V. The American Tragedy

“A nation is not what it considers itself to be in time but what God thinks about it in eternity.” — Vladimir Soloviev, cited by E. Tavernier in the preface to Trois Entretiens, Paris, 1916.

IN NECESSARY things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity (in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas), is a wonderful program, which should characterize all Christian cultures at all times. The Middle Ages were largely imbued with this spirit. The necessary element of unity was the Church and her dogmas. If a medieval prince gave a feast, he would have been extremely shocked to find that one of his guests did not believe in God or considered the crucifixion a myth. As regards the dress of his guests he would permit a far-reaching latitude and he would indeed be highly astonished if all his male friends would wear identical garments. Today we consider it quite natural that our left-hand neighbor at a banquet is an atheist, our host a heretic, and our right-hand neighbor an agnostic. Emily Post would probably severely censure anybody who would take exception to the religious views of his hosts or guests. It would be “tactless” and demonstrate a lack of good breeding. Yet it would be an even greater crime to appear at a formal dinner in sports clothes and not to don the rigorously prescribed uniforms: tuxedo or tails. So we have today disunity in the necessary things and uniformity in the “doubtful things,” not to speak of charity which has been replaced by ambition.

In order to illustrate the situation even more accurately one might take the example of a tree with roots hanging in the air and the branches fixed individually on iron poles. The situation in ancient Rome and in the United States have certain parallels when we remember that both countries served as meeting places for the most different religions. The Roman chaos of Isis, Mithras, Jahveh, Zeus, Kybele, Jupiter, and Saturn has been matched by Mary Eddy-Baker, Joseph Smith, Aimée S. Macpherson, and others. This variety of forms has caused religion to be held as something merely relative (an opinion not a truth). People who dogmatize furiously about the President, the gold reserves of Fort Knox, and the New Deal become suddenly vague, “broad minded,” and uncertain if they talk about religion. They look to the most abstruse laymen for “orientation,” and nowhere is the distrust for the expert greater than in this domain.* Astronomers, mathematicians, biologists, electrical engineers, and movie stars expound publicly their views about God, eternity, grace, and original sin, whereas nobody would dream of asking archbishops or professors of divinity about their opinions on atom smashing, protoplasm, or short waves.

Catholicism fits very badly into this “pantheon,” it fits into it only as ancient Christianity did into the multiform, liberal religious world of the first century A.D. Christendom was then considered to be an unsporting, disagreeable, exclusive, and totalitarian low-class sect, which “didn’t play the game.” Catholicism in the United States is frequently looked upon with similar feelings. One will find Unitarians in America who invite Episcopalian ministers to preach in their churches and — what is less surprising — Jewish rabbis delivering their sermons in Presbyterian houses of worship. This concessionalism and interdenominationalism leads to that famous nonsectarian attitude that culminates in the saying: “There’s truth in every religion,” which is precisely the gist of the parable of the ring in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The true early Christians never minded being used as living torches or as crocodile fodder. Sectarians now too often forget the tradition of these heroic martyrs, and the intolerance even of their sectarian fathers. One finds Presbyterian pastors using “Luther” as their Christian name and Lutherans who are called “Calvin,” oblivious of all the abysmal antagonism between the ex-monk and the dictator of Geneva, who founded their respective religions. One also wonders whether the rabbis preaching in Lutheran Churches know anything about Luther’s contempt and hatred for their race and faith. One at least can imagine how the refusal of Catholics to “play the game” adds to their unpopularity.

But apart from their unpopularity, they are in an extremely difficult and delicate position. This in spite of the fact that with their twenty-three million souls they are the largest religious community in the country.*

The relationship between the Catholic Church and the state in the United States of America is characterized by the absolute acceptance of the separation of these two domains by the Church as an “ideal condition” for all such countries. Catholics of the United States are entirely sincere in their acceptance of this allegedly “democratic” tenet of faith.²⁴³ The result, however, of noncooperation in the educational domain (the public schools themselves give no instruction in the Catholic or any other religion) has caused the Church the loss of millions and millions of souls. There ought to be somewhere around thirty-five million Catholics in the states, but there are actually only twenty-three, and this leakage continues. In Central Europe children of religiously indifferent parents received, twice a week, from the age of six to the age of eighteen, compulsory, denominational religious instruction.** But the National Socialists in their great admiration for secular tendencies have done their best to abolish all religious instruction of the young. The continuous leakage in the United States is going to render the percentage of Catholics smaller and smaller. Today the proportion is one to six, but tomorrow it may be one to seven or one to eight. Catholics live predominantly in the large cities of the Northeast, and though they try heroically to keep the number of their children from declining, they have great difficulties in competing with the high birth rate of the rural, Protestant South. The Catholic rural movement is therefore of cardinal importance.***

