“You like chips , don’t you?” said the little girl, as I kept reaching my hand into the dish and extracting another and another flaky fried-potato and began crackling it with my teeth. “Yes,” I replied, “I’m a regular chip monk.”

Now how funny are such things? How good is a pun? Even at its best I claim it is never very good. In fact, I think it is somewhat harmful to the mind.

The other day it was reported in the newspaper that a Maine hen had won a prize for having hatched nearly two hundred pullets in the course of a single year. Now, what ought the faithful punster to remark on hearing that? He ought to remark that the hen deserved the Pulletser Prize. . . . I see.

Obviously the mental level of a pun is not deep. For a pun is only surface humor. Real humor lies in seeing an incongruity between a fact and an imitation of a fact, between a truth and an almost truth. The incongruity observed is not complete, but only partial; because a likeness as well as an unlikeness must exist in the bogus that pretends to be real before it becomes funny. When both are presented to the mind in contrast, we laugh. Why we laugh is a mystery. It seems that the intellect is submitted to some sort of hot and cold douche in one shower. The mind half accepts, half rejects what is being offered to it for recognition. At one and the same moment it sees a darkness and a light, a nothingness and a somethingness; it becomes simultaneously aware of its own madness and its own sanity.

This experience makes it rush to the exercise of knowledge with a new freshness and delight. It leaps, jumps at truth, snares it out of the trappings that try to conceal it, and fairly hugs it with joy, beholding it, as it were, like sunlight seeping through a cloud, like bright water bubbling out of the parched earth. The mind becomes tremendously excited over the fact that it cannot be fooled, over the surprising accuracy of its own function in the face of a plausible mistake. This causes a surplus activity to take place in the spirit, which reverts inward, and, finding no place to go, turns outward, quickly overflows into the body, and results in that beautiful explosion called laughter, which is not only analogically divine, but also specifically human. Animals do not laugh; neither do angels. The former cannot see the point of what is laughable; the latter have nothing to laugh with.

It will be well to make here a most important observation. One cannot laugh at the false which imitates the true, unless one knows clearly that there is a true and that the false, though approximating it, is not achieving it. A toy frog is funny both because it is a frog, and because it isn’t; also because there is a real frog which it isn’t. A monkey is amusing, first, because he is not a man; second, because he certainly looks and acts very much like a man; and, third, because there is such a being as man.

Other things being equal, our ability to laugh depends on the number of our certitudes because the more certitudes we possess, the more counterfeits of them can occur. People who believe in little laugh at little. The world of the skeptic is an utterly humorless one. If, when I go to the zoo and am confronted with an almost human-featured chimpanzee who amuses me with his antics and the expression he assumes while munching peanuts — if I am suddenly persuaded that this tailed, hairy, smelly creature is in reality a sleeping Shakespeare, a dormant Goethe, an undeveloped Milton, on the verge of breaking into speech, asserting his intelligence, and announcing his rage at the injustice of being confined in a cage, then the chimpanzee not only ceases to be amusing to me, he becomes positively and shriekingly tragic. I know of a college professor, a psychologist, who keeps a statue of a gorilla on his desk. For his own amusement? No. For his own contemplation. The professor’s bronze gorilla is not a toy; it is a terror: a horrible picture of what he believes he himself would be if his ancestors had not mated correctly.

Some years ago we had not lost our enthusiasm for the circus, that delightful world of topsy-turvy where all the men behaved like animals, and all the animals like men. While attending the circus we enjoyed our sanity all the more from having it rubbed the wrong way. We admired the intelligent elephant, we chuckled at the unintelligent clown. But only because it was all a few hours of make-believe. Nobody went to the circus laboratory-minded, or imagined for a moment that after the show the elephant went out and bought a copy of the evening newspaper; or that the clown trotted off to a cage and began drinking water through his nose. How long the circus, a world-old institution, will endure depends on how long a still large number of normal minds can withstand, let us say, the influence of university psychologists, who observe in rat mazes those pedagogical principles which they supply generously to school teachers for the training and edification of our children . . . Animals, by the way, never go to the circus. They have to be forced there, and forcibly kept there, too.

I think I am now able to say exactly what a pun is. It consists in seeing the incongruity between the true and the false in the matter of words. The reason why a pun is never unequivocally funny is because words are only arbitrary symbols of thought: their truth is due entirely to custom, not to essence or idea. Humor consists in seeing incongruity in idea. Puns are only pseudo-humorous.

The French have the right name for a pun when they call it un jeu de mots. It is true that a pun besides, being a mere jeu de mots, can sometimes carry a humorous overtone in idea, as, for instance, calling Mr. Chesterton “a tank of paradoxygen.” But the punness of this statement might be taken away without destroying the humor. Mr. Chesterton would be funny as a tank of anything, having once described himself as “a well-meaning hippopotamus.” But in the strict pun it is required that there be only an incongruity of words without letting in any incongruity of idea. When Voltaire remarked to a lady seated next to him at dinner, who insisted on dropping tobacco ashes in his tea-cup: J’aimerais mieux mon thé que des cendres (J’aimerais mieux monter que descendre), he uttered a perfect pun, in which there is clearly no vestige of humor, though there is much of wit. But a witty man is admired for his mental adroitness rather than for his mental hilarity. He can often be, as Voltaire was (Alfred Noyes to the contrary, notwithstanding), the most cruel and cynical of men. He can even be an atheist. A humorist cannot be primarily a cynic, nor ever an atheist.

Sometimes, because of its extreme appositeness to a situation, a pun can acquire an elegance that makes it relatively delightful. As good a pun as was ever spoken, to my memory, was made by a young English Jesuit, now teaching at Wimbledon College. He met in a railway train a young man who said he was constructing a philosophy of his own. The young man declared that he set the foundation of his private philosophical system in the following epistemological principle: “I am, therefore I think!” “Oh,” replied the young Jesuit, “isn’t that putting Descartes before the horse?”

The trouble with the inveterate punster is that he does not wait for puns to occur, nor even for one to be needed; he goes about seeking them, forcibly making them up. And this requires almost no talent, because word resemblances (which can be easily turned into word absurdities) are uncountable.

Likewise, a pun requires no art whatsoever in the telling. A genuine joke often demands some dramatic ability in putting it across. But a pun is equally good in anybody’s mouth, with anybody’s voice, with anybody’s gestures. And once heard, one wants nothing more than never to hear it again. Our tendency on hearing a pun is almost as much to jeer as to cheer, not because it is bogus, but because it is bogus-bogus. That most withering of all depreciations, “He thinks he’s funny,” is applied most frequently to whom? To the punster. American radio comedians, with a plethora of puns on every program, have long since ceased to be entertaining. They have become positive nuisances.

The English are incorrigible punsters, but their puns are better than ours because they take more care with them, and, being conservative by nature, they do not try to make too many. Americans must always over-produce, and over-production in the matter of puns is disastrous. We would do better to leave all puns to the English and turn our minds to that field of humor where extravagance is no handicap, and where nobody in the world is able to compete with us: the field of metaphors. The metaphors in Cole Porter’s remarkable ditty, “You’re the Top,” are not only the most inventive imaginable, but their very extravagance enhances their charm. The headline-writer on a New York newspaper, who, when John Masefield visited America a few years ago, captioned the story of the poet-laureate’s refusal to give an interview to the newspaper reporters with the title King’s Canary Refuses to Chirp produced a specimen of what we can expect any moment in our daily journals. And no English low-brow would be capable, as Ring Lardner’s baseball player was, of giving his sweetheart a look “that you could pour on a waffle.”

I said in the beginning of this paper that puns can be harmful to the mind. They can, because they teach the mind to become flaccid and lazy, lazy in a sublime activity where it should be most alert: in laughter, that delightful paroxysm of soul and body together, in which human nature rejoices in its own sanity in a way no ape has since the world began, nor will until the world ends.

(You’d Better Come Quietly, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1939)

The greatest lack of charity in the world today, my dear children, is found in the Liberal Catholic treatment of Jesus. This treatment goes on all through the year, but it comes home to one most especially at Christmas. Liberal Catholicism at Christmas is a “Jingle Bells” Catholicism, with no Blessed Mother, and no little Child at her breast. Mary and her Child are exposed to the cold winds of our disregard — they who need our love as they needed the breath of the ox and the ass; as Jesus needed the warmth of the swaddling clothes!

God is lost and forgotten in His own world! Having come to make Himself visible, He is snubbed by the hard hearts of the world and told that they prefer it the other way. They prefer that the visible should not have become visible. And they pretend to get that message out of the mouth of Jesus! They imply that what He came to say need not have been said!

You say, “Father, are you not very hard on the world at large when you feel that so few people get into Heaven? You make the way so narrow and straight!”

Our Lord, not I, said that the way was narrow and straight. But, may I say, the journey is not hard for all that. It is a struggle to get to Heaven. It is a cross-bearing pilgrimage. But there is something beautiful about carrying a cross when you know which road to walk upon. The insufferable burden of the cross is when you do not know which way to carry it: when you come to a crossroads, and the crossroads becomes the cross, not that which is upon your back!

Everyone in the United States, if he wants salvation truthfully and sincerely, knows in the depths of his heart that the Catholic Church is the way. Even when he has not heard the truth of the Church, he has heard the falsehoods spoken about it. He knows it by the manner in which it is slandered and rejected.

I was reading today a prayer written by Saint Thomas More, just before he died, in 1535. Saint Thomas More was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and while he was there waiting for the sentence of execution to be passed on him, he turned to prayer.

Saint Thomas More could not find in the England of his day many who would support him in the dogma for which he was to die. He was given the hold-up question which is always put to us these days: “Are you right, and are all the bishops wrong?”

There was something in Saint Thomas More’s stubbornness in the Tower that was a rebuke to the more than thirty bishops in England who would not support him. Actually, we know that there was one bishop, Cardinal Fisher, who did support the doctrine of Papal Supremacy, in defense of which Saint Thomas More was prepared to die. That fact, however, was concealed from Saint Thomas More. The officers of the King deliberately told him that Saint John Fisher had given in. Saint Thomas More thought that he was fighting for the Faith non-episcopally. When it was said to him, “You are going against all the bishops in England,” he said, “I have all the bishops in Heaven on my side!”

Saint Thomas More, since he believed that Cardinal Fisher had defected, did go against every bishop in England. And still the Church has canonized Thomas More. The bishops in England had gone into heresy! If the bishops of Saint Thomas More’s day could go into heresy, the bishops of our day can go into heresy, too.

If we in Boston are not to learn from Saint Thomas More, then I ask you, by God in Heaven, why do we have a church dedicated to him right in the center of the city? Is not the Church teaching as much through that canonized loved one, as through the Question Box in the local diocesan paper?

