Catholic Clannishness
Donovan, Joseph P
CATHOLIC CLANNISHNESS By JOSEPH P. DONOVAN AFTER the experience of last election many of us became sceptical of the ability of historic Ameri-canism to survive as a controlling element in the...
...We have been looking upon the Faith once delivered to saints as if it were ours by right and not by privilege...
...It is the continuance of Catholic Klanism...
...We have parodied divine charity...
...What is more, the Church among us would have the necessary technical equipment to prosecute her jus regiminis (right to rule) with boundless prosperity...
...That growing army of Catholics whose inferiority complex is now driving them into the maw of secularism would be turned back and begin rushing to the further exaltation of the Cross of Christ...
...We glory that over two million of our little ones are in Catholic schools...
...Yet when were Catholics in any age privileged to do so much for the Church with relatively so little sacrifice to themselves ? We need only two things primarily in higher education...
...but we have not time to bother with things so unmaterial...
...That far-seeing Chicago prelate was credited with saying that had he riches, he would leave them all to educate Catholic laymen and Catholic laywomen for every form of direct and indirect leadership...
...In any event our well-to-do Catholics could provide the endowment...
...That expanded into $133,000 would enable each year eleven young men and women "bachelors" from Catholic colleges to go on for three years' graduate work at the enlarged Catholic University, including one year's residence at a foreign university...
...We have been able to regard an entire nation in martyrdom at our door and refuse it more than a ripple of prayerful sympathy...
...We are proud of what has been accomplished in the field of Catholic higher education, but we never dream of asking ourselves if the system is adequate or not...
...One is the Catholic University of America expanded into one of the world's great graduate schools...
...Our local Catholic universities that are only of yesterday already begin to complain that we have no trained laymen and laywomen to supplement the work of the religious teachers in these new institutions...
...To the objection, what is going to become of our struggling local Catholic universities with all this attention given to the Catholic University of America, I answer: nothing adverse but everything helpful...
...Yet on reflection the thought should have come to us that American Catholics as a body have been guilty of a worse travesty...
...The anticlerical movement feared by some would lack formative material...
...American thought as a whole just does not know there is a Catholic culture...
...We congratulate ourselves upon having endowed the teaching communities engaged in that thankless task, when we pay a tuition about large enough to cover one-third the running expenses of an equivalent secular institution, to say nothing of the initial cost of building and equipping...
...But the scholarships should come from the faithful generally...
...Let something like this come to pass and in fifty years American thought will be permeated by Catholic culture...
...For instance, those who have studied the matter say that with an endowment of $30,000,000 the Catholic University can do for 22,500,000 Catholics in America what Louvain now does for 8,000,000 Catholics in Belgium...
...The easiest expedient at hand for securing the scholarships is by expanding the annual seminary collection by a third or a half in order to train lay as well as clerical breakers of the Bread of Life, to educate priests to minister to souls directly and laymen and lay-women to minister to souls indirectly...
...Unprivileged Catholics in our very neighborhood can fall away from the Church without ever causing us to think that we might have an obligation to help reclaim them...
...The major in Italian literature, for example, would reside a twelvemonth in Milan, Florence and Rome, the major in Spanish literature, at Madrid, the major in protozoology at the German centres of graduate study in that branch...
...yet never as a group will they get beyond a restricted number of courses in the arts and the sciences--when would one of them offer a course in Dante by a professor of international renown, or a course in Flemish literature ? They and the Catholic University will tend in their progress to remain complementary instead of becoming competitive...
...The people everywhere should contribute to support what touches each and all as the intellectual adjunct of their enlightened faith and as an ordinary condition for the prosperity of their divinely revealed religion...
...These local universities are now largely undergraduate and professional schools...
...We have a pontifical university that its founder, Pope Leo XIII, that mighty intellectual huntsman before the Lord, visioned as another Paris or Oxford in the rebirth of Catholicism under republican auspices...
...Even the latter can happen in course of time without any detriment to our educational structure...
...yet we exert less influence upon American thought than if we were one in a hundred...
...For these cultural technicians would be a liaison corps between clergy and laity in all external concerns...
...We have been conscious that 8,000,000 Catholics in the Philippines were annexed to the Church in America, still we have not cared whether the faith was going to live in those jewels of the Pacific...
...The other is a constant stream of men and women graduate students to furnish that university with living material for its artistic fashionings...
...The problem now is to get one great fully adequate graduate school in the arts and sciences, or else witness our whole educational system lapse into an expensive gesture...
...and many of those are untrained in Catholic principles...
...If we say that we cannot accomplish both these things, we stand convicted before the bar of international Catholic public opinion of Catholic Klanism...
...And as for Catholics teaching in state and endowed universities, they make up about 1 percent of the professors...
...For an inadequate solution of a problem does not get out of the category of non-solution...
...Non-Catholics with hearts as upright as the heart that beat in the breast of Cornelius the Centurion are sending us messengers of good-will to invite us to come and instruct them in the vision of grace...
...Suppose a present seminary collection of $100,000...
...We, the one source of enlightenment, withhold the sought-for illumination...
...And yet how simple the undertaking, if we only replace our 100 percent Catholicity, paralleling the Klan's 100 percent Americanism, by a genuine Catholic attitude toward things of social solidarity...
...We treat it as a private venture that must prosper from within-it has about half the endowment of a certain Kentucky hill college...
...True, the incipient graduate schools of the local institutions will become of increasing importance...
...That means an addition of about $25,000,000...
...American thought seeks enlightenment...
...The charity of Christ presseth us not...
...At the same time we forget that another two million are not in Catholic schools, a two million we try to think out of existence...
...A leaven of families would eventually have some relative who had become distinguished in state and Church through the patrimony of the poor...
...Nor has the Catholic University any ambitions in these lines...
...The more we go into the subject of Catholic higher education, the stronger becomes the indictment of our Klanism...
...For the counterfeit had seemed for practical purposes better than the cherished reality...
...In short, majors in all the sciences and arts would converge toward those European schools most noted for the courses being pursued...
...They have acted as if the common heritage was theirs to monopolize instead of theirs gratefully to share...
...In so doing they will prepare the way for the solution of the problem of Catholic higher education locally...
...We have one Catholic in every five or six citizens of the United States...
...These multimillionaires alone could put in place the keystone of Catholic educational progress...
...There is only one thing that the local institutions must fear...
...The complete system of Catholic Action they would enable the Church to build up would leave no room for lay jealousy and Church estrangement...
...The Klansmen have parodied political and religious equality...
...Scores of parishes without a pastor, involving a multitude of souls in the pangs of spiritual starvation, constitute a situation which appears to be none of our concern...
...Although we teach that earthly riches are a stewardship to be discharged in accordance with the wishes of the Master, yet God's grace we treat after the manner of an absolute dominion...
...This latter was in part the thought of the late Archbishop Quigley, whom I heard quoted by the present bishop of Oklahoma twenty years ago on the way in from Saint Paul's outside the walls of Rome...
...CATHOLIC CLANNISHNESS By JOSEPH P. DONOVAN AFTER the experience of last election many of us became sceptical of the ability of historic Ameri-canism to survive as a controlling element in the nation's destiny...
...Such they will continue to remain...
...We have in the country at least a hundred Catholic multimillionaires, who need to learn the Christian tradition of giving, of making Christ a necessary heir, not merely a legatee of every fortune, a tradition that has come down in English-speaking countries in the broken, or Protestant line of descent since the Reformation...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 26
