Why?
396 THE COMMONWEAL August 2I, i929 WHY? A LETTER in our correspondence column this week calls for an answer to the question : "Why is Catholic leadership so truculent in its attitude...
...It certainly did not originate the Volstead doctrine...
...We behold the rampant vices incident to bootlegging and law-breaking...
...Short will understand us when we say that if the query had originated with him personally it would not be answered here...
...But you will never cram it down the throats of the Irish...
...Whereas the movement against alcoholism in France and Germany derives some of its firmest support from groups inside the Church, only a few American Catholics have expressed themselves in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...you will never make it palatable to a Latin...
...396 THE COMMONWEAL August 2I, i929 WHY...
...And in the end you cannot maintain an American majority for it...
...As a people, we are caught between Bishop Cannon and the speakeasy patron...
...Volsteadism is right or wrong, and the facts alone can tell which...
...Inevitably the "human side" of the Church took on an urban mentality...
...Curiously enough, the beginnings of the anti-liquor crusade in the United States invite a good deal of Catholic sympathy...
...Puritanism as such had nothing to do with these forms of restraint...
...A LETTER in our correspondence column this week calls for an answer to the question : "Why is Catholic leadership so truculent in its attitude toward the Eighteenth Amendment, and the crusade which ushered it in...
...Admittedly Catholic opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment may be something more than this...
...In other words : our opposition to prohibition has nothing at all to do with religion, but is the logical outcome of observations based upon life and the news...
...It was concentrated in the larger cities, with a surplus dotting several agricultural sections with Gothic spires...
...There is really something quite unusual in the unanimity of Catholic public opinion regarding Volsteadism...
...That organization keeps on appealing to the "law," on the ground that anything written upon the statute books calls for civic obedience...
...This he did for ascetic reasons, just as he taught people to sing hymns for liturgical reasons...
...Whereas Catholic speakers had at first--witness the life of Bishop John England been invited to address audiences in Methodist churches, the pulpit was eventually reserved for the "ex-priest," the "escaped nun," and the dozen other "horrible exhibits of Romanism" which could always count on a fat collection...
...and when we see the actual working out of the law, we behold, not a little country town from which the saloons have been banished and in which the stalwart actual citizen is squeezing wine out of elderberry blossoms, but the city in which the speakeasy has supplanted the bar controlled by law...
...Lyman Abbot saw this cleavage plainly, and therefore advised against carrying the anti-liquor crusade into the national arena...
...We believe that, right or wrong, prohibition cannot be conceived of as a function of the federal government, that enforcement logically demands the co6peration of local constables and village detectives, and that therefore the nation is seeking to utilize a power which cannot rightly belong to it...
...Normally it is not without its appreciation of traditional Catholic philosophy, for which a thing cannot be wrong in itself because it permits of abuse...
...At all events, Catholicism faded out of the South and out of those rural districts wherein the Demon Rum was most likely to be burned in effigy...
...We see the church in politics pitted against an innocent desire-innocent because the city worker cannot gather elderberries or go in for corn mashes...
...And that means, as far as we are able to judge, being between the devil and the deep sea...
...It is a strange fact that the descendants of sturdy men who stood beside Milton and Hampden should now be willing to assent to such reasoning...
...The whole movement seems to us hopelessly bundled up in the yarn of a fluffy ideology...
...If we of The Commonweal have opposed the Eighteenth Amendment, it is for much the same reason as would have moved Abbot to oppose it...
...When the great apostle of the first--Francis Asbury-preached to this country, he advocated celibacy of the clergy and total abstinence by the faithful...
...Under the pressure of the Romantic age, Puritanism in England had evolved into two movements having much in common not only with each other but also with mediaeval tradition--the Methodist movement and the Oxford movement...
...We ourselves have been consistently opposed to this law and have, indeed, considered antagonism to it one of the really important functions of the civic mind...
...An opponent of the insidious rationalization of religion, he was perhaps unconsciously influenced by the appeal and the authority of the past...
...At any rate, the one argument which this philosophy would accept as valid--the argument that, under existing social conditions, the evil effects of alcoholism far outweigh the good---is almost never stressed by the Anti-saloon League...
...Perhaps the temper of the frontier was partly responsible for the change, and it may be that racial and nationalistic clashes have played their part...
...Prevalent crusading habits render it impossible, however, to concentrate upon anything excepting contrasted fanaticism...
...It deserves attention precisely because it has been put by many people of the most varied religious and social habits...
...We are sure Mr...
...Whether or not this explanation for the "Catholic stand on prohibition" is accepted, we feel that it would be well to insist again upon one aspect of our own point of view...
...Quite as inevitably, town and country were pitted against each other in the struggle about temperance...
...As time went on, however, evangelistic religion became more and more intolerant...
...The best conceivable plan for the control of liquor is likewise dependent upon the test of facts...
...It may occasionally be based upon the feeling that, since prohibition has been insisted upon by the Methodists as a "dogma," these same Methodists ought not to be surprised if members of an older Church resent having it forced upon them...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 16
