The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church -Todays Problems - all is under the supreme worship of Caesar.

SURVIVALS AND NEW ARRIVALS
Hilaire Belloc
The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church
one institution alone for now for two thousand and twelve years has been attacked not by one opposing principle but from every conceivable point.

It has been denounced upon all sides and for reasons successively incompatible: it has suffered the contempt, the hatred and the ephemeral triumph of enemies as diverse as the diversity of things could produce.

This institution is the Catholic Church.

Alone of moral things present among man it has been rejected, criticized, or cursed, on grounds which have not only varied from age to age, but have been always of conflicting and often of contradictory kinds.

No one attacking force seems to have cared whether its particular form of assault were in agreement with others past, or even contemporary, so long as its assault were directed against Catholicism.
Each is so concerned, in each case, with the thing attacked that it ignores all else.

Each is indifferent to learn that the very defects it finds in this Institution are elsewhere put forward as the special virtues of some other opponent.

Each is at heart concerned not so much with its own doctrine as with the destruction of the Faith.
Thus we have had the Church in Her first days sneered at for insisting on the presence of the full Divine nature in one whom many knew only as a man; at the very same time She was called Blasphemous for admitting that a Divine personality could be burdened with a suffering human nature.

She was furiously condemned, in later ages, for laxity in discipline and for extravagant severity; for softness in organization and for tyranny; for combating the appetites natural to man, and for allowing them excess and even perversion; for ridiculously putting forward a mass of Jewish folklore as the Word of God, and for neglecting that same Word of God; for reducing everything to reason—that is, to logic, which is the form of reason—and for appealing to mere emotion.

Today She is equally condemned for affirming dogmatically the improbable survival of human personality after death, and for refusing to admit necromantic proofs of it—and pronouncing the search for them accursed.

The Church has been presented, and by one set of Her enemies, as based upon the ignorance and folly of Her members—they were either of weak intellect or drawn from the least instructed classes.
By another set of enemies She has been ridiculed as teaching a vainly subtle philosophy, splitting hairs, and so systematizing Her instruction that it needs a trained intelligence to deal with Her theology as a special subject.

This unique experience suffered by the Church, this fact that She alone is attacked from every side, has been appealed to by Her doctors throughout the ages as a proof of Her central position in the scheme of reality; for truth is one and error multiple.

The Two Cultures
Before we can understand the relative importance of the forces moving against the Catholic Church today, we must grasp the fact that She exists, in our divided and chaotic civilization, among three widely different surroundings.
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In all these three provinces the Catholic Church has long lost, and nowhere in any part of them regained, Her old and native position as the exclusive and established religion of society, with full official status, and the support of the civil power for Her authority.

But Her own attitude towards the alien dominating civil authority, its attitude towards Her, varies in very nature from one to the other. Still more do the social atmospheres of each and Her own reactions in those atmospheres differ from one to the other.

When we turn to the particular case of the English-speaking world (outside Ireland) we find a situation quite different from that of the rest of the Protestant culture, because its history has been different.

In almost all other aspects the term "English-speaking world" is a misnomer. The "English-speaking world" represents no reality to which can be properly attached one name. But in this one (and capital) matter of Catholicism the term is exact. With the exception of Ireland the area covered by English speech, that is, Great Britain, the white Dominions, and the United States have a character of their own so far as the Catholic Church is concerned.

The English-speaking world, though now morally broken up, had a common root. Its institutions, at their origin, sprang from the English Protestant seventeenth century.

The American social groups arose for the most part as emigrant colonies with a definitely religious origin, and nearly all of them with an origin strongly anti-Catholic.

In England, Scotland and Wales the Catholic Church had been (nearly) defeated by 1605.
Even at the highest estimate and including all who vaguely sympathized with Catholicism, we find it was by 1688 no more than a seventh or an eighth of England in numbers, much less of Scotland, and in both countries failing.

It dwindled after 1688 to a tiny fragment, about one percent and that pitiful atom was of no account in the national life nor of any effect on national institutions.
From such a source flowed first the colonial system of America, next that of the Dominions.

Catholicism reentered late as an alien phenomenon after the character of society had become "set" in an anti-Catholic mold.

There all national literature, traditions, law and especially history were (and are) fundamentally anti-Catholic.

All the Philosophy of Society was long settled in the anti-Catholic mood before the first recrudescence of Catholicism appeared.

Therefore it is inevitable that the Catholic body within this English-speaking world should breathe an air which is not its own and should be more affected by a non-Catholic or anti-Catholic spirit than could be possible in the other Protestant nations wherein an ancient Catholic culture exists with unbroken traditions.

There has thus been produced in Britain and the United States a situation the like of which has not existed before in the whole history of the Catholic Church since Constantine. It is a situation of very powerful effect upon the general fortunes of our race today throughout the world, because the English-speaking communities are for the moment so wealthy and numerous.

It leads, among other things, to an atmosphere of debate rather than of combat, which every general observer must have noticed.

It also leads to the conception of proportional claim; that is, the claim of the Catholic minority, even when it is small, not to be forbidden (by direct means) access to positions and public advantages in the general body. Conversely it leads (as in the case of University teaching ) to the use of indirect means for the prevention of Catholic progress.

It is a position rapidly developing; it is one the future of which cannot, of course, be determined—on that account it is the more interesting.

But it is one which certainly will change. That is almost the only thing one can predicate about it. What began as a persecuted thing and went on as a tolerated anomaly has turned into a regular constituent of the State, but a constituent differing in quality from the rest of the State.

One effect is the close interaction between such Catholic minorities and the non-Catholic English-speaking world around them.

