Mr. Blanshard Views the Irish
HERBERG, WILL
WRITERS and WRITING Mr. Blanshard Views the Irish The Irish and Catholic Power. By Paul Blanshard. Beacon. 375 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Will Herberg Author, "Judaism and Modern Man"; contributor to...
...He also has no sense of the complex interaction of religion and society...
...To Mr...
...Ireland is not the holy land of Bishop Sheen's vision or the horrendous "clerical state" of Mr...
...Above all, it seems impossible for Mr...
...if that is so, the attitude of almost all Jews and a large majority of Protestants in America is even more bigoted than that of the Catholics...
...There is fanaticism among marginal groups of superzealous Catholics, and the moral and religious outlook of considerable sections of the Irish people can hardly be characterized as mature...
...All this was known before, but we must not be ungrateful to Mr...
...Blanshard's recent book, the third in his journalistic crusade against Rome, is of little help to the openminded reader who really wants to find out the truth about Catholic Ireland and Irish Catholicism...
...To Mr...
...Blanshard to grasp the fact that the American type of public school is not the one and only kind of educational system conceivable in a free society...
...Nor is it possible for Mr...
...Irish censorship, official and unofficial, is by all accounts incredibly stupid and absurd...
...Blanshard does not try to be fair and objective...
...Blanshard's statist-secularist absolutism has some very disturbing implications...
...Nor is that all...
...Such a moral judgment," F. Ernest Johnson has well pointed out, commenting on this dictum of Mr...
...Blanshard's offensive is not against merely the Catholics, but against all Jews and Christians who take their faith seriously...
...Blanshard regard Ireland as the showpiece of Roman Catholic society in the modern world...
...Through its spiritual, cultural and social predominance, the Catholic priesthood has been able to make its will prevail in Irish life, to the virtual destruction of every thing Mr...
...To Mr...
...The result is that most of the author's denunciations of Catholicism as anti-democratic would be equally telling as denunciations of the views held by believing Jews and Protestants, as he himself must surely see...
...it is curious that he cannot see the difference) is exalted, population is declining and poverty growing, fanaticism is encouraged, and the people are kept in a state of "moral childhood...
...he does try most earnestly and he succeeds in being so much more in this book than in the two that have preceded it...
...Blanshard, the American public school is not merely an historically developed system which, on the whole, meets the needs of American society...
...various church authorities...
...Ireland, he tells us, is a "clerical state," in which a narrow and intolerant censorship is rampant, education is segregated along religious lines, sex is condemned, "chastity" (he means virginity...
...even so thoroughly different a system as Ireland's need not be "anti-democratic" under appropriate conditions...
...This outlook is just as rigid and just as sectarian as the fundamentalism of the so-called "Bible Belt," but Mr...
...Blanshard, the border between the Irish Republic and the northern Six Counties is not merely a Protestant-Catholic border or a British-Irish border...
...He goes on to complain furiously that in Ireland "children are taught that democracy is worthy of respect only when it accords with Catholic principles...
...Blanshard's thinking, the defect that vitiates not only this book but his others as well, is his iron-clad dogmatic orthodoxy...
...Blanshard even quotes the judgment of the authoritative Protestant scholar, M. Searle Bates, who says: "The Eire Constitution of 1937, generally approved in its working, deserves close study as an independent reconcilement of Roman Catholic concepts with a free society under special conditions of history and political needs...
...Blanshard plainly expects it to make our flesh creep...
...Or take the public schools...
...Although the Irish Republic is overwhelmingly Catholic, Protestants and Jews possess unrestricted rights of cult, worship and teaching...
...Blanshard refuses to recognize it as such and throughout speaks quite sincerely, though with a rather noticeable self-assurance, in the name of "American democracy...
...he sees Ireland as a central focus of infection sending its poison ("Irish Catholicism") through the length and breadth of the English-speaking world...
...After all, for centuries it was the Catholic Church that nourished and protected the elements that went into the making of Irish nationality and culture...
...Of course he has...
...Blanshard's nightmare...
...Blanshard testifies, "and it grants complete official freedom to opposition political parties and to opposition religious groups...
...Blanshard's other books on this subject...
...As Americans," Mr...
...Felim O'Briain, for asserting that the state has "no primary goal of its own...
...indeed, non-Catholic schools, conducting their education in terms of their own religious outlook, "receive full public support from the taxpayers on the same proportionate basis as the Catholic schools...
...For that he will have to go elsewhere...
...to him, a practice prevailing in Catholic Ireland must be taken as the unequivocal expression of Catholic doctrine...
...But these concessions are no more than concessions...
...In any case, since when has approval of religious intermarriage become a tenet of American democracy...
