Dreams and Business

...One is that, by very reason of our size and unexpended resources, we were able to improve on our teachers, and become teacher in turn...

...Many of these Catholics," Mr...

...It is to be noted that misgivings on the score are not by any means confined to England...

...This having been granted, we are free to go on and admit that for American Catholics special interest must always attach to such a meeting as the National Catholic Congress, held last year at Manchester, and of which the printed report has just reached America...

...For more than one reason, this notion of a vast Anglo-Saxon condominium, toward which destiny, shrewdly assisted, is moving with the momentum of a natural force, finds less favor among Catholics than among some other elements in our population...

...Catholics and Christians generally will be quite prepared to pierce the unfortunate phrasing...

...Nevertheless, it is impossible not to see, out of all this discussion, claim and counter-claim, something that wears the lineaments of a true Christian sociology beginning to define itself, whose power to redress the ills of the industrialized world may prove incalculable...

...Colgan went on, "are regular in their attendance to their duties, some of them are everi more, they are prominent members of the League of the Cross: yet they do not realize the danger to their religion by their wholehearted support on such occasions...

...E. Colgan, of the Catholic Social Guild, an organization which makes its basis the Rerum Novarum encyclical, when he told the congress that at Blaydon, in the centre of the mining region, during a May Day procession where many incendiary banners and mottoes were carried and which ended in a meeting addressed by an avowed communist, "the most prominent of the people in the procession were Catholic miners and their wives...

...They are aware how large a part in the colorful story was played by groups and individuals whose descendants have been taken into American life by other roads than those of race and blood...

...But because we have not reached this point, there is no reason we should not profit from lessons offered us by communities which have...

...We find ourselves, here," continues M. Denais, "squarely in face of that 'undeserved misery' against which the great 'worker's Pope' Leo XIII, raised his voice with such eloquence and fervor...

...Stolidity and a refusal to be perturbed are typical of our English brothers, and the nearest thing to a warning note was uttered somewhat casually by Mr...

...The spiritual enrichment that has come from diversity is obvious to them...

...They make no doubt that forces not dissimilar have been at work in the material and intellectual spheres as well, and that their resultant today is only obscured and misinterpreted by too rigid an insistence upon the legend of a common origin, buttressed though it be by the historical accident of a common language...

...Two things have resulted from this reaction and interaction of two great nations dedicated to similar conceptions of life and life's purpose...

...Critics anxious to carp might well have asked the speaker whether any issue more "real" than that of a •subsistence wage was likely to commend itself to a locked-out miner, to say nothing of a locked-out miner's wife, and whether the ambiguous word "politics" at all in such a connection is not a misnomer subconsciously used to spare the susceptibilities of a prim Manchester audience...

...Meeting, as it did, in the midst of the greatest labor conflict that has ever visited England, it was natural that the general strike should cast its shadow over the Manchester Congress...

...In a word, though signs are not wanting that prosperity may bei leading us through a period of transition with our eyes only partially open, we have not attained that stage which a recent writer in England has had to note, where "men are ever coming more and more to feel that economic developments are too much for them, that the world has got out of human control and acquired a momentum of its own, so that economic hardships and contradictions have to be accepted as inevitable...

...In a recent article upon Catholics and the housing problem, published in La Vie Catholique, M. Joseph Denais, a former municipal councilor of Paris, puts the cruel dilemma into words no one can fail to understand when he asks us "how ideas of revolution can fail to haunt the upright and hard-working head of a family when he is unable, in return for an honest rental, to ensure his family a sanitary dwelling, and how it is humanly possible for him not to adjudge as malignant and deserving of subversion a society that acknowledges itself powerless to satisfy this primal necessity...

...No single class, dedicated to hard and unremunerative work as its secular function, and with no relief in sight from generation to generation, has as yet detached itself and assumed the properties of a social deposit...

...Its justification by reason of the wealth it produced has effectually prevented its being seriously questioned in a country whose early problems were necessarily material ones...

...There are those who, upon occasions that can always, be made to recur, lose no opportunity of suggesting a special community of interests between the two great branches of the English-speaking peoples...

...Is there a danger that the impact of economic problems, presented in their most poignant fashion, may in the end so indurate the believing worker's heart that the seed of life finds itself falling upon parched and rebellious soil...

...It was the destiny of this country to come into being as a nation contemporaneously with the beginnings of the industrial movement, which not only changed the face of the earth but had a profound influence on habits of thought...

...Colgan's speech the expression of a very sincere and timely apprehension...

...The size and scale of the experiment in the older country have been kept before our eyes during every decade of our national existence...

...The other is that, owing to the greater social elasticity of a newer and wider world, we have been saved hitherto from learning more than the pleasanter half of the lesson industrialism has to teach...

...Naturally, in the ranks of the men and women who attend these congresses and conferences, every shade of thought and temperament is represented, from impatient actionists who incur the easy reproach of "Sovietism" to so-called "dreamers" for whom the sneer of "mediaevalism" is always kept as a handy and telling retort...

...Luckily, both in the old world and in the new, men of good will are not lacking who make the translation of Christian ethics into practice their concern...

...For, if only a proportion of our people inherit AngloSaxon blood, there is no doubt that the conditions under which we live are an Anglo-Saxon inheritance...

...Bishop McDevitt of Harrisburg, who has just presided with such rare dignity and sympathy over the regional meeting of the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems in his own cathedral city, puts the case irrefutably in the May issue of the National Catholic Welfare Conference Bulletin, when he tells us that "no greater force can be found to reform the evils of our industrial system than a strong, rightly informed public opinion, which is always created by means of a thorough, honest, intelligent and persistent discussion of any important question...

...They will see in Mr...

...No category of the economically disinherited exists among us...

...To name the organizations, national, international and regional, which make industrial relations their subject of debate and who offer suggestions for more humane contacts between labor and capital would be a work of supererogation...

...But no list, however perfunctory, can omit the two Catholic Conferences in this country on Industrial and Social Relations, which meet periodically in the most actively industrial sections of our own country, nor the Semaine Sociale and Jeunesse Ouvriere in France, with their many ramifications, nor the various organizations connected with the Centrum party in Germany...

...Outside the Catholic communion justice compels mention of the Interchurch Movement, whose courageous report on the situation at Pittsburgh a few years ago created almost a crisis in the attitude of religion to labor, and the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology, which is meeting for the third yearly session at Keble College, Oxford, next month, and whose discussions this year will be directed to examining the entire theory of property in its relations to Christian ethics and patristic teaching...

...Conditions drive Catholic miners into these movements and their interest in reforms sometimes blinds them to real issues, and often, before they have quite realized it, . . . they find themselves drifting until they are faced with a struggle between religion and politics...