Another obstacle under the present inevitable arrangement of separation of Church and state lies in the frequent preoccupation of priests with the raising and administration of money and funds. The whole European clergy, Catholics as well as Protestants, received a salary from the state* (which, after all, should be nothing else than the organized community). Bishops in the United States necessarily have to spend much time with the problems of financial administration, and the refusal of the states to subsidize Catholic schools (as even Anglican England does it) adds not only a great financial burden to the expenses of the Catholics, who have to pay taxes for the state schools as well, but increases the material responsibilities of the Church. The generosity of American Catholics is therefore something really impressive and almost without parallel in the annals of the Church. Their share in the Peter’s Pence and in the upkeep of the Catholic missions is more than praiseworthy. And yet it must be emphasized that the separation of Church and state does not lie in the tradition of Catholicism which is concerned with a Catholic culture. The express condemnation of the abstract principle by Pope Pius IX is understood to have no application in countries like England and the United States. In the latter instance the quota regulations of 1924 have throttled Catholic immigration almost completely; the liberal Irish quota is the exception to the rule.²⁴⁴

A serious handicap in spreading the faith in the United States (which can be effected only through a very considerable increase in conversions) is the uneasiness and crisis in the intellectual sphere of American Catholicism. The Church in the United States is certainly not sterile in comparison with other religious communities and it can be said without exaggeration that her intellectual and artistic activities almost double those of all other “denominations” taken together. We can only speak of a crisis (which is no new phenomenon) if we think in proportional ratios and compare the artistic intellectual achievement of Catholic America with that of the materialist intellectuals on one side and the British Catholics on the other. The proportion of Catholics in the United States of America compared with that in Britain is numerically almost ten to one, yet if one compares the splendid list of British Catholic thinkers and artists with their American equivalents then the situation looks quite different. The reasons to be assigned for this condition are many; one might blame Jansenistic Puritanical²⁴⁵ trends which have found their way from St. Sulpice to Ireland and from there to the United States. But the class structure of American Catholicism, the lack of a historical background in the Northeast, the “racial” diversity and general animosity, the tradition of the Ku Klux Klan and the Know-Nothings, even a certain feeling of social inferiority have attributed to the present situation which is visibly improving. The lack of an important Catholic intellectual forum may have led to the loss of many well-known Catholic thinkers and writers (men like Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, James T. Farrel, Will Durant)* who had to begin under such conditions, and thus were enticed by the superficial brilliancy of the secular “creeds.”

The American Catholic, as a member of a minority, distinguishes himself by very few external traits from his fellow Protestant or fellow pagan — except by eating fish on Friday and his membership in the Knights of Columbus or other Catholic societies. He tries to keep among his coreligionists, and while he is proud of his religion there is sometimes, in spite of great zeal and uprightness, a certain despondency, timidity, and superabundance of prudence.²⁴⁶ He positively suffers (even if subconsciously) from the fact that he had nowhere, with the exception of Maryland and a few districts in the Southwest, a historic upper class, and that he further lives within the cities thus equally lacking tradition and organic connection with the soil. In a country of social registers and a still potent aristocratic and hierarchic tradition, this amounts to a considerable handicap. England, with her numerous Catholic old English families, a Catholic sector of the aristocracy and numerous converts in the intellectual world, is in a far more advantageous situation.²⁴⁷ And there are in addition the numerous witnesses of pre-reformation England in stone and brick, the castles and cathedrals of Catholic Britain which are only for the time being in Protestant hands.

