Catholics and Liberals
CATHOLICS AND LIBERALS pATHER RYAN undertook a day's hard work when he acceded to a request from the Nation and wrote an article on Catholicism and Liberalism. On the whole he did remarkably...
...Interested in "social experiments," he may be distressed beyond measure to see the government putting the laboratory under lock and key...
...We cannot ask those who term themselves "liberals" in this country to accept, while they remain unconvinced, the Catholic experience...
...A clout or two from his battle-axe would do us no harm, but a smoke-screen or a cloud of dust (useful to generals) is out of place in intellectual combat of every useful or agreeable kind...
...If this be true, it follows that separation from Christ is the major calamity for him...
...Or to what extent is the individual really the captain of his soul in any realm of inquiry or practice...
...The liberal is normally a person who finds that he cannot square the rights to which he feels entitled with community desires, mandates and manifestos...
...The mere fact that he is a Christian in the integral sense, accepting the birth, death and resurrection of the Son of God as firmly and reverently as did the groups to whom Paul spoke, means that he has bound himself to the Master as a leaf is joined to a tree or a finger to the body...
...Only if this were settled could we be in a position to know exactly what is the relation between the individual soul and the Creator, or between conscious and mediate interpretations of divine law...
...But what is authority...
...But we do join with Father Ryan in suggesting that the cause of industrial, political and intellectual justice "will not be served by lecturing, threatening and antagonizing Catholics merely because they refuse to accept the anti-church variety of liberalism...
...This has, broadly speaking, been expressed as law and counsel by the Church...
...Well, for two thousand years crowds of saints and mere men have thus thirsted for spiritual virility and fled from disease of soul...
...But the experience of the Church, indicating that numbers of the faithful have avoided sources of spiritual infection as a result of counsel thus given, is an experience which the liberal may not be able to comprehend but at which he should not stare with an unfriendly eye...
...On the whole he did remarkably well, although his paper reveals the sovereign difficulty involved in trying to reduce the points at issue to generalizations or principles...
...These questions cannot be answered because it is impossible to get at the bottom of the evidence upon which the answers would have to rest...
...For one thing, "liberalism" has never been rightly denned, the chief synonym for it being the vague term "anti-authoritarian...
...For his part, the Catholic is a person convinced that he cannot be sure of his rights—or of doing the right thing—without a sanction above and beyond himself...
...We shall have more respect for the universal-mindedness of the American liberal when we find him less antagonistic to points of view with which he disagrees and less niggardly of the achievements of others...
...Perhaps the most ambitious endeavor to reach solid ground was the famous, if sometimes derided, controversy over divine grace...
...But above and apart from all these things there has been a solid mass of supernatural and natural reality which has always and everywhere been firmly annealed to the Catholic community—revealed truth, the promises and gifts of Christ, the virtue of reason, the rights of man...
...In all our present, limited views we are necessarily guided by experience and the conclusions to which reason arrives because of experience...
...Fundamentally he has agreed to this union, by an act of soverign will, because he seeks life...
...History, too, is a record not merely of ideals and heroism, but of human short-sightedness, error and passion...
...Villard...
...Indeed, one may go farther than that and say that the Index has probably been an apologetic disadvantage in the modern era...
...It is true, of course, that not everything is clear even now...
...Some of the sinning and erring manifestly occurs in what is broadly termed the "history of liberalism...
...For he himself, when the truth is told, carefully insulates himself against infection of another kind...
...Their experience gradually built up a fairly dependable catalogue of those actions and reflections which are calculated to hamper or impair the individual...
...He will not only covet life, but will also fear death...
...In short: the conscious act of being a Catholic is a personal deed, involving the whole personality...
...Numberless matters are debated pro and contra inside the Church, and even in the ethical realm the extent of free territory is indicated by the almost universal acceptance of the theory of probabilism— which means that one may act in a way of which many disapprove providing one has reputable support...
...Seeking to investigate a problem, he is annoyed to find the Catholic Church putting a ban on certain writings having to do with that problem...
...It should be obvious, for example, that the Index is not in the slightest degree effective as an instrument for curtailing the literary explorations of Mr...
...Criticism of this kind he is entitled to return with interest...
...Conscious and voluntary repudiation of this, either in whole or in part, has always meant, and will continue to mean, the eventual individualization of the Catholic and his separation from the body of the faithful...
...His faith is partly a logical conclusion, partly hunger, partly consciousness of divine virility...
...That Catholics have frequently sinned, or that even the highest ecclesiastical honors are not a guarantee of intelligence and virtue, is as plain as day...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 16
