Old Unhappy Far-off Things
Coleman, A. I. du P.
OLD UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS By A. I. du P. COLEMAN THE recent article by M. Jules Bois, entitled French Catholicism: a New Era (The Commonweal, March 17) produced a very odd...
...The Comte de Mun, again—how 1890 it all is...
...and more than one book of the most prominent cleric, to employ M. Bois's language, is on the Index...
...In the 'nineties there were those who took the advice given today by M. Bois and attempted to form a Catholic party...
...But, unfortunately, through it all there runs a vein of language which is only too familiar to those who have followed closely the French history of the past score of years...
...Why was a republican minister allowed to say: "We have driven Jesus Christ from the schools—now we will drive Him from the hospitals...
...The services of these men to a republican government when and in so far as it was a patriot government—to M. Clemenceau during the war and M. Poincare since—are recognized by all who know the facts...
...Is Marc Sangnier perchance among those who M. Bois says are "compromised" by the war on the republic—"those who are both good citizens and Catholics in the best sense...
...On the other hand, M. Maurras's writings on the relations between Church and state have had the honor of being cited with approval by one of the foremost of modern theologians, Cardinal Billot (De Ecclesia Christi, pages 36, 37...
...He means Charles Maurras and the Action Frangaise...
...but the wistful look in his eyes made it sound like "one is lucky enough to have the Faith, or one isn't...
...They know him for what he is—a man of stainless and incorruptible honor, more removed from any suspicion of self-seeking than any public man I know of...
...But," he went on, "I cannot understand any man calling himself a decent Frenchman and having anything but the utmost respect and veneration for the Catholic Church...
...the master who has led the new generation to firm ground, out of the swamps of anarchic individualism in which they used to flounder after any will-o'the-wisp when M. Bois and I were young...
...Rome, evidently, does not consider them "Catholics in the best sense...
...In the last decade of the nineteenth century the name of Archbishop Ireland was a name to conjure with in France, when French Catholics were repeatedly urged (as M. Bois urges them) to "imitate the American Catholic...
...Let us leave all that and come down to 1926...
...Not Protestant...
...The most notorious of them was the irrepressible Marc Sangnier, founder of The Sillon, who still wanders about Paris, a rather ridiculous, disappointed elderly man, in even worse company than of old...
...he looked at it again to convince himself that it had actually been written within the past twelvemonth...
...Second, although the readers of M. Bois's article would go away with the impression that this is a freethinking and "neo-pagan" group, those who know the facts are well aware that many of the oldest and most prominent leaders in it are practical Catholics...
...In 1909 he took his stand publicly among the defenders of Thalamas, who, in a public lecture at the Sorbonne, had heaped foul insults on Saint Joan of Arc—the same Thalamas who in 1914 wrote an enthusiastic letter to Madame Caillaux commending her for having murdered M. Calmette, the editor of The Figaro...
...The movement stands for a lofty and unselfish patriotism, for a return to the best traditions in all departments of the national life...
...You should see the gleam of affectionate reverence in the eyes of all who know Charles Maurras, at any mention of his name...
...No—these old stale accusations can mislead only those who have but a superficial acquaintance with the facts and personalities of French life...
...OLD UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS By A. I. du P. COLEMAN THE recent article by M. Jules Bois, entitled French Catholicism: a New Era (The Commonweal, March 17) produced a very odd impression on at least one reader...
...a keen and cogent thinker, and by general consent the greatest living writer of French prose...
...Not freethinking...
...Well —his organization was condemned and suppressed by Pope Pius X in 1910...
...French Catholics might do very much worse, after all, than trust to his wisdom...
...Why did it break off relations with the Holy See...
...If M. Bois's article were no more than a rehabilitation of the ancient theories of thirty years ago, there might be no great need to take note of it...
...it is not even, properly speaking, freethinking...
...Why did it set up a system of education from which the name of God was as far as possible excluded...
...Third, "the government of the republic," says M. Bois, "is neither Jewish nor Protestant nor Catholic...
...Or we might have learned something by attending the open-air meeting of 100,000 Breton Catholics two days later at Landerneau near Brest, assembled under the presidency of their bishop, to warn the government not to tamper further with their rights as citizens and as Christians...
...But not Jewish...
...The way is open to the 'ralliement'—the sincere adhesion to the republic...
...On croit, ou on ne croit pas," he said—one either believes or one doesn't believe...
...He rubbed his eyes...
...M. Bois is right, in spite of etiquette, in placing his authorities in this order, as has been abundantly shown by the documents published in Les Lettres last November and December, on the occasion of the Lavigerie centenary...
...First, the very word "royalism" misleads many Americans...
...This sentence must have been written between 1890 and 1892...
...What is the meaning of the republican cry, from Gambetta's "Clericalism—there is the enemy I" to Caillaux's opening words in a speech after the electoral victory of May 11, 1924: "We are here to celebrate the triumph of the republic over clericalism...
...When he says: "I vision a prosperous future for Catholics in France, provided that they do not follow the political fanatics, whose nationalist leaders are indeed, most of the time, Catholics rather in name than in fact, since they profess, more or less openly, atheism or agnosticism," one knows what he means...
...Why, then, did it drive thousands of monks and nuns from their homes and their labors...
...The last page, especially, is full of phrases which "date," as we say, unmistakably—they belong to 1890...
...Unfortunately, there is room here to state no more than a few of these facts...
...Precisely these same things were said twenty years ago, with much garbling of quotations, by some fanatics on the other side (including unhappily two or three priests) who seemed to place their democracy before their Catholicism...
...Really, this is a strange assertion...
...Such Catholicism was the solemn wish expressed by Cardinal Lavigerie and Pope Leo XIII...
...Catholic it certainly is not...
...it sounds to them narrow, out of date, mediaeval...
...Now—against all such acts of irreligious zeal the Action Fran^aise has for twenty-five years marched as a solid phalanx without a moment's wavering, inspired by the great leader who, M. Bois insinuates, "takes pleasure in announcing that he believes neither in God nor in the Gospel...
...that the preponderant spirit of the rank and file is unquestioningly Catholic...
...There can be no mistake about it...
...The connotation of the name Action Fran^aise includes, indeed, the return to monarchy, but is much wider than that...
...and that there are plenty of instances of young men who have returned to the practice of religion as a result of their association with the Action Fran?aise, while it would be difficult to find one case of the opposite...
...Why did it ruthlessly confiscate Church property...
...I shall not soon forget an interview I had last summer with M. Maurras—I do not need his permission to quote his words, for they are in line with what he has published over his signature a hundred times...
...its history is briefly chronicled by the Abbe Dimnet as "a woeful failure...
...We might have been more edified if we could have been among the 7,000 Catholics who crowded the Salle Wagram on February 26 to hear the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris enjoin them to insist on the recognition of the rights of God, bring about the abrogation of the secularist education laws, and recreate a Christian spirit in the nation...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 22
