In Regno Christi

...He surveyed the rights and duties of racial minorities in the light of Christian principles...

...The larger conference was to make Christian principles concerning the mutual rights and duties of nations in their dealings with one another more widely known according to Catholic tradition in general, and especially to the pronouncements of the Supreme Pontiff and of his predecessors in modern times...

...In the final session, Professor Le Fur of Rennes tackled the complex problem of the nation and the use of force...

...That has been done with unmistakable clarity...

...Like the law of private morality, the law of national morality was subject to the same Divine Will...

...It was necessary to guard against the tendency to make ethical axioms of what were, after all, working empirical principles, brought forth in circumscribed environment, and perhaps only really and fully suitable for that environment...

...And this is looked upon as one of the important results expected of the Oxford meeting...

...That is to say, any sincere Christian believer, whether an adherent of the Catholic Church or not, could have subscribed whole-heartedly to the moral principles laid down at the various sessions...

...Mass was said daily during the conference, in Ruskin College, which, in term-time, is the Labor party's college for training its coming men in advanced Socialist doctrines...

...Unless the principle is to be maintained that in no case may one nation justifiably be subject to another nation, there was a danger of a doctrinaire application of the principle of selfdetermination militating against the peace and welfare of the world as a whole...

...Except for certain special meetings, the assemblies of the Catholic Social Guild were held in common with those of the International Catholic League, thus merging in one united conference...

...4...

...Practically, though not actually, the subject amounted to a consideration of the Balkan problem, as well as of some of the perplexed racial problems of Central Europe, where the principle of self-determination has been applied in a none too judicious manner, and with little or no understanding of the rights of racial and religious minorities...

...Looking at the question from the standpoint of an American Catholic, Dr...

...Ryan at the opening session, and the moral teaching of the Catholic Church touching on war and rebellion...

...Professor O'Sullivan's belief in the doctrinaire application of the principle of self-determination being a possible menace to the peace of the world, is a point of view that has been maintained in more than one pastoral since the war by Cardinal Bourne...

...Politics, as regards the politics of parties, was ruthlessly shut out from the conference...

...One of his points of view was that in most discussions of relationship between nationhood and statehood, the question of practical utility was given too little consideration...

...Latin, French, German, Lettish, and Serbian were among the languages that were heard from the platform at this reception...

...The Catholic Council for International Relations is debarred by its constitution from taking up any political activity or from interfering in existing institutions...

...And it is just here where the special value of the subsidiary conference of delegates for Catholic action shows itself...

...But below the surface there is everything to promise that the conference will eventuate in profound and substantial moral effects...

...the streets are almost deserted...

...At the basis of all true nationalism stood, as its secure and lasting foundation, the truth of the solidarity of the human race and the dependence of every creature upon every other creature...

...Our official exenemies have been here before this, though it has been mostly under the auspices of sloppy sentimentalism and pugnacious pacifism...

...But neither a lost nor a dead cause could have drawn representatives of twenty-eight countries to the summer somnolence of Oxford, as they have been drawn these last days to discuss a cause that is not lost nor dead—the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ...

...Oxford dreams its own dreams during the Long Vacation...

...that it was an organic being which possessed rights other than those of the individuals who composed it...

...The field covered was the defining and surveying from the historical viewpoint the principle of nationality, followed by a consideration of nationality as recognized by modern treaties...

...The authorities of the Church, of the university, as well as of the city of Oxford, were associated with Cardinal Bourne in welcoming the delegates...

...With the relationship established, the further principle >was discussed of the intervention by any other state or states for the purpose of assisting or repressing any given nationalist movement...

...Like the individual, the state was bound by the great fundamentals which underlay all human rights and human responsibility...

...at the same time those Christian and Catholic moral principles that are at the root of all national policies were exposed in the clearest light...

...In greeting these foreign visitors to England and Oxford, Cardinal Bourne laid stress on the fact that such a conference as that which was assembling must be one of the most potent means of restoring the courtesies of civilization, which had been so terribly shattered in the war...

...The good of the nation was a lawful end, but an end that must be defined and regulated by taking consideration of a higher principle to which it was subordinate—the law of justice...

...professors and undergraduates are scattered on holiday...

...F. W. Sherwood, who occupies a high position in the English judiciary as Recorder of Worcester, brought his knowledge of the law to bear on this topic...

...The closing sessions of the conference dealt with the nation and the state, and the nation and the use of force...

...The president of the conference was the Archbishop of Liverpool, who, at one of the early special meetings of the Catholic Social Guild, was elected as its president...

...It was not so much that race and nationality were minimized as that membership in one family appeared to be the only thing that counted...

...while, on the other hand, perhaps overmuch attention was given to the doctrinaire aspect of the matter...

...It is not without reason, then, that Catholics from twenty-eight countries should have come to Oxford to discuss Catholic principles concerning race and nationality...

...Ryan, professor of philosophy in the Catholic University at Washington, read the main paper on the subject...

...From twenty-eight different countries, Catholics have met and have exchanged thoughts and ideas...

...The doctrine of Hegel that the state was supreme...

...As patron of the conference, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster extended a welcome to the delegates, at a reception held in the hall of Wadham College, generously placed at the disposal of the conference by the college authorities...

...Here, in a later day, came also Achille Ratti, who, as Pope Pius XI, has called the peoples to enter into the kingdom of justice—Pax Christi in Regno Christi...

...Race, so it appeared, seemed to count for very little at Oxford...

...A fatal heresy had been preached, said Dr...

