The World's Cardinal
Shuster, George N.
344 THE COMMONWEAL February 3, 1926 THE WORLD'S CARDINAL By GEORGE N. SHUSTER BORN near Waterloo and himself the foremost spiritual figure in a greater conflict, Cardinal Merrier is at...
...It is well that for these obsequies there should be no sombre and austere silence, but rather the surging of crowds in a kind of triumph for the good man laid to rest...
...The great Cardinal himself was fully aware of the obstacles to be surmounted: he understood that the spokesmen for Anglicanism were far from ready to concede much that would be required of them from a Catholic point of view, and that England itself was not ripe for a greater "second spring" than the world had seen since apostolic days...
...passed, so that in mourning there need be no desolation but only peace...
...He was the world's cardinal because he had the supreme gift of being able to reckon with mankind as a community...
...And his judgment was wise...
...In Belgium, however, there were room and freedom for resolve...
...By reason of the grace that is never wanting, the dying Pontiff of the Kingdom of Christ had spoken resolutely for the charity that is above all battles...
...With Germany on the one hand and France on the other, every young devotee of historical culture has been forced to choose...
...Of him it may be said that he remained unselfish, that he despised all forms of nepotism and party prejudice even as he constantly debased himself...
...Now, as earlier, the Archbishop of Malines proved that he had made a choice...
...We came to know him during the difficult days of conflict, and later in the aftermath of triumph when it was a pleasure to see the man who had owned such spiritual dominion over the universal scene...
...To us he represents both vision and authority opening to plain view once again the healing harnjony of tradition and life—the power to think of spiritual democracy not as a dead historical institution but as a practical goal...
...It is still too early to speak with anything like finality about the Malines conferences on problems connected with the union of Christian peoples...
...But, though we might observe this power in his books and pronouncements, or from afar in the manner of his private conduct, it must remain, for the most part, a secret...
...And when he came back to his own Belgium, he knew that the two most famous of his modern countrymen—Maeterlinck and Verhaeren— had decided for modernism...
...The young Mercier decided for France, at a moment when the future was struggling toward new purposes...
...between stark conservatism and growth—yes, even growth in the Church of God...
...And as we observe the slow development of his mastery, we seem to follow at the same time the awakening of an old Europe which had once again determined to be masculine and free...
...For the material furnishing the background of this article, I am indebted to Dr...
...But the force of example is such that the good carry on when the great have...
...344 THE COMMONWEAL February 3, 1926 THE WORLD'S CARDINAL By GEORGE N. SHUSTER BORN near Waterloo and himself the foremost spiritual figure in a greater conflict, Cardinal Merrier is at peace under the arches of SaintRombaut, where the relics of Belgium's noblest and most ancient priesthood are treasured...
...Years of seminary training went by, leading to ordination in 1874...
...In the two men—the sovereign Pontiff and the Belgian primate —were incorporated the two abiding principles by which humanity must always be governed in the conduct of civil life...
...This is the tranquillity for which he had always been prepared...
...Many had known the value of his personal friendship, the sweetness of his counsel, the charity of his untiring personal effort to heal the wounds of war, of internecine dissension, of industrial inequality...
...While the conservative trembled and the critical were indignant, he struck out boldly for the conquest of the modern world...
...They overwhelmed a few troops in the ruins of captured cities, but a voice stood up against them in which there was a strange, irresistible, fearless note...
...It was the Christmas pastoral of Cardinal Mercier, destined to influence the fortunes of war, and to be read with homage by historians to the end of time...
...Nevertheless, it was not merely a question of defending the hearth...
...the consciousness of the value of culture...
...If you would know, submit yourself...
...He also knew that in so doing Belgium could aid in fixing the direction of European civilization...
...and the decision to find the tonic of discipline...
...We note rather, at this time, the significance of Cardinal Mercier in the story of mankind—the share he took in the culture of its civilization, the emergence of his personality at a moment which demanded leadership, and the steadiness with which he averted chaos by preaching a gospel of discipline...
...Nor shall we easily forget—we who have borne the burden of war—that he towered nobly above all leaders of battle in the simple act of confessing his faith...
...It seemed, indeed, that the age-old, central stream of European life would dry up, or seep into the young rival torrent...
...between intellectual discipline and mental chaos...
...Though the sources of the great mediaeval Thomistic tradition were still vigorous, the task of making them practical and effective, of bringing them in contact with the modern mind, was almost equivalent to a crusade...
...Meanwhile he saw, in the Paris of Renan and Taine, the battle that raged between traditional Catholicism and the new science...
...With the close of the tremendous devastation, Cardinal Mercier was once more ready to weld a link between the tradition which his life had served and modern circumstance...
