The Sound of the Hammer
GREAT men, Emerson tells us (using the adjective in its spiritual sense) have always "confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age." If that be true, there is not only a dearth of...
...Many of us actually feel that if Columbus were alive today he would undertake a cruise to some particularly forgotten yesterday...
...The crowd sweeps on, as a stream does, faithful to its current and its shores...
...They are rather the despoilers, the autocratic egoists, the soulless ones of the time...
...We were not asked to see Saint Francis as the peer of Racine and Bossuet—though he was these things also...
...Loneliness has engulfed the prophets, half of whom are making predictions to antiquity...
...But those of us who care to look about in this contemporary world, and see what activity is really genuine and able to enkindle enthusiasm, find that as a modern force the See of Peter is without a peer...
...This fact merits special attention just now, when the seventieth birthday of Pius XI has called forth so much personal interest in the man...
...This lack of vital interest in what we are doing as a community —as mankind—does not, of course, normally extend to individual pursuits...
...but one fancies there were many outside their ranks who took heart because it had appeared, giving benediction to "bring happiness to the living, peace and eternal rest to the dead...
...Saint Francis became the patron of writers...
...If that be true, there is not only a dearth of great men in the present age, but many of us are traveling away from greatness as fast as we can...
...That the sovereignty of Christ over the souls of men might be better realized in the minds and hearts of the faithful...
...One may, however, find a reason for hope in this very persecution...
...Naturally enough, such an encyclical came with especial effectiveness from a Sovereign Pontiff who himself had associated widely with governments, and had enabled the Church to formulate, frankly and without selfishness, a series of treaties with states which, while gaining for the Catholic cause freedom of action, fully recognized the sovereignty of civil government within its own sphere...
...The old things are, of course, models, tools, sources of inspiration...
...that in particular all misunderstandings between civil and ecclesiastical power might be settled according to the norms of justice—these varied things were the results which, it was hoped, would accrue from the new and peculiarly modern festival...
...Listening to prim little human parrots recite the glories of plumbing and Baldwin locomotives, the sensitive would give their souls for a dance on some Hellenic green or even for standing-room at a mediaeval festival...
...How goodly the sight was, only Catholics, can, perhaps, thoroughly understand...
...Behind the words there was seen to rise, visibly near and not any longer masked by retirement, the Church which in equally evil days had struggled to save justice, charity and intelligence for the world...
...The record of papal diplomacy since the accession of Pius XI is the record of readiness to meet the modern time on its own terms, to escape from the routine of a dead political past, and to establish the commerce of the Church on a plane far above controversy...
...Nevertheless, as has been said, there is one exception...
...So much effort and vitality cannot wholly fail...
...It reveals clearly the character of the vigorous enemies of the Church in our day...
...Mediocrity has a good time organizing itself into crowds, but we know that the somebody who said the other day that a hush has fallen upon the world as it waits for a revealing voice was right...
...And the Pope said: "His writings always breathe a spirit of charity which was, indeed, the controlling motive in every controversial labor he undertook...
...To them he spoke first of all of the "peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ," bravely enumerating all the wounds inflicted through combat and dissension, loyally praising that loyalty and steadfastness of soul by which the future seemed to secure a guaranty of well-being, and firmly dedicating the energies of the Church to the effort of bringing into being that concord for which so many of the sorrowing yearned...
...Later on the Holy Father was enabled, because of the centenaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Josophat and Saint Francis of Assisi, to draw attention to those sources of religious vitality which the modern age can find in Christian tradition...
...We have spoken of the intelligence—that greatest of man's gifts, which is essentially honesty in looking at things as they are, in refusing to make a mirage of the world...
...It was high time, perhaps, to proclaim the fact that the Church militant is not an association of the dead—that the matter of moment to it always is not the building it has completed, not the turrets which it has raised up as mementos of its aspirations, but the sound of the hammer erecting a home for the world...
...Granted that some men and even some institutions are boldly and commendably trying to create a public mood for action— trying to create a will to peace, for instance— the fact remains that almost all of them are like men who step aside from a crowd and plead with it to change its course...
...It was once more the "Church militant," abroad on the fields that the rights of Christ and of man might be regained...
...This force was consecrated by the Holy Father in the second of his encyclicals, devoted to Saint Francis de Sales...
...Dozens of little scribes may be thinking even yet of the Church in terms of illuminated manuscripts and Gothic architecture...
...Similarly, the Pope used Saint Josophat, martyred archbishop of Polotsk and glory of the Eastern Slavs, as an introduction to the difficult problem of church union, which the Russian revolution has rendered particularly important, and as a reason for endorsing the Pontifical Oriental Institute...
...But it is really for the work it is doing that the Church lives...
...Homesickness for golden eras flourish in great variety amongst us...
...Understandably enough, the holy Bishop of Geneva was not described (as a humanistic historian would have described him) as a man of vast and lucid mind who represented most nobly the spirit of French classicism at a time when its achievements in the most diverse fields were so remarkable...
...The Holy Father took up the leadership of the Church at a moment when the crowds who knelt throughout the world to receive the benediction given from the balcony of the Vatican Basilica were largely composed of veterans and widows of other veterans...
...Our age is heavy with messages to which nobody will pay attention...
...And in the words of Saint Hilary, "the Church conquers all at the very moment when she is abandoned by all...
...Finally there came the most remarkable of recent encyclical letters, establishing the Feast of Christ the King...
...Very likely they would not be understood if they did...
...Nevertheless the constant opposition to it is also formidable, and is indicated by the circumstance that the most recent papal encyclical deals with the persecution of the Church in Mexico...
...We were summoned rather to view him as the model for that profession through which intelligance is, in our day, most widely dispensed to the masses...
...We are all hammering hard at our own houses to make up for the oppression of the stillness which hems us round...
...And naturally the Poverello, so well beloved by multitudes outside the Church, suggested a parallel between our own disheveled time and the troubled years through which Francis lived, between the virtue we need and that which he so illustriously exemplified...
...The Papacy has realized the Emersonian definition of greatness, meeting the spirit of the time with a cordiality and understanding adequate to it...
...These are no longer scholars, scientists, historians, statesmen—with whom the See of Peter lives, for the most part, in a spirit of loyal cooperation...
...In most cases those who could best lead it do not even join or harangue it...
...that from this new fervor others might catch fire and, turning aside from the innumerable secularizations proposed by enemies of faith, resolve to restore the Saviour as the model for all human things...
...It is interesting to note how the encyclical dealing with the Angelic Doctor bears in mind constantly the circumstances of our day, recommending as it does, for instance, that institutions of higher learning hold "a solemn disputation on a philosophical question or some other important scientific subject...
...To this generally prevalent state of affairs there is only one really outstanding exception...
...The "magnanimity" of the Saint, therefore, was recommended especially to those whose task it is to comment upon the relations between the world and the things of faith...
...How far all this comes from melancholy aesthetic notions of Catholicism as something which really lived under Saint Louis and the mediaeval Popes, but which has merely lingered on in anaemic fashion ever since...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 10
