The Anglo-Saxon and the Catholic Church

I

‘PATRIOTISM is the religion of the English’ — that epigram, applied to any English problem, gives you the core of its truth.

Applied singly to any individual matter, — especially the matter which I deal with here (the position of the Catholic Church in modern England), — it is necessarily and grossly insufficient. But as a character explaining what foreigners find it difficult to understand, and as a statement supplying the main directive of all English affairs, the formula stands: ‘Patriotism is the religion of the English.’

In the matter of the Catholic Church, therefore, we must, first of all, consider the relation between that international organism and the national emotion, at once profound and vivid, which especially distinguishes the English people among their compeers throughout Europe. The principal issue in the whole affair is the issue between an intense national feeling and something not specifically national; something which of its nature must act independent of nationality.

But anyone who would state the problem fully must add two other factors.

Before I mention these, I should enter a caveat. I am about to state two things which are not only true, but importantly true, and yet which appear paradoxical; two truths which might, taken superficially, appear contradictory.

(1) The first is this: England alone of the ancient provinces of European civilization, alone of the regions in which civilization took root at the very origin of our Christian culture—England alone, in all the fully-matured tradition of the Roman Empire, broke with the unity of Christendom four hundred years ago.

The other defalcations from unity would not have affected the history of the world — the revolt of the German provinces in the north, and of Scandinavia, would have withered away in time; everywhere else throughout the Occident, the revolt against unity was mastered; especially in France, where it threatened to overwhelm society. By the seventeenth century the bulk of all that counted in the tradition of our civilization of the West, all that we inherit from the traditional culture of Rome (whereby we live) had settled back onto its natural basis and seemed again secure. But Britain had definitely taken a divergent course.

After 1605 (I take that for the pivotal date) England had become, on the whole, Protestant; yet, while Protestant, it retained some essence of the old Catholic culture. You may see that in two forms, first in the literature, which is essentially Catholic down to the first quarter of the seventeenth century; next, and much more powerfully, in the position of the gentry. The gentry took advantage of the great religious quarrel to seize economic power, and ultimately to destroy the Crown; they turned England into an aristocratic state, which would not tolerate monarchy or the popular idea in any form; but never did the English gentry, as a body, — they do not to this day as a body, — forget the original Catholic culture from which they sprang.

One might summarize this first truth by saying that England alone of the Protestant regions of Europe retained throughout her national organism, and particularly in its most conscious part, the gentry, strong memories of her traditional culture, of the spirit which had made her: that is, of the Catholic Church.

I do not mean that England retained such memories through her retention of external moulds, such as a formal episcopacy, a liturgy largely translated from the old liturgy, and so forth — for these are but the dead husks. I mean that everywhere throughout the English nation there lingered, like a personal memory, something of the Catholic past.

(2) Now the second truth, which, as I have said, may seem at first contradictory to the first, and the enunciation of which must therefore seem paradoxical, is this: of all the great modern national groups, England is that one in which the Catholic Church is most thoroughly ignored; England is that one of the modern nations in which there is the deepest ignorance of the Catholic Church in its practice, daily habit, and immediate, obvious, effect upon character and life. The English are that one modern white people in which the average man could tell you least as to what the Catholic Church is; England is that one western European country in which Catholic culture, and Catholic tradition in the world as a whole, are most completely unknown.

In Holland, more than one third — but not one half — of the people are of Catholic culture. In Ireland, the Catholic culture, though producing a violent reaction against itself, is of the very blood of the people, and is everywhere thoroughly understood — even taken for granted. In the artificial Reich which Prussia imposed over the greater part of the Germans, the Catholic Church formed a very large minority — comparable to the Catholic minority in Holland. In the German-speaking world as a whole, the Catholic culture represents exactly one half of the people. The great restored nation of Poland — which ignorance has not yet learned to treat seriously, but to which so much of the immediate future in Europe belongs — is intensely and vividly Catholic. In Hungary, the Catholic has killed the Bolshevist movement. The new Yugoslavia is half Catholic.

Wherever you go throughout European civilization, the nature, the action, the character, of the Catholic Church is a familiar thing. In England it is oddly unknown. Men know that the Catholic Church is there, as I know that Chinese literature exists; they have no conception of what it is.