It is therefore difficult and unjust to blame American Catholicism for not having produced an “independent” Catholic type. But if the Catholic is just a “plain American,” a “fellow like you and me” or a “regular guy,” then we do not deem the situation satisfactory. The “average American” is either a Catholic type or he is not. If he is not, then the Catholic has to decide whether he wants to represent the type of his Church or the (temporary) ideal of the masses. He cannot compromise on that provided he is aware of the existence of such an alternative (which he very seldom is).*

Yet if the dynamic American Catholic is aware of this issue then he must face another decision, another alternative — either he must go into some sort of Catholic ghetto (which still exists intellectually and socially to a certain extent) or go out and conquer the country for Christ. One has only to see St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York standing on a summer afternoon in the very shadow of the steel and concrete masses of Rockefeller Center to understand the essence of the Catholic ghetto more readily. The paradoxical side of that problem is that there are so many Catholics in that ghetto without having decided to be culturally Catholics. These Catholics, living strictly after the precepts of their religion, will nevertheless be helpless victims of “progress” and the industrial civilization with its identitarian tendencies. It may be exactly their fear of total assimilation which drives them into a state of separation and seclusion.** But this again does not cancel the tendency to be a “regular guy” and we see the Catholic striving to be more American than the non-Catholic American (taking the word American in its contorted, late nineteenth-century sense). And here we must not forget that mimicry is always a sign of weakness and defense. Defense is the characteristic of the Church in America in spite of her striving often to take the initiative and the offensive. It is also mimicry and the spirit of self-defense which led indirectly to the establishment of the Bellarmine legend and the emphasis the American Catholic puts on his loyalty to un-American democracy.*** Here and there the American Catholic’s “clericalism,” a timid reliance on priestly guidance in purely worldly matters, breaks through (the lack of an aristocracy leaves the clergy supreme) with the danger of giving the impression for a Jansenist puritanism. In this particular guise his “attraction” and magnetism is almost zero. To expand, the Church in America needs men of the faith who are also men of the world.

Catholic education in the United States is a problem in itself. The grade schools and the high schools have a level not considerably higher than the non-Catholic schools. Yet the colleges and universities — affected by the spirit of “intellectual democracy” — are in their scholastic attainments not always as conspicuous as they should be. But Catholic institutions of higher learning have a very special task, i.e., to provide America in general and the Catholics in particular with something new; they have to create a Catholic elite. While the birth rate remains the Catholic problem of quantity, the elite remains the Catholic problem of quality. The future of Catholicism in the United States rests on these two pillars.

But if the intellectual standards in colleges and universities were everywhere to be raised as high as responsible Catholics would like to have it, a large exodus of the students to the non-Catholic state universities, where they receive an education on the money of the taxpayers, is to be dreaded, seriously imperiling an educational system which has few endowments and is financially based upon tuition fees paid by the students.* Thus the competition of the secular institutions of higher learning and the lack of financial resources make the creation of a large Catholic intellectual aristocracy almost impossible. Other ways and means must be found to carry out this necessary task, and such first-rate institutions as, for instance, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto seem to promise a brighter future.

Another problematic chapter of American Catholicism is its political affiliation with political trends popularly (but not accurately) called “democracy.” Responsible Catholics (ecclesiastics and laymen alike) have by their utterances and writings created the impression that the cause of the Church and the cause of world “democracy” is one and the same. The most desperate efforts have been made to proclaim St. Thomas Aquinas, Bellarmine, and Suarez as “early democrats,” while the Founding Fathers, as we know, were opposed to ochlocracy. The skeptical attitude of the Church toward political mass movements in the past centuries is little mentioned in Catholic schools, and the students seldom become aware of the fact that the Church has a basically hostile and negative attitude toward the very spirit of our time (and rightly so). There is little emphasis given to the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX which makes excellent reading (and sense). Today more than ever before it is a timely document. There are in America few Catholics who would dare to read aloud (in mixed society) such a condemned statement as the one contained in the Syllabus taken from the Allocution Iamdudum cernimus (March 18, 1861):

The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.*

And there is indeed little probability that Pius IX would take a more conciliatory attitude toward “modern civilization” in our present year.

A Catholic may certainly be a convinced political “democrat,” i.e., a believer in popular representation. Such a conviction is not incompatible with Catholic dogma. This question moves clearly on the plane where In dubiis libertas is written in flaming words. But it is highly doubtful whether “democracy,” with its modern ochlocratic trends, agrees with the parfum of the Church which is monarchical, patriarchal, and “aristocratic” (in the qualitative sense). Catholic democratic parties could only be found in such countries where Catholics were a not fully respected minority — as, for instance, in the Second Reich. But hardly had the Center Party declared itself for “democratic” institutions (and the republican form of government) when the Bavarian deputies seceded from the party. The Catholics in Bavaria were a majority and thus they did not care for an egalitarian attitude so significant for the “underdog.” The whole rapprochement between the Church and popular governments with liberal principles dates only from the rise of superdemocracies, which proved to be even greater evils than their milder forerunners. Choosing between the ancien régime** and the Gironde, the Church would always have sided with the ancien régime; in the choice between Gironde and the terror régime of Robespierre, the Church would incline toward the Gironde. This is not the indication of a wavering, unprincipled attitude but the Church has to strive to establish the best possible conditions for a Catholic life and a Catholic existence. Said Pope Pius XI, “In order to save the souls of our children We would not hesitate to negotiate with the devil in person.”

