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The Culture of the Church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
Among the preparatory prayers of the Mass, there are these words from Psalm 42: “Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy.” However inadequately accomplished, the purpose of this essay is to affirm and distinguish our cause as Catholic minds and human beings from the nation and from the world that are not holy—to affirm the strength and meaning of the world of the Church for our varied worlds of living and working. As Christopher Dawson points out in a remarkable essay, there is, even in the modern world, “a tradition of sacred culture which it has been the mission of the Church to nourish and preserve”—and to nourish and preserve it even in the nation that is not holy. “However secularized our modern civilization may become,” Dawson continues, “this sacred tradition [this sacred life] remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of a new life. The great obstacle is the failure of Christians themselves to understand the depth of that tradition and the inexhaustible possibilities of new life that it contains.”
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1954
References
1 Dawson, Christopher, Education and the Crisis of Christian Culture (Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1949), p. 23Google Scholar. Substantially the same essay has been reprinted in Dawson, 's Understanding Europe (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1952)Google Scholar, Ch. XIII, “The Problem of the Future: Total Secularization or a Return to Christian Culture.”
2 Ibid.
3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (New York, W. W. Norton, 1949), p. 14.Google Scholar
4 Dawson's recent books of greatest importance: The Gifford Lectures of 1947 and 1948–49, Religion and Culture (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1948)Google Scholar and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1950)Google Scholar brilliantly detail his preoccupation with this central and crucial theme.
5 The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard M. Hopkins (London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 302.Google Scholar
6 Guardini, Romano, The Church and the Catholic and The Spirit of the Liturgy, (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1953), p. 51.Google Scholar
7 Ibid.
8 Ellard, Gerald, S.J., Christian Life and Worship (Milwaukee, The BrucePublishing Company, 1950), p. xiii.Google Scholar
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10 Ibid., p. 31.
11 Ibid., p. 99.
12 See the Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, issued 06 29, 1943Google Scholar (published: New York, The America Press, 1943, with introduction and supplementary matter by Joseph J. Bluett, S.J.).
13 Newman, John Henry, Discussions and Arguments (London, 1872), p. 379.Google Scholar
14 Ibid.
15 Adam, Karl, Christ Our Brother (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1931), p. 134.Google Scholar
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22 Sturzo, Luigi, The True Life, (Paterson, N. J., St. Anthony Guild Press, 1943), p. 265.Google Scholar
23 Ibid., p. 268.
24 The achievements, in the face of enormous odds, of Catholics in this country have been noted by Dawson—and we would not deny them. Here we suggest only the dangers and perils to what has been accomplished. The problems of the Catholic minority in American Culture have been pointedly and understandingly described by Father Thomas McAvoy, C.S.C., in a series of articles for this Review: “The Formation of the Catholic Minority in the United States, 1820–1860,” Review of Politics, X (01, 1948)Google Scholar, “Bishop John Lancaster Spalding and the Catholic Minority (1877–1908)”, ibid., XII (January, 1950), 3–19; and “The American Catholic Minority in the Later Nineteenth Century”, ibid., XV (July, 1953), 275–302. A great virtue of Father McAvoy's studies—of unusual importance in the writing of the history of the Church in the United States—is their placing of the situation of Catholics within the total picture of American cultural and social development.
25 Guardini, , op. cit., p. 26.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., p. 11.
27 Bonacina, Conrad, “Catholicism and the Latin Culture Heresy,” The Wind and the Rain, vol. VI, no. 2 (Autumn, 1949), p. 88.Google Scholar
28 Ibid.
29 Danielou, Jean, The Salvation of the Nations (London, Sheed and Ward, 1949), p. 65.Google Scholar
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33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
37 Here reference must be made to the concern shown in a number of very recently published, or republished, essays by Christopher Dawson, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Father Leo R. Ward, C.S.C. Dawson: “The Study of Christian Culture as a Means of Education” (Lumen Vitae, Vol. I—1950—No. I ); “Education and Christian Culture” (Commonweal, 12 4, 1953Google Scholar); “Future of Christian Culture,” ibid., March 19, 1954. Von Hildebrand: “Catholicism and Unprejudiced Knowledge,” “The Role of Reverence in Education,” in The New Tower of Babel (New York, P. J. Kenedy, 1953)Google Scholar. Ward: “Is There a Christian Learning?” (Commonweal, 09 25, 1953)Google Scholar; see also Ward, Father's Blueprint for a Catholic University (St. Louis, B. Herder, 1949)Google Scholar. Perhaps the whole hope of the redirection of life and studies in the Catholic universities and colleges of America can be reduced to the teachers, to their absolute importance: the power of the living presences of their Christian minds, their vital possession of the realities of Christian culture, will give form not only to their own works and utterances but also—and this is the heart of the matter—to the lives and minds and works of the students coming under them. Our paramount problem today is how to develop these Christian teachers, these true “creators of culture who see existence under the aspect of eternity, eternal form” (see page 144 of this essay). For little in the present education and preparation of the ordinary scholar-professor will fit him for the full dynamics of the vocation of the Christian teacher.
