Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church. Hilaire Belloc

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      Now the essential point to seize in the nations of Ancient Catholic Culture, the nations which withstood the storm of the Reformation and maintained their traditions intact, is that this quarrel has never yet been decided. The old security and unquestioned position of the official church which remained standing for five lifetimes after the Reformation while all its moral invisible supports were silently crumbling, was never the same after 1791. The French Revolutionary armies carried on the new lay conception of the State into Belgium, into Spain, into Italy, into Catholic Germany. Literature and teaching continued their effect. The idea of the Lay State (though nowhere perfectly realized and everywhere combated) overspread all Catholic Europe.

      But neither the official Church nor the Catholic conscience ever admitted this lay theory of the State. The Church continued to claim her political place as part of her theory of Catholic society; and all Catholics—in every case the bulk of the nations concerned—felt that it was Her right.

      To take a test instance, the Church claimed a special position in education. She called it essential to society that the elementary schools should teach Catholic doctrine to the children and the Catholic philosophy should permeate the universities. The lay conception of the State fought, and continues to fight, this claim as a tyranny and an anomaly.

      And the main thing to grasp, if we are to understand this mighty political problem of "Laicism" (which is so little known outside the nations of the Catholic culture), is the fact already emphasized: that the struggle is still proceeding. The conception of the laical state which looked like winning hands down fifty years ago has not even achieved an uncertain victory; the Catholic ideal, though more sympathetic to the new strong and healthy movements in Italy and Spain, is not supreme in those states over the Laic. The two parties are still standing on their positions.

      The laical ideal in education still appeals to the logic of the man who thinks of religion as a private opinion, and usually as an illusion at that. But to the average parent in a Catholic country, the so-called neutrality of the lay school and university is still felt to be a sham. Its neutrality is not in his eyes a real neutrality, it is a form of persecution and, still more, a policy designed to uproot the Faith.

      There is no reconciliation between the two positions, because they start from different first principles, which run through every function of civic life; not only education, but administration, justice and everything else.

      The Catholic Position starts with the first principle that a homogeneous Catholic society with Church and State closely bound up together is the ideal; and that ideal, remember, is not something vague to be aimed at in the future, it is a living historical memory of recent date, even in some districts a thing experienced within living memory and to others half restored.

      For instance, it is only half a lifetime ago that the Crucifix was taken away from the Courts of Justice in France; and in Italy, as we know, it has recently been put back. In Spain, after more than one interlude of the laical state, the union of Church and State has been established. In Poland the proposal to make Catholicism the established State Religion was defeated only with difficulty. It will be renewed.

      Take, then, the Catholic culture as a whole, and you see present in it a political situation not comparable to that in England or America. You see a political situation of conflict not yet decided, with a strict, wide, strongly historical claim on the Catholic side to establishment and State recognition; a claim, expectant only in some countries, partly realized in others, but everywhere vigorously alive.

      This brief introductory sketch of the Catholic position in Catholic societies it was necessary to add to that of the Church in the Protestant culture before approaching an analysis of the older and newer forces arrayed against the Faith today, because those forces differ in character according to the culture in which they act.

      To them will I now proceed, and I will open with the Survivals, beginning with the more venerable of the group, those which are in "articulo mortis" and yielding up the ghost before our eyes, and going on in order through the less moribund to the most active.

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