BLANSHARD ON CATHOLICISM

...In the whispering silence of Harriette Arnow's mountain nights, our urban hysterias seem almost obscene...

...Frankly," says Blanshard, "I do not know," and adds '.hat he realizes that "the identfiication of honest criticism with religious bigotry is exactly what the Catholic hierarchy wants" lie takes comfort in the fact that Americans did not continue to hate Englishmen after the Revolution—a poor analogy, I tliink, since the situations are qualitatively different...

...Arnow tens' Nunn's story in the rhythmic and fecund language of nature...

...Now and then, though, we do get a Bober novel which plagues both these houses, and is drawn instead from the rich, cool springs of our own daily lives, a novel written without pretense, without despair...

...he does not run, as one wag put it, on The Truck of the Kafka...

...will only be achieved with its establishment as a "Catholic Republic" with the Roman religion the "sole religion of America...

...MR...

...Arnow represents a step backward (or is it forward...

...It is the giant world of Kentucky that matters, and the people of the Cumberland Mountains...

...and this being so, he and the red beast were tied together with a bond stronger than any made by God or man, be it the link between a man and his child or his wife or his land...

...Us flirtations with fascism and somewhat specious bandwagon campaign against the only modern totalitarianism that rivals its own...

...If there :-an be any major criticism of Paul Blanshard's book, it will not claim insufficient documentation (documents, dates, publishers and Imprimatur...

...and rather than working tine waaster up to metaphysical white heat, Mrs...

...To the American liberal's reticence to speak about "another mau's religion," he replies that "silence . . . may mean acquiescence in second-rate medicine, inferior education and anti-democratic government...

...Liberal Americans need to think again on the nature of the individual man, his freedom and responsibilities, and the moral stature of his institutions...

...508 pp...

...If most of our writers have been influenced "by Melville and Dostoyevsky, Mrs...

...n * THE STARTING GUN in "The Catholic Plan for America" has been fired in the area of public education vs...

...Strengthening tha...

...Reviewed by ANATOLE SHUB BECAUSE PUBLISHING IS A BIG-CITY BUSINESS, most of the novels you see around reflect either the personal tastes oi bright urban publishers' editors or else their formulized appraisal of what the folks in the sticks will go for...

...How to avoid the "Know-Nothing"' b rand of repressive partisanship...

...parochial instruction, and as Mr...

...On the negative side, perhaps most have some nwareness that the "National Office for Decent Literature" and the "Legion of Decency" intervene as censors in the publishing and motion picture worlds...

...Yet most Americans, accustomed to regarding the Catholic church as perhaps the most ardent Richard Archer is at the Harvard Divinity School...

...Non-Catholic Americans are more or 4 leas familiar with the suave homiletic technique of the Catholic Hour's zealous Msgr...

...The efficaiy of opposing "Catholic Action" by an anti-Catholic action movement designed to elicit similar mass-response requires m o r e consideration than Blanshard has given to it...

...and these have now earned a secure niche beside the Mississippi River boaters of Mark Twain and the Carolina townsmen of Thomas Wolfe...

...Blanshard raj Is for "a resistance movement designed to prevent the hierarchy from imposing its social policies upon our schools, hospitals, government and family organization," wherein "the will to defend American freedom...

...On the other aide—"for the peasants," if you will—you get a few choice miracle stories, numerous literary extensions of "Life Can Be Beautiful," and the 1,001 rewrites of Moll Plunders...

...BLANSHARD MAKES CLEAR that his book is "not about the Catholic faith but about the cultural, political and economic policies of the rulers of the Catholic Church," and affirms that "the Catholic problem," as he sees it, "is not primarily » religious problem," but an "institutional and political" one...

...But as contemporary political experience has shown, method is integral to the ends of resistance...

...Its arbitrary censorship of the arts and sciences, the press and the Aim industry—a censorship which "cannot be considered in isolation" inasmuch as it has "impaired the integrity of the media of information serving non-Catholics as well as Catholics...

...Blanshard has been at pains to show, in Mexico, in Austria, in Spain, and preeminently in Quebec, the issue has often been decided there...