Yet there is definitely the tendency in this country to identify Catholicism with popular representation and one must add that this attitude is represented sometimes by the best heads of the Church in America. There is Dr. Mortimer Adler who attempts to prove (not exclusively on Thomist grounds) that “democracy” is not only the best form of government but the only just one; there is a book called God and Democracy, written by a fine mind; and there are many numerous other attempts to come to conclusions which are dangerously close to an anathematization of all nondemocratic thought. Yet the most powerful argument against “democracy,” i.e., its lack of the element of love, often causes nothing but endless astonishment, because the line of argument of these Catholic democratists is purely intellectual-rational.* If one mentions to them Catholic thinkers of the first order who objected to ochlocracy, they are frequently labeled as “victims of the prejudices of their time,” which argument may turn out to be a boomerang.

This lack of respect for the postulate of liberty in doubtful things (In dubiis libertas) is similarly felt in the domain of theological thought. Thomism, in the American branch of the Catholic Church, has an almost absolute monopoly. St. Thomas is cited as practically an infallible authority and sometimes even a Jesuit may become apologetic when the name of Molina is mentioned. The necessity for unity is overstressed; a typical characteristic of every religious group in the diaspora. The fear is that the hostile majority may interpret as disloyalty friendly criticism within the Church. Yet it is difficult to see how these shortcomings can be eliminated unless the Church is successful in achieving three tasks: the formation of a Catholic culture at least in certain parts of the United States, the creation of an equivalent to a Catholic “Aristocracy,” and the conquest of the intellectual key positions. Unless these goals are reached the Church will necessarily have to continue to remain in the “ghetto,” and in spite of the fact that she alone possesses the full truth it will be her fate to be a “sect among sects.”

Catholics must not forget that their religion is far too great to be identified with any political trend, party, or ideology. (This does not hold in the negative sense as ideologies contradicting tenets of faith or morals are incompatible with the Church and must clearly be combated.) A Catholic supporter of the ideals of hereditary monarchy should similarly object to having “God and Monarchy” named in the same breath. Political parties and ideas come and go. Nations, governments, nay, even constitutions,* rise, decline, and perish. Only the Church remains. Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. The promise, “I will remain with you until the end of the world,” had been given to us by Jesus Christ and not by Thomas Paine or Robespierre.

We have dealt with the position of Catholicism in the United States more thoroughly than with the other “denominations” for two reasons: Catholicism is first of all the only important bridge between Europe and the United States, and, secondly, it stands side by side with the old American Whiggish tradition, the great positive spiritual-intellectual element in the American framework. Strange as it must sound, it is also the only uniting faith of the religiously disunited states, connecting the missions of the Southwest with the French-Canadian immigrants in Vermont and Maine, the Boston Irish with the settlers of Maryland, the Spaniards of Tampa with the Poles of Chicago, the Croats of Montana with the French of New Orleans, the Magyars of Cleveland with the Portuguese of Rhode Island and California. No other single religion in the states has such a racial and geographical record. There is also much less Anglo-Catholicism (or rather its equivalent) in the United States than in Britain. The Episcopalians are officially “Protestant” and many of them are tainted with modernism of the most outspoken type. The other religious communities, as, for instance, the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, show themselves preoccupied with material problems which seem to expose them dangerously to the magnetism of communism. The desire to be “progressive” engendered in them a fatal nostalgia for the message of the Kremlin, and the temptation to adulate communism is especially strong in the “liberal” Protestant groups.²⁴⁸ During the Spanish Civil War Protestant public opinion** was entirely in favor of the Communists, Anarchists, and “Democrats” who had committed delirious atrocities against lay people, priests, and nuns. On the other hand we find a most phantastic dabbling of laymen in the domain of theological knowledge and speculation and the efforts to reconcile the modern world with integral Christianity resulting frequently in the most amusing struggles.²⁴⁹