I say that between the first and the second of these propositions there is an apparent contradiction; but the contradiction is apparent only, nor is there any paradox.

The apparent contradiction lies in the apparent similarity between knowledge and instinctive memory; in reality, these two are very different things.

To know a particular emotion, or a particular culture, is one thing; to have an instinct of it remaining in one’s blood is quite another. It remains true at one and the same time that England, being, alone of all non-Catholic regions, a region of ancient pristine civilization, has in a myriad ways — but especially through its most articulate part, the gentry, till quite recently the governing class — an instinctive attachment to the culture by which England was brought into being; yet is also now entirely alien to that culture, so far as direct knowledge is concerned.

Not only is the Catholic Church unknown in England, and that in a degree really astonishing to anyone of general European acquaintance; but Catholics within England take the position for granted. The Catholics of this island, Great Britain, are more than one twentieth, but less than one sixteenth, of the total population; even of this tiny fraction much more than half are Irish; and of the remainder a good half again are influenced by the Irish connection: they are either sons of an Irish parent, or married into a family of Irish descent.

In other words, of purely English Catholicism in this island, wholly English in tradition, you have, perhaps, more than one per cent of the people, but certainly not two per cent.

The contrast between this little body and the Anti-Catholic England around it is due, in some degree, to the memory of what was for generations a fierce persecution. After this came the dread of appearing non-national, let alone anti-national. These two things combined still prevent the English Catholic from playing the political part which the Dutch, the German, the Swiss Catholic plays. The world around the English Catholic treats his religion as a sect among other sects, and he too often comes perilously near to accepting this absurd and humiliating error.

Not that he ever falls into the puerility of confounding faith with opinion, or of mixing up reality with the phantasms of the mind; no Catholic ever descends to that, or can in the nature of his creed ever descend to that. But there presses round him a packed society in which faith (as distinguished from opinion) is unknown, and in which the idea of a reality outside of man’s judgment, and of authority as a function of reality, are equally unknown. The English Catholic tends to talk in terms of the society around him; he is driven to do so by the nature of his exile.

Thus it is that, in all the great political quarrels of our time that have arisen between the Catholic Church and the reaction against it, the English Catholic has — alone out of Europe—remained silent, or, at any rate, has not taken part in the universal European movement. Thus it is that he has not shown any active sympathy with the great Catholic nations struggling against Protestant domination, and particularly with the Poles in their heroic and now successful duel with the Prussians. Thus it is that he has, if anything, exaggerated his antagonism to the claims of the Irish.

II

Now put all these things together, and I think you will see what the position of the Catholic Church in England is, and what in particular are the attraction, the difficulties, the heroism, the failures, and the success of the English convert: that is, of the Englishman who, in the midst of such forces, openly accepts the Authority of the Faith.

The tripartite complex of forces which I have described — national feeling, a Catholic tradition, a total ignorance of the Church — comes into play against every man of the more educated kind who, in the society of England, approaches or considers the Catholic Church. The instructed, the traveled, the traditional Englishman has it in his blood to be concerned with that from which all his cultivation, all his art and rhythm, all the things around him which he loves, down to the very details of the landscape, proceeded. The clothes, or forms of Catholicism are still about him; and, apart from that, he has inevitably an hereditary longing which hardly allows him to leave the old religion alone. It is astonishing how very large a proportion of the men who have passed through the universities and through the learned professions, have, at one time or another, come — I do not say to approaching the Catholic Church, still less to attempting a habitation of it, but at least within sight of its coasts. It is astonishing to discover in how many has been roused something more than curiosity; something like the spirit of exploration and adventure, by that land-fall.

These things cannot be put numerically; there is no census. You are dealing, not only with indefinite gradations of feeling, but with very numerous categories of emotion. But I think one might say, roughly, that for one man who is known to have approached the Catholic Church and to have considered reconciliation with it, in this country, there are certainly ten who, in their heart of hearts, have considered the matter; and for one man who actually accepts Catholicism and is baptized, there are more than twenty who have at some moment or other in their lives considered the matter.

Yet (and here again the apparent paradox appears) in no country of the civilized West is there such a gulf to be crossed.

