Communications
448 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, I929 THE IBERIAN VIRGIN By CATHERINE RADZIWILL HE emotion which the Bolsheviks' destruction of the famous Iberian chapel in Moscow will produce among...
...The inescapable fact is that these dear old hymns are out of place at Mass: however much they may appeal to the majority to which Mrs...
...It has a good line, the best in the world...
...G. B. Shaw, in his latest play, The Apple Cart, predicts an actual union of England and America by I965, with America in control...
...Traffic, or the art of merchandizing, is wholly indifferent in itself and has no necessary bearing on the object trafficked...
...It is to be noted with deep satisfaction that so eminent an authority as Dr...
...What they will be allowed to do in heaven is another question...
...Among these things was a prophecy that so long as the Iberian Virgin remained in the chapel she wished to be built for her on a spot which the pilgrim designated, no real harm could happen to Russia...
...it therefore received what is termed the presumption of the law, that is the favor of the doubt...
...We belong to thee, gracious czar," said the head of this deputation, "and thou canst kill or torture us at thy will, but the Iberian Virgin belongs to Moscow, and in Moscow it shall remain 1" The ruthless sovereign for once was awed, and the ancient city remained in possession of its most sacred shrine...
...Ryan admits the lack of ethical validity of prohibition rather tardily...
...Ryan does not become specific as to these...
...He draws a line of distinction between the "manifold evil consequences" of the prohibition laws which effect that they are not "any longer binding in conscience," and the "social disorder which their violation entails...
...As the prohibition law is no more self-executing than any other, the evils engendered by it are the immediate results of its enforcement...
...In fact the concept embodied in the term "enforcement" is rapidly undergoing much the same disintegration as the term "temperance...
...This studied silence respecting a muchdiscussed situation at the present day, and in its stead the playing up to the popular disfavor of the old-tlme saloon showed the same shrewdness, if not downright deception, which was so adroitly employed in putting over complete prohibition in the first place...
...2. A peace-loving Catholic man who writes to The Commonweal casually telling the handful of us to dominate martially and physically the one hundred millions of the others (he must think we are all Dempseys, Tunneys, Sonnenbergs and Schmellings...
...It has followed the Romanovs into history, and into the grave...
...Babbitt might help us here...
...3. The police officer of Boston who bans Scribner's from public sale, the only result of his futile and absurd gesture of repression being to convlnee the outside world that his religion made him do it, and that Catholics would run wild along similar nonsensical llnes if they were ever given an opportunity...
...O the Editor :--The writer of these lines had the opportunity of hearing the debate on prohibition between Messrs...
...Agere sequitur esse: the action follows the essence...
...Napoleon reverently bared his head when he visited it...
...So we get a new version of an old limerick: "Leo and Columbia go for a ride, He pets her and calls her his Sadie...
...Why then should the traffic of this same commodity become utterly evil and nefarious...
...If that is so, then it would seem illogical to recognize a state of social disorder entailed by the violation of a law that is no law...
...WHEN CATHOLICS TALK Los Angdes, Calif...
...Enforcement is coming to denote complete suppression, as in the case of intoxicating liquor...
...According to his evolutionary process of reasoning, the damaging evidence against the cause of prohibition was at first not sufficiently apparent to warrant its condemnation...
...The above-mentioned writers on the subject either tacitly or explicitly regard the home manufacture of intoxicants for home consumption as morally admissible...
...Alexander I prayed there before starting to repulse the victorious French armies...
...Ryan has now come out in open condemnation of the prohibition law in all its aspects...
...They are setting at defiance not only the prohibition law, but every other law of honesty and decency in their nefarious traffic...
...Now I think that the most excruciating and blood-curdling instances of this point are the following items, all occurring within the past year: I. The snappy Catholic official of a great eastern city who stated that he would like to see more Rome-rule in this countryi (said speech has always seemed to me to be the cleverest bit of political sabotage ever concocted...
...For example, the usually staid and temperate True Voice, in an editorial of June 28 thus gave expression to its vigorous antipathy: "We have no sympathy with bootleggers and other violators of the law...
...It seems hardly possible...
...WHAT SHALL THE FAITHFUL SING...
...By the latter's account, it was a faithful copy of one in the Iberian monastery on Mount Athos, and it had been given to him by Our Lady herself who wanted it to become the patron ikon of Russia...
...The Iberian chapel was perhaps the holiest spot in Russia, and its entire existence was associated with that of the czars so intimately that perhaps only now will Russians realize that the empire has actually disappeared forever...