The great crisis of Protestantism in the Anglo-Saxon as well as in the Scandinavian world is intrinsically connected with the breakdown and shrinkage of the average man’s power of imagination; this is after all the loss of a faculty which is as serious as the loss of a limb or sense, or perhaps even more so. One of the most important differences between “modern” society and preindustrial society consists largely in the great antithesis between phantasism and realism, between man and machine. All fictional heroes in Europe, from Parzifal and Don Quixote to Peer Gynt and Dostoyevsky’s “Idiot,” are fantasist dreamers.* The “traditional” European, and especially the nonprogressive easterner and southerner, has almost always an “inner realm” of which he is king.** This is the reason why he does not feel the grim realities so keenly (as we outsiders imagine he does) and manages to retire into his realm of dreams like a tortoise into her shell. The total materialists (who are called “realists” without justification because their nonrecognition of metaphysics as well as lack of imagination makes them anything else but realists in a higher sense) have always led uncomfortable and drab lives, hurting themselves continuously, while the dreamer might live in all luxury among the creations of his phantasy. The dreamer and fantasist is in a way invincible while the “realistic” materialist is exposed to danger by more than one Achilles heel. The fantasist and dreamer has moreover the added advantage of a greater dexterity in the interpretation of the visible world, thanks to his well-cultivated artistic vision. With transcendental perception his eye sees through things and happenings, and he thus uncovers and senses the deeper causalities and reasons which remain hidden to the cold and expressionless fishy eye of the “realist.” Protestantism as well as technicism has contributed a great deal toward the firm entrenchment of “realism” in the modern world. The former preached an unnatural “soberness” while the latter actuated a real “desiccation” of the human mind.²⁵⁰

Already in decadent Rome, where a populace with a phantasy crippled through a megalopolitan way of life clamored for circenses, do we witness this decline of the imaginative and artistic faculties of a people. That process is today accelerated through the leveling tendencies in general education and the increasingly technical and collective methods of production. The average man from the nonindustrial world (South Italian, American Indian, Arabian, Persian, Ruthene, Slovakian, etc.), is often unable to read or to write, yet he is self-sufficient and can be independent of the artificial forms of megalopolitan amusement because he can sing or produce poems, carve wood, paint or compose; he is able to invent new fairy tales, to weave, to stitch, or to play an instrument; he is often a good conversationalist and his humor has roots without being derived from half a dozen funny papers; as a peasant he has a deep organic connection with nature and as a craftsman he can be a true artist, using all his personality to create objects of art. The craftsmen of Ur, Shinar, Lagash or Babylon had undoubtedly greater satisfaction with their finished products than the workers in Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant — in spite of the fact that the Ford worker can read and write (in order to send telegrams and read ads). Yet the workers of Detroit contribute less to literature than the Old Karelians who in spite of their illiteracy produced the “Kalevala.” It is even highly probable that all the great European epics were composed by illiterates and only later on recorded.²⁵¹

The decline of phantasy naturally engenders a decrease of the manifoldness of forms, because all new combinations (inventions) are nothing else but “Castles in Spain” brought to reality.²⁵² The terrifying lack of phantasy is also the reason for the imitative urge in our modern American civilization and the predominance of monotony in the industrial centers.* This decline can only be measured by comparison with phantasy (and intellectual-artistic production) prior to ochlocracy, mass immigration, and industrialization. Hardly is there anywhere in the United States a church possessing originality which has been built after 1840.** The houses of God are usually misplaced gothic or romanesque imitations squeezed in between dismal railway stations or surging skyscrapers. It is even more shocking to see the abortive efforts of town planning, or the Utopian habit of naming streets after mere numbers or letters. A cultured man cannot possibly live in room 6489 on the sixty-fourth floor of a house on the corner or 109th Street and 10th Avenue. This may be fitting for one of the unfortunate creatures in Huxley’s Brave New World but not for man created in the image of God.