I have myself personally known perhaps fifty men who had very seriously considered the claims of the Roman Communion, and who at some moment in their lives had admitted those claims, who had felt with regard to the Catholic Church that it was a sort of home which they were asked to enter, and the entry to which they could with difficulty refuse; and yet who remained (up to within the very moment of their entry — such as entered) ignorant of quite elementary details in Catholic life. It was like watching the poor marveling, in winter nights, at the houses of the rich, all lighted and warm, yet knowing nothing of the real life within.

I recollect one case (which, as these words can now no longer come beneath the eye of the man concerned, I have the right to quote) where a perpetual attraction toward the faith did not exclude the ignorance of so elementary a detail as that Mass is not to be heard in the afternoon. I only give this as a tiny, vivid concrete example. I think it will serve.

The man approaching the Catholic Church in England or even examining it, has, I say, to face the combination of these three forces: a profound ignorance (as, for instance, an ignorance of what intellectual freedom the Catholic especially enjoys); an hereditary attraction, a very strong national repulsion. This last — nationalism — is by far the most practical, obvious, immediate factor in the whole affair.

To repeat the formula with which I opened this paper, ‘Patriotism is the religion of the English.’ The whole of English history has been marked, for now nearly ten generations, with the profound stamp of a national isolation from Christendom. What really happened in the generation between those who could just remember the Mass and those who were brought up Puritan in the seventeenth century— what really happened to the generation born between 1580 and 1600 — was the acceptance of a national Church. Not of national doctrine, not of a specific national heresy — or national truth, whichever you choose to call it — but of a civil system wherein an Englishman should be English throughout and owe allegiance to nothing whatsoever but England — not even to a general and, therefore, a cosmopolitan creed.

The man, his descendant, who is to-day most attracted to the restoration of unity in Christendom, the Englishman who is most profoundly affected by the call of the Catholic Church, remains to the end, until the last step is taken hesitatingly or heroically, an Englishman, who only hesitates, or needs heroism, because England is not of the Faith. He nobly feels — to put it rather violently — the dread of treason: that is the long and short of it.

Conversely, the Catholics whom such a man has known have always been presented to him — not wholly unjustly— as having in them something alien. Either they are Irish, or they are (as I am myself), a man with a foreign name. Or, if their name is English, there will always be, somewhere — as is inevitable with the Catholics — some international connection.

The most intensely national of all Englishmen are, perhaps, the ’old’ Catholic families, as they are called. Most of them are not old families at all. Those of them who are old families have mostly been singularly uncertain in their Catholicism under persecution. Yet even among these, the moment a man is a professing Catholic, you have inevitably a devotion to certain shrines that are not English, — Lourdes, for instance, — a sympathy with certain movements outside the nation, a communion with the idea and the time of a united Christendom.

In this connection I must conclude with a very important side issue. It is often asked whether that most profound of European changes, the change of an Englishman from his normal attitude to an acceptation of the Catholic Church, would not be made easier if the position of the Catholic Church itself were to change. It is often asked whether something which to-day seems quite impossible, but of which many great minds have dreamed, — the general conversion of England, — might be effected if the Catholic Church were to accept, in some degree, what is called in the mouths of many, ‘modern thought’; in the mouths of others, ‘progress’; in the mouths of others, again, ‘science’ — and so on. It is suggested that there lies hindering the acceptation of the faith by individual Englishmen (and still more hindering an acceptation of the faith in the Mass) some attitude in the Catholic Church which the reason of modern man cannot accept. The thing thus stated connotes a difficulty in reconciliation between two things which are antagonistic only through the folly of one; much as reason is antagonistic to mere habit, or as acquired knowledge is antagonistic to a routine of ignorance.

To all such suggestions, but particularly to those suggestions when they are made in connection with the conversion of Englishmen, I should reply that, the very proposal of such things, the very suggestion of compromise between the Faith and what-not, shows complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is.

The conflict is not between tradition and reason, or between routine and acquired knowledge; or even between the modern ethos and an antiquated ethos. The conflict is between two philosophies. In the one — that of the Catholic—the position of the opponent is fully understood; in the other — that of a non-Catholic — the position of the opponent is misunderstood.

