Christendom on Its Knees

...The modern leader of industry, thought or science is, therefore, the demonstration of which way mankind is going...

...Conditions are entirely different...

...Why attempt to conceal this hope...

...To a generation inclined to be forgetful of it the day of prayer appointed for the regeneration of Russia may be an impressive reminder...

...Upon these every conscienceless quest for wealth and comfort has been built...

...Nor can Catholics forget Archbishop Cieplak, who found a martyr's death as truly as Saint Polycarp...

...In both cases the proportion of ruling caste altruism has been virtually the same...

...Granted the virility of Christianity in our corporate and individual living and the threat of Bolshevism would be an idle joke...

...But though the cord which binds Stalin to Lenin and Lenin to Marx is strong and evident, one must not forget that the assumptions of atheistic Communism are as old as the race...

...Dostoievsky knew that Russia might prove terrible because he had looked into the hearts of unscrupulous aristocrats...

...More than a few of our leading men are admirable omens...

...Such virility, however, must be revealed first of all in the leader...

...Nor have we, to tell the truth, any great confidence in the direct effectiveness of protests from the outside world...

...It does not follow, however, that Russian Christians or Jews can derive much benefit from the repudiation of Soviet policies by Europe...

...Or who among us would not venerate Father Ambro-sius, so well beloved by all of Russia's greatest literary men...

...Now as ever they are hushed expectantly, waiting for the command which is lived rather than spoken...

...But to whatever point of the compass a historian turns, the weaning of a populace from God is found to have been sponsored by those who triumphed in the name of "economic law" and contentedly enslaved their fellow-men...

...The western atheist is tired of smiling at religion...

...All this can be made plain by reflecting upon what has happened in Russia since 1919, in a spirit of carefully weighing the evidence...

...What the Catholic hopes for rather, on this day of prayer offered in the name of Saint Joseph, patron of the universal Church, is that God will confirm the faith of the troubled and suffering in Russia...

...Even Francis had to preach to fishes until people had seen the holiness of his life...

...We live, one may say confidently, in a time when professions of faith and honest virtue are multiplying...

...Another part is due to the abolition of moral mandates (in which countless moderns in the West have likewise placed their faith...

...From the very beginning religion has been preached to the Russians by their intellectual aristocracy...

...Let us be frank and fair...

...It is, of course, useless to summarize here the Bolshevik activities against religion...

...and he cites as evidence the comparative security enjoyed by the 17,-000,000 Mohammedans in Russia, who in Caucasia and the Siberian republics have strong ties with their brethren living abroad...

...It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the conflict is localized...

...Tolstoy was merely living up to a tradition...

...It is there for us to look at as the handwriting on the wall...

...And morals...

...To say that religion in Russia has been corrupt and emasculated may be permissible in part...

...America and Europe will be safe from Moscow only if they succeed in mastering the drift toward worship of power and moral laxity now so manifest...

...And since 1920 this nobility of spiritual service has been participated in by throngs of the humble-not merely the monks, priests, rabbis and lay folk who have given their lives as memorials of faith, but also by that immeasurable army of the despoiled who have lived in exile and poverty everywhere...

...the chronicle of torture and rapine, of hunger and foul disease, of infamous hysteria and enforced cringing-all this nightmare enduring throughout a decade can be dispelled by no opiate...

...And so Dante's hallowed phrase, "In His will there is our peace," takes on a new significance...

...After this, the horrors of Moscow may be seen as horrors which, by the grace of God, we have as yet been spared...

...The assumption underlying all aggressive Communism is that the western world can be divided against itself by winning the support first of revolutionary intellectuals, and secondly of the proletariat...

...but even these generally wanted subservience, wanted labor, wanted no trifling with the established order...

...Here, too, the emphasis has been entirely upon production- upon speeding up the industrial machine so that those in control might obtain greater power...

...It was the class which had learned to draw up a case for unbelief that made our present family statistics a fair rival for those of Soviet Russia, where the dissolution of matrimony is the easiest thing in the world...

...During 500 years the churches of the West have not been so closely united in one action...

...And part of our prayer should surely be for ourselves, for the strengthening of faith in the western world and for the victory over the things which have brought on the catastrophe of Russia...