Does not the Church teach by her canonizations? Does not the Church teach the Jesuits, for example, whom they should follow when it makes two Jesuits, Saint Peter Canisius and Saint Robert Bellarmine, Doctors of the Church?

Before I go on to speak of Christmas and the liturgy of Christmas, I am minded to say to you, very, very strongly, that the Church is still teaching that there is no salvation outside it. It is teaching this doctrine in all its prayers, in all its abjurations of heresy, and in the kind of Catholic it is willing to call a success in Heaven.

The canonized Catholics are always conspicuous for their orthodoxy. The saints are never the Liberal Catholics; never the easy, careless, mundane minds. The latter may prevail locally for a while. They may be editors or assistant editors of diocesan newspapers. They may write a column in the press, or appear on the radio, or television. But the kind of mind which the Church guards and preserves and gives to us for example, is the kind of mind that says what Saint Thomas More said in the last year of his life, when he was preparing for his beautiful martyrdom:

Teach me, O Lord, to be joyful of tribulations,
To walk the narrow way that leadeth to life…

If it is a narrow road, then not great crowds are pouring over it. One, therefore, could walk that way, if one walked with the steps of a child!

That brings me to a second point, and to a thought that has been in my mind this Christmas season. I have been thinking of how beautifully the Catholic Church arranges Christmas week.

The liturgists in the Church, in our day, have come to be those men who feel that when dogma is aesthetic, it is then de fide; or, in other words, when it is attractive decoratively, it has then been defined! They skim off the liturgy from the Faith and leave all the, I might say, hard, cold, challenging, monotonous, heavy, beautiful, silent, unobtrusive truths, behind.

If these men, these modern liturgists, were to have arranged Christmas week, I am certain that they never would have ordered the feasts of the Church so that the priest would go from white vestments for the Mass of Christmas to red vestments on the very day after Christmas, for the Mass of a martyr saint!

I know these aesthetes! I unfortunately lingered in their territories too long in the days when I was urged to be America’s leading Catholic versemaker! I can almost hear them say: “Oh, can’t the martyrs wait until after the Epiphany? We have just gone over to Bethlehem to see the Baby, and you turn us on to Stephen and his stoning immediately, the day after!”

The very day after the birthday of the silent, hidden little Baby Who is God — the day after this Divine challenge to the world — the Church gives us for our reflection and veneration a man cast out of the city and stoned by the Jews because he believed that this Baby, lying on straw in a cave, breathed on by an ox and an ass, and wrapped in the clean, warm, woolen clothes His Mother had prepared for Him, was God. The Church celebrates, the day after Christmas, the death of its first martyr, Saint Stephen.

You see, Christmas does not stay in soft territory for too long, does it?

The second day after Christmas is the feast of Saint John, the beloved disciple, who was also a martyr. The only reason the priest wears white vestments on this day is because the martyrdom of Saint John is celebrated on another day. Saint John was thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil. That was martyrdom indeed, and Saint John deserves to be called a martyr, even though he was miraculously preserved from death and died of love, as an old man. The priest is urged to wear white vestments, on the second day after Christmas, for a white-haired old man, the last of the Apostles to die.

The third day after Christmas is the feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates the slaughter of so many little infant boys for the sake of Jesus. You might say, “Why don’t you hush up these noisy Jewish babies until our songs get sung and our Christmas carols are finished?” “No,” says the Church, “this is the way I want it: Rachel, bewailing her children!” . . . Rachel was buried near the place where the Holy Innocents were martyred.

Having staggered through these three days of Christmas week, with Stephen stoned, John in and out of a cauldron of boiling oil, and the Holy Innocents slaughtered, we come, on the fourth day, to Saint Thomas à Becket — another martyr! He is called à Becket, and not just Becket, because in his day — which was shortly after the Norman invasion — the little French connectives were still put in English names.

Thomas à Becket is the great Archbishop of Canterbury who was killed in his Cathedral for the dogmas of the Faith. As he entered his Cathedral in the evening, at the hour of Vespers, his enemies came to kill him. Saint Thomas forbade his people to defend him with their arms. “The house of God,” he said, “must not be defended like a fortress.” He walked into the church, and when he was not far from the altar, his murderers overtook him.

They hit him once with a sword. That must have hurt. They hit him harder with a sword. And he was not gone. They hit him again, and the sword broke!

It was a pretty sound beating Saint Thomas got on that head on which a mitre had rested, to show God what a man was willing to suffer for the beliefs in his mind, for the dogmas that make him divine — and not the points of view that make him popular.

We envy this great Saint Thomas of Canterbury. We know it is a beautiful thing to die for the dogmas of the Faith. There is some sense in which you can say that if a Catholic does not know when he is right in his Faith, so that he can stand alone against the world in defense of it, he has not got the Faith at all!

Saint Joan of Arc had to stand alone. Condemned and betrayed by a bishop, she was burned at the stake. Little Bernadette of Lourdes knew that she must stand alone in preserving the message given to her by Our Lady.

We find in Saint Thomas More’s meditations, which he made all alone in the Tower of London, the following prayer:

Give me Thy grace, good Lord,
To set the world at nought.
To set my mind fast upon Thee,
And not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths…
To be content to be solitary,
Not to long for worldly company,
Little by little utterly to cast off the world,
And rid my mind of all the business thereof,
Not to long to hear of any worldly things…

Imagine how beautiful a heart must be, how sure it must be in its union with God and the divine company of His Blessed, to say: “I do not want to hang upon the blasts of men’s mouths. I want to be content to be solitary, to be glad to be alone.”

Saint Thomas More did not mean that he wanted to be alone for loneliness’ sake. He did not say, “I want to be lonely.” He said, “I want to be content to be solitary” — because: “I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.” (Gal. 2:20.)

This is all the more poignant when we remember that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, for love of us, submitted Himself to indignities which neither the Father nor the Holy Ghost ever knew, or could know, in eternity. God the Father was never scourged with ropes. The face of God the Holy Spirit was never spat upon. And neither God the Father nor God the Holy Spirit, in the nature They have in common with the Son in eternity, could die.

Only the Son of God took a human nature, and only He was able to die. He trod the wine press alone. (Isa. 63:3.) “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken Me?” He cried on Calvary, (Matt. 27:46), to let the other two Persons in the Blessed Trinity know the depths of degradation to which one Person of the Divine Three was plunged for the sake of man.

There was one place in the passion of Jesus where an angel comforted Him, and that was in the agony in the Garden. But there was another place where there is no mention of the comfort even of an angel, and that was in the agony on the Cross.

All alone, God died: in the supremest martyrdom that ever could be. We who can die are privileged to die with Jesus. If we die apart from Him, it is a routine death, which even the undertaker will soon forget. If we die for the sake of Him, it is a martyrdom, which even the angels will remember.

But to go back to the birthday of this lonely Jesus. The feast of Saint Sylvester is at the end of Christmas week. He was a Pope. They call him the first great Pope after the Church came out of the catacombs. The conversion of Constantine the Great occurred during his pontificate. Pope Sylvester was the Roman Pontiff during the Council of Nicea, in 325. He died in 335.

I would say that the great message of Christmas week can be summed up in two words: dogmas and martyrs; dogmas for which Catholics should be ready to die, and martyrs which Catholics should be eager to become.

That is our offering to the little Child of Bethlehem, from the world of hardship into which He came. We give Him the whole of our mind in belief, and the full flood of our heart’s blood in testimony to that belief.

Americans are generous. They are tired of being generous for the wrong reasons. As an American Catholic priest, I call them to a new crusade: in which their courage will need to be divine, their suffering will be great, and their victory eternal.

(Bread of Life, Saint Benedict Center, 1952)

Chesterton was a man of few ideas made expansive by a gorgeous imagination and a complete and accurate set of moral sympathies. He said the same things over and over again, but in so many different ways, and loved the same things over and over again, but from so many different angles, that he never found it needful to create a brave new world in order to be either courageous or original.

I

In person Chesterton was a large man who was something of a strain on his clothes. Tidiness he persistently ignored in favor of comfort. Everyone who got near him was tempted to rearrange him, or at least to giving thought as to how it could be done. Eventually Chesterton gave up the idea of expecting to be held together in ordinary attire by ordinary threads and buttons, and went around wearing a cloak. The simplicity with which one could secure a sort of stylish seclusion by the tying of a single knot or the fastening of a single hook appealed to Chesterton. A cloak was a garment calculated to reveal not how he was fashioned, but where he was to be found.

In point of kindliness, Chesterton had one of the biggest hearts that has ever lived. And yet I am told the doctors found it undersized physically when they examined him in one of his illnesses. Nothing daunted, he went right on using what share of heart he had to love the world largely and lavishly until the hour of his death. This is what is known as a paradox.

When Chesterton stood up he was impressive. But it was even more marvelous to watch him sit down. He sat down with an air of supreme humility, as if totally collapsing in the arms of God. In the difficult assignment of being both huge and human he needed lots of support. Once seated, he would doze and dream a great deal, and seemed constantly distracted by the incessant rush of his own thoughts.

As humility was Chesterton’s outstanding moral virtue, so what he chose to call “sanity” was what he wanted most for the mind. He was far too humble to suppose that one could appropriate sanity as an assured possession without offering plenty of credentials. And so he undertook to outline what he meant by sanity perhaps more carefully than any man of his generation. One of his contemporaries, George Bernard Shaw, said sanity was the specialty of the superman. This pseudo-preternaturalism annoyed Chesterton, and his reply was devastating. “Shaw criticizes human nature,” he said, “as though he himself did not possess it.” Another contemporary, H. G. Wells, offered hope that sanity might blossom in some brain of the future. Chesterton was quick to analyze this mixture of biology and guesswork masquerading as prophecy, and he exposed it to relentless ridicule. In the end he made more of a monkey out of Wells than Evolution ever had.

The sanity which interested, and indeed fascinated, Chesterton was the sanity which has already occurred in the world, whose proof is in tradition, whose roots are in the past, whose record is in history. That welter of things which men of all times have accepted as lovable and true he labeled Orthodoxy. Of this Orthodoxy he was prepared to act as Defendant. He did so in one hundred and two books, (1) writing as many as eight in a single year. He felt Orthodoxy to be a cause to which one should be loyal. He called it the Flag of the World. He thought laughter was a good air in which to float the Flag of the World. He conceived laughter as something more than a human roar that went rollicking up to the skies; he believed it to be a divine delight that had descended to Earth and was shaking it. He was prepared to trace its tremors everywhere and said its source was in the mirth of God. When criticized on this and other points for not being serious, he made his brilliant and never-to-be-forgotten distinction between the serious and the solemn man.

So much for the “physics” of Chesterton.

