Calamitous Indifferences
CALAMITOUS INDIFFERENCES VOX populi may be pardoned for being almost as incoherent as the noises of Broadway. The only respectable choruses are trained choruses, the only effective opinion is a...
...The worst mistake, from a practical point of view, that Lord Baltimore ever made was to admit (1649) a band of Puritans whom the Virginians had driven out...
...This serves two purposes: first to guarantee the delivery, to one's door, of "free literature," and second to suggest that a contribution to aid "the work of the Society" will be most welcome...
...Why does not Mr...
...Ford is "free" to accept the teachings of the Catholic Church...
...Ford gets enough out of this variety of appeal to pay for the insertion of his copy, and, beyond that, for the continuance of his endeavors, all that was said in our initial paragraph seems marvelously clear and correct...
...Ford asked whether the claims advanced in behalf of the Calverts as inaugurators of religious liberty in the United States are justified...
...Even so, Mr...
...Or why does Mr...
...This is, after all, a world of practical affairs in which one must expect decency to characterize the attitude of one man toward another...
...There figure in his advertisement four selections from Catholic authorities-Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, John Joseph McVey and John A. Ryan...
...One is astonished, however, to find that they have apparently received no attention from Mr...
...Breck-inridge Long: "The inhabitants of Maryland entertained certain ideas of what were rights...
...Sooner or later he may find himself in the position of the Maryland Puritan-a man who has attempted to bag everything for his side and who discovers eventually that while the majority is willing to accept his code of manners it is of an entirely different spiritual mind...
...Secondly, the emphasis placed upon separation between church and state in Virginia was largely due to the efforts of Baptists and Presbyterians, who chafed under the restrictions imposed by the Church of England (see Wesley M. Gewehr: The Great Awakening in Virginia...
...Everybody who tries to undermine that tradition has our sympathy...
...The same page was offered us, and we confess to having thought hard about accepting it, publishing it opposite these remarks, and thus detracting from the funds which support whap...
...Marshall abstain from reference to the endless series of theologians who have expounded this mandate...
...Marshall adheres but upon the old English law of King Alfred, passed, as is evident, in a Catholic age...
...Such a procedure would deprive Messrs...
...An economic fact would seem to remain a fact, regardless of Wall Street...
...Ford has neglected to advertise these facts...
...and the subsequent satisfaction of the same group, offering thanks because of their deliverance from "the arbitrary will and pleasure of a tyrannical Popish government...
...Marshall does not tell us how Jefferson attained to his liberality, or why Virginia favored religious freedom...
...Indeed only this thought justifies the present concern with Mr...
...Ford's historical learning is incomplete, his theological wisdom is extraordinary...
...What, then, is the Catholic doctrine regarding religious liberty...
...It is no wonder that Mr...
...For the moment one supposes that the attitude of legal historians is fairly well summed up by Mr...
...We come now to the vital word "free" upon which several million pages of definition have been expended...
...What these were can be deduced from a meditation on colonial Puritans...
...There are compensations in the fact that his distinguished father, Henry Jones Ford, was a member of the original editorial board of The Commonweal...
...Ford and Marshall of all their thunder...
...Fancy whap broadcasting those memorable contrasts which McMahon has so neatly classified and labeled: the lower, puritan House of the Maryland Assembly protesting against the Proprietary not on the basis of "a single act of deliberate oppression or wanton exercise of power," but on the score that "popish idolatry" was being practised...
...A man can shoot his grandparents, but who shall say that he is free to unload his shotgun at them...
...Ford's views were, in a measure, expressed editorially in the New York Telegram (Scripps-How-ard) with which a correspondent in our present issue has busied himself...
...At the present rate of advance one may expect a majority of one's fellow-citizens to howl with joy over some hypothetical announcement that the world is square...
...We notice in the current issue of the Nation, cheerfully dedicated to the opposite side of everything, a page advertisement furnished with the simoleons of Mr...
...We hold that this "experiment in tolerance" was a unique and original thing...
...Ford please note-where the governors or the clergy of Catholic Maryland molested Protestant, Jew or Quaker...
...What is absolutely certain is the fate of liberty in Maryland once people of Mr...
...Ford's stamp get hold of it...
...But he contents himself with saying that "the liberal spirit of Virginia and of her great statesman (Jefferson) contrasts strangely with the early spirit of the province of Maryland under Lord Baltimore...
