Autor: Bellco, Hilaire

Buch: The Great Heresies

Titel: The Great Heresies

Stichwort: Moderne als Häresie 4 - ; Aussicht: zunehmender Konflikt: Kirche - moderne Attacke

Kurzinhalt: Either the Catholic Church ... will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence; or the Catholic Church will, in this case as throughout the past, react ...

Textausschnitt: 126b So the Modern Attack develops and works. What does it presage for the future? That is the practical, the immediate question we all have to face. The attack is by this time sufficiently developed for us to make some calculation of what the next phase may be. What doom will fall on us?
Or, again, by what good reaction shall we benefit? On that doubt I will conclude. (Fs)

126c The Modern Attack is far more advanced than is generally appreciated. It is always so with great movements in the story of mankind. It is yet another case of a "time-lag." A power upon the eve of victory appears to be but half-way to its goal even perhaps to be checked. A power in the full spring of its early energy appears to contemporaries to be a small precarious experiment. (Fs)

126d The modern attack on the Faith (the latest and most formidable of all) has advanced so far that we can already affirm one all-important point quite clearly: of two things one must happen, one of two results must become definite throughout the modern world. Either the Catholic Church (now rapidly becoming the only place wherein the traditions of civilization are understood and defended) will be reduced by her modern enemies to political impotence, to numerical insignificance, and, so far as public appreciation goes, to silence; or the Catholic Church will, in this case as throughout the past, react more strongly against her enemies than her enemies have been able to react against her; she will recover and extend her authority, and will rise once more to the leadership of civilization which she made, and thus recover and restore the world. (Fs) (notabene)

127a In a word, either we of the Faith shall become a small persecuted neglected island amid mankind, or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, "Christus Imperat!"
The normal human conclusion in such conflicts that one or the other combatant will be overwhelmed and will disappear, cannot be accepted. The Church will not disappear, for the Church is not of mortal stuff; it is the only institution among men not subject to the universal law of mortality. Therefore we say, not that the Church may be wiped out, but that it may be reduced to a small band almost forgotten amid the vast numbers of its opponents and their contempt of the defeated thing. (Fs)

127b Neither is the alternative acceptable. For though indeed this great modern movement (which so singularly resembles the advance of Anti-Christ) may be repelled, and may even lose its characteristics and die as Protestantism has died before our very own eyes, yet that will not be the end of the conflict. This may be the final conflict. There may be a dozen more to come, or a hundred. But attack upon the Catholic Church there will always be, and never will the quarrel of men know complete unity, peace and high nobility through the complete victory of the Faith. For if that were so the World would not be the World nor Jesus Christ at the issue with the World. (Fs)

127c But though not in their entirety, yet in the main, one of those two fates must come, Catholic or Anti-Christian victory. The Modern Attack is so universal and moving so rapidly that men now very young will surely live to see something like a decision in this great battle. (Fs)

127d Certain of the most acute modern observers in the last generation and in this have used their intelligence to discover which way fate should fall. One of the most intelligent of French Catholics, a converted Jew, has written a work to prove (or suggest) that the first of these two possible issues will be our fate. He envisages the last years of the Church on this earth as lived apart. He sees a Church of the future reduced to very few in numbers and left on one side in the general current of the new Paganism. He sees a Church of the future within which there will be intensity of devotion, indeed, but that devotion practised by one small body, isolated and forgotten in the midst of its fellowmen. (Fs)

128a The late Robert Hugh Benson wrote two books, each remarkable and each envisaging one of the opposite possibilities. In the first, "The Lord of the World," he presents the picture of the Church reduced to a little wandering band, returning as it were to its origins, the Pope at the head of the Twelve and a conclusion on the Day of Judgement. In the second he envisages the full restoration of the Catholic thing our civilization re-established, reinvigorated, once more seated and clothed in its right mind; because in that new culture, though filled with human imperfection, the Church will have recovered her leadership of men and will inform the spirit of society with proportion and beauty once more. (Fs)

What are the arguments to be advanced on either side? On what grounds should we conclude for a tendency one way or the other?

128b For the first issue (the dwindling of Catholic influence, the restriction of our numbers and political value to the edge of extinction) there is to be noted the increasing ignorance of the world about us, coupled with the loss of those faculties whereby men might appreciate what Catholicism means and take advantage of their salvation. The level of culture, including a sense of the past, sinks visibly. With each decade the level is lower than the last. In that decline tradition is breaking away and melting like a snow-drift at the end of winter. Great lumps of it fall off at one moment and another, melt, and disappear. (Fs)

Within our generation the supremacy of the classics has gone. You find men upon every side possessed of power who have forgotten that from which we all came; men, to whom Greek and Latin, the fundamental languages of our civilization, are incomprehensible, or at best curiosities. Old men now living can remember uneasy rebellion against tradition; but young men only perceive for themselves how little there is left against which to rebel, and many fear that before they die the body of tradition will have disappeared. (Fs)

128c That mood of faith has been largely ruined, ruined certainly for the greater part of men, all will admit. So true is this that already a majority (I should affirm it to be a very large majority) do not know what the word faith means. For most men who hear it (in connection with religion) it signifies either blind acceptance of irrational statements and of legends which common experience condemns, or a mere inherited habit of mental pictures which have never been tested and which at the first touch of reality dissolve like the dreams they are. The whole vast body of apologetics, the whole science of theology (the Queen exalted above every other science) have for the mass of modern men ceased to be. If you but mention their titles you give an effect of unreality and insignificance. (Fs)