II

It will surprise many of my readers to find me associating the notion of metaphysics with the name of Chesterton. One is wont nowadays to associate it more readily with a name like Maritain, perhaps because of the alliteration. But it is my conviction that Chesterton could destroy many of our so-called metaphysicians right in the territory of their own thinking. By way of becoming “pure mentalities” they pretend to have gotten rid of all emotion in thought. They tolerate Chesterton only because of the scintillation of his ideas. They do not approve of him, as is evidenced by the fastidious way in which, kid-gloved with logic, they handle realities which he was prepared to rush at with bare hands, and in the full panoply of his powers. One or other of them will occasionally quote Chesterton, but it is always with a smile — a little, soft, academic smile, as if to say: “Pardon this fantastic interruption in my otherwise reliable ratiocination. It will allow us to indulge in the delicate pleasure of depreciation. It may also serve to relieve the tension of the classroom.”

By way of defending Chesterton against these intellectual isolationists, I may say that his laughter was not an emotion in the sense in which they take the word unfavorably. It was not a frivolous attitude of mind which prejudiced thought, as in the case of a mere comedian. It was rather the fruit of thought — often of some very grim thought — and it occurred to him by way of a spontaneous explosion which he thought it unwise to resist. When he described himself as “a well-meaning hippopotamus,” he did not do so by way of ridiculing the notion of “rational animal,” but by way of showing that ideas which get on very well together in the abstract order do so less sociably when outfitted to exist. Logic deals with essences, laughter with existences. Essences may be proved, but existences must be affirmed. Once affirmed, existences can never be identified by definition, only by description, and if description be forbidden to touch them, then something metaphysical gets lost. Laughter is one way of restoring it. When a reality has been reached which is prepared both to define and describe itself with the triumphant affirmation: “I am Who am!” then logic and laughter both subside in an eternal stillness. The mind has at last arrived at the world’s most serious secret. There is nothing left to do but blindly deny or boldly adore.

If it be objected against laughter that it is more of an observer than a critic, it must also be said of it that it leaves ideas fully delineated as the mind first found them, completely focused for action. Under such a favorable spotlight what takes place is something in the nature of a prizefight. But whereas logic wants to follow the contestants around in the rôle of referee shouting rules, laughter is content to sit back as a spectator and cheer for whatever happens. For ideas in action are not only never fully sociable, but there are times when one idea threatens to knock out another so completely as to leave no mystery between them. Laughter enjoys this hugely, for it is utterly a fanatic, known in sports parlance as “a fan.” Chesterton was not only willing to admit he was a fanatic, he boasted of it. For a fanatic is merely an enthusiastic witness giving testimony. A fanatic is not a partisan making a perverted report. That Chesterton was never a partisan, I am prepared to show.

It is clear from the early pages of his Autobiography that Chesterton’s home was not a place notably given to despondency. His parents were kindly, lovable people, and nothing in his early training drove him to despair. Puritanism of a sort was there, but it was not that extreme Puritanism which makes everything pleasurable a sin. Puritanism had done much more harm to houses in Chesterton’s neighborhood than it had to his own. Puritanism had, for instance, transferred conviviality from the village tavern to the village bar-room; from a place where a man might sleep off his intoxication to a place where he gets thrown out for being drunk. Puritanism was the cause of Chesterton’s “hell-instructed grocer” who ruined the business of innkeepers by making customers of over-bibulous duchesses furtively drinking in their dressing-rooms. Nothing of this coarseness had touched Chesterton’s own household. It was a household in which he was reasonably contented and to whose inhabitants he was always scrupulously loyal. In this last he differs greatly from those debunkers of Puritan culture lately derived from Boston, Mass., U. S. A., who air their grudges in melancholy novels that ruin the reputations of their families.

But if Chesterton’s home was, on all simple, substantial counts, a happy one, it had not nearly as much happiness as he wanted to put there once he became an adolescent and had begun to read. As soon as he found from his reading what European homes in general, and English homes in particular, had been in the past, he sought to improve his own, not in the manner of an interior decorator with a new motif, but rather as one who would refurnish it with things that had wrongfully been taken from it by that sad trick of history known as the Protestant Reformation. Within the four walls in which Chesterton proposed to live, he wanted more dining done, more dancing, dreaming and diversion, even more drinking, and particularly more religious devotion. What that devotion was to be in terms of dogma he was not at once ready to say. But that some chill between man and God had occurred right at his own fireside, he was alert and generous enough to see. If this be called partisanship, then the word has no decent meaning.

Later in life, when Chesterton married and made a home of his own, he restored to it much of what he had been deprived of in his youth. But there was one bright item which, by the strange will of God, he was not able to restore. And that was a child. And yet never once, by the slightest petulance or resentment, did he make his own childlessness the measure of a home’s true worth. With every talent in his power — by story, by treatise, by poetry, by apostrophe, by prayer, by the writing of nursery rhymes and the drawing of pictures — he sought to please, and pay tribute to, the child. He even went boldly to the defense of the child unborn. He literally blasted Dean Inge of London for his moral stand on the prevention of children. “The trouble with the Dean of St. Paul’s,” he wrote in words as accurately as I can recall them, “is not that he is merely anti-Catholic, he is anti-Christian. He thinks pride is a virtue and humility a vice. This temper of mind governs all he does, and lately when he brought it to bear on the subject of birth-control, it never even remotely occurred to him to consider that his own birth might have been prevented.”

So certain was Chesterton that partisanship had never influenced his own thought, that he was prepared to criticize it vigorously when he saw it tampering with the thought of others. Arnold Lunn, some time before his conversion to the Catholic Church, wrote a book called Roman Converts. It was a very patronizing book in which Lunn sought to make nice adjustments between the motives which led men like Newman and Ronald Knox into the Church, and those which drove men like Tyrrell out of it. In one unfortunate paragraph, Lunn, who boasted otherwise of being a sportsman, so forgot his sense of fair play as to call God’s Mother “the patron of a party,” remarking that Christ was “never a party leader.” Chesterton fairly leapt at this cheap remark and tore it to shreds. In a burst of magnificent indignation, he wrote a poem called “A Party Question.” “Who made that inn a fortress?” he shouted in defense of Our Blessed Lady. And he ended by calling the phrase Lunn had used, “That little hiss that only comes from Hell.” Chesterton could afford to be chivalrous on this particular subject, because twenty-five years before his own conversion to Catholicism, in the days when he was religiously no more than a young agnostic, he paid the “Party Question” this youthful and pathetic tribute:

Hail, Mary! Thou blest among women;
Generations shall rise up to greet.
After ages of wrangle and dogma,
I come with a prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel’s red plumes are a wind
In the lanes of thy lilies at eve,
We pray, who have done with the churches;
We worship, who may not believe.

Chesterton is classified in literature most frequently as a controversialist. Some prefer to label him simply: a journalist. “Defendant” would be a good name for him, but hardly a genre in which to put a writer. “Literary man” is far too loose a term to fit him. True, he excelled in many and varied styles of literature, particularly as an essayist, and very valuably in the field of literary criticism. T. S. Eliot, for instance, believes there has never been a better critic of Dickens than Chesterton. But Chesterton was scarcely a literary man in the sense in which Maurice Baring is one, or Max Beerbohm, or the late F. V. Lucas. One archbishop, even during Chesterton’s lifetime, was all for calling him a Doctor of the Church. However unofficial, this compliment may be taken as more than a mere pleasantry. For if the requirements of a Doctor of the Church are eximia scientia et sanctitas, surely something perilously near to both must be ascribed to a man who could roam without an imprimatur through all Catholic theology, hagiology and apologetics and never make a statement which the most meticulous Ultramontane could suspect of heresy; and who could fill a hundred books with an almost beer-garden joviality and never write a line that would cause a child to blush. It would be nice to have a St. Gilbert taking rank with St. Augustine, St. Bernard and St. Thomas, but the proposal, however exciting, had best be left to the justice and generosity of the Pope.

III

And so, for want of a better rating, Chesterton must fall back into classification either as a poet or a philosopher. By way of escaping this “dilemma,” we might make a third choice and say he was a mystic. Indeed, there are in Orthodoxy (his most brilliant book) abundant passages that illustrate the mystical quality of his mind. But his was an imaginative rather than an illuminative mysticism. It was not achieved — and it is no criticism of his morals to say so — by that rigid asceticism of the senses which leaves the mind devoutly dark and patiently prepared to receive the pure light of the supernatural. Chesterton’s was the colorful approach to mysticism: to mystery by way of magic, to angels by way of fairies, to God the Father by way of Mother Goose. Chesterton saw, and rightly, a serious psychological necessity in Mother Goose; but she is hardly the sacred religious need expressed in the Lord’s Prayer. True, there is, as Chesterton points out, a marvelous asceticism achieved in every simple choice of charity (a man who chooses one woman to be his wife renounces all other women), but this is the choice of charity in the moral order, more properly called charitableness. It is not the infused, supernatural Charity spoken of by St. Paul, which is strictly theological and in which no choice is given: no choice but the pure surrender to the terror and bewilderment of being chosen.

It is also to be noted about the mysticism of Elfland, that it can devise no clear symbol even for what it wants to say in the order of poetry. It is a damnable business to undo a beautiful piece of imaginative writing by pointing out its logical flaw, but that is what we must do with Chesterton precisely at the point where he is trying to show the superiority of imagination over reason. He says, in Orthodoxy, at the end of his well-known chapter on “The Maniac”:

That transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much of the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

This, however fascinatingly spoken, is arbitrary symbolism of the very worst kind. For it is not the visual clarity of the moon — that soft clarity which is the delight and companionship of lovers — which causes lunatics. It is rather the imperceptible gravity of the moon, that tugs at temperaments as it does on tides. But inasmuch as relatively few temperaments are as unstable as water, the weight of the moon may be disregarded while the wonder of the moon remains. True, the moon may not light up the rest of the world as brilliantly as the sun does, but in all its shapes, from crescent to full disc, it is the best form in which to look at light itself. The real lunatic is not the moon-gazer nor the star-gazer, but the one who tries to outstare the sun. Furthermore, in Christian mysticism, the moon is Our Lady. “Pulchra ut luna” is God’s own phrase for her: a symbol with a divine guarantee.