It is necessary, therefore, for every Catholic in his apologetics, and even in so general an article as this, written by a Catholic, to reiterate what ought to be common knowledge, not only among educated men, but throughout the world in which the Catholic Church exists as an active force.

The doctrine, the practice, and the morals of the Catholic Church proceed from a certain conviction which is not antagonistic to, but indifferent to, mood or opinion. They proceed from a conviction that there exists upon this earth a certain living Organism possessed of a Personality, expressed by a Voice; that this Organism is of Divine Institution; its personality that of the Creator Himself, as impressed upon a corporation necessarily human in its functions; its Voice, the recognizable voice of That which made, upholds, continues, and beatifies the universal scheme.

Believing this, it must be a matter of profound indifference to every Catholic what the transient mood of 1622, or 1722, or 1822, or 1922, may be. That is obvious. If the mood is for the moment pantheistic, or, earlier, deistic, or, earlier again, atheistic, or, earlier still, Puritan, and so forth, no Catholic can concern himself with that.

What is much more important (for it is a real issue), no Catholic can hesitate between the Voice whose Divine Authority he recognizes, and even an apparently complete conclusion due to experiment.

When men say there is no conflict between Faith and Science, they are right in practice, for no established conclusion of experiment has ever in practice been challenged by the Faith; but in theory they are wrong; for, should any result, apparently arrived at conclusively by the use of experiment and of reason working upon sensual experience, clash with an authoritative definition of the Church, the former would be denied by every Catholic and the latter accepted.

An example from mundane things may make this clear. I trust my senses more than I do a map; the English sixinch Ordnance Map, drawn up by the authorities at Southampton, is the most perfect and accurate document I know; it is far the best piece of cartography in existence. I am certainly bewildered and puzzled if I find on the six-inch Ordnance Map a road where, before my very eyes, there is no road. I certainly, at first, think it is I who have made a mistake, and not the map. But if, after checking the matter fully, I find that, without a doubt, the ploughed field at which I am looking is that very area on the six-inch Ordnance where a road is marked, then I say that the Ordnance Map, to my great astonishment, is wrong; my senses are the better evidence.

That is exactly the attitude of the Catholic toward Science in the true meaning of that abused word. St. Thomas, by far the clearest of all expositors, and the greatest thinker of our race, gives the famous definition: ‘Science is that of which we deny the possibility of the opposite because we have been convinced by proof; Opinion is that of which we admit the possibility of the opposite; Faith is that of which we deny the possibility of the opposite, although we are not convinced by proof.’

Standing faced by these three forms of acceptation, the Catholic puts Faith first, Science next, and Opinion nowhere. His antagonist confuses Opinion with Science, and leaves out the conception of Faith altogether. To say, ‘I believec—that is, I have no conclusive proof,’ is (outside the Catholic Church) nonsense; within the Catholic Church, it is the very core of knowledge.

I have admitted this digression in order to explain that, in the particular case of English Catholics, and of Catholic conversions of Englishmen, all discussion as to whether the Faith will do this or that with defined truths is beside the mark. There is no question, and can be no question, of the Catholic Church modifying a defined truth to meet some ephemeral social mood. For instance, the law upon the institution of marriage having been laid down, it will never be changed, so far as the Catholic Church is concerned, by any passing wave in favor of either greater or less stringency. The same is true with regard to the rights of property. The same is true with regard to the fundamental difference between man and the brute creation. The same is true with regard to the doctrine of eternal punishment, and, on the other side, as against the waves of diabolism, or despair of eternal beatitude. The same is true of the Incarnation. The same is true of specific personal immortality; — and so on, throughout the whole system.

Further, the man who approaches the Catholic Church, whether in England or elsewhere, coming to it from outside, does not long concern himself with any such ideas of modification this way or that. He has seen the Personality; he has recognized the Voice.

Two matters alone concern him after that experience: —

First, is the Voice authoritative, with a Divine authority; is the Personality representative of that which made him, and of that which he is?

Secondly, if these things be so, has he, or has he not, a courage to accept the consequence?

(The same subject will be discussed by Dean Inge in the April Atlantic.)