Religious Tolerance

...Drink on, 'ci...

...A lccturc on Jane Austen by an English prelate of literary distinction was in one instancc thus described...

...Catholics believe their Church's doctrines to be divinely rcvcalcd, and must consequently rejcct as error contradictions of these doctrines...

...Do we ask Senator A, a staunch protectionist, to stop attacking the free trade principles ~of Senator V&iiig Th&hQ~±9 1t'tM tqnt of 'tine former j~ sincerity, patriotism...

...True, many Irish-Americans appeared to demand political sympathy from all their coreligionists, nor did they hesitate to use the Catholic press and sometimes even the pulpit for the spreading of Irish propaganda...

...Do we invite them to forget their dogmatic differences in a common rendition of The Star Spangled Banner...

...The development of mutual understanding and mutual trust arc indeed the only means toward that whole-hearted social coaperation which bigotry so deplorably hampers...

...Thus if a Protes...

...The other enticement is wrapped in all the tinsel of a faded nautch-girl, feigning youth with the pera verse rites of the Orient...

...But soon the sirens are metamorphosed into harpies...

...I have been gravely told of an embezzler whose confessor asked for a share of the loot as a substitute for restitution...

...A discussion that fails to define its terms, he submits, may be stimulating or challenging—it cannot be illuminating...

...Not a few Protestants illogically conclude that Catholicism is incompatible with breeding and social posWcn, a prejudice reflected by those Catholics who seem to suspect the orthodoxy at' their coreligionists who are not of the laboring classes...

...One may deplore the violence, one may suspect that it indicates more prejudice than reasoned conviction...

...If we assent, it tries to damp us in our body, identifying our noble self with the lower...

...Evil destiny Is your warden and death is stronger than life...

...The tolerant Christian, on this theory, has no desire to oppose the substitution of the Nietzschean superman for Christ as an ideal...

...The prevalent creed is bound up with national culture and traditions, there is little chance for mutual discoveries of good faith, and distorted ideas of the minority's religion are sure to pervade the popular mini Catholics in Sweden, Protestants in Spain, must suffer these disadvantages as long as the religious homogeneity of those countries persists, for to the average Swede or Spaniarct "Catholic" or "Protestant" mean something largely fictitious...

...and after having believed themselves to be gods, these children of Maya awaken the prisoners of abasement and despair...

...the tolerant Protestant regards with equanimity the view that it was a fundamental mistake...

...Patriotic Catholics and Protestants can unite in combating the spread of a movement so incalculably fertile in evil, not by denying their differences, but by seeing these differences as they really are, by acknowleaging each other's good faith, and by emphatically r~~tsolving to strive together for their country's welfare in spite of the sad heritage of a divided Christendom...

...Conditions itt the United States are of course very different...

...mind, however, was more accurately shown by the enthusiasm with which Protestant clergymen of Shin Fein sympathies were feted, and by the charges of "British propaganda" made with more fervor than discrimination against visiting English Catholics...

...Realization that racial and social factors thus cornpikace our problem is neccssary for the mutual understanding of religious points of view, an understanding which must grow if we arc all to join in checking the spread of bigotry...

...Does it i'wolve welcoming views in opposition to our own, or at least indifference to such views...

...Here are easily detected the curses of the three fates, finally labelled in the psychiatry of Freud...

...Let us look at the facts in regard to economic and political doctrine...

...The entire town," my friend adds, "divided itself along religious lines...

...Tle next question is whether doctrinal intolerance, inevitable as long as the doctrines involved are considered vital, can be combined with tolerance of the persons with whom one disagrees...

...THE COMMONWEAL November a6, 1924 ful ones, are convinced that their differences from Protestants are neither insignificant nor theoretical, but full of profound social consequences...

...but at present the proportion of Catholics among Americans of iriherked culture is not large...

...But intemperate zeal of this sort should be ascribed to a racial rather than to a religious cause...

...Misconceptions as to each other's beliefs and sinc9rity by American Catholics and Protestants are not due, except in certain limited areas, to the fact that either group constitutes a small minority...

...The situation is less marked than formerly, much less so, no doubt, than it Will be fifty years hence...

...I have known of Protestant children greeting their Catholic cousins, as the latter came out of church, with taunts descriptive of their ineligibility for polite society—a naYve but significant manifestation...

...The one a soulless psychology, materialistic and determinist, exultantly diminishing our stature and vilifying our character...

...Most Catholics in the eastern states arc of Irish extraction...

...History is commonly appealed to, of course, to prove that the second sort of intolerance is inseparable from she first, that when a man contradicts the religious opinions of his neighbor it is impossible for him to give the neighbor a square deal, much less towork shoulder to shoulder with him in the tasks of citizenship...

...In other words, "intolerance of ideas" certainly tends towards "intolerance of persons...

