"Modifications"
SINCE a famous diplomatist of the nineteenth century set all the chancelleries of Europe buzzing by the simple process of stating the facts, the reverberations of truth have been as unaccountable...
...After having called upon Governor Smith to explain his attitude toward the Church's teaching, they are now calling upon the Church to define its attitude toward the Governor's explanation...
...It is quite impossible, in the limits to which space confines us, to glance at more than one misconception that lies at the bottom of these very varying receptions, of what read like a very blunt statement...
...In other words, the contemporary world confuses universality with universal application...
...The "modifications" it scents are, in point of fact, as natural and inevitable to any body whose parish is the world, and the world in all ages, as any modification which mankind has consented to under the pressure of time and space...
...We may discard, for present consideration, such a pronouncement as that of the New York (Methodist) Christian Advocate, which warns the American people that the liberties of their country are as unlikely as ever to be "entirely secure in the hands of a man who has bowed the knee to Rome...
...What they rub their eyes at seeing "emerge" is only what all of us watch emerge around us during the spring...
...It is the very principle of life and growth...
...Governor Smith's opponents, of course, number in their ranks men who are suave as well as men who are truculent, and a fair number of the former are skilled in the old zetetic device of dissecting a plain answer so as to make of it fresh elements for discussion...
...It is when these latest critics stretch the implication so far as to see in the statement a simple Catholic layman may make unreproved, some outward manifestation of change "in the traditional thought of the Church" that their observations lead them astray...
...This is no longer the language of intelligent debate, and that section of our people which is worth convincing need not be set on their guard against it...
...It conceives of power as something methodical, uniform and calculable under all conditions, no matter how intricate the mechanism that has set it in motion...
...The Smith-Marshall controversy may be "dead" as news, but some of its aftermath is too striking a case in point not to bear resurrection...
...SINCE a famous diplomatist of the nineteenth century set all the chancelleries of Europe buzzing by the simple process of stating the facts, the reverberations of truth have been as unaccountable as they are wide-spread...
...After admitting, with) a commendable frankness that cuts the ground from under more accepted teaching than perhaps he suspects, that "religious liberty on this continent is not primarily a Protestant but an American achievement," Dr...
...The contemporary mind, perhaps because it is doomed to grapple with so much complexity, is set against diversity...
...Eminently calculated to impale the object of its attentions on one or other horn of a dilemma, the famous "open letter" failed of its effect, not through any mental adroitness on the part of its recipient, but through the working of a law, as beautiful as it is simple, and worthy of more observance than it receives, that whereas one contrivance will fit only another contrivance, the truth fits anywhere and everywhere...
...Among the public voices outside his communion and party which absolved the New York executive from all suspicion of divided loyalty, no experienced debater will be surprised to find many who were by no means satisfied to let the matter rest at the point to which it had been] carried...
...While all that the Christian Advocate, also a Methodist organ, published in New York, is prepared to concede, may be judged by its rather cryptic and grudging statement that: "Doubtless his declaration is true of a great many of the laymen of the Catholic Church, as liberalized and Americanized by their experience in the conditions of church life as they prevail in the United States," Even among the voices less concerned to modify their approval there is an accent almost of surprise at the tenor of the reply in fact of what has always been credited...
...Better worth noticing among a budget which the Literary Digest recently collected, are such comments as that of the Pittsburgh organ, of the same name and religious complexion, which believes that the result of the famous letter in reply will be "the thorough committal of Roman Catholics to this liberal or American view of the relation of Church and state in this country," or that of the Congregationalist, which believes that Governor Smith's declaration "marks the emergence of a Catholicism that is American rather than Roman...
...But this one deserves notice, because it is inherent in the thought of our day...
...Impressed, as the least sympathetic cannot help but be, by the mere material aspect of the Church's accomplishment, it is natural that it should impute to it something of a rigidity which, in point of fact, the Church has never sought...
...Justin W. Nixon, a prominent Presbyterian minister and an accepted authority on Protestant canon law, goes on to observe that "Governor Smith has simply borne witness to his fundamental Americanism and indirectly to the modifying influence of that Americanism upon the traditional thought of his Church...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 5
