A Voice from the Grave
A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE IT IS one of the misfortunes that attend discussions conducted in an atmosphere of theory that, whereas a dilemma only has two horns, casuistry literally bristles with...
...Marshall anent the position of Catholics in American politics, were "very fully and circumstantially answered" by the beloved CardinalArchbishop of Baltimore in its issue of March, 1909...
...In re-reading the words of a man who passed years ago "beyond these voices," and comparing them with the note of mistrust and suspicion that is so prevalent today, it is impossible not to be afflicted with a little sadness...
...Two or three, however, seem to cry aloud for quotation...
...The founders of the republic, when they inaugurated the greatest experiment in democracy the world will ever know, took an immense draft upon the future...
...To have met one, or a hundred, and satisfactorily blunted them today is no guarantee that the principle which is being put on its defense will not find another, just as peremptory, confronting it tomorrow...
...Bluntly, the air it wore of posing an entirely fresh quandary, propounded now because it had hitherto been evaded by those most concerned in rebutting it, was not at all justified by the facts...
...But it will not, for any practical purpose, be the Constitution that the old Maryland Cardinal, who thought he knew it, died believing in and loving...
...His courage, indeed, was the quality that most endeared him to his fellow-countrymen of all denominations...
...that the limits of each are fixed by the nature of its purpose . . . and that members of the Church are bound to obey the state within its own domain, in all things that do not contravene the moral law...
...Under the heading, A Cardinal Speaks for "Al" Smith, our contemporary reminds a forgetful public that all the questions raised by Mr...
...Marshall's letter, if it had been written after the latter's appearance...
...Marshall's invention...
...The sentiment (one admits it freely) is not Mr...
...but, were it to be attempted, it would meet with the united opposition of the Catholic people, priests, and prelates...
...Marshall as territory "in which it is impossible to determine to the satisfaction of both in which jurisdiction the matter lies...
...In adding this last phrase, he was well aware that he stood with one foot in that famous "twilight zone" of conscience, defined by Mr...
...No charge, for instance, was so plausibly advanced by Mr...
...He met it then, quite simply and frankly, by pointing out that the Constitution of our fathers when it dissociated America from any concept of a state church, made a clean sweep of privilege, and settled the question of comparative degrees of "favor" at the same time and by the same instrument...
...Far more than the comparative credit or discredit of any religious communion among our citizenry depends on its just solution...
...In an article written in The Commonweal many months ago,* one of these libels, which had reference to a wholly imaginary reservation in the attitude of Church to state in France, was examined and traced to its source in a rhetorical flight of the essayist Macaulay...
...The Open Letter to Governor Smith at the hand of Mr...
...They knew (for they were men of philosophic thought, quite aware of the dualism of human nature) that the energies they were releasing would not be confined to the material sphere...
...The hope was expressed at the time that, if the ancient slander was ever revived, some notice at least might be taken of the fact that it bore upon its body traces of previous encounters with truth...
...Charles C. Marshall, was treated with what we venture to consider fitting detail in the last issue of this review...
...The thought of which Cardinal Gibbons was the spiritual heir was so brave in its essence...
...There is practically no limit to the supposititious cases which can be framed by a determined advocate once the sound practice of confining evidence to cases of fact, which the law has had to insist upon to preserve its own reputation, has been abandoned in favor of the Socratic method...
...To the question of a possible clash in jurisdiction, which is as old as the history of any church which has not merely been a department of government, the Cardinal replies by reiterating the principle of independent functions, rooted, though contemporary idolaters of the supreme state seem to forget it, in natural quite as much as in ecclesiastical law...
...The credit of the discovery, to give credit where credit is due, does not belong to The Commonweal, or to any organ even remotely connected with the interests of the Catholic Church in America...
...Could "such favors," it was asked, "be accepted in place of rights by those owning the name of freemen...
...The separation of Church and state in this country seems to them the natural, inevitable and best conceivable plan, the one that would work best among us, both for the good of religion and of the state...
...No establishment of religion is being dreamed of here, of course, by anyone...
...Not only are these problems, in which conscience is intruded as the insoluble factor (the mathematical repeating decimal) desperately hard to express in terms which infer finality...
...From their very nature we may expect to see them laid under contribution again and again whenever the exigencies of special pleading call for them, without any hint that they are old or discredited...
...A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE IT IS one of the misfortunes that attend discussions conducted in an atmosphere of theory that, whereas a dilemma only has two horns, casuistry literally bristles with points of interrogation...
...They [Catholics]," wrote the Cardinal, "accept the Constitution without reserve, with no desire, as Catholics, to see it changed in any feature...
...The Church," he told us, "holds that the civil government has divine authority, just as has the ecclesiastical...
...In expressing his conviction that never, from any act of a government to which every loyalty that was not due God was freely and lovingly rendered, would such a predicament arise, Cardinal Gibbons spoke words that ring strangely prophetic and which our neo-Erastians might well ponder when scrutinizing possibilities of conflict: "There are forces, I know, that tend to paternalism and Caesarism in government...
...His leading article in that number," proceeds the North American editors, "could scarcely have been a more apt and effective reply to Mr...
...The old Cardinal never lacked courage...
...It comes from the North American Review, a weighty and secular organ, dedicated, since the days of Henry Adams, to an expression of the views held by the more cultured 646 element in Massachusetts and New England...
...So long as these liberties, under which we have prospered, are preserved in their fulness, there is no danger of a collision between Church and state...
...but true Americanism recognizes that these forces would bring disaster on American liberties...
...It was, there can be no doubt, very much in the air that the wise old Cardinal of Baltimore breathed seventeen years ago...
...Thanks to them, Americans, during the first century and a half of their history, have seen members of a body they were taught to consider the child of the state, spoiled or despoiled by turns, not only sharing in a vast material growth, but inevitably, as the very memories of disability faded away, acquiring the confident belief that no single part or parcel of their political inheritance as free Americans would be refused them...
...To take up the points answered by Cardinal Gibbons, one by one, and to stress their positively amazing parallel with the heads of Mr...
...Marshall's letter, would require more space than we can devote to it, the more so as there is little doubt that means will be found to give fresh currency to this voice from one in whom, at times, America as well as Catholic America seemed to be incarnate...
...The purpose of the present article is not to add anything to this detail, but merely to suggest that Mr...
...Upon the day which decides that a Catholic citizen of the United States, possessing all the qualifications which the Constitution lays down, and commanding the unlimited respect of his own commonwealth among free states, is ineligible for the highest federal office because he is a Catholic, the American Constitution may still remain the least imperfect instrument of government in an admittedly imperfect world...
...Marshall's much advertised "open letter," respectable and moderate as it appeared in contrast with the charge against the Church in France, was, in one respect at least, no franker...
...Marshall as that the Church in America was merely letting its principle of a closely cooperating Church and state lie in abeyance, meantime allowing "state authorities for political reasons—that is, by favor and not by right—to tolerate other religious societies...
...Today a crisis seems to be impending...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 24