...Banded together in response to an appeal from the Sovereign Pontiff are all those who still believe that God dwells with men, that obedience to His summons and confidence in His assurances are the most vital elements in any conception of human liberty, and that spiritual virtue is the only lasting treasure...

...The incredibly long list of ghastly murders, past the scenes of which Trotzky and Stalin rode in armored cars...

...Have we here the ultimate heresy, curtailing Revelation to a mere denial ? Perhaps...

...Ultimately the Bolshevist will be defeated by triumphantly resurgent Christianity or he will not be defeated at all...

...How shall we explain the confluence of sinister personalities-the Rasputins and Lenins -at a given moment ? And the answer must surely be that these men were something like heavily charged steel bars into which the demoniac energies of an anti-Christian generation had been stored...

...How many of us can lay claim to the spiritual stature of such a man as the Patriarch Tikhon, who in his eagerness to promote Christian unity knocked at the doors of the Vatican, and who died a harassed prisoner in a cell of the Donskoy monastery...

...There can be no tranquillity, social or personal, for us until the assumptions upon which conscienceless materialism is based have been overruled...

...The blood and filth of Leningrad can be traced to ideas which captivated a Europe more and more empty of its traditional faith...

...Before the social movement in modern Britain got under way, there were doubtless some wealthy men who wished to promote the education and hygiene of those dependent upon them...

...No less obvious are the opposing forces-those who have used Russia as the material of a social experiment, and whose deeds of repression are more ruthless than the half-forgotten edicts of Caesars and Sultans...

...Another reason for this leniency is doubtless Moscow's hope of capitalizing upon possible Mohammedan antipathy to the British...

...These have been chronicled by journalists and victims, photographers and historians, so that as much of the world as cares to read has been fed the news piecemeal during a decade...

...And Nietzsche, his violent counterpart, looked also and read the horoscope of Europe...

...Here is that without the absence of which they could not have been...

...Therefore the Soviet persecution of religion is a stark and overwhelming confession...

...Soviet Russia has international cravings...

...Thus perhaps the world might see again what it witnessed under Nero -the powerlessness of rigor to dispel the glory of revelation or to destroy the sacred right of community in the Church...

...A series of outbursts in all parts of the world, engineered by apostles of a new Utopia and shared by hundreds of disaffected workers, prove too well the priority which many people concede to the values of material well-being...

...Russia has not begotten her own misery, even though the sins she committed against her people cried unto heaven...

...No group of half-crazed fanatics waged a murderous campaign against religious faith...

...And now it may well be that, in turn, the "cotton and iron" of the West are not safe from the attacks of revolution...

...What is the essence and what is the record of Bolshevism...

...The record of socialized Russia is, to continue, strikingly like the record of unmoral capitalism...

...We all have drifted toward the abyss in which unhappy Russia lies, striken with madness and desolation...

...Though disarray and lack of heroism have afflicted the Russian Church, it is still too early to say that the shibboleths of Marxian agitators have genuinely affected the belief which is lodged in 100,000,000 souls...

...Though he may not care to take up arms against it himself, he hails war upon it as a boon...

...It was the glutted citizen of the West, tired of restraint and hungry for pleasure, who popularized divorce and pornographic festivals not outlawed into stigmatized parts of town...

...The masses are patient and imitative...

...It is, indeed, true enough that the intellectualist group will be stirred to admiration far more easily through open persecution of religion than through abstinence from persecution...

...Here is "the thing" which they would stamp out because it is the sole force opposed to them...

...If that be true of Russia, what shall we expect for ourselves...

...The third and smallest part is due to the ending of patience among the poor...

...It is quite conceivable that imperialistic capitalism became, during the nineteenth century, fully as hostile to Christianity as Moscow is now...

...Leo M. Glassman, the well-informed Jewish newspaperman, tells us that " the Soviet government adopts a liberal and humane policy wherever it finds that to be in its own political interest...

...But it is only relatively true...

...The methods it adopted were, of course, different...

...One point is surely worthy of particular attention...

...Part of the success of Bolshevism is due to the use of force (in which a great body of Europeans have believed with all their souls...

...May those who kneel to pray for the saving of Christendom in Russia not forget these also...