If one could go through the whole of Chesterton’s works and gather together the great number of brilliant and accurate things he has said on the subject of epistemology, psychology, cosmology and ethics, one would have a book full of philosophic wisdom which no philosopher could afford to ignore. But unfortunately the journalist in Chesterton clouded much of what was the true philosopher. In his effort to study the universal within the local — which is the philosopher’s task — he frequently became too local, and at times hopelessly insular. Chesterton is in great part untranslatable, which no philosopher can afford to be. His deepest thought is sometimes so bound up with superficial English idiom, or manners, or even politics, that one is often required to know the inside of the mind of some nonentity like J. H. McCabe or F. E. Smith before one can get to what Chesterton himself is saying. The discriminating reader will, of course, make allowances for these provincialisms, especially since they occur within the orbit of such large and valuable thinking. But, alas, philosophy is a science that cannot be safely entrusted to the discriminating mind. It is at once the philosopher’s strength and weakness that he must safeguard his most tenuous judgments with a sort of universal language, which at its best can travel instantaneously from mind to mind independently of time and place, and at its worst is a jargon of such words as: virtualiter, potentialiter, aequivalenter, eminenter, that capture a minimum of idea and are almost the ruination of speech.

IV

Some criticism similar to that which I have made of Chesterton as a philosopher, must also be made of him as a poet. No poet of the twentieth century (with the exception of Hilaire Belloc) had a better command of the traditional forms and subsidiary styles of verse than had Chesterton. He could write a ballade or a rondeau as well as any man who ever lived. In satire, burlesque and parody he was superb. Likewise the number of utterly wonderful things he has said about poetry (not in any one place, but scattered throughout his work, sometimes in a detective story, sometimes in a treatise on economics) ought to be collected and put in one book. Mr. F. J. Sheed told me he thought of making such a collection some day. I hope he will. It might well begin with the accolade Chesterton gives the poet for being “the only man in the world who knows what he wants to say, and can say it.”

But when it came to writing poetry himself, in serious fashion, Chesterton was altogether too committed to a single manner: the grandiose. He was often sublime in his verse, but rarely exquisite. He was constantly the troubadour thumping out a great theme. When the material suited his mood, as it did in Lepanto or The Ballad of the White Horse, all went well. But all did not go well in his simpler verse, or rather I should say, in his verse that ought to have been simpler.

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born

is, I protest, utterance too apocalyptic to suit the plain fact of a donkey, even the humble little beast who carried Our Lord in triumph through the streets of Jerusalem. I myself once wrote a poem on a donkey, so I may be presumed to know his requirements in verse. At least my donkey is a creature who may be more calmly recognized.

Hitched by a halter to a rail,
He twitched his ears and twirled his tail;
In every lineament and line
He was completely asinine.

Let my stanza be only the tribute from one donkey to another; at least a donkey remains somewhere in the arrangement, not merely a nightmare on the subject of Palm Sunday.

V

Poor Chesterton! If he be, in the unrestricted sense, neither poet, nor philosopher, nor mystic, then where shall we place him? Must he be the “tattered outlaw” of all categories simply because none could contain him? No. I believe there is one rating he deserves, without any reservation. Chesterton was one of the world’s greatest metaphysicians.

If it be objected that metaphysics is, after all, only philosophy (a competence from which I have already removed Chesterton), then I shall object again that metaphysics is not, after all, only philosophy. Metaphysics is what Aristotle — who never used the word metaphysics — called “the first philosophy.” It could as readily be called “the first poetry” or “the first mysticism.” Briefly, metaphysics is the preoccupation of the mind with being as being, with thing as thing. Briefly, metaphysics is what Chesterton called “Aristotle’s colossal common sense.”

Technically, here is the way the “first philosophy” is handled. The logician discovers in metaphysics the contingency of things, their essential insufficiency to exist by themselves: hence his distinctions between essence and existence, potency and act, imperfection and perfection, accidents and substance. The poet discovers in the same metaphysics the forms by which potencies have been actualized: hence his attention to the integrity, clarity and proportion by which contingent things endeavor to image the pure act from which they originate. The mystic derives from metaphysics a loving interest in the undeserved gift which all contingent beings are both to themselves and to those who behold them; hence his tributes of adoration, gratitude and humility. For being as being has three intrinsic attributes (three transcendental notes) which are inseparable from it: it is true, it is beautiful and it is good. Indeed, it has a fourth inseparable note which is almost the undoing of the other three. It is one. Wherefore, no mere logician can be a perfect metaphysician, any more than a mere poet can, or a mere mystic. Each has only a one-third interest in the subject of being; the logician in ens qua verum, the poet in ens qua pulchrum, the mystic in ens qua bonum. The logician will tell you himself, as he must, that he has no pure ontology. His ontology is necessarily clouded by the analogies in which he words it. The pure logos of anything is known to God alone. Likewise does the poet cloud the pure beauty of things with his metaphors, and the mystic the pure goodness of things with his symbols. But the complete metaphysician is the “compleat angler” who fishes for being qua being with every bait at his disposal. What cannot be caught with analogy can sometimes be taken by metaphor, or by symbol, or vice versa in any order. How wonderful if all three should work together! In such a metaphysician as Chesterton I believe they did, at least far more strikingly than they do in most men. (2.)

In page after page, in book after book, I find examples of this metaphysical harmony in Chesterton’s perceptions. As soon as he was able to think, he plunged right into the heart of “the first philosophy.” When his tooth ached, along with inquiring, “Why have I a toothache?” he also inquired, “Why have I a tooth?” and, indeed, “Why have I anything?” His fondness in early childhood was more than for wood you could whittle, water you could drink, and soap you could wash with; it was for “the toughness of wood, the wetness of water, and the magnificent soapiness of soap.” Nothing could be more metaphysical than this.

Almost the very first utterance Chesterton the writer made to the world was the declaration of his own contingency, the confession of his own utter needlessness to anything or anybody. So unnecessary did he consider himself to the universe around him that he immediately rejected Pantheism as a religious creed because it deprived him of a God to whom he could be grateful for his existence. “I want to adore the world,” he said, “not as one likes a looking glass, because it is oneself, but as one loves a woman because she is entirely different.” The gift of life he defined as “a kind of eccentric privilege” for which we owe an infinite gratitude. He declared he found everywhere “the sense of the preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the hollow of a hand.” He scorned the pessimist who criticizes this world “as if he were house hunting, as if he were being shown over a new set of apartments.” He would not allow any low estimate of our beloved universe to be made. He wrote: “While dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind.” The Materialist, he agreed, did explain the cosmos, but “with a sort of insane simplicity” which forced Chesterton to say that, “it was not much of a cosmos” when any innocent beholder could suggest a so much better one.

Chesterton was literally entranced with the thingness of things, with facts as facts, not deviously explained, but bravely accepted as they are. He wrote a whole book about things as things, and called it Tremendous Trifles. He believed that the very repetition of things was a delightful argument for design. “One elephant with its absurd trunk is a wildly amusing sight,” he wrote, “but for all elephants to have trunks suggests a conspiracy.” Even in their grotesque form, he was anxious to preserve the most fantastic and useless pieces of creation. If someone said: “Camels in various places are totally diverse: some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers,” Chesterton vowed he would reply: “Then what do you mean by a camel? What makes you call them camels?”

Chesterton brought this simple metaphysical outlook to the deepest experiences of his life. Merely to be in the presence of any human being, however lowly, caused him pleasure. Merely to know that any woman could be his wife astonished him. Here is his charming stanza (from the poem “The Beatific Vision”) written, with that detached devotion which is the essence of pure love, to Frances Blogg Chesterton.

But what shall God not ask of him
In the last time when all is told
Who saw her stand beside the hearth,
The firelight garbing her in gold.

“The first philosophy” will not cause a prophet or a superman. It will not create a new cosmos, devise a new civilization, or evolute a new era. Hence, little of our modern thinking is done in terms of it. But it will give one a healthy, happy, hilarious outlook upon things as they are, capable of making every ordinary thing appear as a portent. “It is to the ordinary man that odd things seem extraordinary,” wrote Chesterton, “to the extraordinary man they are simply ordinary.” Chesterton preferred to be, and always was, in however extraordinary a way, the ordinary man. “A thing worth doing at all is worth doing badly” was one of his profundities in the realm of common sense. He refused to allow the oddness of the world to be destroyed by familiarity. He felt the short space of a man’s life was not time enough in which to exhaust the strangeness of the world, or alter his own position in it as a stranger. Rather than lose a sense of the strangeness of things (which metaphysics calls “their contingency”) he was prepared to look at the universe standing on his head.

I have not read all of Chesterton’s books. But I have read enough to know that his outstanding talent was the one I have indicated, and that I can expect abundant manifestations of it wherever I turn in his writings. And so, before I leave him, I pay him a great compliment, indeed one of the greatest I think I could possibly pay. I call him “the laughing metaphysician.” He laughed loudly at himself, which is humility; and he made others laugh, which is charity.

2. In fairness to my reader, I think I must say that, as far as I myself am concerned, this is a speculative arrangement, not a practical one. The metaphysical scheme I here outlined seems to me sound enough, but, unfortunately, except in the case of geniuses and saints, it is unfeasible for the general run of us. It is thoroughly unfeasible for me. Unlike Chesterton, I cannot say that I discovered the Doctrine of Original Sin before it was revealed to me. Without my Faith, I should certainly be prone to cope with the ignorance, ugliness and iniquity of man by equalizing in him the functions of philosopher, poet and mystic. But, alas, I know from Revelation that Original Sin has lessened the wonder and warmth of the human mind and left it with little more than a sense of curiosity. At least it is in terms of mere curiosity that nearly all education is now pursued. Curiosity, if thorough enough, will make a fairly good logician (e.g., Mr. Mortimer Adler). The logician wants problems to solve. He regrets the point where problems threaten to become mysteries, where curiosity must cease and let contemplation come in. But, unfortunately again, contemplation can never return to the human race wholesale, and never in the full pristine innocence in which Adam enjoyed it when he surveyed everything with a child’s insight and went around calling the animals by name. With our loss of the power of contemplation, the simple beauty and goodness of things has disappeared. We are left with nothing but the cold truth on our hands: “the bitter truth,” “the hard painful truth,” that must be pieced together by the patient study not of things in themselves, but of things in their causes. Apart from the liturgy of the supernatural, which is safeguarded by the Church, and the special illumination of Grace, which is the free gift of the Holy Spirit, I find no reliable poetry or mysticism in this world. And so I am content to amble along with the philosophers as my best guides, knowing that they have taught me all I know, and hoping that Faith will fulfill in me what their dialectics never can.

(The Leonard Feeney Ominibus, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1943)

Certainly you have been noticing that everything new in art looks strange.

And, just as certainly, you have noticed that what is being passed off as the “modern” look in homes, stores, tables, chairs, paintings, and overshoes, has come in for some healthy ridicule from the great bulk of the American people who still retain their sanity. But in the midst of the digs and catcalls, brought on by living rooms full of wire and canvas furniture, and picture frames full of cows in flight over violins melting in frying pans, it is apparent that very few of you realize what is behind all this madness. How did sensible Americans get mixed up in all the current maze of curved concrete, plate glass walls, and egg crates stuck to the ceiling!