We have touched already the problem of the child of technical civilization who is unable to amuse himself alone. Most English people suffer from the same shortcoming. Conversation is almost out of question. The South or East European (or the Central and South American) on the other hand is still able to sit and to talk or even to be silent and to look for hours thoughtfully into the sky. Not so the product of the technical world; he needs his artificial clubs and his very amusement is provided by an elaborate and expensive industry; this amusement industry is of an astounding manifoldness, it comprises not only Coney Island and Play-land, but also the whole legion of trashy magazines full of sex, crime, and financial success, and — last not least — the movies, this serialized production of daydreams. Even England has an average of 17,000,000 “picture goers” weekly in peacetimes; on Albion’s green island relatively good seats can be obtained for as little as fifteen cents in out of town cinemas for double-feature performances. Here the little man after the day’s miseries is received by a smart-looking gentleman in a tuxedo, usherettes with naked legs, and the sweetest fake smile, who accompany the “patron” to his upholstered seat where he receives consolation and forgetfulness.* Drugged by the oscillating pictures our little man starts to identify himself with the hero. He, the little accountant in the button factory, who is suppressed and persecuted by his boss, his wife, his daughters, and his “friends,” now identifies himself with the athlete of Hollywood on the screen, who chokes the tigers with his bare fists. Similarly, the elderly working woman seated next to him identifies herself with the glamorous daughter of the millionaire who has only to give a languishing look in order to have ten men with sleek black hair and buccaneer moustaches at the beck of a finger. Then comes the awakening and the emptiness. . . .

Yet the most important result of the shrinkage of phantasy is to be found in the lack of ability for religious metaphysical visualization. The decay of the imaginative faculty has in this field the most detrimental consequences.²⁵³ Eternal life, God and devil, the angels, the lives of the saints, Golgatha and the Resurrection, the whole theistic Weltanschauung surpasses completely the faculties of the technical homunculus, who like the unfortunate Apostle Thomas only believes what he sees.

The religious communities of the United States, in the industrial areas, who depend upon their flock financially, have therefore to interest their members in material, social, and political questions. These religious societies are in exactly the same situation as the “intellectuals” who follow public opinion instead of leading it, the press²⁵⁴ or the higher institutions of learning.²⁵⁵ The Catholics at least have nowhere compromised on the essentials. The “Churches” on the other hand, have followed the trend toward the left in a slavish way, trembling in their shoes lest they be accused of being old fashioned, reactionary, or uncompromising. The masses who cared more and more for security, after having lost their enthusiasm for the lottery of liberal capitalism with increasingly unfavorable odds, have induced the shrewder and more “farseeing” part of the ministry to side with Leftism, thus hoping for a longer lease of life. This involves the acceptance of socialist and pink tendencies, an enthusiasm for all humanitarian and “progressive” ideas like birth control, the surgical abortus, euthanasia, “free love,” and pacifism, not to mention the numerous inroads of modern skepticism, so that little of the depositum fidei remains. The residue is a pale, problematic humanitarianism, which looks with greater respect to the “Men in White” than to the ministers of their faith.*²⁵⁶

The inner crisis of America — the cultural as well as the religious and the political one — cannot be overlooked, although the prophecy of de Tocqueville hardly takes into account the older American tradition and sounds therefore less convincing. America’s great danger lurks at that impasse where lay government must forcibly change into an expert government.* This is the critical moment when Fascism, Nazism, or something similar might easily step in, and then all would be lost.

Fascism in the United States — where tradition is still a small, growing plant and society is forming itself under great pains, nobly struggling for organic integration — would be a thousand times more brutal, anti-cultural, and devastating than in any European country. The structure of American industrial society is far from vigorous or harmonious,²⁵⁷ nor does it possess an inner happiness and balance because it is still undergoing its “troubles of adolescence,”²⁵⁸ nor, finally, is it in a good position to oppose a well co-ordinated attack directed against its last shreds of liberty.²⁵⁹No industrial civilization, anywhere and at anytime, can resist a well-organized revolutionary identitarian onslaught, and the industrial areas of the United States are geographically too remote from its agrarian counterparts in order to profit from their “counterrevolutionary” elements.

There is an additional danger in the emptiness and monotony of “small life” in the United States, in the monotony of suburbia, in the small towns and in the agrarian plains, a monotony greatly created by uniformity. Boredom and routine could here easily make an appeal to vital energies looking for an outlet, aspiring to “action,” craving for adventure. James T. Farrel in his various novels has again and again portrayed the “lost young man,” in his attempts to color his barren existence by some form of violent activity. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Studs Lonigans who do not know with what to start their lives, and that is true not only in the big cities but also in small towns and villages. What after all can the average young man, eager for action in the world of today, do? Duels, crusades, discoveries have come to an end. The “inner kingdom” of phantasy and imagination has been dried out by “sober thinking” or comics and movies. Naturally, there is religion and the Holy Folly of the Cross, there is intellectualism (the consolation of the intellect), there is alcohol and sex (the adventures of despair) or, finally, crime: the attraction of Blue Jaw Magoon’s Purple Gang, the life of a “gorilla” or of an ace trigger man. The pent up energies of young manhood needs some sort of outlet in the stone deserts of Brooklyn, Detroit, or Chicago.

