Places and Persons

...Jean Mabillon, the French Benedictine archivist who visited the University of Salzburg in 1683, has left an account of an academic festival...

...Today we have our just part in the continuance of that apostolic activity Should the opportunity present itself to help man the Christian frontier in Europe, can we refuse...

...We should have no priesthood and no flourishing ecclesiastical life if there had not been given to us, in the pioneer centuries just ended, missionaries from every part of the old world...

...Little enough is left, one must concede, of the old Austrian mission to "hold the southeast" for Christianity...

...On the other hand, the significance of economic law had been impressed upon hundreds of thousands with unmitigated cruelty...

...And it is true, indeed, that many thoughtful men of today live in dread of a new invasion from the East which would not strip them personally of any worldly possessions but which might destroy things they hold dearer than life itself The worst aspect of a perennial conflict between conservatism and revolution, as now in progress throughout southeastern Europe, is its tendency to inculcate hopelessness...

...Not Heidelberg itself has greater symbols of man at his loftiest than this city in which catacombs from the era of Roman persecutions blend with fastidious baroque churches and contemporary manifestations of literary or even architectural art (for here one may see a notable sample of the "modern" building style, which seems destined to memorialize the spirit of today...

...The passing of the old order with the war placed Christianity midway between unparalleled progress and almost unexampled danger...

...He reported that many of the nobility of Austria were in the audience, seeking refuge here—Turcorum metu eo refugere coacti—from the threat of Turkish invasion...

...The United States, more than any other country in the world, is evident proof of the assertion that the Church's dominion is world-wide...

...Whether the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat are Bolshevistic or not, they are at once a critique of existing inhumanity and a commentary on a world conceived of all too materialistically...

...Max Reinhardt, enthusiastic as ever, has declared that this project interests him vastly more than theatre or cinema ever could...

...In this way the doctrine of Von Ketteler might victoriously rival the theory of Marx...

...From both points of view, the needed centre for a new intellectual advance and the necessary bulwark against destructive ideas, the revival of Salzburg has been undertaken, one may say, by the Church itself...

...Nevertheless it is too late in the day to believe in intellectual isolation...

...They have already taken the prospectively rejuvenated university under the shelter of the abbey, and have appointed to the faculty one of their most brilliant scholars—the well-known psychologist, P. Alois Mager...

...But wholly apart from the current prestige of the order, there is its illustrious tradition in south German history...

...And now, of recent years, the ancient town has once more come to life...

...Nevertheless there are a hundred kinds of spiritual riches in Austria...

...That was during the days of the large and fervent baroque culture which rejuvenated central European civilization with religious humanism...

...In Germany proper, academic conditions are such that the desirable thing is to maintain a quota of Catholic professors in the important state universities—Munich, Bonn, Berlin and the rest...

...Yet, though they love all these things well, the leaders of the Church in the Germanic countries would hardly stake much upon them just now...

...New liberty, the disappearances of customs which had become restrictions, opened the way to an apostolate freer of the trammels of institutionalized endeavor...

...The third faculty—jurisprudence— is particularly desired...

...religious caring for the orphans and the poor whose number had multiplied so greatly during the war...

...and it stands to reason that southeastern Europe, so fearfully unsettled, must be the great proving grounds for new Muscovite apostles...

...All of Catholic Germany and Austria has caught up the idea and resolved to go ahead with the work to be done...

...This is the way we have learned to live...

...Christianity, one may well remember, is a creed of hope as well as a religion of faith...

...Now these as well as the masters of theatre and melody have been stirred by a momentous dream...

...It is true that university problems are acute and difficult to solve in this country—that unawareness of the need and dearth of equipment weigh heavily on many shoulders...

...Secondly, the atmosphere of Salzburg is as definitely, ineradicably cultural as that of any other old-world university town...

...Meanwhile there really have been simple and solid citizens in Salzburg—merchant tailors inured to the feel of cloth...

...Then, with the coming of a new and more nationalistic age, the old school was forced by the government to restrict itself to a theological faculty...

...Only a brightening of the intellectual horizon by new confidence in the right—which includes dispelling the clouds of mistaken idealism and bad science can awaken energy, foster courage and improve the status of the race...