...Let all our salesmen remember this...
...The patriarch (who had the reputation of being a real saint, and was later canonized) always referred to his strange visitor as a messenger of the Almighty, dispatched to reveal to him "many things unknown to others...
...This is substantially the Canadian system, which alone provides a solution of the problem that is just to use and misuse alike...
...Hardly twenty people could stand together within its four walls, but it was never empty...
...However, the saloon's defenders are no doubt willing for the sake of their weaker brethren to forego their natural right to this form of business and the dispensation of liquor at the bar, as well as to repress their equally natural proclivity for congenial companionship at these places, and restrict the consumption of liquor to public eating places and the privacy of the homes, with their restraining influences...
...However, Dr...
...Ryan continues: "Concerning those provisions which forbid the sale of liquor and its manufacture and transportation for sale, I still hold, as I did from I92o until I926, that they enjoyed during those years a presumption of social utility and ethical validity...
...It seems therefore not improper to inquire into this supposedly utter depravity of the liquor business...
...It is to be frankly admitted, however, that the saloon offers an occasion for intemperance to those so inclined by furnishing places of easy access to liquor and, through the spirit of conviviality therein engendered, an opportunity for overindulgence...
...Again, the suggestion of federal control and distribution of liquor Mr...
...Crowds of worshipers came to pray, if only for a few minutes, and no Russian would have visited Moscow without prostrating himself before the famous ikon, a glorious thing glistening with precious stones, to which new ones were added every day...
...And what has become of the ikon itself...
...Does the plan seem complimentary to the qulck-witted Latin mind ? Does The Commonweal, regardless of objectives, really approve of "conferences" when the results are already "in the bag" ? According to the newspapers, Mr...
...But this is to be considered a distinct concession not enforceable by law, voluntarily surrendered for the sake of common welfare...
...ANNIVERSARIES AND STEAMSHIPS Covington, Ky...
...GUNS, TREATIES, TAXES Allston, Mass...
...These statements of disapproval are proposed evidently as axiomatic...
...The Iberian chapel was built in 1648 to house an image of the Virgin and Child which had been brought to the patriarch of Moscow, Varsanofy, by an unknown pilgrim...
...Ryan's course of reasoning is founded on too ample a supposition: neither the successful nor the unsuccessful enforcement as such of a law permits a conclusion back to its moral essence...
...the Polish invaders who conquered the city after his death, respected it...
...Too often it seems to me that we pay commissions to the goof whose approach is poor, whose sales talk is all wrong, and whose order-book is never opened...
...Should this difference, however, be insisted upon, close observation of the case will reveal that a direct contradiction is therein involved...
...The enforcement of a law is merely a completive element of jurisdiction and not an essential requirement of legislation: for it is conceivable that abnormal circumstances may suspend or even abrogate a just law, and on the other hand that an unjust law be enforced by tyrannical authority...
...O the Editor :--Onlookers seeking to understand the major league game of international politics should bear in mind that an alliance is a combination not only pro, but contra--for friends and against enemies...
...One hopes that no sacrilegious hand has been found to deface the sacred image before which so many ardent supplications have been poured out, the image that has brought peace to so many broken hearts, blessed so many weary souls, given courage to so many downtrodden creatures, who have received from it strength and courage to go on with the struggle of existence...
...For instance, the question as to the ethical validity of the home manufacture of intoxicants for home consumption he never so much as alluded to...
...The sole and whole burden of his argument consisted in a sweeping condemnation of the liquor traffic and its ultimate dispensary, the saloon, as irredeemably wicked...
...It stood at the gate of Moscow's famous Red Square, and was a marvel of Byzantine architecture...
...But all this is meaningless in the face of deeds and utterances of real representatives, or persons accepted as such...
...how it is concerned with the soul of the individual, and has no use for mobs or for mob action, mob appeal or mob rule, etc., etc...
...I am sure The Commonweal will pay a fitting tribute to the greatest Father and Doctor of the Church...
...Now I think Mr...
...the ethical or unethical quality thereof exists prior to its commercial use...
...to do so in regard to prohibition is to put up an a posteriori argument devoid of strictly logical cogency...
...Ryan's own theory the prohibition law, inclusive of its application to the traffic in liquor, has no direct ethical validity...
...4. The Catholic authorities of England who with a loud fanfare submit a list of questions to all candidates for Parliament, knowing full well (surely they were not unaware of the effect of their action...