38 Gilson, Etienne, Christianity and Philosophy (New York, London, Sheed and Ward, 1939), pp. 116–117.Google Scholar
39 Newman, John Henry, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (New York, 1950), pp. 181–182Google Scholar. In the same discourse (VII: “Nature and Grace”) Newman also cites an opinion of divines and holy men “that the number of Catholics that are to be saved will on the whole be small. Multitudes of those who never knew the Gospel will rise up in judgment against the children of the Church and will be shown to have done more with scantier opportunities.”
40 Gilson, , op. cit., p. 117.Google Scholar
41 Ibid. Still we must remark here upon the proper pride of faith characterizing and inspiriting the minds of some of the greatest Catholic intellectuals of the modern world: men like Gilson himself, Maritain, Dawson, Guasrdini, Karl Adam, deLubac, Danielou, Sturzo, Pieper, von Hildebrand, among others.
42 Bernanos, Georges, Plea for Liberty (New York, Pantheon Books, 1944), pp. 165–166.Google Scholar
43 Gurian, Waldemar, “The Mask of the Devil,” Scrip, The University of Notre Dame Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (08, 1942), pp. 5–6Google Scholar. A few phrases and sentences in part III of this essay have already appeared in The Dome, the University of Notre Dame Yearbook, for 1952.
44 On this matter in general, see Cameron, J. M., Scrutiny of Marxism (London, SCM Press, 1948), pp. 102–111Google Scholar and Reinhold, H. A., “The Christian in the World,” Orate Fratres, vol. XXV, no. 9 (08, 1951), pp. 405–411.Google Scholar
45 See Pieper, Josef, “On the Christian Idea of Man,” The Review of Politics, vol. II, no. 1 (01, 1949), pp. 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also note Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York, Pantheon Books, 1952)Google Scholar, where he remarks: “Our hope is that the true sense of sacramental visibility in the celebration of the Christian cultus should become manifest to the extent needed for drawing the man in us, who is ‘born to work,’ out of himself … out of the toil and moil of every day into the sphere of unending holiday … out of the narrow and confined sphere of work and labour into the heart and center of creation.” (p. 81)
46 Of all those who surround the Christian in civilization, closest to him is his family. For the most part, the Christians in the world will marry and rear families. Here in the sacred character of the marriage state, in the Christian family, in this core-unit of social existence, this most central and closest of all units of human society, the Christian finds his remarkable chance for the sanctification of the senses and for the revelation of his true zeal and responsibility. In the love of wife and children, shared and reciprocated, he learns to discard the importunate demands of self. In the need to maintain the community of the family, regardless of trials and tensions, he acquires the courage of patience and the long-suffering patience of courage. In the children who are the fruit of the marriage-union, he recognises citizens, like himself, of the city of man and pilgrims, like himself, towards the City of God, the bearers of gigantic promise and the means, even as he is, of the fulfillment of God's eternal plan. So the Christian wants to safeguard and carefully direct, in the anxiety of his love, the lives of his family. The Christian knows, too, the privilege and comfort of the family life, the deliverance from isolation that is its heart. In the heart of his family, the Christian will find a divinelyfavored liberation from the confinements of the lonely individualism infecting civilization.
47 Guardini, , op. cit., p. 37.Google Scholar
48 Ibid., p. 54.
49 Berdyaev, Nicholas, Dream and Reality, (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1951), p. 326Google Scholar. The horror of the hour is that we may be content to look upon the Church merely as a very useful organization in fighting Communism, merely as a tremendous anti-Communist instrument—and thus fail to see the Church as a complete way of life, with an eternal integrity which will permit her to survive not only Communism but whatever other evils may rise following the disappearance of the Communists, for it is true that the Church prays over all tombs.
50 Ibid.
51 vs. 5–19. The Ronald Knox Translation of the New Testament (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1945), p. 167. Consider here Romano Guardini's excellent book, Faith and Modern Man (New York, Pantheon Books, 1952)Google Scholar; a series of essays which, as the author says in the preface, “grew spontaneously out of the urgent questions asked by people in spiritual stress;” and each “is the answer given to hard pressed Christians in a time of acute physical and spiritual threat.” In the essay, “God's Patience,” Guardini emphasizes that life without patience is impossible: “For patience bears with the imperfect, uses restraint in dealing with the defective, spares the unfortunate and surrounds them with that deep-seated concern which is not only compassion, but also a common destiny. And in so doing man, in his own way, but continues to exercise that quality which God manifested at the very beginning of creation. Yes, He who created this existence made patience the condition of human life in this world” (p. 19).