The solutions suggested are naturally of an extreme character; there is little likelihood that young men in large numbers will be drunk with God because there is little of the spirit of Clairveaux, Solesmes, Assisi, Loyola, or Beuron in the United States. Nor yet do they want to be candidates for the electric chair, nor are the higher intellectual values communicable to vast numbers. Political parties of the totalitarian type on the other hand promise “everything” — faith (in a worldly millennium), intellectuality (on a sentimental basis), drunkenness (with words), crime (of the “honorable,” i.e., political type). An American Fascism of tomorrow might actually attract all “better” elements leaving the scum to its pastime of drink, theft, and sex. Needless to say this is a dangerous game. It may be that these elements, having a free hand, would “save America” for the “White Man,” and Christianity might thus well-nigh become a tolerated religion,²⁶⁰ but the Church as such would suffer bitterly in the long run and the catacombs might be her last stage of development here in this country.*

In the sober forties there will be another generation, steeled by the war, grimmer in outlook, far more determined to have its own way. The generation of the twenties was one of despair, of despair for the “right reasons”; there is a danger that our decade will be one of wrong and false aims.²⁶¹ The issue is thus far graver. Most planning (whether it is done by ochlocrats, Fascists, Pinks, or Communists) points to a radical decrease of liberty. Yet there is no doubt that the end of liberty in America would be practically the end there of the Church.

These inner political issues of utmost gravity are now overshadowed by the grim realities of a total war in which our very existence is at stake. Conscription (and voluntary service) will absorb a large proportion of the young men who will profit from a little discipline and drill.** The hold of the experts, the presidential power, the importance of the ministries and the armed forces will increase constantly. This war may prove after all to be a great opportunity to make the necessary reforms which will reform lay power and recast party influences in a qualitative sense and thus avoid the danger of the formation of a mass party and the rise of a mass leader after the war. To carry out this task properly, to enact this transition without the further (lasting) loss of liberties for the individual needs divine assistance. Nothing is more difficult than to swim against the stream and to act against the “spirit of time” short-circuiting the development from ochlocracy to tyranny and to reach over to the “next” historical period, which must be one of freedom in an order supported by law and knowledge, not one of collective tyranny based upon a sensate hysterical animalism. There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.

The last war gave a few totalitarian teetotalers an ugly chance to pass a law which regulated the diet of Free Americans. The war is, as the Greeks have recognized it before, the father of all things. The present war may prove to be the turning point to a new era and the καιρός, the “time of opportunity and action,” may be nearer than any of us believe. The moment of necessary reform will come and the new way of life (both changes intrinsically interconnected) may not be so far behind. This new way of life must be the synthesis of two great traditions; the Catholic one and the Anglo-American one, Baltimore and Boston, faith and liberty. This new-old way of life must be like a tree with roots in the past, roots in the soil and its branches and leaves must be turned to timeless, eternal truth. It must not be made of paper; it must be living and pulsating, satisfying the heart as well as the intellect.

Poor and glorious America! Never in history has a country carried such great responsibility in its formative age, in its period of growth and maturation. Never in history have men of good will all the world over looked with such great expectancy and hope toward any other land. Never in history had a nation more bitter struggles to regain its balance, to find its soul, to shape its face than America. Europe was a hard and cruel mother continent to the Americas, covering them with her amorphous surplus population, dumping these in incoherent fragments over a young country barely emerging from its childhood and adolescence.

Without wealth and without tradition, without learning and often without piety, did Europe’s lost children arrive on these shores to start a new life, to help in building America. Never were men more cruelly exposed to the ravages of industry, to the temptations of money, to all heresies and aberrations of a godless century, of a faithless age. The Europeans in the shadows of their cathedrals, under the walls of their old monasteries, had something to lean upon, reserves to draw from. And yet, it is the parent who has fallen a victim, who has become the “Apostle of her Apostasies,” and it is America that has taken over the torch from her trembling hand.

Said Edmund Burke, America’s great friend and advocate:

The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western, was discovered; and that other will probably be its asylum when it is hunted down in every other part. Happy it is that the worst of times may have one refuge still left for humanity.*

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* It is significant that religion and politics are the two domains where modern man manifests such a deep conviction in lay intuition. “Democracy” has indeed for the secularized American the same importance in these instances, as National Socialism for the secularized German, or Communism for the irreligious Russian.

