The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 1923. THE ANARCHY OF CRITICISM

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 16, 26 April 1923, Page 29

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 1923. THE ANARCHY OF CRITICISM

HE most striking part, of the Holy Father’s 1Y [! VU Encyclical was his exposure and condemnali a £ lion of that moral Modernism which conj[<£ nCS* sists in refusing to accept the ruling of the Church whenever it is contrary to economic, social, racial, or national* interests in which iW* we are deeply concerned. This the Pope condemns drastically, even as his venerable . predecessors condemned the dogmatic Modernism of Tyrrell and Loisy twenty years ago. Loisy’s heresy has died a natural death, but the Catholic world to-day is threatened with the canker of the new heresy which is another form of the revolt of the intellect against religion; and, consequently, another form of the Protestant spirit of anarchy which moved Luther and those who followed him to rebel against the- Church and to lapse into varying depths of unbelief whither their private judgment led them.

* The world has known three distinct stages of revolt of this kind. First, there is the revolt of the comparatively few who deny absolutely the existence of God. There have been such, in all ages, though it is open to question whether their atheism was not merely an excuse for their irreligious lives. Again, there is the revolt of those who do not reject God, but reject the knowledge of God : they profess to believe in God, because they see that the light of reason, the light of nature itself, obliges man to believe in a first cause, and that this first cause must be a personal cause, an intelligence and a will. (Cfr. Manning, Four Great Evils of the Bay.) The third phase of revolt is that, of those persons who profess their belief in the Christian faith while reserving to themselves the right of criticising it and judging for themselves how much or how little they will accept. That phase is common to-day, and it is cognate to the moral Modernism so vigorously condemned by Pope Pius in his first Encyclical, Is it not the same thing as he describes when he speaks of persons who refuse to accept the teaching of the Church because certain prejudices and interests of theirs are

reprobated is it not precisely the form of revolt of those who quibble and distinguish and try to find dialectical loop-holes in authoritative pronouncements of their divinely appointed guides? Cardinal Manning reminds us that human reason cannot “stand related to revelation both as a critic and a disciple at the same time. The moment it begins to criticise, to test, to examine, to retain, or to reject, it has ceased to be a disciple; it has become the critic; it has ceased to be the learner it has become the judge and yet find me, if you can, any middle point where the reason of man can stand between the two extremes of submitting to the divine authority of faith as a disciple, and of criticising the whole revelation of God as a judge. There is nothing between the two. Now this kind of intellectual revolt (I must call it by a hard name, but it is an old one, and used by the Apostles) is heresy. What is the meaning of heresy ? It means choosing for ourselves, as contra-distinguished from the receiving with docility from the lips of a teacher—the choosing for ourselves what we will believe and how much we will believe.” Thus, even inside the Catholic Church, even among people who think they are faithful, we have to-day this spirit of criticism. We have people who say: “I believe in everything that has been defined by the Church ; I believe in all that is of faith ; but I reserve my right to believe as much or little as I like beyond that. They will tell you that they believe the Pope is infallible, but if the Pope writes in condemnation of something they are interested in, they will turn round and tell you that they are not going to take their politics or their economics from Rome. They deny the right of their Bishops to fulfil their divine office of guides they argue and quibble and equivocate in order to justify things which the Bishops, speaking in the strict fulfilment of their duty, denounce as crimes against the laws of God and man and at the same time they will recite rosaries with fervor and pray like angels. All this is part of the revolt of the mind against God it is all part of the anarchy of criticism, of the moral Modernism which threatens to become the plague of our days unless a revival of simple, sincere Catholic faith heals the wounds.

* This revolt is part and parcel of the Protestant spirit: those who are caught in it are the spiritual heirs, not to St. Peter, but to Martin Luther. To sincere and simple Catholics it appalling to consider how even among the children of St. Patrick we find some who would take it on themselves to tell their Bishops the limits of their jurisdiction and to deny their right to define what is sinful and what is lawful. When Catholics begin to define for themselves how far they will submit to their lawfully constituted spiritual superiors, it is but a short step until they go on to define also how much or little they will believe on the authority of the Church. In principle both phases of revolt are the same: in essentials they are.one in that they are both a revolt against the same authority which said, years ago : He who hears you hears Me.