...King Devil, the big fox, will of course be compared with Melville's Whale and Walter van Tilburg Clark's more recent Cat...

...among the many U.S denominations, but nonetheless as one competitor among many, may not be prepared for author Blanshard's sweeping charge of a qualitative difference whereby the Roman church represents an alieninspired, Italian-dominated "network of ecclesiastical power that reaches to every corner of the world," dominated by an autocratic clergy and an "infallible" temporal and spiritual leader, whose claim is dominion over all of Christendom and whose long-range program for the U.S...

...Blanshard surveys the entire area of hieratical intervention...

...in other words, the pap to shush the shrill cries of suckling Babbitts...

...Macmillan...

...But Mrs...

...By Harriette Arnow...

...is more important than the method of resijtance...

...for she springs from Mark Twain and Tolstoy...

...Toleration and compromise is, by Catholic diflnition, out of the question, for if the Catholic leligion by rig:it ought to be the "sole sovereign religion," all instruction is rightfully within its province...

...The moral subordination of medical practice to theological doctrine, particularly as applied to therapeutic abortion and birth-control...

...With the pristine serenity of Knut Hamsun's Grourth of the Soil, Mrs...

...no class- of men are more naturally aaafinaiil than the Catholics to transfer the doctrine oi the •quality of condition into the political world...

...How such a "resistance movement" could be inspired save by a kind of anti-Catholic "hierarchy" is difficult lo imagine...

...Reviewed fey RICHARD ARCHER OF HIS CO-RELIGIONISTS in America, Catholic Count Alexis De Toequeville wrote in 1835...

...fine becomes mast escplicit when she tells how Nunn "understood moat clearly that the big red fox had to run—he had to chase him...

...In the meantime, resistance will probably continue to be—as of necessity it has been for some time — on an ad hoc basis...

...Its campaign against Constitutional "separation of Church and State," especially in relation to public funds and parochial education...

...And finally, its notorious "neutrality" in respect to modern dictatorships and democracy...

...It is the story of Nun nelly Ballew, Cumberland Mountain farmer and fox hunter, of his family and neighbors, Of bis daily isolation and his brushes with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, of his attempts at making moonshine and, especially, of his nightly hunt of a big red fox called King Devil...

...Fulton J. Sheen, and many thousands unaccustomed to the sign of the Imprimatur, have found solace in Trappist Thomas Merton's exotic brand of "peace of mind," The Seuen-Storied .Mountain...

...The threat of a new "American Protective Association" should be weighed...

...On the one hand, you get aovels simply fraught with anti-Semitism, psycho-analysis, Southern racism, class struggle, and the neuro-muscular strains of hucksterism—all these given as a "public service," a genuflection before the mythical goddess called Art and the not-so-mythical bitch called social conscience...

...But symbolically enough, while King Devil exerts much fascination, he is hardly the entire book...

...Yet after hardly more than a hundred years, career-journalist Paul fJQlanshard has published, first as a jeries of articles in the Nation, and #ow in expanded book form, a bitter, "hard-hitting" indictment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America, charging it with being a vast political movement designed to impose its frankly "un-American" dogma and social policies "upon our schools, hospitals, government and family organization...

...Arnow's characters are people, not personified ideas or schematised ineohate forces...

...Employing a "documentary approach," Mr...

...Hunter's Horn is one of these rare books...

...are generously provided), nor prejudicial or "stacked" language (most of thi' occasianally emotive terms of the Nation articles have been-eliminated in the Beacon Press edition), but rather that, in attacking hieratical authority, social-reformer Blanshard puts too much authority in the claims of the modern "welfare state," as when he exalts "the people's law" over and against traditional "moral law".—an hypostatis that linked Luther with Hitler...

...thoy constitute the most republican and the moat democffHc claaa In the United Stales...

...The Giant World of Kentucky HUNTER'S HORN...

...Arnow talks about the fox with subtlety, by suggestion and kidirection...

...Its "medieval" canons en marriage, divorce and annulment...

...basis with new moral resources and ' a rejuvenated political philosophy of democracy seems to be the next step...