...May one not believe that the act was providential...
...Charles Mercier, nephew of the late Cardinal—G...
...The unanimity of affection in so many official tributes is an omen of long remembrance...
...In many ways Cardinal Mercier's personal relations with the United States have left an abiding mark...
...For that community is the noblest of ancient ideals, just as it is the most vital of modern needs...
...Came 1914, and the Germans advanced across the borders of Belgium...
...and the modern scene was to prove again the rightness of Caesar's antique phrase— Belgae fortissimi sunt...
...Even the Germans, whose honesty, fortitude, and sacrifice we can now honor without cavil, understand that the paths which the world has elected to tread are safer and better than those in which the official Reich had placed so much confidence...
...These ancient virtues of Rome and Christendom, not the fruits of constraint or mechanical obedience, but the acquired characteristics of the trained intellect, were what he saw at stake at the Mame and the Yscr...
...But it is no less true that Christian tradition has made the defense of the fatherland a duty and an ideal, so that Cardinal Mercier with his breast to the foe symbolized a sacred obligation as binding now as in the days of Roland or Ferdinand of Spain...
...With fidelity to the past and faith in the future, he studied medicine, science, mathematics, and history, knowing that—as Saint Thomas himself had declared—the mediaeval system was not a finished, lifeless thing, but a ship on which one could go safely forward...
...The spirit in which the work of the Louvain school was carried on has, perhaps, never been summed up better than in the following sentences from an address delivered to the Institut de France by M. Boutroux, in honor of Cardinal Mercier's reception: uHe believes that the first duty of the mind, as that is active within us, is to bow respectfully to reality as it is, as God has made it—to observe and not to fabricate...
...But he was strong enough to succeed...
...and the last word of Pius X—"Poveri figli"— consecrated anew and with eternal pathos the mission of peace which is our most sacred inheritance...
...But the mainspring of his conduct was firm...
...All the world knows that the Abbe Mercier's endeavor at Louvain, carried on until his election to the hierarchy in 1906, was no idle afternoon's affair...
...it could not have been done in Catholic Germany, where the greatest thinkers—Schell, Baeumker, von Herding—were wrangling with the wraith of Kant...
...If one reads carefully through the pastorals of Cardinal Mercier which appeared during and after the war, one cannot help being struck by the constant emphasis which is placed upon order and discipline...
...Indeed, the whole era spanned by his life was historically a water-shed...
...The five years during which the world listened so attentively to what he said, were years of precipitous cleavage between past and present...
...Today we can judge the fruits of what the Abbe Mercier pertinently termed "neo-scholasticism", familiar as we are with schools and scholars who have helped, in all parts of the world, toward making tradition real by giving it life...
...No further din of war or glory can disturb the man who was, above all else, a master of the interior life...
...It would have been impossible in France, where the authority of Descartes and his disciples was still supreme...
...The varied facets of his career owe their brilliance to this vision of changeless man—of our common purpose, principle, and final beatitude...
...All of these had listened to his words...
...He knew that it was right for Belgium to resist the invader...
...Once in many centuries such a man is given to his people, and they rightly honor his name...
...Then Leo XIII, in an encyclical letter beginning with the name of the Eternal Father, called for a rebirth of intellectual Christendom, and the "tall Abbe" Mercier undertook to establish a school of scholastic philosophy at Louvain...
...The family into which Desire Mercier was born, at Braine-rAlleud during 1851, had not lost the simplicity of its middle-class virtues under the weight of honors brought to the name by men in public life, or by the ancestral relative who had been so valiant a missionary in the American far-West...
...But it was a Belgian family...
...But, in a deeper sense than usually rises to the surface, yOlinger America does homage to the Primate of Belgium...
...It was the part of charity to invite all those who yearned for the peace of the Christian community to friendly conversation and better mutual understanding...
...There is one word more...
...For Belgium's fate has been to feel, like every old, small and essentially provincial country, the contradictory attractions of two vigorous neighboring civilizations...
...But men are more often active than philosophical...
...and one may say without fear of contradiction that, had this man not lived, the destiny of Europe would have been different...
...If today the aims of union are more widely discussed than ever before and supported by the prayer of faithful hearts everywhere, not the least of the reasons why all this is so must be found in the sincerity of the prelate who now lies dead while all men mourn his passing...
...His own children have come in pilgrimage, to give their simple mementos the benediction of a farewell with him...
...The triumph of Germany would have meant not so much the establishment of autocracy as the victory of modernism—the defeat of Roman tradition by chaos, the overthrow of the revivified thirteenth century by the already stale nineteenth...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 13