* There are twenty-three million Catholics in the United States. The sum total of people claiming church membership is sixty-four millions. Fifty-two per cent of the population of the United States profess no established religion. Other estimates speak of forty-two million “potential” Catholics. It is held that the official Catholic census can take no adequate account of the “floating” and nondue-paying Catholic population which would vastly increase the figures.

** This was usually done by a temporary division of the classes in three groups — Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. This religious instruction was not given by the regular teacher but by priests, ministers, or rabbis who drew a salary from the state.

*** Theodore Maynard writes in his book The Story of American Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1941), about the menace of the city birth rate in relation to American Catholicism. Reprinted in Vol. XXXIV, No. 23 of Commonweal under the title “The Lost Land.”

* With the exception of the Soviet Union and the Third French Republic.

* The Irish list would include such names as Liam O’Flaherty, James Joyce, Francis Hackett, and Sean O’Faolain.

* Theodore Roosevelt came out brutally against the Catholics when he said: “The Catholic Church is in no way suited to this country and can never have any permanent growth except through immigration, for its thought is Latin and entirely at variance with the dominant thought of our country and civilization.” A good half of these statements are at variance with truth, yet they express a real sentiment and like all half-truths they have a kernel of truth. The Catholics will have to change America. Omnia restaurare in Christo, is a program for the world which excludes neither the City of Rome nor the United States.

** See the estimate of Fr. Victor Dillard, S.J., regarding the Ghetto Catholic in his article in Etudes, April, 1940.

*** The reader is reminded again that we distinguish (following strictly Platonic and Thomistic principles) between a republic, a legitimate form of government, and democracy, its corrupted form.

* Even in spite of tuitions the self-sacrifice of orders (Jesuits, Christian Brothers, etc.) is necessary to keep Catholic education going.

* The sense in which the propositions in the Syllabus are condemned can be learned only by searching the documents from which they have singly been taken. No Catholic should disdain the accumulated wisdom of 2000 years. “Liberalism” is here clearly the continental, Rousseauan brand, not the Anglo-American tradition in the sense in which it is employed, for instance, by Christopher Dawson.

** The Church would naturally prefer the France of St. Louis to the superficial and frivolous ancien régime.

* The nonrational values play a very small part (if any) in Thomist philosophy.

* Even Jefferson was a bitter enemy of the idea of constitutional immutability.

** It will take a long time until the Anti-Catholics in this country will drop the charge against Catholicism that it is “Fascist.” This illusion is based on the usual ignorance concerning Catholicism as well as Fascism. The view that Catholicism is terroristic and based on violence while Protestantism is liberal, enlightened, and mild — is almost general. Read in this connection Giuseppe Gangale Rivoluzione Protestante (Torino, 1925). The thesis of this book is Protestant, Fascist, and Anti-Catholic to the core.

* That explains the lack of ambition of the nonprogressive European who always would feel outraged if accused of being ambitious. A young Englishman or American would consider the same characteristic as highly flattering; in France the remark “c’est un ambitieux” is extremely derogatory.

** The best conservative cultural review of Germany is called Das Innere Reich— The Inner Realm.

* William Dean Howell in his Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891) attacked phantasy as an “aristocratic” vice. “Democracy” in his opinion is bound to “realism,” i.e., Sachlichkeit, p. 321.

** This is typically “Protestant” limitation as the North European development of ecclesiastic styles stopped with the reformation. Neither did Catholic architects have enough courage to build modern churches. An imitation gothic church is not a sufficient or efficient challenge to pagan modernity. Modern art must be either destroyed or “baptized” and it can only be destroyed if we provide a living alternative.

* The June, 1940, number of the American monthly Screenland brought an article entitled: “Satisfy Your Suppressed Desires at the Movies.” Thus the cinema is acknowledged as a clearinghouse for Freudian “complexes” and a repair shop for defective personalities.

* Communism in the United States is thus largely an outgrowth of humanitarianism aggravated by the candid superstition of progress. It lacks thoroughly the interesting apocalyptic qualities of Eastern Bolshevism in its early stage.

* Which means either discrimination in franchise or ascendancy of the administration over the legislation.

* We will deal with this question (and the whole problem of American culture) more intensively and extensively in our next work.

** Neither should it be forgotten that a disillusioned generation well disciplined and skilled in the arts of war can become an even greater asset in the hands of a totalitarian leader.

* Cit. by Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1910).