Well, like many of our present problems, this one immigrated here from Europe, where it had been gaining momentum since the year 1906. In that year, a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso produced the first of his deranged, erratic, twisted, brainsick, moon struck, crackpot canvases. Over night Picasso became the talk of Europe — and not just because of his spectacular queerness. For Pablo Picasso was that wild and fabulous contradiction: a painter who is a Jew.

Except for a liberal Jewess named Rosa Bonheur, who had done some pictures of horses a few years before, Europe had never heard of a Jew owning a paint brush and easel. Image making of any kind was strictly forbidden by the vigilant rabbis. To enter the world of art meant apostasy from the synagogue. Pictures and statues had been taken over by the Christians, who commemorated in paint and stone the Jew detested fact that God had become Man — picturable now, along with His Virgin Mother, His Foster Father and His host of haloed saints.

Picasso finally realized all this, and his entrance into art was not in the least a scrapping of his Jewish loyalties. For Picasso had hit on a new angle for showing his Jewish hatred of pictures. He was willing to bet that he cold get Gentiles to pay money to see how a faithful Jew, let loose in a studio, ought to behave toward a piece of canvas.

He would use paint not to make images but to break them.

All the Jews jumped on Picasso’s bandwagon as soon as they saw what he was doing. Gertrude Stein wrote two books in praise of him, and young Jews from every capital in Europe flocked to Paris, Picasso’s headquarters, to be instructed in the new iconoclasm.

It didn’t take long to figure out that there are two basic ways of obliterating the subject matter of a picture. You can either distort it and twist it and stick it in a setting where it never, in reality, could be; or, you can reduce the thing to circles and squares and haphazard lines, leaving no trace of what you started with. The Jews decided that these two styles of destruction were entitled to fancy names, so they called the first one “surrealism,” and the second, “abstraction.”

From then on, modern art became a Yiddish field day — but not an intolerant one. Gentiles could enter the race as long as they observed the rules. Consequently a Dutchman named Piet Mondrain became a leader in “abstraction” and “surrealism.”

With the pictures on the wall gone haywire, it was only a matter of time before the rest of the room, the house and the whole neighborhood followed suit. And naturally, there was a Jew already posted at each foreseeable point in the process, waiting to give you the “latest, up to date fashionably smart” item, just the way you saw it advertised in the sick Jewish press.

But before we trace the effects of Picasso’s revolution as it spread beyond the studio and art shop, there is this unhappy realization for Catholics: The Jewish attack was successful where, of all places it most wanted to be — in pictures and statues of Our Lord and the saints. Just enter any of the brand new churches which your local bishop has lately erected with the help of a Jewish fund raising expert. Apart from the immediately apparent fact that there are hardly any statues at all, you will notice that Our Blessed Lady has been streamlined, the Stations of the Cross have been reduced to fourteen studies in abstract composition, and the Crucifix (above the altar which looks like a drug store counter) has been distorted into some weird sub-human shape.

An investigation will many times reveal that these travesties on Christian art were done by respected Catholics who, in following the Jewish line in art, imagine that they are keeping our Church “abreast of the times.”

Thus far, however, “liturgical” Catholic sculptors have not yet reached the extremes of distortion which their Jewish mentors have. No Catholic, for example, has yet produced a statue of Our Blessed Lord that looks quite as grotesque as the totem pole monster with rope bound wrists which is sketched on the title page of this article. This particular bit of diabolism is entitled “Behold the Man,” is meant to be Jesus in His crown of thorns, and comes to us from the Jewish chisel of an east side New York sculptor named Jacob Epstein. Epstein does all his carving in London now, and as a reward for a steady stream of blasphemies like “Behold the Man,” he has been made a “knight” by the head of the Church of England, the namesake and worthy successor to Queen Elizabeth I.

By the end of World War I, the Jews felt Christian art and sculpture were well launched on the road to destruction, and so they decided to have a fling at architecture. Accordingly, there suddenly broke out in all parts of the Jew inhabited world a rash of delirious designs on everything from office buildings to hamburger stands. At a loss to explain whence this new, sharply distinct architecture had come — arising in every nation at the same moment, and essentially the same form — bewildered Gentiles dubbed it “International Style” and let it go at that.

One reason for the universal sameness of the new architecture was, of course, that the Jews contriving it had all been given the same artistic schooling. They were all bent on translating the perversities of Picasso into concrete. But even more potent as a stereotyper was the single, resolute objective in each Jew’s mind as he sat down to his drawing board. He was determined that, more than a new mode of building, his blueprint should present the setting for a new way of life.

As to what that new way of life ought to be, Jews everywhere were agreed. Instructed by their Talmud, they knew that the welfare of the world depended on Gentiles’ taking the place nature intended them to have.

The first thing you noticed about the new Jewish architecture, and that you still notice, is the stark nakedness of it. A Jew-designed house, with its vast expanses of unashamed glass, gives its inhabitant the feeling he has made his bed on the front lawn. It leaves him without a scrap of dignity, privacy, or composure.

With unwonted frankness, the Jews describe these houses of theirs as “machines of living.” They are meant simply to facilitate man’s biological functions — to give him a place to bring his food and eat it, a place to protect himself from the elements, a place to sleep and to raise his children. And the Jews feel these purposes should be plainly and immediately evident in the house’s construction. The modern family dwelling, they hold, should be designed with the straightforwardness of a bird’s nest — which presents no deceitful fripperies, but is clearly and genuously what it is: a secure spot where the bird may lay its eggs.

To go with their animal-function houses, the Jews have also designed some animal-form furniture, the most striking specimen of which is probably the Jewish chair. It is impossible to see the human body — back hunched, arms dangling — trying to conform itself to one of these atrocities, without either snickering in amusement or gasping in horror.

As with painting, the Jews are willing to admit an occasional apt Gentile to the fraternity of architects and designers. But it is always made clear that he is there by sufferance, the show belongs to the Jews. Thus, the brainstorms of a ferocious Finn, labeled “lamp” or “table,” might be featured by a modern minded furniture store: but you can be sure that the man who ordered them, and who stands by your shoulder urging you to buy, is solidly Jewish.

To trace the origins of modem Jewish architecture, as a central, organized movement, it is necessary to look to Germany. There, by the mid-twenties, a certain Walter Gropius, supported by the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, Jewish writer Franz Werfel, and Jewish mathematician Albert Einstein, was operating a successful school of architecture called the “Bauhaus” (German for “building house”).

The Bauhaus had contracted to be the laboratory for all that was new in art and technology. It aimed at coordinating the twentieth century forces of the studio and the machine shop, with all the work done jointly by a “commune” of students, teachers, artists, and grease monkeys.

By the year 1933, Adolph Hitler had arrived on the scene, and it became quite apparent that there would be no room in Germany for two such contradictory enterprises as the Jew-ridden, communal Bauhaus and the Jew-Hating National Socialism. The Nazis chose to stay, and ordered Gropius and company to pack some realistic luggage and get out.

Although Walter Gropius eventuated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and became our next door neighbor, the idea of a Bauhaus still obsessed his former colleagues. The most capable of them, a Hungarian Jew named Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, finally persuaded some unwary industrialists to support him in establishing an American Bauhaus in Chicago — the now famous Institute of Design.

When Moholy-Nagy died in Chicago his “new Bauhaus” laid him out in an exhibit of his paintings, sculptures and designs, then hired a Jewish cantor to come in and lament over the body in proper Hebrew fashion. It was a fitting gesture; for Moholy (as even his wife called him) had rendered his race an immeasurable service.

Under his direction, the Institute of Design had completely assumed the role of the old Bauhaus in Germany, serving as the headquarters for modern architecture. But beyond that, Moholy and his Institute had won the everlasting gratitude of Jewry by promoting in America the idea of mass housing. This was the most significant advance in the campaign to animalize Gentiles by designing their dwellings since the International Style first burst into being.

It was immediately evident to most Jews that there were tremendous advantages in putting lots of Gentile families under one roof and having many such identical roofs congregated in a small area. For those who needed more convincing, the first such assemblages (called by the innocuous name “housing projects”) provided the clincher. Placing the inhabitants in compact, uniform stalls; indiscriminately mixing up black and white families; compelling them to lead a kind of life that strips off the properties and conventions of civilized man — these measures have proven their effectiveness. Housing projects are openly, notoriously, jungles of crime, cruelty, depravity, and vice. As enforcers of Talmudic theology, they are unbeatable.

Although there is no precedent in the animal world which justifies the building of a place for religious meetings, the dispensers of modern Jewish architecture have produced, along with their housing projects, a number of churches. Each of these looks as though the architect had begrudgingly said to himself as he started off, “Well, if all the pious herd want to be packed into one room at one time, I suppose I can build them a barn for the purpose.”

Lately, the architects have been more enthusiastic about churches. They are now designing a variety which fits quite neatly into the animal pattern. It is popularly called the Interfaith Chapel. It is a communal religious center for the priest, the minister, the rabbi, and its calculated Jewish effect is to reduce the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, to the level of televangelist fakery and Talmudic filth — a supreme award for eighty five years of plotting on the part of Messrs. Picasso, Epstein, Moholy and company.

IN THE YEAR 1792, on May thirteenth, in the ancient Italian seaport town of Sinigaglia, high up on its perch overhanging the Adriatic Sea, there was born to the Mayor of the city, Count Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and his wife, the Countess Caterina, their seventh child, Giovanni-Maria Giovanni-Battista Pietro Isidoro. The year 1792 was an ominous one, as far as the world outside the castle of the Mastai-Ferretti’s was concerned, and it would forever overshadow the life of little John Mary Mastai-Ferretti, one day to become the great Pope Pius IX and to rule the Church of Jesus Christ from the throne of Peter for thirty-two years, the longest pontificate of any Pope except Peter.

He would, this boy born in the tragic year of 1792 — gently nurtured, sensitive, generous, gay, loving, pure, true-hearted, possessing great charm and great good looks, taught as a child to revere the poor, deeply devoted to the Church and known for his constant and absorbing love of the Blessed Virgin Mary — live all his days surrounded by revolution; revolution diabolically planned and sustained, the like of which never before was seen. The unbelievably horrible French Revolution, the first in the satanic plan to tear down the thrones and altars of Christendom, was already three years old in the year 1792, when John Mary Mastai-Ferretti was born.

It is not at all surprising that the French Revolution, about which we in America, as if by a gigantic conspiracy, have been taught so little of the real truth, should be visited upon the land which had allowed its king — in his mad passion to place himself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the Vicar of Christ — to cause the death of Pope Boniface VIII. It is true that France remained nominally Catholic both during and after the Protestant revolt, but it never as a nation quite returned, even in the periods of Catholic revival, to its old purity of Faith and its old filial devotion to the Popes, which had been its crowning mark before the outrage and death of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303.