One man will call it absorption of the Catholic body into the non-Catholic air which is about it upon every side; another would call it the very opposite—would say that into that non-Catholic air was infiltrating a measure of Catholic ideas.

The fact that these two contradictory views are so widely held proves that mutual reaction is strong.
Another effect is the comparative lack of sympathy, politically at least, between these Catholic minorities and the great bodies of Catholic culture abroad.

The political quarrels of these great foreign bodies are either ill-understood or ignored in the English-speaking world, or, at the best, even in the case of widely traveled men with a large Continental connection, rouse no great interest (let alone enthusiasm!) in the Catholics of England and the United States.

You may say, for instance, that the Catholic body in England is slightly less hostile to the Polish cause than the run of Englishmen are, but you cannot say that they know much about Poland, or that one in a hundred of them has any marked sympathy with Polish resistance to Prussia.

Similarly the great body of literature in the Catholic culture is closed to these minorities of Catholics in the English-speaking world. They have no powerful daily press. They get nearly all their news and more than half their ideas from papers anti-Catholic in direction. The books which make the mind of the nation help to make the mind of its Catholic minority—and that literature is, in bulk, vividly anti-Catholic.

My own experience of this lies especially in the department of history.

The whole story of Europe looks quite different when you see it from the point of view of the average cultivated Frenchman or Italian from what it does in the eyes of the average educated English or American Catholic.

So much is this the case that the statement of what is a commonplace upon the Continent appears as a paradox to most Catholics in England.

The past, especially the remote past, is another world to them. All the belauding of the break-up of Christendom in the sixteenth century, all the taking for granted of its political consequence as a good thing, all denunciation of our champions, all the flattery of our worst enemies, all the sneers at nations which kept the Faith, all admiration of the Princes and Politicians who destroyed it are absorbed by us in the books on which we are bred.

A ridicule and hatred of the later Stuarts at home, of Louis XIV abroad: a respect at least for the House of Orange: an insistence on the decline of Spain: all this and the whole mass of English letters train us in special pleading against the Faith. Nor have we, in England at least, any bulk of true history (as yet) to counteract this flood of propaganda.

But before closing these remarks upon the position of Catholics in the English-speaking Protestant countries, one point must be observed in modification: the Catholic, even under such favorable surroundings, has the advantage over his opponents both in definition and in knowledge. He knows much more about the others than the others know about him.

Further the Catholic has a philosophy which applies to all the practice of life and which does not change, while in the world about him there is neither a united philosophy nor even fixity in the moods of the time. This contrast is increasingly noticeable as the dogmas of Protestantism and its social rules dissolve.

The Catholic Church has, then, in that English-speaking world with which the readers (and writer) of this book are principally concerned, such advantages and disadvantages.

It is badly cut off from the general Catholic world outside.

It is permeated by an anti-Catholic literature, social custom and history.

On the other hand it reacts upon that hostile atmosphere and perceives, though dimly, some of its inherent superiorities: notably in clarity of thought and a determined philosophy.

The disabilities of the Faith in such an air are closely connected with that modern cross-religion of Nationalism of which I shall speak in more detail when I come to the main modern opponents of the Church.

The mark of the Catholic situation in all this area of Protestant culture is toleration upon a basis of Nationalism.

Worship the Nation and you may hold what lesser opinions you please.

Whether the Catholic body be very small and poor, as in Great Britain, or a strong locally grouped and politically influential, mainly urban, minority as in America (the estimates of this differ—some,
I believe, would call it a sixth of the population); whether it be very large indeed as in Australia and Canada, or smaller as in New Zealand, everywhere this mark is apparent.

Therefore the Faith is treated as one among many sects within one nation: and we tend to accept that position.

The modern Protestant doctrine, that sects, that is, opinions, have a sacred right to existence "so long as they obey the law," the idea that the State has a right of legislation against which no moral appeal can lie—let alone the legislative power of the Church; the inability of those who think thus to see that toleration and conformity with every law make a contradiction of terms: all these create the social atmosphere in which we live.

The particular practice of Catholicism may be continued without hindrance; we may hear Mass.
Certain characteristic products of Catholicism may develop unimpeded.

For instance, the religious orders enjoy complete freedom in every part of this world, they possess property without limit, and spread and build without restriction.

But all is within and beneath civil society.

Again, what is most important, the Catholic educational system is safeguarded in the English-speaking Protestant world.

It is safeguarded in different ways and in different degrees in different places.
Thus in England it enjoys public revenue.

In the United States it does not enjoy that revenue, but it is allowed every opportunity for voluntary extension.

But all is under the supreme worship of Caesar.

The truth I here emphasize is unpalatable. Most of us are only half aware (and are becoming less aware with every added decade), that the air we breathe is anti-Catholic; that the history we are taught, the moral ideas behind the legal system we obey, the restrictions imposed on us, the political conceptions embodied in every public act, the general attitude toward foreign countries, are all the products of that Nationalism which their non-Catholic fellow-citizens regard as the sacred emotion.

We cannot but be ourselves filled with that emotion.

But it is spiritually at issue with the Faith.

So far I have dealt mainly, as being our chief concern, with the situation of the Catholic Church in the English-speaking world as a preparation for judging its reception of both decaying and growing antagonisms.

To appreciate the effect of these as a whole, let us glance at the situation in the countries of ancient Catholic culture, such as France, Spain and Italy, where there reign conditions very different from our own; for that purpose, let us consider the origins; since we shall not fully understand this important dual character attaching to the present political position of the Catholic Church in the world unless we appreciate how it came about through the past.

The great battle of the Reformation ended without victory for either side, legitimate or rebel.