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

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СКАЧАТЬ in particular provinces—for instance, where the Italians control an Aegean Island—but take the enormous area as a whole (with a total population not much less than 200 millions) the numerical proportion of Catholics therein is negligible, their social importance equally negligible.

      The same cannot be said of their spiritual effect; the effect, that is, provoked by Catholic thought, occasionally, upon intellectual groups of some importance in leadership. But, generally speaking, the tiny fragment of Catholicism is drowned in that vast sea of the Orthodox culture. There is talk, indeed, and hope of some great Catholic development acting through the spiritual void left by the recent revolution in Russia; but that is for the future.

      We must nonetheless remark that the Soviet revolution has shaken all the world of Greek culture to its foundations. Before it took place the whole of that culture ultimately depended, directly or indirectly, upon the armed might of the Russian Autocracy. The Czardom was the nucleus or foundation of all the Greek-Church culture; it was the essential institution; it was the central post on which all the fabric leaned. It made of the Orthodox religion a powerful monopoly; it acted positively and urgently for the forcible exclusion of Catholicism, not only in Russia but, for instance, in Serbia, where the example was copied. All that has gone to pieces.

      The Soviet Government in spite of certain recent changes remains predominantly Jewish, not only in the personnel of its secret police within and of its propagandists without, but in its moral character and methods. Not perhaps because it is Jewish, but certainly because it is Bolshevist, it has as strong a hatred for the Greek Church as for Catholicism; perhaps in a final issue it would make its chief object of attack throughout the world that which it felt to be the most living force; and this is, without question, the Catholic Church. But the general position, so far as the Catholic Church in Greek countries (and particularly in Russia) is concerned, is so far little changed by the huge upheaval, She remains almost unknown to the mass of the people.

      There is indeed one recent exception to be remembered. This exception is the precarious subjection of the Catholic Croats and Slovenes to the orthodox power of Serbia. The incompetent politicians who imposed their own confusion of mind and their own ignorance of history upon Christendom after the Great War, tied, not federally, but absolutely, a considerable body of Catholic culture to a dynasty, a capital and a government not its own: the dynasty and government of Belgrade. A large Catholic district was artificially sewn on, as it were, to the edges of the Orthodox peoples. Thus, politically, a new kingdom called Jugo-Slavia has, to its original Orthodox half, another half, as large, attached; and this new piece is Catholic in culture and western in script and all the details of life. We have already seen the disastrous consequences of that blunder.

      Similarly Roumania has had attached to it a body roughly doubling its size, most of the inhabitants of which are either Latin Catholics or Uniate Catholics.

      These anomalies, which have arisen from the crudity of our Parliamentarians, somewhat obscure the issue. But it remains true that in the area of the Orthodox or Greek Church culture the situation of Catholicism is one of such slight influence that we may for the moment neglect it. The real issue is between the situation of Catholicism in the area of Protestant culture and in the area of the old Catholic culture; and between the state of the Church in the one and Her state in the other lies a contrast such as the past history of our race never knew.

      The area of the Protestant culture is formed by the United States of America, Canada as a whole (with the exception of the solid French-Canadian corner), Great Britain, Australasia and the Cape, Holland, North Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States, excepting Lithuania.

      In this area there are two things to be remarked. First that the degree in which the Catholic Church is known in the various parts of this culture, through its numerical proportion or moral influence, varies greatly; next, that this area of culture contains one province of a peculiar kind upon which one must speak specially if one is to avoid an erroneous conclusion—that province is the Prusso-German Empire, or Reich.

      The Scandinavian countries, which are almost entirely Protestant, are small, and do not largely affect the general situation today. Another of the lesser countries, Holland, has a very large, active and well-organized Catholic minority, a great deal more than a third of the nation—indeed, nearer 5/12ths—but the traditions, political and social, of Holland are opposed to Catholicism, for Holland arose as an independent nation by a financial revolt against its monarch, Philip II, who stood in his time for the Church against the Reformation; and all the energies of its governing class were, for two hundred years, directed against Catholicism.

      But in that Prussian system which is best named today "The Reich," and which has come to be popularly, though erroneously, called "Germany," a special condition of affairs was established by the genius of Bismarck.

      Bismarck determined to divert the strong desire for German unity to the advantage of his own kingdom of Prussia and its ruling dynasty, the Hohenzollerns, whom he served. He therefore created a so-called "German Empire," which was to be the very negation of what the old words "German" and "Imperial" had meant for a thousand years. He deliberately designed it to contain the largest possible minority of Catholics consistent with leaving the majority of the new State Protestant and under the direct and indirect control of Berlin. Had he worked for a union of all German-speaking peoples he would have included Austria and the German parts of Bohemia, and he would have formed a State where the two cultures would have balanced each other. The word "German" would not connote for us—as it now does—the idea of "Anti-Catholic," nor would one of the principal Catholic bodies in the world—the Germans of the Rhine and Danube—have fallen asunder and, in losing their unity, lost their power.

      As it is, we have the State which Bismarck artificially framed still existing among us, strongly organized, and in the peculiar situation of being directed from the Protestant culture, leaving the Catholic culture within it active and free yet politically dominated by an anti-Catholic tradition and standing before the world as part of the Protestant culture.

      If one were to call the German Reich, as a whole, Protestant, there would be natural and justified protest from those portions of it in the south and west which are not only Catholic and strongly so, but for the most part Catholic in homogeneous bodies, with memories of comparatively recent local sovereignty, some fragments of which remain. Indeed the Catholics of the Reich amount to just a third of its whole population.

      On the other hand, if one were to say of this Catholic element in the Reich that it was a separate affair, belonging to the Catholic culture as a whole, one would be still more wrong. The Catholic portions of the Reich are not forcibly joined to a greater anti-Catholic portion as are the newly annexed parts of JugoSlavia or Roumania, but they are still bound into the new state created by Bismarck for the benefit of Prussia.

      Common great victories won sixty years ago, very strong common influences, accompanied by a great expansion in wealth and in population and a very striking development in all forms of civic activity, the founding of a whole new social system, a well-maintained internal order—all these things have welded Bismarck's Reich together. We thus have, as regards the situation of the Faith here, this anomaly; that, though very far from homogeneous in religion, as a unit the Reich counts in the eyes of foreigners as part of the Protestant culture. It attracts the sympathy of Protestant nations such as England and Scandinavia; its own hostility is rather directed against neighboring Catholic Powers such as Poland and France.

      The Reich, then, not only contains a large minority of Catholics, but of Catholics particularly devoted to their religion, but this Catholic minority of the Reich, though culturally similar to a considerable German Catholic body beyond the nominal frontier (the main part of them are in Catholic Austria), is politically separate from its fellows. Should the future see a union of Austria with the Reich the whole character of Central Europe would be transformed and the work of Bismarck destroyed.

      Such is the situation СКАЧАТЬ