It was France’s voice which, in the fifteenth century, through the University of Paris and its sons, John Gerson and Peter d’Ailly, was loudest in proclaiming the Pope inferior to, and therefore subject to, a general council of the Church! It was France’s “Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges” which not only insisted on the supremacy of a council over the Pope, but practically deprived the Pope of any jurisdiction over the French Church. “Gallicanism,” or the equivalent of what would amount to a French National Church, independent of the Holy See, was not very far off, after that.

It was the traitorous political ambition of France which set up Protestantism permanently in Europe. It was France’s Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), Prime Minister and real ruler of the country under Louis XIII, who, to ensure the political victory of France in Europe, took the side of the Protestant Princes of Germany against the Catholic Emperor, Ferdinand II, at the most critical moment of the Thirty Years’ War between the forces of Protestantism and Catholicism. Cardinal Richelieu hired the Protestant military genius, Gustavus Adolphus, for five tubs of gold (approximately two million dollars), to enter the war against the Catholics. The defeat of Ferdinand made forever impossible his dream of a Europe united again as one family by the Faith, so close to realization but for the treachery of the French Cardinal.

It was France who, in 1682, under its absolute monarch, Louis XIV and his subservient clergy, more loyal to their King than to their God, passed the famous Four Gallican Articles, which again not only practically withdrew France from the jurisdiction of the Pope, but declared in effect that Christ’s Vicar was not infallible. And even though Louis XIV withdrew the articles after two Popes had condemned them and his country had been interdicted, Gallicanism was by then deeply and firmly established in the thought of the people. It would, along with the Jansenist heresy (a species of Calvinism within the Church) — and the shocking looseness of morals both of Louis XIV and his great-grandson and successor, Louis XV, of their courts and of French society generally — disastrously weaken the Faith and prepare France for the religious skepticism and free thought already prevailing in England and Germany.

In the literary hands of the Freemason Voltaire and the equally anti-Christian writer Rousseau, along with the French Encyclopedists who were in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia, also a Freemason, this “free thought” would usher in the “Age of Enlightenment” in France and lead straight to the sheer atheism and diabolical mockery of God of the terrible French Revolution.

It was precisely at the hour in history when France, now the leading nation of the world, was giving to that world the spectacle of a dissolute Catholic King, Louis XV, who with his court lived lives of such shameless corruption that they rivaled in depravity even the notoriously wicked courts of Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia — when the vices of royalty had passed down through the nobles and bourgeoisie even to the poor, and the seed of Lucifer gave every appearance of triumphing over the seed of Mary — that God allowed a scourge to come upon Europe, just as He had permitted the scourge of Mohammedanism to ravage the heretical and sinful East in the seventh and succeeding centuries. Indeed, the scourge which brought about the temporary chastisement of Europe in the eighteenth century, although it crossed the Channel and entered the Continent decked out in new clothes carefully refashioned and tailored in London, had its origins very definitely in the East. Its symbols, its ceremonies, its dress, its traditions, its rituals, all were Eastern. William Thomas Walsh, writing in his book, Philip II, said of the degrees and rituals of Freemasonry that they “are shot through with Jewish symbolism: the candidate is going to the East, towards Jerusalem, he is going to rebuild the Temple, destroyed in fulfillment of the prophecy of Christ … The official coat of arms of the English Grand Lodge, even to this day, is the one made in 1675 by Rabbi Jacob Jehuda Leon, known as Templo, who went from Holland to England that year.”

Modern Freemasonry — for such is the scourge — came into being in England in 1717, when the ancient Catholic guild of working masons, Protestantized long since in England, but existing in Great Britain and Europe for many centuries, was revised. Its professional, laboring character was dropped, and it emerged a philosophical, pseudo-religious secret society, its formulas, ceremonies and traditions all pointing to a Jewish origin, although its new constitutions and ritual were drawn up by a Scotch Presbyterian minister, James Anderson, and a Huguenot refugee minister, John T. Desaguliers, and its Grand Master, in 1722, was the profligate, thoroughly immoral Duke of Wharton who everywhere was reputed to be “from no vice exempt.”

It was in 1725 that the new Freemasonry spread to Paris, in 1728 to Madrid, in 1729 to Ireland, in 1731 to the Hague, in 1733 to Hamburg, in 1736 to Germany, and so on, to Italy.

Voltaire became a Freemason in England, around 1727, and on his return to France did everything in his power to spread it among the nobility and intellectuals. Unspeakably immoral, both in his life and in his writings, the intimate of Frederick the Great, because of the use Frederick could make of his extraordinary ability to write, Voltaire shared the Prussian King’s consuming hatred of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. It was their constant cry that the “Christian religion is an infamous religion. It must be destroyed by a hundred invisible [sic] hands. It is necessary that the philosophers should course through the streets to destroy it as missionaries course over the earth and sea to propagate it. They ought to dare all things, risk all things, even to be burned, in order to destroy it. Let us crush the wretch! Crush the wretch! Écrasez l’infâme!”

Freemasonry spread like wildfire over Europe. It became the rage in Paris. The nobility and some members of the higher clergy — especially in France where Gallicanism and Jansenism had, in the century before, as we have seen, prepared the ground for the perpetual ridicule of religion and all its institutions, including even holy matrimony, which, in the 1700’s, was the order of the day — were perversely fascinated by the doctrines of Freemasonry, and they entered its lodges in great numbers. Later, many of them, when all their theoretical dreams were come true, at the height of the Revolution found themselves mounting the bloody steps to the guillotine, ruefully facing at last the bitter truth that they had, along with the downfall of the Pope and the existing order, plotted their own destruction.

The teachings of Freemasonry spread far and wide the spirit of revolt not only against the authority of the Vicar of Christ, but against the authority of the State, as well. In the third quarter of the 1700’s, a new and even more sinister element was added. This was the “Illuminism,” so-called, of Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law in the University of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, which gave to Masonry the mold and lasting form by which it has, despite all opposition, come down to us today and by which “it will advance until its final conflict with Christianity must determine whether Christ or Satan shall reign on this earth to the end.”

Weishaupt’s way, which is still the way of the Masonic lodges today, was first to entice men into his organization through its lowest degrees. As Monsignor Dillon explained in his famous Edinburgh lectures:

A man, though in Masonry, may not be willing to become an atheist or a Socialist, for some time at least. He may have in his heart a profound conviction that God exists, and some hope left of returning to that God at or before his death. He may have entered Masonry for purposes of ambition, for motives of vanity, from mere lightness of character. He may continue his prayers and refuse, if a Catholic, to give up the Mother of God and some practice of piety loved by him from his youth. But Masonry is a capital system to wean a man gradually away from all these things. It does not at once deny the existence of God, nor at once attack the Christian dispensation. It commences by giving the Christian idea of God an easy and, under semblance of respect, an almost imperceptible shake. It swears by the name of God in all its oaths. It calls Him, however, not a Creator, only an architect — the great Architect of the universe. It carefully avoids all mention of Christ, of the Adorable Trinity, of the unity of Faith, or of any faith. It protests a respect for the convictions of every man, for the idolatrous Parsee, for the Mohammedan, the heretic, the Jew, the schismatic, the Catholic. By and by, in higher degrees, it gives a ruder shock to the belief in the Deity, and a gradual inducement to favor Naturalism.

As time goes on, the man who manifests any real religious depth or signs of conscience never goes beyond the lower degrees. He remains instead a member of the rank and file of Masonry, of the respectable front presented to the world, but he and his kind are never trusted with the real secret. On the other hand, those who meet the Masonic requirements, who are possessed of no fine moral sensibilities, proceed in the ways of irreligion, immorality, espionage and occult science until they arrive at the advanced degrees and are let in on more and more of the frightfully guarded secrets of the Order.

But, and this is more than ever true in our day, the visible leaders of Masonry — and of all the secret societies which are but subsidiary to it — are never the real leaders! For beyond the visible leaders there is an inner circle, organized on Masonic lines, whose members are hidden and unknown to the public. Beyond this inner circle, there is another and still more secret ring. At last, at the very top, there sits the lone head and his small — six at most — carefully chosen coterie of advisers, who direct the invisible government, not only of Masonry, but of the world. These men are known to but very few on Earth.

At the great coming together of the Masonic bodies from all over the world at the so-called Congress of Wilhelmsbad on July 16, 1782, Adam Weishaupt gained control of all the secret societies of the Congress, which at that time — only sixty-five years after Masonry’s modern revision — represented the amazing total, of three million members! Weishaupt next succeeded in allying Illuminism and Freemasonry, an alliance which has been of the darkest significance for the world. It is impossible to exaggerate the depths of its power for evil. For the face which has looked out upon the world from behind the mask of Illuminized Freemasonry, from that day to this, is none other than the face of Lucifer himself.

This is the enemy whom Pope Leo XIII saw in the vision which caused him to faint in terror for the world. This is the enemy whom he named in his encyclical, Humanum Genus, in which he wrote to his sons, the Bishops:

We wish it to be your rule first of all to tear away the mask from Freemasonry, and to let it be seen as it really is, and by sermons and pastoral letters to instruct the people as to the artifices used by societies of this kind in seducing men and enticing them into their ranks …

This it was which caused Pope Saint Pius X to cry out in his very first encyclical:

So extreme is the general perversion that there is room to fear that we are experiencing the foretaste and beginnings of the evils which are to come at the end of time, and that the Son of Perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, has already arrived upon Earth.

This it was which caused the Editor of the Acta Sanctae Sedis (Acts of the Holy See), writing for the July 13, 1865 issue, to say:

If one takes into consideration the immense development which these secret societies have attained; the length of time they are persevering in their vigor; their furious aggressiveness; the tenacity with which their members cling to the association and to the false principles it professes; the persevering mutual cooperation of so many different types of men in the promotion of evil; one can hardly deny that the Supreme Architect of these associations (seeing that the cause must be proportioned to the effect) can be none other than he who in the sacred writings is styled the Prince of the World; and that Satan himself, even by his physical cooperation, directs and inspires at least the leaders of these bodies, physically cooperating with them.

It was at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad that Masonry became “one organized atheistic mass, while being permitted to assume many fantastic shapes.” The Knights Rosicrucian, the Templars, the Knights of Beneficence, the Brothers of Amity, and many, many others, subversive and irreligious as each was in its own right, now were united to the body of Illuminized Freemasonry. All would have, under whatever name and whatever form they chose, the same counterfeit respect for religion, the same apparent acceptance of the Bible, the same outward zeal for the care of widows and orphans, the ill and the destitute. All would have the same terrible oaths of secrecy; all would have some variety of the same fantastic, Asiatic, Hebrew and Turkish ceremonial, “to which any meaning from the most silly to the deepest and darkest could be given.” All would have the same ascending degrees, although the number might vary, and all would have the same fearful death penalty for the violation of secrets, for indiscretion, and for treason.