...Freedom reposes upon intellectual and moral ability to express a preference...
...Charles G. Marshall in a hypothetically communistic America...
...No fate we can think of would be more ironical than that of Mr...
...So eminent a historian, knowing the story of the Catholic Church more thoroughly than any of its members and as busy with the chronicles of mankind as any other man, might have been expected to give them some scant notice...
...If our opinion is incorrect, it ought to be easy to produce evidence against it...
...They kept up this edifying variety of tactics until, under William and Mary, the Established Church was set up in Maryland...
...The Church reposes upon a grant of authority from Christ to preach His message and to continue His sacramental life upon earth...
...No philosopher worth his salt would hold that man is "free" to do anything from which he is not restrained by a brace of bloodhounds and a cordon of grenadiers...
...Something definable as a bad spiritual bluff would seem to merit well-nigh any treatment excepting riotous applause...
...As soon as a man recognizes the validity of this grant he is not free to turn aside from it, either because too much is demanded of him or because he is interested in other matters...
...Their publicity value is, from his point of view, positively nil...
...It is interesting to note that in neither case have the claims actually made for Lord Baltimore been examined...
...When one pauses to think that Mr...
...Marshall...
...There may be some question as to whether Mr...
...Marshall...
...But if Mr...
...What interests us most in this display is a coupon one is asked to detach and mail...
...These folk refused to obey the colonial government...
...But there can be no question that the tradition of these United States is to affirm that religion cannot be a civic barrier, shunting some believers into comfortable seats around the fire and banishing others to the wilds...
...We observe incidentally that Mr...
...For our part, we willingly absolve him on the score of very invincible ignorance...
...The present writer believes that he stressed the right explanation in his Catholic Spirit in America-where it was asserted that the American tradition of the right to freedom of conscience had its origin in practical politics-but several new groups of facts are now available...
...In the first place it should be noticed how chary the discoverers of this quotation are of quoting along with it the context it properly needs...
...Ford advertise the mandate of canon law: "Nobody may be constrained by force to profess the Catholic faith...
...The answer is very simple...
...It does not "contrast" at all...
...In common with the majority of thoughtful historians, we asserted that the Toleration Act might have been more generous in wording than it was if certain circumstances had not limited the action of its protagonists...
...The first is this: Jefferson based his conception of rights not upon the principles to which Mr...
...And of similar material there is verily no dearth...
...Referring to The Commonweal, Mr...
...The Catholic faith, when both sides of the definition have been presented, becomes something which the individual cannot be spoon-fed by the state but nevertheless not something which the individual is free to decline...
...It may only declare that he is ignorant, through no fault of his own, of its life and power...
...and passed a law in 1654 enacting that "none who profess and exercise the Popish (commonly called the Roman Catholic) religion can be protected in this province by the laws of England...
...It does not mean denying that the sun has spots, or insisting upon having arsenic for luncheon...
...What one finds perilous and inexplicable in the existing situations is the general willingness to gamble against odds...
...The only respectable choruses are trained choruses, the only effective opinion is a marshaled opinion...
...Ford, indignation (or worry) concerning whom is as out of place as a mouse in a kitten's lair...
...But so long as he does not-even subconsciously-recognize that validity, the Church is not "free" to insist upon his allegiance...
...This declaration is used to scare so many American children and adults that for purely humanitarian reasons some brief concern with it may be in order...
...See G. Chinard: Thomas Jefferson...
...In a similar way no citizen is free to abet disregard for his fellows or their sacred rights...
...and in striving for the attainment of those rights, they, partly through their own initiative, partly through the magnanimity of their proprietary, did take certain steps and did adopt certain forms which were expressions of public sentiment of that day and which molded the public opinion of a later day, and to which the forms and spirit of the constitution are partly traceable...
...Arguments about the dimensions of the word "partly" as here used remain possible...
...Franklin Ford...
...The answer is a resounding "No" on the basis of several quotations, one of them from the redoubtable Mr...
...summoned the commonwealth commissioners to their aid...
...The most important point in these quotations is the papal assertion that "the principle that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none" is false...
...Our emphasis lay upon the fact that so long as early Maryland was ruled by Catholics the state scrupulously respected the rights of dissident religious minorities-There is not a single instance on record-Mr...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 25