...His Grace foreshadowed the tone for the greater conference that was to follow when, as president of the Catholic Social Guild, he affirmed the principle that, as Catholics, they could have nothing whatever to do with party politics...

...In the modern world, there should be no place for such an unchristian ideal of the state...

...Not altogether in the domain of faith and practice, which is for Catholics alone, but in the much wider sphere of national and political morality whose field of action, in the last resort, is the ballot box...

...It needed but to glance at the methods of Communism to be convinced of the powerlessness of such a movement to bring pacification to a tortured world...

...To Oxford came that great humanist, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who ruled Christendom as Pius II...

...the fifth annual conference of the International Catholic League, an organization founded at Graz, in Austria...

...Mack, that politics had nothing to do with religion, and that the interests of the state and of humanity were separated from, and not subject to, the control of the Christian conscience...

...After Oxford, it will be difficult for them to work in ignorance of each other's aims—to carry on behind a wall of national insularity and isolation...

...It was also, His Eminence said, a valuable medium for promoting mutual esteem...

...One achievement, from the English point of view, has been the fact that it has been possible to get so many Catholics, representing so many countries, together...

...The Catholic representatives from twentyeight countries were not induced or invited to band themselves together in an international political union...

...To put the work of the conference in a phrase, what it has done has been to give a powerful stimulus to the formation of a Catholic mind...

...The famous French Jesuit, Pere de la Briere, contributed to this discussion...

...There were several incidents, quite small and trivial in themselves, during the conference, that were a happy augury of increasing mutual esteem...

...but in the heart of Oxford the university city sleeps...

...As a consequence of this heresy, the public mind had been invaded by the modern paganism called materialism...

...The colleges are closed, only caretakers and occasional tourists disturb 'the quietness of their halls and cloisters...

...There was, so far as one could see, nothing artificial or forced in the atmosphere, such as obtrudes very plainly at the international pacifist reunions that have been held in London...

...Circling about outside, the municipality goes on with its own busy life...

...From some of these ancient colleges went out the most renowned statesmen ecclesiastics of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, layers of the foundations of the law of the nations...

...The struggle of classes, of capitalism and the workers, even the struggle of races, had all sprung from this same tainted source—the attempt to separate God from the life of modern society...

...The sequence of topics was graduated 386 THE COMMONWEAL September 2, 1925 with perfect precision, beginning with the question— What is nationality...

...and a special conference for delegates of central committees for Catholic action, called jointly by the Catholic International League, the International Office of Catholic Organizations of Rome, and the Catholic Union of International Studies of Fribourg, in Switzerland...

...In a sense, the Oxford conference has not been a Catholic conference at all...

...Oxford has therefore given Christians a moral code...

...In wider matters, there is the hope of greater unity in world problems...

...These three assemblies were the sixth annual summer school of the Catholic Social Guild...

...And, therefore, Catholics can never admit any distinction between the conscience of the individual and the collective conscience of a nation...

...Under the inclusive title of the Oxford Catholic Conference, there have just closed^ after a duration of eight days, three distinct assemblies which, speaking broadly, may be described as having met at the invitation of the British Catholic Council for International Relations...

...Under this covering title was discussed the relations between the principle of nationality, already treated of by Dr...

...But there was nothing sloppy or pugnacious in seeing Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans kneeling together at Mass or listening to a sermon in French or German...

...The Archbishop of Liverpool gave expression to this when, early in the conference, he spoke of the enormous influence that could be exerted throughout the world were the 40,000,000 Englishspeaking Catholics to pull together...

...Herr Doka of Zurich, in the first of these propositions, exposed at length in what the principle of nationality consists, of the place it holds in a state of which the peoples are made up of several races...

...The conferences of the Catholic action delegates, which met to consider international coordination of Catholic action, were held separately, though they were an essential part of the conference as a whole...

...To a large extent they must, in the first place be confined almost entirely to the Catholic community...

...what really mattered was that these representatives of so many peoples were, in actual fact, members of one great family...

...and there is an air of repose about these ancient buildings, some of whose halls have echoed to the voices of Grosseteste, of Roger Bacon, of William of Wykeham, Saint Edmund Rich, Saint Richard of Chichester, and many another great master of the schools...

...Mack, superior of the Luxembourg Seminary, took the platform at the second session, when, in considering the nation and humanity, he read an able paper on the principle of nationality in relation to the rights of the individual and of society as a whole according to Christian doctrine...

...As Christians, it was for them to love the nation which embodied their individual and collective aspirations, their cultural history, their common language, and, very frequently, a religion which all held in common...

...The delegates' conference was to concern itself with the international coordination of Catholic action* Oxford has done its work, and it seems that the only thing left is for Catholics to act...

...Self-determination was the topic at the third session, when there were considered the principle of nationality as a claim to political sovereignty, and colonization in the light of Christian principles.' Professor O'Sullivan, of the National University of Ireland, ably maintained his thesis...

...Its work is to study, and all the evidence points to a considerable encouragement of hard and practical thinking along the lines that have been merely indicated at Oxford...

...In England, at all events, the results of the International Catholic Conference at Oxford are not expected on the surface to be spectacular...

...Five sessions were devoted to the discussion and exposition of Catholic principles concerning race and nationality...

...Ryan said that no conception of nationalism which contravened or contradicted the truths of Christianity could be acceptable...

...and that, in the pursuit of these so-called rights, it had unlimited power and could, with impunity, negative any personal rights which conflicted with its own supreme purpose, was palpably false...