...There remain in Salzburg the original structures once occupied by the university which Paris Lodron, likened to Pericles by his fellowcitizens, had established in 1622 to become the "Alma Benedictina" of the Austrian world...

...So long as there goes, somewhere in the world, a shadow of a surviving Austrian, its contour will have something of Benedictine "discretion...

...We owe to him all our culture in every sense of that word, whether direct or attributed...

...There are many who believe the power of Marxism to be greater than ever before...

...The Festspielhaus, committed to drama remote from ultramodern tastes and to the performances of the Vienna orchestra, became a meeting place for the world's artistic elite...

...Beyond this Salzburg had only a gymnasium and its memories...

...In Salzburg the Benedictines have been at home for ages...

...Every procession in history that went down the Danube moved through the shadow cast by these hills...

...There are many reasons why a university under the auspices of the Church, and serving as a rallyingground for Catholic intellectual forces in the Germanic countries, should be established precisely here...

...But the names are those of places where the lights of the past burn late—the glitter of old seigniories set against the wellnigh eternal twilight of monastic peace, river and castle turret...

...And Herman Bahr, returned from virtually all the modern literary crusades, conferred upon the town his fervent blessing...

...Max Reinhardt suddenly conceived the idea of reviving the mediaeval play...

...Beyond that, the opportunity to labor for international peace and understanding according to the spirit of natural law and supernaturally infused charity is very real and important...

...An effort to effect a liaison with the United States is already in progress and, for reasons which are obvious, merits support...

...Of course such a juridical program cannot remain independent of philosophy and theology, with which sciences it blends in that "wholeness" of Weltanschauung which Cardinal Newman held to be the ideal of university life...

...From them we have derived our law and customs, our domestic virtues and arts, the way we mourn or make merry, Latin and Greek, drawing and poetry and acting and music, as well as all our social forms...

...Hugo von Hoffmansthal came to dedicate his sad romantic genius to the enterprise...

...About all this you may read in the books of Joseph Nadler...

...Indeed it is hoped that this committee may become the power destined to bring about intellectual cooperation between scholarly Catholics throughout the world...

...Today the solid citizens and the artists are banded together to restore the old university...

...It can develop, in the light of modern findings and conditions, those principles of "Christian sociology" which so many German Catholic scholars of an older generation labored hard to establish...

...It is not penniless but it is very poor...

...Meanwhile, however, the university is the thing...

...First and foremost, there are the Benedictines themselves...

...He found his way to Salzburg, made a friend of the abbot, and got permission to use the fagade of the great minster as a background for Everyman...

...To quote Herman Bahr: On every page of the chronicle of Austria, one meets Saint Benedict...

...The Benedictines cleared the forest and taught Austria how to hunt and fish and raise wheat, how to build and how to tend the vineyard, how to pray, think, read, write and add up sums...

...While the financial stringency with which Germany is now afflicted must preclude any rapid carrying out of the plans made, the committee looks forward to restoring the three faculties of theology, philosophy and jurisprudence which once made Salzburg renowned and which now constitute the nucleus of European higher education...

...Mozart came there to coax unforgettable harmonies out of A Flat and F Major...

...Ecclesiastically speaking, the chief sponsors are the cardinal archbishops of Munich and Vienna...

...Tremendous spiritual yearning, unleashed by the discovery that so many smart nineteenth-century gods were hollow and impotent, actuated a "movement toward Christ...

...Harder and possibly more virile tasks are on the carte du jour...

...The university committee is, therefore, a roster of distinguished names, many of them less well-known here than they should be, others universally famous...

...The university itself, renowned for scholars and poets, earned the right to term itself the centre of drama and humanistic verse...

...and even, I suspect, a policeman or two to keep the urchins off the lawns...

...But in Austria...

...Reduced to being a small republic, the old empire of the Hapsburgs limps disastrously about its economic, political and cultural tasks...

...For motives that far transcend local conditions, Rome itself has sent out heralds of blessing and approval...

...One does not doubt that the Salzburg idea will cdmmend itself to numerous Americans...

...Beyond that all Catholic cultural agencies in Germany and Austria have joined hands in support of the venture...