the = German philosopher, Kant. There are two parts in his philosophy the speculative and the moral. This speculative philosophy ends in this conclusion: the existence of God and the truths resting thereon cannot be demonstrated. Consequently, man, determined to stand on his reason alone, can serenely do so without God. fence that widespread mentality of the pretended “knowing ones”; Religion is good for sentimental souls, for women, for children" for peasants; superior minds, to which they, of course belong, have got above the popular level, and have come to the decided conviction that, if they have not to deny God, they have still less to affirm Him. They wrap themselves up proudly in a systematic abstention, which they confound with a scientific mind, and call “agnosticism.” - 15 From this theory of scientific inaccessibility in the religious province proceed the ideas of necessary neutiality, of secularisation,” of religious effacement, now deeply prevalent in the intellectual movement of societies, even devotion. - , The practical section of Kantian philosophy vigorously asserts the law of duty ; but duty powerless to hud in God, banished from our convictions, either its origin or its support, takes its rise in the human subject himself who is conscious of it. Man is self-de-pendent in the moral order. He is his own lawgiver himself the ideal, himself the end to which liberty is subordinate. A moral personality finding in itself its own law that, according to Kant, is the whole of man. The tempter had said to our first parents: Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and you shall be as God. Kant says to man: Thy eatness is. in thy morality. Of this morality thou thyself ait the principle and the end. Thy greatness aiises from thyself— art God. Rehold the triumph of human pride ! Never was carried to this length the cult of self, the pagan exaltation for paganism is nothing but the exaltation of human nature, the affirmation of its sufficiency and independence. No doubt , this moral beauty of pure disinterestedness is but an ideal, and Kant asks himself whether there ever was on this planet an act of unmixed moral purity but that is precisely one of the characters of moral conception in vogue' to-day, that is, that duty appears to consciences far more an ideal, to which it

is fine to aspire' than a strict law that each one is obliged to realise in his life. Do you not recognise in these features Modernism, which , substitutes evolution, of conscience, the conscience of collectivity, for the authority of Revela', and the Church? The Modernist rejects dogmas from outside, from on high, which are binding; his faith is a poetic chant, a moral and religious ideal, in which he recognises himself. He .declines to let himself be governed by the Head of a Church divinely invested with a mission to command subjects. Dogma and laws are to him the result of deep aspirations, progressive aspirations of individual consciences, which are vaguely supposed to form a “collective conscience.” Their fruit, fully ripened, is gathered by the teaching Church, which becomes, by the dogmatic or imperative formulas it issues, the interpreter of the collectivity. Thus the teaching and governing authority has disappeared: it is, as in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract,” the emanation of universal suffrage. Modernism was fitly called by Pope Pius X. the rendezvous of all heresies. It is the resultant of Protestantism, Naturalism, and Kantism. I would willingly call it scepticism cloaked in the garb of religion. To the overweening conceit of some it appears to J>e the safety-engine of Christianity imperilled by Roman autocracy. It is, verily, the subtle revolt of souls who know not how to either believe or obey, and delude themselves by thinking that they remain religious because they idolise an ideal forged by themselves. Did you ever hear the ideal exalted as it now is ? Evolution of the one, personal elevation, the affirmation of personality, and so on and so 0n.... But no, the ideal is not we; we are nafura filii irae, we came into the world under malediction from on high, and, even after Divine mercy has granted forgiveness, we remain degenerates, whom only the regenerations in the blood of Christ can restore to sound and fruitful life. The ideal is Christ Jesus, the poor One of Nazareth, the meek and humble of heart, stripped, suffering, dying in ignominy on Calvary, but conquering, by His death, His royalty over the world. This ideal is old of twenty centuries ; it is no longer to bo created by the barren efforts of a virtuoso. And, to the end of ages, the Church, by the mouth of her faithful children, will acclaim her only sovereign: “Gloria, Inns ct honor tibi sit, Bex Ghriste lied erupt or’’ (Palm Sunday). Well, that is how we were before the war. And behold the revelation of the wisdom and omnipotence of the Sovereign Master of events, who patient, because He is eternal, never fails to realise with might and sweetness His holy designs. The intellectual world had paid court to Kant; even Frenchmen, so hostile by natural temperament to Germanic domination, had honored the genial dreamer with their philosophic Pantheon. And lo! pan-Germanic pride became the chastisement of Europe. No doubt pan-Germanism will perish in the snare it set for others; such is the law so often recalled in the psalms of David; the trickster is caught in his own traps. The wars of Europe made France expiate the great crime of the French Revolution. Napoleon, Consul and Emperor,, had some fleeting hours of glory. Waterloo ealed his downfall. The instrument of Divine vengeance must sooner or later be mutilated or broken. No doubt of that. If the nations refuse to bend down before God and His Christ, the peace which they may conclude will be, despite the pomp and array of international tribunals, extremely precarious: Nothing will avail. Christ must triumph over our resistance and unbelief. “He must reign, till He has put all His enemies under ,His feet.” (Cor. xv., 25.) And if men do not allow Him to reign by His mercy, He will reign by His justice. Somehow He will and must reign. “For other . foundations no man can lay, hut that which is laid', which is Christ Jesus.” (1 Cor. iii. 10.)