...Unless religious differences can be combined with these things, unless American Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and agnoszics can agree to disagree in this manner, religious divergence will be synonymous with civil strife, and our future will be dark indeed...

...6o THE COMMONWEAL November z6, 1924 RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE By T. LAWRASON RIGGS RECENT discussions of such important topics as education, democracy, the established results of science, tempt one to conclude that the avoidance of definition is a sine qua non of modem expository writing...

...In the meantime it is unreasonable to expect from them bland indifference towards their mutual contradictions...

...Recent generations have been called upc~ to choose between two snares...

...Such despicable enterprises flourish on the conditions which this essay would help in remedying: confusion, wilful or otherwise, of racial and social issues with religious ones—misconceptions of doctrines—mistrust of those with whom we differ...

...But it is necessary to do so, and one is gratehA to Mr...

...It pretends to be the new truth, and it is as old as the lint lie...

...Walter Lippmann for showing in his Liberty and the News how much of our fashionable "religious tolerance" is a mere result of the view that doctrinal differences have all the rights of guesses which are as arbitrary as they are unimportant...

...You men," it says, "are anchored to heredity, you cannot disentangle yourselves from your native temperament and baseness...

...It takes sad pride in amplifying our worst drawbacks...

...THE SUPERCONSCIOUS By JULES BOIS IN AN essay on Christianity, Cardinal Gibbons quoted an inspiring sentence taken from an encyclical letter of Leo XIII, which should serve as a motto to any real psychology, not limited to the analysis of our ordinary and animal functions, and ought to be the slogan of a thorough education to be imparted to children and young men...

...human still because it shines in our spiritual masters, the heroes and the saints, pierces through the man of genius, true to his mission, and could be stirred up in all of us to quicken the best of our nature...

...What, one wonders, does the writer make of the nobile genus of half the saints in the Roman Breviary...

...Protestants tend more towards positive errors in regard to Catholic doctrine—the almost univcrsal mistakc about the Immaculate Conccption is an in~ stance—Catholics, towards ignorance of Protestant views...

...Yet all attempts at mutual understan&ng must fail unless accompanied by mutual trust...

...The personal god is the last idol...

...Yet I have known of credence givcn to the sorry libel by othcrwke intelligent inhabitants of a New England city particularly proud of its culture...

...If they November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL Lx exist in deplorable abundance amongst us, is it not largely because racial and social factors have complicated our religious problem...

...of both sorts of intolerance to accidental factors rather than to any inherent necessity...

...However, in the most dreadful crises of our destiny, we are saved only by this aid, which bequeaths inspiration as well as conversion, regeneration as well as power...

...and the other a spurious metaphysics, resurging from the dust of occultism and from Asiatic fireworks—an intoxication and a mirage...

...Yet, whatever imprudence or cruelty has been shown in the past by Christians of all kinds, surely no Christian is justified in letting this tendency prevail, and certainly no Catholic can find support in his Church's teachings for a zeal for orthodoxy which ignores charity, seeks to gain unfair advantages, or refuses to serve with those of different religion the country to which both owe allegiance...

...and self-worship the supreme religion...

...It has hitherto been regarded as mysterious because we were ignorant of its rules...

...we move heavily under the coat of mail woven by this material and mechanical civilization of ours...

...the tolerant Catholic does not react against the statement that the Reformation is the source of all liberty and progress...

...Should they avoid Charybdis, the pessimistic and agnostic attitude towards life, they would run aground on the hidden rocks of over-optimism...

...tant has macfr up his mind to accept as genuine such a palpable forgery as the "Knights of Columbus oath" of recent notoriety, if he regards the Catholic who denies it as a dupe or as authorizcd to lie about it, exposition of the true Catholic attitude towards nonCatholics is obviously wasted on him...

...There is need for the former to correct, by consulting the Catholic Encyclopedia or by asking well instructed Catholics, misunderstandings which, cvcn among the educated arc sometimes grotesquely false...

...If they did, our pity for their heads would exceed our admiration for their hearts—unless, indeed, our only solution of the tariff problem were an impressive "ignoramus et ignorabimus...

...With more ease than the mere intellectual, does the simple man without cerebral conceit and guided by his conscience, often enjoy this privilege When we are intoxicated by vain reasoning and verbal culture, we lose contact with nature's and supernature's finer energies...

...Nay, these are worse than impertinences, they are stenches in the ndstrils of that fashionable goddess, the tan Vital I Perhaps they remind hef unpleasantly of her dethroned predecessor, the Goddess of Reason, perhaps they suggest that the dethroning may not be permanent...

...In a country where the vast majority of the population is Catholic or Protestant, for instance, the few adherents of the other religions are inevitably eyed with suspicion, if not as dangers to the community, at least as eccentric and scarcely respectable individuals...

