Life and Leadership
LIFE AND LEADERSHIP IT should have been perfectly obvious—though apparently it was not—from what was said in these columns two weeks ago, that The Commonweal has no desire to undertake the...
...We are dependent upon mass organization for our shoes and suppers...
...We ought not, for instance, to be indifferent towards the problem of international peace, which a succession of Sovereign Pontiffs has set before the faithful as a sacred THE COMMONWEAL September 2, 1925 goal—to fail to realize, as the London Month puts it —"that hundreds of thousands of earnest men in the old world, alive to the continued presence in their midst of the causes of war, are casting about for means to remove them...
...Possibly the roots of our trouble are too complex and profound for immediate discovery and cure...
...Does not the success of these men, growing as it did out of a chaotic era and in a land that had been alienated from religion, suggest what might be done here if the virtue of charity were to become less wholly a "private affair...
...We wish, therefore, to make it plain that our respect for hard-working priests who encourage frequent Communion among young men, and who apply the saving discipline of faith to the growth of human personality, is quite complete and utterly sincere...
...The words must adjust themselves to the very rhythm of our hearts, as we set ourselves to the cleansing and beautifying of the common life...
...But we cannot merely drone it off like a formula, or flaunt it like an appropriate holiday banner...
...whatever the reasons may be, the business has failed...
...We cannot afford to sever Christian principle from the practice of industrial business...
...when a benignant rule did not despise the savages of the West...
...And so it is rather startling to realize that anybody could have suspected us of making the Confiteor an appendage to the Constitution...
...But the effort to work on, to struggle forward, is not merely an aesthete's pleasure or a gourmet's pride, but the proof of the discipline that makes us men and the rule by which we become rulers...
...Poverty and opposition have not, and cannot, shackle us...
...But the facts in the case remain—we have no John Dewey, no Elihu Root, no Ralph Adams Cram, no H. L. Mencken, no Edwin Arlington Robinson—and we have not seemed particularly to care about having them...
...It was the normal business of Catholic higher education to develop such a group...
...the foundations of a healthy and beneficent parish life laid...
...There are those who feel that all talk about social activity is quite like band-music—suited to occasions and gatherings, but not the normal stuff of life...
...Theologians have not as yet unraveled the social teaching of the Gospels;' but mankind has tried, unto the healing of many generations, sacraments and petitions, and the rule of the Savior's cross...
...Today—these hours when a new world is rousing—must produce its own leadership and life...
...the rooting out of cant, lying, vulgarity, greed, and dishonesty—of drunkenness and lust—the correcting of our extravagant estimate of the value of what is merely matter of life's accompaniments as distinguished from life itself—which is thought and love, strength and courage, patience and forbearance...
...And yet, at least until recently, we have been guilty of an apathy which Father Ryan scored vigorously and notably in the Salesianum, as well as more recently at the Oxford Conference, and which The Commonweal has done its best to break...
...and when we dreamed, with Father Isaac Haecker, of winning a nation for the arms of Christ...
...For all practical purposes, the hortatory appeal of Newman to the students of Dublin is as necessary and as unheeded today as it was fifty years ago...
...We do not like to think so, and yet the final answer must depend upon our ability to grapple with the social needs and impulses of the era...
...What members of the hierarchy, thoughtful students, and experienced public leaders have continually said we repeat firmly—it is not sufficient, in this day and age, that the individual take cognizance of himself alone...
...But though all these things are a source of just pride, they must not be allowed to blind us to the peculiar generic necessities of the time which are social, even as the Church itself is social...
...Industrial conditions have gradually created a common culture which suffers no isolation of body or spirit...
...The life of the race is becoming, more and more, a tangle of social concerns...
...There is always a certain salutary hopelessness in our social hopes...
...But the heart of the matter is unaffected by such discussion...
...we ought not to assume that we can share in the direction of the American mind unless we are ready to foster intellectual leadership...
...Has all this died forever...
...Churches have been built...
...We do not know what the findings will be...
...Never has there been greater need for some American Ozanam or Count de Mun, who shall gather his fellows round him for a mission of social peace...
...It is surely in proportion to our ability never to falter from such a program that we shall carry the beneficence of the Catholic tradition to the aid of America and the world...
...And one reads with something less of awe than of hope, how Anton Bruckner, groping through the disillusioned life of his time, found the way to a reconstitution of sacred music, and made the symphony speak of Divinity to the moderate heart...
...just as much as it has been the revolutionary concern of Marx, Jaures and Lenin...
...We ourselves are convinced that...
...The people who are the bearers of the largest thought, the deepest- love, live and work forever in the race, while merchants and traders perish and are forgotten, like the wares they deal in...
...schools established...
...the danger is that our complacency may keep us in perennial bondage...
...The Apostle might have supported his statement on the subject with arguments derived from common sense...
...what can remedy and fortify it is simply an improvement of that diet...
...LIFE AND LEADERSHIP IT should have been perfectly obvious—though apparently it was not—from what was said in these columns two weeks ago, that The Commonweal has no desire to undertake the direction of spiritual directors...
...Profit cannot be derived, however, out of a mere, sterile past...
...The answer comes in a kind of melancholy chorus—so much less than he might...
...we are forced to derive the building materials of the soul from the generally accepted quarries...
...With 2,000 years of history to look back upon, all of us are very certain that the first mission of Catholic culture is intimate religious care...
...There are other matters of almost equal importance...
...the amelioration can come only out of the great gardens of the Catholic mind—the satisfying abundance of that which is called Christendom...
...For, in all truth, the Catholic tradition has been alive and transcendently active on this continent—in the days when martyrs stumbled and died for civilization, in the best sense, of the forests...
...In the virtue of charity there is the strength by which we grow in unison—which is also about the only way we grow individually...
...The idea of a commission to study the causes of Catholic apathy has, as was explained two weeks ago in these columns, grown out of a consideration of higher education...
...It is the development of our inner life, the enriching of our minds, the purification of our hearts, the education of ourselves through liberty and labor, the reform of our politics...
...Now how much has the American Catholic done to influence the trend of his age...
...What unsettles the world in our time is, fundamentally, its diet of ideas...
...Perhaps we may fittingly set down here the words in which Bishop Spalding once proposed an ideal for educated living— "Here, at our hands, lies the task God sets us...
...It will therefore be interested in finding out why the colleges have failed to provide the kind of leadership which would have made the Catholic body publicly important...
...and our talk of Catholic art is sorry stuff while we leave the general tenor of the country's aesthetic experience unaffected, excepting by cheap approximations to the rue Saint Sulpice—or even plaster Gothic...
...Young men and women will be trained vainly in the shadow of ideals, if, after all, we send them into a world which we accept on its own terms and in the conduct of which we have no share...
...Whether we wish it or not, the great debate which those names signify rushes to an outcome by which our children shall be made or marred...
...The "deluge" that can so comfortably be projected into the future may swirl, not only over the machinery and wealth of civilization, but also terribly and abysmally over souls...
...Well, it has been on the lips of Francis, Dominic, Ignatius and Augustine...
...No doubt the great Bishop realized—as we all do— that when everything possible has been said and done, the world will still be, largely, a lost Paradise...
...Surely the essential values are sufficiently axiomatic...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 17