All the high initiates would have, unknown to their brothers of lower degrees, the same program for the annihilation of all religion, of all love of country and all loyalty to sovereigns. All would strive for the abolition of monarchy and ordered government, the abolition of private property and inheritance, the abolition of marriage and morality, and the institution of required government education of children. (This plan, as we know, is being fully worked out in our time.)

It was at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad that the Jews were emancipated, as the result of a carefully produced wave of pro-Semitism which broke over Europe in the wake of a book, Upon the Civil Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews, written by a man named Dohrn under the direction of Moses Mendelssohn and brought out in August of 1781. “This book,” we are told, “had a considerable influence on the revolutionary movement. It is the trumpet call of the Jewish cause, the signal for the step forward.”

The Jews, whose function of abettor and overseer at the births of Freemasonry and Illuminism had been performed in the role of privileged servant, were now, at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, admitted on full equality to the family circle. And the Jewish influence, as Father Edward Cahill, S. J., brings out in his book, Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, soon became one of the main driving forces behind Masonry. It is the influence which today dominates the whole organization.

At Wilhelmsbad, it was decided to move the headquarters of Illuminized Freemasonry to Frankfurt, significantly at that time the headquarters of Jewish finance, with the familiar name of Rothschild already well in the lead. It was at Frankfurt that the incredible plans for world revolution were perfected, with France chosen to be first on the list and Italy soon to follow. It was at Frankfurt that the deaths of Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden were resolved upon.

The diabolical certainty with which all these schemes of the enemies of Christianity came off, exactly on schedule, is startling! They did achieve the French Revolution, and it was the most atrocious, cruel and bloody massacre the world had ever seen up to that time. In 1792, the year in which Pope Pius IX was born, in the “September Massacres,” three hundred assassins from the Paris underworld and Paris jails, mad with dope and drink and lust for blood, massacred, amidst indescribable orgies and satanic abandon, the Archbishop of Arles, two bishops, four hundred priests and monks, one thousand Catholic nobles, and eight thousand citizens, in Paris alone. At Meaux, Châlons, Rennes and Lyons, similar scenes were taking place.

They did, these enemies of Jesus Christ, during all of the next century — particularly in 1830, 1848 and 1870 — cause revolutions all over Europe and the world. They did attack Italy. They did seize the Papal States and conquer Rome. They boasted that the papacy was no more, and in that they were, and always will be, devastatingly wrong, but they did bring off their scheduled revolution in Russia, in 1917, and the unparalleled revolution of the First World War, in 1914, when twenty-seven nations were joined in bloody combat and 37,508,686 men were killed, wounded, crippled and taken prisoner; when the Masonically conceived League of Nations was foisted on the world by the President of the United States, the Freemason Woodrow Wilson, under the influence of his fellow Masons, Colonel E. M. House and Mr. Bernard Baruch. Mr. Baruch ever since, as the publicized “Elder Statesman and Adviser to Presidents,” has directed from behind the scenes the government of the United States, whether Democratic or Republican.

They did, these terrible enemies of the Church, achieve the revolution of the Second World War, in 1939, and its carefully directed outcome, that twin sister of the League of Nations, the even more sinister United Nations, through which every country of the world lies now in imminent danger of losing its sovereignty and becoming part of the long planned, diabolically schemed, One World Government, whose aim is finally to enslave the whole Earth!

That the French Revolution of 1789 was plotted and carried out by the Illuminized Freemasons, there is no need to establish since the Masons openly boast about it themselves. All of the Revolution’s apostles and leaders were Masons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Lafayette — the American Revolutionary War hero of whom Marie Antoinette, after many betrayals of the King at his hands, cried out, “Better perish than be saved by Lafayette!” Talleyrand — the apostate Catholic bishop who consecrated the first constitutional bishops of the Revolution in spite of the decree of Pope Pius VI in 1791 declaring the automatic suspension of any priest or bishop who took the oath to maintain the civil constitution drawn up for the Church in France by the Revolutionary government, for the sole purpose of completely subjecting the Church to the domination of the State. “Separation of Church and State” has ever meant but one thing to the revolutionaries: Control of the Church by the State, and to that end they have, successfully, popularized their slogan, “Separation of Church and State,” until Catholics look upon it almost as a dogma.

The members of the terrible Jacobin Club of Paris and the leaders of the Reign of Terror, Danton, Marat and Robespierre, all were Masons. The throne was betrayed by Philip, Duke of Orleans, the first Grand Master of the Grand Orient Lodge of France, and blood relative of King Louis XVI.

It was well known in every country of Europe that the cause of the French Revolution could not be attributed to the abuses of the ancient regime. In Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette — despite the tower of calumnies raised against the beautiful Queen of France by the powerful Masonic enemies who plotted the country’s downfall through this lively and charming daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, calumnies perpetuated by the biased and silly English literature through which the story of her life has come to Americans — France had at last a thoroughly good King and Queen. They were good Catholics, this tragic husband and wife, good sovereigns, and good parents to their beloved children. And they had worked hard, the King to wipe out abuses and the Queen to dispense charity to the poor, whom she loved. She did not, at any time, ever say of the poor those foolish words which are, in America, a byword whenever her name is mentioned, “Let them eat cake!”

The Revolution’s purpose was not to uproot abuses, but to destroy the monarchy and overthrow Christian society. And it accomplished both. The Revolution took the lives of the King and Queen of France, both of whom died nobly. “I forgive the authors of my death,” Louis said, “may my blood never be avenged upon France.” And it is told of Marie Antoinette that she carried herself, during the last days of her life and during the terrible hours before her execution, with the heroic fortitude of a martyr and the calm dignity of a saint. Their little son, Louis XVII, died miserably later, in a cobbler’s shop.

America knew, in 1798 at least, the cause of the French Revolution. After the Terror had spent itself — after the terrible de-Christianizing of France, when its churches had been desecrated and closed, the adorable Sacrament of the Altar blasphemed, a notorious prostitute adored on the main altar of Notre Dame as the Goddess of Reason, when “streetwalkers dressed in chasubles, and donkeys laden with sacred relics had passed through the streets,” when the rivers and roads ran red with the blood of the guillotined, when Danton, and Marat and Robespierre, at last had followed each other to the death they had so mercilessly dealt out day after day to countless poor victims, when the National Convention had given way to the Directory, and the Directory was about to give way to the Consulate of Napoleon — Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, addressed the people of New Haven:

No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded [in the French Revolution]; no impious sentiment of action against God has been spared; no malignant hostility against Christ and His religion has been unattempted. Justice, truth, kindness, piety, and moral obligation universally have been not merely trodden underfoot … but ridiculed, spurned and insulted. … For what end shall we be connected with men of whom this is the character and conduct? … Is it that our churches may become temples of reason, our Sabbath a decade, and our psalms of praise Marseillaise hymns? … Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat, or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?

It was in such a world of revolution that Pope Pius IX grew to manhood. In 1798, when he was but six years old, a French army, for the third time in two years, marched into Italy. It entered Rome, pronounced Pope Pius VI deposed as temporal sovereign, and proclaimed the Papal States a Republic! While the Pope was pleading with his captors to be allowed to remain and die in Rome — he was then eighty years old — and his enemies, having insolently refused him, were plundering his room and tearing from his finger his episcopal ring, outside in the Roman streets a statue, of the goddess of liberty trampling underfoot the papal tiara and the sacred symbols of the Faith, was being set up at an entrance to the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo; the papal coat of arms was being painted, amid howls of lewd laughter, on the drop curtain of a popular Roman theater; the sacred vessels which had been stolen from the altars of churches were being used in the wild orgies which were going on all over Rome to celebrate the Republic. The Revolution, indeed, had moved on, according to plan, from Paris to Rome!

Pope Pius VI died, in 1799, at Valence, on the Rhone River, a prisoner of the French. And hearts were heavy with sorrow and foreboding in the castle of the Mastai-Ferretti’s, high up in Sinigaglia, on the Adriatic Sea, in the Papal State of the Marches.

Pope Pius VII, whose pontificate opened on March 14, 1800, and closed with his death on August 20, 1823, when he was eighty-three years old, was to prove the greatly loved father and friend of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti. Pope Pius VII, like his predecessor whose name he had taken, would also suffer exile and imprisonment at the hands of the masters of revolution. And for all of the long and weary twenty-three years of Pius’ pontificate, Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti — as a schoolboy of thirteen in the college of Volterra, in Tuscany, as a lad of seventeen stricken with epilepsy at the height of all his young promise — would be poignantly aware of his Holy Father’s suffering, humiliation and trial, little realizing that he was to follow upon the same road, bearing the same burdens, occupying even the same bishopric of Imola, on his way to the bishopric of Rome.

Pope Pius VII was to suffer, as had Pope Pius VI, and as would Pope Pius IX, the loss of the patrimony which for fifteen centuries had belonged to the Popes, the saviors of Rome and the founders of Western Civilization. But to Pio Nono, as Pope Pius IX was affectionately called by the whole world, the patrimony of Saint Peter would not be given back.

Although popularly it has been said that the French Revolution and its anti-Christian program came to a close with the rise of Napoleon and the restoration by him of the practice of the Catholic Faith, forbidden under the Directory, the Revolution, as planned for the world, was very far from ended in 1800, when the pontificate of Pope Pius VII opened and the consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte began. For Napoleon, military genius though he might be and remarkable leader of men, was a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Templars, the extreme Illuminated Lodge of Lyons. He had been created by Masonry, and he must do its bidding. As long as he was obedient to his masters, France would be his, all Europe would be his. His armies would meet with the fabulous success which has ever since been the talk of the world, for, coupled with his own extraordinary gifts, Masonry’s all-seeing, all-knowing eye would have taken care that, as Father Dillon says:

… the resources of the enemies of Napoleon were never at hand, the designs of the Austrian and other generals opposed to him were thwarted, treason was rife in their camps, and information fatal to their designs was conveyed to the French commander. … But when Masonry had reason to fear that Napoleon’s power might be perpetuated; when his alliance with the Imperial Family of Austria, and above all, when the consequence of that alliance, an heir to his throne, caused danger to the universal republic … when, too, he began to show a coldness for the sect, and sought means to prevent it from the propagandism of its diabolical aims, then it became his enemy, and his end was not far off. … His opponents began to get that information regarding his movements, which he had obtained previously of theirs. Members of the sect urged on his mad expedition to Moscow. His resources were paralyzed; and he was … sold by secret, invisible foes into the hands of his enemies.