...A recently arrived English Protestant was chosen instead...

...Conditions similarly illustrative of religious antagon...

...Suppose, for instance, that a urnreraity professor's deviation from the orthodoxy of laissez-faire capitalism has aroused the violent opposition of trustees to whom the capitalistic creed is the fundamental of fundamentals...

...The traditional Protestant distrust of the Catholic clergy is sometimes so profound as to be unconscious...

...The disturbing force of this factor iii our problem is moreover greatly increased by social conditions, sincc Catholics in the higher strata of American society arc still comparatively rare...

...Not that the unfortunate results of religious divergence cart be wholly obliterated, even by the utmost good will...

...Tolerance of persons includes the wish to understand the opponent's point of view, the determination to believe in his good faith until the contrary is proved, above all the willingness to live at peace with fellow citizens of all creeds and of none, and to codperate with them for the welfare of the common country...

...Possibilities of friction must apparently remain, as long as human nature is tempted to advance the cause of what is seen as vital truth in ways incompatible with charity towards those believed to be in error...

...Yet such attitudes are obviously dependent on another, namely, that the questions involved are of small importance...

...ism on a racial basis are reported by a Protestant friend...

...If the opposing body of old-fashioned Protestant theology has waned, there has grown up instead among liberal Protestants a naturalistic humanitarianism, which grows more and more aggressively dogmatic, and which is of course much farther removed from the whole Catholic Weltanschauung...

...but this iconoclast decapitates us of our highest nature...

...On his promotion from the post of inspector in a New England factory, his competent assistant, a Catholic of Irish ancestry, did not succeed to the posidon, because, in the words of thc foreman, "persons of his rcligion don't get promoted in this department...

...For so long as misconceptions abound, the seeds of religious discord will take root and flourish...

...It is the urgent duty of all educated Americans to join in fighting the crude intolerance which is capitalized by such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, and which has followed with hideous unexpectedness the union sacr6e of the war...

...I do not think it does, and I would ascribe the simultaneous pr~.cna...

...and so it becomes for us the umpire of Providence, for such a wisdom is seldom taught in our colleges and universities...

...And I have read in a Catho1k paper an attack on "Prominent Catholics" that seemed to be inspired by no sentiment more Christian than hatred of the socially conspicuous as such...

...So much of it seems a sort of game whose object is never to descend to such obsolete impertinences as the definition of terms or the use of the syllogism...

...Snobbish dislike of other daises is confined to no section of society...

...It is doubly objectionable when it serves to footer religious prejudice...

...Their recent absorption in the disturbances of thc mother country seemed not infrequently to put an alien political issue before the best interests of America and of the Catholic Church as well...

...Drink of my cup," it sings, "and my philter will carry you beyond sickness, old age, misfortune, sin ani death...

...The real cause of the conflict, nevertheless, seems to bc racial...

...Life is often alone in charge of this initiating task...

...No one acquainted with the facts could state, as a writer in a Catholic periodical has stated, that Catholics at our large univcrsities are looked upon as socially inferior, and encouraged to atone for this by lavish entertainment of their classmates...

...It should not be necessary to point out that a reasonable man cannot be "tolerant" in this sense of doctrines which he regards as errors in matters of vital moment...

...that such Catholics, to quote the article, "are made to pay dearly for the jays of Protestant society...

...Not only does it blow out that dawning glow which every young man in his hours of enthusiasm and faith feels as though piercing through his brow...

...and the Namelessness of his family life...

...A power greater than human," the Pope declared, "must be called in to teach men's hearts, awaken in them the sense of duty and make them better.~~ "More than human," indeed is that power since it descends from Sinai and Golgotha...

...and there is nced for intelligent Catholics to be conversant with the main teachings of liberal and conservadve Protestantism...

...This attempt to shed light on the question of religious tolerance will therefore begin with a hopelessly mediaeval "Distinguo I" What do we mean by tolerance...

...Mistrust on the Catholic side is here again a less positive thing, usually a vague expectation of hostility where none exists, and due no doubt to the quasi-isolation that social and racial factors have fostered...

...The tale was accepted on the mere word of the detected crimiaal, for its hearer instinctively chose belief in the depravity of an unknown priest rather than thc suspicion that a man known to be a thief might also be a liar...

...Catholics, in proportion as they arc thought...

...If many Protestants need to learn that Catholics arc not taught to lie to them, many Catholics need to realize that Protestants arc not taught to hate them...

...Their real state at...

...The first temptation is clothed in the stem garment of official science...

...Now the conversion of dogmatic Christians to an analogous "tolerance," desirable or not, is certainly remote...

...but one has no right to object to a capitalist contradicting what is to him heresy...

...In any case, the present writer chooses to risk the charge of rudeness to the Bergsonian divinity...