EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 January 1940, Page 8

EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS

CATHOLIC WRITER'S COMMENTS A letter containing some strikingcomments on Christianity and Communism in the world today, has been received by his Grace. Archbishop O'Shea, from Mr Arnold Lunn, who is one of the-leading Catholic writers of the day. Mr Lunn became a Catholic several years ago. Writing from Rome on December 5. he refers in the first place in the coming National Eucharistic Congress:—"l have been travelling in the Balkans, and the good news that your Congress had not been postponed restored my sense of proportion which had been infected by the contagion of war anxieties. But it is precisely in a time of grave secular troubles that we need this reminder of Eternal Reality. Even those who are not of our Church may be reminded by the Eucharistic Congress of Truths which do not vary, and of a philosophy which does not need to readjust itself to every passing fad and fashion. Rome will not sign a non-aggression pact with Moscow. There can be no concourse between Christ and Beelzebub. We Catholics have at least one great consolation, denied to those who are not of our faith. However grievous our secular anxieties, we have, at least, the intellectual satisfaction of understanding what is happening. We have the key to the of this age. The Marxist looks a fool when the cham-

pion of ‘Peace and Democracy’ invades Finland. The vague ‘Pink’ who screamed for a pact with Russia as the basis of collective security is tying himself into all manner of knots. But

we did not expect that brutal persecution would inaugurate an era of universal peace. It was not we who were naive enough to believe that the most Bloody of dictators would fight to preserve democracy. It is not our philosophy which is menaced by the continued operation of the Law of Contradiction. ‘Things are what they are,' wrote a great Anglican Bishop in the eighteenth century, ‘and the consequences will be what they will be. Let us not deceive ourselves.’ The trend of events is intelligible within the framework of Catholic philosophy, and unintelligible on the hypothesis that man has an innate tendency to improve, and that all. our troubles can be solved by the methods of secular humanitarianism. The great fallacy of this age is the ‘bootlace fallacy,’ the belief that man can lift himself by his

own bootlaces. If societies which reject Christ and his Church gradually became - more prosperous, more just ; and more humane, the Bootlacians would have some cause for satisfaction. If the world steadily approached Utopia as it receded from Christ, we Catholics might be tempted to reconsider oui- premises. But this is notoriously not the case. On the contrary the brutalities of the world into which Christ was born seem humane compared to the totalitarian cruelty of the one great European country which has officially adopted Atheism as the State religion. Private judgment has been liquidated in Luther's country, and even Bootlacians are beginning to be dismayed by the rising tide of brutality and the rapid degeneration of morals. The Good Pagan watches with dismay the crumbling of his world. Mr H. G. Wells despairs of •Homo Sapiens’ as well he may if Homo is so foolish as to build his house on the Wellsian sands. ‘The squalid failure of Russian Communism,’ a leading intellectual of the Left recently remarked to my son, ‘has been a tremendous blow to all of us.’ Yes, to all of them. And herein lies our splendid chance. Young people who are despairing of Communism, the only plausible alternative to Catholicism, are unanchored and depressed. If wo could mobilise one Catholic layman eager to convert Communists for every hundred Communists who spare no efforts to pervert Catholics, the collapse of the Marxist dream might be tile prelude to a Catholic revival.”