...Really the Inquisition, the Gunpowder Plot, etc., are not as hard to explain to one's fine non-Cathollc friends and associates as the weird utterances of twentieth-century moderns...
...The Iberian chapel itself was a small gem, in its way...
...it does need salesmen...
...I do not know what calendars, encyclopedias and histories the writer consulted, but any Lives of the Saints or School Church History could have told him that in 430 there died at Hippo in Africa Aurelius Augustinus--Salnt Augustine, the "Doctor of Grace," one of the most lovable men and one of the keenest minds that this world has been privileged to behold...
...Will Russia ever forgive the cruel tyrants under whose rule she has fallen this act of desecration and vandalism...
...how it indulges in no political threats, nor seeks political repression...
...But no line sells itself...
...COMMUNICATIONS THE MORALITY OF THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC Bristol, Pa...
...But this is the worst that can be said of it, and all the other evils generally ascribed to it are to be wholly imputed to the lack of self-restralnt on the part of intemperate patrons...
...Ivan the Terrible had prostrated himself before it...
...He would tell us that it is all reducible to salesmanship...
...James A. Ryan in an article entitled The Evolution of an Anti, appearing in The Commonweal of June 26, puts down his reasoned and seasoned opinion in this wise: "Concerning the unwisdom of national prohibition and the September 4, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 449 menace to individual liberty which it involves, and concerning the immorality of including in such legislation the manufacture and possession of liquor for personal use, my opinions have never changed except in the direction of greater intensity...
...According to Dr...
...Cumulative experience, however, has definitively destroyed the presumption that favored the 'noble experiment' during the early years of experimentation...
...It is disappointing that Dr...
...his voice is gone out into all lands, and his words into the ends of the world...
...CHRISTOPHER I. FITZGERALD...
...Dr...
...Washington, D. C. O the Editor :--What dear old hymns the Helen Hughes Hielschers heard when they were little girls in churches without organs, and where the cholrmasters beat time with their feet, are in one respect like the delicate aesthetic digestions of the Theodore Maynards: they are beside the point...
...T O the Editor :--It may be brash assumption on my part, but I am going to brave the storm and suggest to the Catholic spokesmen and leaders who live in so-called Catholic centres to remember that when they address themselves to Catholics others may listen to their words and have opinions about them...
...Such an attitude was of course to be expected from an official of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, whose sense for the fitness and fairness of things is sufficiently evidenced by the bold assumption of the comprehensive term "public" on the part of a private organization...
...next they "trip" with Japan, leaving France and Italy to fall--perhaps...
...The old Muscovites firmly believed in this prediction, and when Peter the Great built the city which he made the new capital of his empire, and desired to remove the Iberian Virgin to it, a deputation of all classes of the population of Moscow waited on him to declare that this would never be allowed...
...The ikon was associated with Russia's most glorious and most terrible days...
...One may explain the aim of the Church to the best 450 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, x929 of his ability--how it must by its charter be fair, open and non-political...
...The manifold evil consequences of national prohibition have shown, to all who have eyes to see, that it is not only not the best but probably the very worst method of dealing with the liquor problem...
...Commissions are only paid to the salesman who closes the deal...
...Hielscher is proud to belong, they are unllturgical...
...One wonders whether the prophecy of the mysterious pilgrim who brought the holy image to the saintly patriarch Varsano/y is about to be fulfilled...
...It was the palladium of the town and of the country...
...And now it has been destroyed...
...Hippo has disappeared from the map of Africa, "but its great teacher," as Newman says, "though dead, yet speaks...
...As the evaluation of this piece of legislation by the best thought crystallizes in that direction with "greater intensity," there arises the hope that through a course of patient education this inferiority complex will eventually be removed from an independent nation...
...W. A. BIXEL...
...Ryan's statement marks a distinct advance over his previous position, for he now absolves the liquor traffic, at present illegally carried on, from the stain of moral turpitude...
...Shaw has dollar diplomacy in his mind, and is taking a sly dig at Wall Street...
...This pilgrim, whose identity remained a mystery, but who was supposed to have been one of the Apostles sent by the Mother of God to the patriarch, disappeared just as suddenly as he had come...
...he immediately proceeds to hedge in his statement with a reservation...
...This, however, is not required by the true concept of law and, it is safe to say, will never be accomplished as long as man is man, this side of Utopia...
...His successors bent their knee before it when they made their solemn entry into the venerable city previous to their coronation...
...The several important phases that have developed since its enactment he preferred to ignore entirely...