129a We have already arrived at this strange pass that while the Catholic body (which is now already in practice a minority even in the white civilization) understands its opponents, her opponents do not understand the Catholic Church. (Fs)

The historian might draw a parallel between the diminishing pagan body of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the Catholic body of today. The pagans, especially the educated and cultivated pagans, who then lived on in smaller and smaller numbers, knew well the high traditions to which they were attached and understood (although they hated) this new thing, the Church, which had grown up among them and was about to disposses them. But the Catholics who were to supplant the pagans understood less and less of the pagan mood, neglected its great works of art, and took its gods for demons. So today the ancient religion is respected but ignored. (Fs)

129b Those nations which are by tradition anti-Catholic, which were once Protestant and have now no fixed traditions, have been so long in the ascendant that they regard their Catholic opponents as finally beaten. Those nations which had retained the Catholic culture are now in the third generation of anti-Catholic social education. Their institutions may tolerate the Church, but are never in active alliance with it and often in acute hostility. (Fs)

Judged by all the parallels of history and by the general laws which govern the rise and decay of organisms, one might conclude that the active role of Catholicism in the things of the world was over; that in the future, perhaps in the near future, Catholicism would perish. (Fs)

129c The Catholic observer would deny the possibility of the Church's complete extinction. But he must also follow historical parallels; he also must accept the general laws governing the growth and decay of organisms, and he must tend, in view of all the change that has passed in the mind of man, to draw the tragic conclusion that our civilization, which has already largely ceased to be Christian, will lose its general Christian tone altogether. The future to envisage is a pagan future, and a future pagan with a new and repulsive form of paganism, but none the less powerful and omnipresent for all its repulsiveness. (Fs)

129d Now on the other side there are considerations less obvious, but appealing strongly to the thoughtful and learned in things past and in experience of human nature. (Fs)
130a First of all there is the fact that all through the centuries the Church has reacted strongly towards her own resurrection in moments of deepest peril. (Fs)

The Mohammedan struggle was a very close thing; it nearly swamped us; only the armed reaction in Spain, followed by the Crusades, prevented the full triumph of Islam. The onslaught of the barbarian, of the northern pirates, of the Mongol hordes, brought Christendom to within an ace of destruction. Yet the northern pirates were tamed, defeated and baptized by force. The barbarism of the eastern nomads was eventually defeated; very tardily, but not too late to save what could be saved. The movement called the Counter-Reformation met the hitherto triumphant advance of the sixteenth-century heretics. Even the Rationalism of the eighteenth century was, in its own place and time, checked and repelled. It is true that it bred something worse than itself; something from which we now suffer. But there was reaction against it; and that reaction was sufficient to keep the Church alive and even to recover for it elements of power which had been thought lost for ever. (Fs)

130b Reaction there will always be; and there is about Catholic reaction a certain vitality, a certain way of appearing with unexpected force through new men and new organizations. History and the general law of organic rise and decay lead on their largest lines to the first conclusion, the rapid withering of Catholicism in the world; but observation as applied to the particular case of the Catholic Church does not lead to such a conclusion. The Church seems to have an organic, a native, life quite unusual: a mode of being unique, and powers of recrudescence peculiar to herself. (Fs)

Next, let this very interesting point be noted: the more powerful, the more acute, and the more sensitive minds of our time are clearly inclining toward the Catholic side. (Fs)

They are of course of their nature a small minority, but they are a minority of a sort very powerful in human affairs. The future is not decided for men by public vote; it is decided by the growth of ideas. When the few men who can think best and feel most strongly and who have mastery of expression begin to show a novel tendency towards this or that, then this or that bids fair to dominate the future. (Fs)

130c Of this new tendency to sympathize with Catholicism and in the case of strong characters to take the risk, to accept the Faith, and proclaim themselves the defenders of it there can be no doubt. Even in England, where the traditional feeling against Catholicism is so universal and so strong, and where the whole life of the nation is bound up with hostility to the Faith, the conversions which strike the public eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy sacrifices involved in a public avowal. (Fs)

131a Lastly there is this very important and perhaps decisive consideration: though the social strength of Catholicism, in numbers certainly, and in most other factors as well, is declining throughout the world; the issue, as between Catholicism and the completely new pagan thing (the destruction of all tradition, the breaking with our inheritance), is now clearly marked. (Fs)

There is not, as there was even quite a short time ago, a confused and heterogeneous margin or penumbra which could talk with confidence of itself under the vague title of "Christian," and speak confidently of some imaginary religion called "Christianity." No. There are today already almost quite distinct and sharing the field between them, soon to be as markedly exposed as black and white, the Catholic Church on one side, and on the other opponents of what has hitherto been our civilization. (Fs)


131b The ranks have lined up as for a battle; and though such clear division does not mean that the one or the other antagonist will conquer, it does mean that a plain issue is defined at last; and in plain issues a good cause, like a bad one, has a better chance than in confusion. (Fs)

Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the Churches." The present generation cannot. There are not many churches; there is one. it is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set. (Fs)
131c Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn. (Fs; 16.07.2010)