Glen Cook Garrett 04 Old Tin Sorrows
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Catholic Church, which is of most effect at the present moment upon the
political side of that Church's fortunes. This is because the French people
are themselves so strongly divided between clerical and anti-clerical;
because the organization of the State in France is so military and
mechanical; and because national feeling is perhaps more intense among the
French, in spite of their divisions, than among any other people.
Two factors are of especial prominence in lending to the attitude of the
French Government towards the Church such high importance today. The first
is the French influence upon the whole world through a mixture of lucidity
and energy in thought, phrase and action. The second is the central
physical position held by France. This last is but a geographical factor
and therefore only a material one, but it has its weight. When you read a
good French newspaper upon the affairs of Europe, you feel as though you
were standing upon a hilltop and looking down upon a plain all about you.
Paris is equally interested in London, Berlin, Rome, Prague, Warsaw,
Vienna, Madrid and New York, and the lines radiating from that central
point to the others are lines of moral communication, the patterns of which
upon the map are a symbol of that central station, with all its influence
of centrality.
French government has been opposed to Catholicism for fifty years. There
have been moments when the opposition has been more intense, there have
been moments when it has been relaxed, but government upon the whole
favorable to Catholic influence has not been present in the Republic since
the fall of MacMahon in 1877. A highly organized clique, largely masonic,
then captured the electoral machine and has kept it ever since.
It has often been said, and quite truly, that this state of affairs does
not reflect the French people. The French Government is, less than that of
any other people, the expression of national feeling. The system by which
professional politicians whom everyone despises share in rotation the
perquisites of their trade is disgusting to the nation at large; but it is
so fluid a system that it is most difficult to destroy. It was nearly
destroyed in the later 'eighties of the last century. Had the Great War
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SURVIVALS AND NEW ARRIVALS 58
been short and successful, it would have been destroyed at once. It was all
but destroyed in the July of 1926 when mobs began gathering to throw the
professional politicians of the Parliament House into the street. But the
thing has never come off; and meanwhile the clique in power remains still
anti-Catholic in tone and direction. There is an extreme case.
In Belgium, in Italy, in Spain, the tendency is other. But it still remains
true that even in the Catholic culture (and as a matter of course in the
Protestant), governments are, as supplements to Nationalism, out of step
with the spirit of the Church. This material strength of governments,
coupled with and supporting the far more important effect of Nationalism as
a spiritual power, forms everywhere an obstacle to full Catholic life.
It remains to discuss whether this exceptional contemporary force of
Nationalism, of the State as an object of worship to the exclusion of, or
at any rate, far superior to, any other object of worship, is long to
remain.
May we say that there are forces already apparent tending to its decline?
Can we reasonably forecast the coming of a decline in Nationalism during
the near future? Of course, in the long run such forces must appear,
because all human moods are mortal, Nationalism like the rest. But are the
tendencies present today so that we can watch them? And are there, besides
these, contemporary conditions which point to a future hostility to
Nationalism?
I think there are. Besides the Catholic Church there are at least two great
international forces (not to quote more) which are already clearly
apparent. One is that of Finance, the other is that of the protest of the
Proletariat against Capitalism; a protest which in its most lucid and most
logical form is called Communism. Both these act as solvents to that
religion of nationality which was universal before the Great War.
These two forces, International Finance and International Socialism, act
after fashions often unexpected, and the more drastic. For instance, the
big newspapers (and nearly all the Press of large circulation is purely
Capitalist--a mere propagandist agent for Capitalism) bang the Nationalist
drum as hard as they can--even to deafening and to weariness. But that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