...Wilson dismissed with the single reference as to the sheer vulgarity, uttexly inconceivable, which would attach to Uncle Sam being arrayed in the habiliments of a bartender...
...Now our prospect is an unwilling codger to begin with, and owing to a bigoted debauch of generations, has a terrible set of raw jumpy nerves...
...Has it really been sent to another church, or has it been also destroyed, done away with as a "relic of outworn superstition...
...While it is too much to expect good taste from the majority which is so addicted to the dear old hymns, is it too much to say that as Catholics they ought to show some respect to the pronouncements of several Popes, and sing the liturgy to the music that has been approved by the Holy See...
...Wilson delivered himself of a typical anti-saloon attack in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Enforcement Act in the approved fashion of pre-prohibition days...
...The question of their indirect obligation, on account of the social disorder which their violation entails, is one that I am not now called upon to discuss...
...And no commissions are ever paid in business to the men who assault the prospect, or knock his teeth out...
...Ryan did not feel it incumbent upon himself to amplify this important statement, particularly as he broadly intimates that the prohibition law obliges in conscience as far as it relates to the traffic in liquor on account of the indirect consequences...
...This presumption, to continue his line of argument, has now yielded to the certainty of the prohibition law being morally invalid on account of its "manifold evil consequences...
...A. WAo~.R...
...First England and America conjoin...
...Dr...
...THEODORE MAYNARD...
...Will Russia really disappear, destroyed by the ruthless rulers who think that by annihilating an object of universal reverence, they will achieve anything but their own ultimate ruin...
...Can it be possible that Mr...
...And an obedient spirit will have some bearing upon their salvation...
...Therefore, I do not think that the national prohibition laws are any longer directly binding in conscience...
...It makes no observable difference in its operation and effect, whether it be called Dreibund, Entente, Amity or Conjunction, the last name being found in The Commonweal of August 7, under Guns, Treaties, Taxes...
...They return from the ride With the llon inside And a smile on the face of the lady...
...The trained moralist may possibly find a theoretical difference, but to the legal realist it is a distinction without a difference, and for all practical purposes negligible...
...Clarence Darrow and Clarence True Wilson in Washington recently...
...Without meaning to become meticulous, one may observe that the terms "social utility" and '"ethical validity" can hardly be employed as co/~rdinates in legal parlance, as the former is but one of the required qualifications which jointly effect the ethical validity of a law...
...o the Editor :--In your issue of August 7 under the caption Anniversaries and Steamships, one of your editors remarks: "I93O has proved to be a bad year, anniversarily speaking...
...If I am not mistaken, the International Eucharistic Congress will meet in North Africa to commemorate the fifteenth centenary of the death of Saint Augustine...
...No emperor ever came to Moscow without stopping on his way to the Kremlin before the tiny chapel, and lighting a candle in honor of the patron of the city...
...but that if she were ever removed to some other place, it would mean the end of the country and of its rulers...
...Taken in connection with The Commonweal's suggestion of July IO, in Week by Week, that the first conference be "tripartite, leaving the special problems of France and Italy for a later meeting," the machinery of the new diplomacy would seem to be perfected...
...The Catholic Church needs no apologists or buglers...
...but undoubtedly he has in mind the many acts of lawlessness accompanying its enforcement...
...but it is not unreasonable to hope that the blessed will experience considerable improvement in their voices and their musical taste upon arriving there...
...Nor will any salesman sell a line unless he gains the attention, awakens the interest and wins the confidence of the prospect...
...that the whole world would interpret it as a political threat...
...J. J. LAUX...
...It is somewhat strange, therefore, that similar statements should be occasionally voiced by Catholic writers...
...He needs no dwelling place whose home is the Catholic Church...
...When England and America combine to "dispel w'arlness," they contemplate forcing the hands of certain definite parties to a forthcoming conference...
...448 THE COMMONWEAL September 4, I929 THE IBERIAN VIRGIN By CATHERINE RADZIWILL HE emotion which the Bolsheviks' destruction of the famous Iberian chapel in Moscow will produce among Orthodox Russians is akin to what Catholics would feel if the sacred Grotto of Lourdes or Saint Peter's in Rome were deliberately pulled down...
...One of the landmarks of the Russia of the czars has disappeared...
...Dr...
...Dr...
...The Iberian chapel destroyed...
...In this case, however, his conclusion, though eminently correct, is not fully warranted by the premises...
Vol. 10 • September 1929 • No. 18