...Is it written in the Constitution, or is it part of a new kind of loyalty oath that we are required to take...
...Not that Mr...
...Blanshard proclaims, Irish Catholics "should believe in the public school as the proper place for the children of all faiths...
...As a result, despite his rewrite chapters on Irish history, he simply cannot see that the role of priest and bishop in Irish life reflects the deepest realities of Irish history and is not necessarily incompatible with a free society, no matter how incongruous it would be if it were transplanted to the United States...
...It is something much more complex and contradictory, but to get a fair and realistic picture of contemporary Ireland one will have to look beyond the sentimental eulogists and axe-grinding detractors alike...
...1 exhibit of Roman Catholicism in the English-speaking world...
...he is an absolutist who makes his version of the American pattern the fixed and final standard for the entire universe...
...Blanshard displays it as "the No...
...What he finds is so familiar that it no longer frightens us, though Mr...
...Blanshard's, "runs counter to the conception of religious liberty as defined by our courts and affirmed by religious leaders of all faiths...
...in them he surveys the "Irish Catholic empire in America" and assesses the "future of Irish Catholic power...
...The Irish hierarchy is pervasively influential, though by no means all-powerful, in Irish affairs...
...Is he suggesting that our loyalty to democracy should be unconditional and ultimate...
...Catholic power is apparently not altogether incompatible with democratic freedom, certainly not so incompatible as we had been led to believe by Mr...
...Almost all education is organized along "denominational" lines and therefore controlled by the...
...Blanshard has no sense of the relativity of traditions and institutions...
...But the gravest defect in Mr...
...Blanshard's thesis is that Ireland's democracy is hardly more than a facade behind which operates the "invisible government" of the Roman Catholic hierarchy...
...The prevailing attitude to sex and marriage is not a healthy one, and Ireland is in the grip of a serious population crisis...
...After all, Irish Catholics in America, of the same stock and the same teaching, show no comparable distaste for sex, marriage and large families...
...it is, above all, "a border in time between the democratic state and the medieval spirit of Rome...
...Blanshard for bringing it out again, even though he does so in his own peculiar way...
...Blanshard's rather narrow view of things permits him to understand...
...The picture of Ireland that emerges is not altogether unfavorable...
...it is a sacrosanct article in the creed of his religion of "American democracy...
...He denounces one of Ireland's leading Catholic theologians, the Rev...
...contributor to "Commentary," "Partisan Review" Both Bishop Sheen and Mr...
...Blanshard, apparently, the state is a kind of super-entity possessing goals above and beyond the common good of the citizens...
...Has he never heard of the "higher law" or of the declaration, "We must obey God, rather than man...
...Bishop Sheen hails it as "the last bastion of Christian civilization in the West," and Mr...
...He castigates the Catholic attitude to mixed marriages as bigotry...
...To Mr...
...Blanshard to see that the sour "puritanism" that he very rightly finds so deplorable in Irish life is not the simple consequence of Catholic teaching on virginity, but the result of a complicated interplay of factors, not the least important among them being the atmosphere of economic stagnation and hopelessness prevailing in Ireland in recent centuries and, on another level, the historical "accident" that brought about the consolidation of Catholicism in Ireland under the influence of the rigid moralism of Jansenism and the Counter-Reformation...
...Ireland's "political democracy is genuine," Mr...
...is this, too, a tenet of "American democracy...
...to him, this reveals a merely "conditional loyalty" to democracy...
...Life is much more complicated than Mr...
...This peculiar way of his can be very misleading, even when he communicates important bits of information...
...Indeed, there is much in this volume that must be gratifying to the Irish Catholic apologist...
...Blanshard's orthodoxy is an "Americanist" secularism, in which American culture is taken as the ultimate frame of reference and the American state and society exalted as the supreme majesty...
...The critical reader need not accept either of these judgments without qualification...
...Certainly Mr...
...But let him at least recognize that it is not merely against Catholics that his indictment runs, but against all people who do not share his statist-secularist idolatry...
...Blanshard, Irish Catholicism is "a superzealous and distinctive form of the original faith, more dogmatic than the spirit of Rome itself...
...His last two chapters deal with this aspect of the Catholic "menace...
...Who says so, Mr...
...To him, American democracy is virtually identical on its philosophical side with "scientific humanism" and on its sociological side with a uniformitarian cultural absolutism...
...Let it be granted that there is a good deal of truth in much of what Mr...
...Blanshard says...
...but, in his secularist absolutism, he can make nothing of either, and must therefore write them off as obscurantist, antidemocratic bigotry...
...Blanshard regards as enlightened and democratic...
...it is a subsidiary instrument to be used by citizens in achieving their common goals...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 7
