Rome's Supreme Attraction

...As Mr...

...Christian morals are in fact undisturbable...

...In the same journal one of the leaders of the Anglo-Catholics, Bishop Walter Carey of South Africa, expresses his shocked opposition to the resolution in order, as he puts it, "to clear his soul...

...On these themes no one, least of all our belauded 'frank' and 'honest,' over-sexed and promiscuously-minded, modern youth can keep an open mind for a single hour without risk of ruin...

...The Church should be the guardian of the moral standards of the faithful...

...Only Rome speaks with one voice on such themes, and these are the issues of life and death, of the survival or decline of the West...

...There is no authoritative moral theology which can tell us what is the final judgment of Anglicans and Free Churchmen on questions such as marriage, divorce, birth control, companionate experiments, abortion, euthanasia, suicide...

...It is to be found in its ethical rigorism, in that very sphere which Puritan Protestantism thought to be its own...

...ROME'S SUPREME ATTRACTION if A POSITIVE revolution in Christian morals" is A the way the Church Times, of London, the organ of the Anglo-Catholics, speaks about the resolution favoring birth control adopted by the majority of the bishops of the Church of England and of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States in their recent conference at Lambeth...

...This step, however, has been so patently imminent that its sensational effects were discounted by competent observers long ago...

...Thomas's words are so apropos under the present circumstances that we feel a somewhat lengthy quotation is thoroughly justified: "Meanwhile we can all be magnanimous enough to recognize that Rome, in a uniquely tenacious temper, is a steward of the mysteries, and not only of the mysteries, but of the moral witness of the Christian Church...

...George Bernard Shaw, think that the bishops have not gone far enough in favoring birth control and criticize them for not fully sanctioning divorce...

...It becomes increasingly evident that that gulf is less a matter of papal claims, doctrinal divisions, or racial or creedal clashes, than it is a difference on fundamental points of morality...

...This is the supreme attraction of Rome—its moral challenge to a high temperance, chastity and self-control...

...But perhaps one outcome of the Lambeth Conference, particularly of its stand in favor of birth control, will be to reveal the true nature of the gulf of separation...

...Other commentators, notably Mr...

...No merely human institution or organization can resist world changes...

...Anglican and Free Church leaders may also be found who are rock-firm for the Christian ethic, but they can commit no one except themselves...

...The supreme attraction of Rome is to be found not in its devotions or ceremonialism or the absolutism of its intellectual formulations...

...This is not to say that the judgment of Rome even on these themes is to be deemed always and infallibly right, but it is to say that public and private morals cannot be left to be settled by the newspapers or abandoned to the wanton impulses of the mob-minded or of individual caprice...

...News despatches from England inform us that the birth-control resolution, together with the action taken by the Conference sanctioning intercommunion between the Anglican Church and the proposed united South Indian Church which will include non-episcopal bodies, will bring about a bitter controversy between Anglo-Catholics and the various other groups which constitute the Anglican Church...

...For us it seems, of course, that it is the Anglican Church that has undergone the revolution...

...It is the iron bulwark of Christianity against the overwhelming invasion of the corrupting neo-paganism of our times...

...Christian morals remain undisturbed...

...Much was said on this topic at the Lambeth Conference but so far as the published reports of the proceedings have let us see, no very original nor helpful ideas were revealed...

...One correspondent goes so far as to say that there is a prospect of "secession" on the part of the AngloCatholics...

...and this it cannot be until it is reunited into a single corporate visible Holy Catholic Church throughout all the world—one Flock, one Shepherd...

...For us no revolution in Christian morals has been effected by the Anglican bishops, nor could there be...

...From a Catholic point of view, such an occurrence, while exceedingly to be deplored, is the most natural thing in the world...

...This point has been well illuminated by a Protestant writer, the Reverend J. M. Lloyd Thomas, in the Hibbert Journal for July...

...For this the descendants of the Ironsides and the Anglican inheritors of British Catholicism should be outspokenly thankful...

...One of the readiest errors of the shallower type of Protestant is to think that the attraction of Rome is to be found in its sentimental devotions and alluring ceremonial and in its guarantee of sameness and familiarity or usage and language in all the countries of the world...

...The Tablet, of London, calls it to our attention in a recent issue, and Dr...

...It is true that persons not knowing their own minds, tormented by restless hesitations and conflicts, tired and confused, in endless mazes lost, become desperate and resolve to settle all their problems by one general suicidal act of submission to infallible authority and to the direction of a universal, closely-knitted and impressively selfconsistent system of group-thinking...

...Catholics who are not Anglicans, or members of any other racial cult, will hardly accept the Church Times's definition of the Anglican birth-control resolution...

...Scarcely less erroneous is the idea that it is to be found in its provision of a definite and infallible authoritative doctrine to meet the doubts and uncertainties of an age in which even science itself is at sixes and sevens over its own ultimates...

...Perhaps none were to be expected, at least on the part of those who really know how deep and how increasingly unbridgeable the chasm between the Catholic Church and the Christian bodies outside of her communion really is...

...It has its bearing as well upon another subject very keenly discussed nowadays, namely, the reunion of Christianity...

...With the disputes between the Anglo-Catholics and the evangelical groups within the Anglican Church concerning matters of discipline and practice, Catholics of course have nothing to do and should have nothing to say...

...Having nothing to bind them together save the legal lines of their governmental establishment, possessing no court or centre or even principle of final authority either in morals or in theology, the Anglican bishops in this instance, as in many others, have accommodated themselves to the mood of their particular environment in time and place...

...But this is not the chief reason why Rome is now almost embarrassed by the number of its converts, especially from AngloCatholicism...

...But the resolution concerning birth control affects all Christians directly or indirectly...

...Shaw points out, the Anglican bishops have simply "given way under the overwhelming pressure of accomplished facts...

...Rome, whatever its past or present laxities of practice, is seen to be the one uncompromising corporate witness to that moral code of Christianity which preserves western civilization from final collapse...

...It presents the last loyalty of the human race to its own highest moral standards...

...they are final...