And so we see that it was not for the honor and glory of God that Napoleon had, in 1802, made Catholic worship once more lawful in France, but rather because his appointed mission was to restore order again to the country, and he knew that it was only with the aid of the Church that he would, for the time being, be able to accomplish it. It is interesting to note that among the decrees which Napoleon added to the Concordat of 1802 between France and the Holy See (but which additions were never accepted by Pope Pius VII) there appear the old Gallican Articles of 1682, which were to be taught in the schools of theology; clergy violating these articles were to be punished by the State!

Actually, despite the ban of the Popes, the Gallican Articles were being taught at the time in all the French theological schools, and it is upon Gallicanism that the great French Catholic, the Count de Maistre, lays the blame for “the withering of Catholicism in France and all the evils which have befallen her, and, through her, all of Europe.” Gallicanism, indeed! Gallicanism, the old sin of Lucifer, whose “I will not serve!” is the battle cry of Hell. Gallicanism amply paved one of the great highways leading to the Judaized Freemasonry of the eighteenth and subsequent centuries.

And so it is not surprising to find that Napoleon’s whole aim, after the Concordat, was to secure for the State full control over all relations between the French Church and the Holy See. Insult to the Holy Father followed upon insult. In 1809, the troops of Napoleon — First Consul no longer, but Emperor since 1804 — occupied the Papal States, which then became part of the French Empire. Pope Pius VII excommunicated Napoleon after that, and the Emperor, enraged, wrote to his wife Josephine’s son, Eugene, whom he had made Viceroy of Italy, “Does he not know that the times are greatly changed? Does he mistake me for Louis the Mild? Or does he think that his excommunications will cause the arms to drop from the hands of my soldiers?”

Four years later, in 1813, the arms did drop from the hands of Napoleon’s soldiers, become either too weak or too frozen any longer to clasp them, as the hitter cold and gnawing famine of the terrible retreat from Moscow took toll, not only of their arms, but of their lives. And in April of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had ill learned the wisdom of the old French proverb: “Qui mange le Pape, meurt!” (Who eats the Pope, dies!), signed his abdication in the very Castle of Fontainebleau where for so long he had held Christ’s Vicar, Pope Pius VII, a prisoner.

The month following Napoleon’s abdication, Pope Pius VII returned in triumph to Rome. He had stopped on his way at Sinigaglia, where he was treated with great reverence by the Mastai-Ferretti family. Giovanni-Maria accompanied the hero-Pontiff on the remainder of his journey, and he rejoiced when the Pope’s party went out of its way to stop at the Holy House of Loreto, to pay homage to God’s Mother, for it was in her own little Nazareth house, now tenderly enshrined in the handsome basilica built at Loreto to hold it, that Our Lady had answered miraculously the prayers of Giovanni-Maria and his mother, and had cured his epilepsy.

It was Pope Pius VII who, in 1819, when Giovanni-Maria’s ordination was in question because of the impediment of epilepsy, said to him as he knelt before him awaiting his final decision, “We grant you what you ask, dear son, because it is our conviction that this disease will never again afflict you.” And never again did the dread malady trouble the life of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti — never, through all his succeeding years, as priest in Rome, as counselor to the Apostolic Delegate to Chile, as domestic prelate, as Archbishop of Spoleto, as Bishop of Imola, and as Cardinal-Archbishop.

He was very much beloved by his people in each of these assignments. When he was transferred from Spoleto to Imola, in February, 1833, so heartbroken were the people of Spoleto at losing him that they sent a delegation of citizens to Rome to beg Pope Gregory XVI to send some other bishop to Imola and leave with them their greatly loved shepherd. But the Holy Father was forced to refuse them, for the choice of the Archbishop of Spoleto for the see of Imola had been very carefully made. Imola, and the whole north of Italy, was seething with revolt — the backlash of the Masonically planned revolutions which had occurred throughout Europe in 1830 — and it was of the most urgent necessity that bishops be sent to the turbulent cities who would be able to win the love of the people and keep them safe from the designs of the secret societies.

For Italy was honeycombed with secret societies. Masonry had done its work with amazing success. The revolutionary clubs, which sprang up every month somewhere in the Italian States during the boyhood of Giovanni-Maria, and the many planned revolutionary movements within the Papal States, had gradually but thoroughly indoctrinated the Italian people. Everywhere now, in 1833, the false ideals of Liberalism — the name by which the revolutionary anti-Christian movement was most popularly known — were become indeed the breath and bone and thought and sinew of the once gay and happy Italian people. And as the century advanced, new Liberal fronts were opened up. Intellectual, Economic, Social, Political and Religious Liberalism, all fused together to make the nineteenth century the “Age of Liberalism.”

Liberalism’s roots are, it is true, to be found in Philip the Fair’s overthrow of papal authority, in the spirit of the Renaissance, and in the Reformation, but its evil flower came to full blossom under the satanic aegis of Freemasonry. Liberty, in the Masonic sense of license to do what one wants in every territory of life — with no spiritual restrictions — in the hands of the Masonic propagandists overturned, one after the other, the ancient institutions of Christendom. In vain, did the Popes say, “Human liberty does not mean the right to do anything one desires. It means, rather, freedom from restraint in doing what one ought to do; freedom to do what is right; freedom to obey the laws of God as laid down in Divine Revelation and as interpreted by His Vicar, His voice on Earth, the Holy Roman Pontiff.”

Religious Liberalism, perhaps we should pause to say, has three forms.

The first, Absolute Religious Liberalism, stems straight from the Freemason Rousseau, and is the fulfillment of all that Gallicanism — and its counterparts in other countries — ever implied. It advocates the complete subordination of the Church to the State, the Church being permitted to exist only so long as it continues to serve the temporal prosperity of the State!

The second form is Moderate Religious Liberalism. Its slogan, “a free Church in a free State,” is the one which Pope Pius IX fought so strenuously during all the long years which followed his exile in Gaeta. Moderate Liberalism does not speak of subordinating the Church to the State. It speaks only of separating the two, a concept which has been condemned by Pope Pius IX again and again, as we shall see.

The third form of Religious Liberalism is Catholic Liberalism, condemned many times by Pope Pius IX, even in his first encyclical, Qui pluribus, written on November 9, 1846, when he said of Catholic Liberalism, “ … To this end is directed the dreadful system of religious indifference … by means of which these crafty men, putting aside all distinction between virtue and vice, truth and error, honesty and baseness, deceitfully pretend that men can attain eternal salvation in the practice of any religion, just as if there could be any common part of justice with iniquity, or any fellowship of light with darkness, and an agreement of Christ with Belial … ”

Pope Pius X, when he was Patriarch of Venice, warned his clergy:

Let priests be on their guard against accepting any doctrines of that Liberalism which, under pretext of good, aims at effecting a reconciliation between right and wrong.

Liberal Catholics are the great interfaith devotees, the one-religion-is-as-good-as-another advocates, who “have good friends among the Masons, and, papal pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, can vouch for them individually and collectively as being above reproach.” They know many Jews who, unbaptized and infidel though they be, are sure to go to Heaven!

And yet it is told about Pope Pius IX that, although appointment to the see of Imola had more often than not held for its bishop the promise of a cardinalate, Pope Gregory XVI waited for eight years before making Archbishop Mastai-Ferretti Cardinal-Archbishop (which he did in 1840), because Rome was uneasy about his reputed Liberalism. And it is true that when, on the sixteenth of June, 1846, in the fifty-fifth year of his life and the twenty-eighth of his priesthood, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, exceedingly handsome, gracious, kindly, smiling, and plentifully endowed with the gentle, winning courtesy of the true Italian, was elected Pope, the Liberal world — the world of revolution — rejoiced, and the truly Catholic world groaned.

The world of revolution rejoiced that at last a Liberal Pope had come to the Chair of Peter! The orthodox Catholic world groaned because it had learned from long experience the tragic lesson of which Pio Nono did not seem to be aware, namely, that there is no way of winning, by kindness in any form, the satanic hordes which, masked behind the deceptive, soothing, seductive lure of promises of progress, democracy, constitutionality, liberty, equality and fraternity, were tearing from their thrones every Catholic king in Christendom, were abolishing monarchies because monarchies had always been the support of individualism, were reducing to a low, common level every high Christian ideal, were confiscating monasteries, closing convents, legislating for government education of children, sending priests to state universities, dictating the course of studies in seminaries, filling episcopal sees without the authorization of the Pope, while — in order eventually completely to control them — they were flattering “the people” by telling them that the world was theirs to rule by divine right, theirs apart from any influence or restriction on the part of the Church, which Church, they assured them, had always been their enemy.

And when, immediately after his election, Pio Nono gave orders that the Jews should be let out of the ghetto, when he emptied the jails of the thousands of political prisoners placed there for the safety of society and turned loose upon the world incorrigible men who, entirely given over to the revolution and the Devil, would stop at no evil — mass murder, torture, rape, sacrilege, arson, calumny, intrigue, devil-worship — to effect the downfall of the Pope and the Church and the whole Christian order, and when the mobs, in a frenzy of gratitude and entirely mistaking his full purpose, milled around at night in the square before the Quirinal awaiting Pio Nono’s blessing, filling the air with their cries of “Evviva Pio Nono!” wise heads in Europe bowed in fear and consternation.

When Pope Pius IX had made the notoriously Liberal Cardinal Gizzi his Secretary of State, when his reforms included — besides his excellent provisions for the welfare of the Papal States and the education of children — a law establishing a free press, little realizing that the hundreds of newspapers which immediately sprang into being would, under Judaized Masonry’s control, be largely responsible for the downfall of his own civil authority as ruler of the Papal States and the vicious attacks made on his spiritual power; when he had relaxed the restrictions placed upon the Jews by his predecessors and had allowed them even to share in the Papal charities — the same Jews who would later join with the revolutionaries against him; when he had given in to the Liberals’ desire that laymen should replace the clergy in the Papal government posts; when he had approved a new Council of State made up of the younger prelates; when he had instituted one constitutional reform after another, into which the most inflamed revolutionaries underhandedly insinuated themselves — the Liberal and Protestant world applauded. England praised him to the skies, and he became the most fantastically acclaimed and popular man in the whole world!

And up in Austria, its wise, prudent and able old Chancellor, Prince Metternich — who, practically single-handed and alone, had, ever since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, staved off the enslavement of the Catholic Church and the countries of Europe, even though he was called a “reactionary” for doing so — shook his experienced head. He issued warning after warning to his Holy Father, Pope Pius IX, all of which went unheeded, and all of which a brokenhearted Pio Nono lived later to realize would have saved the day for his Papal States.

Finally, when Pope Pius IX granted a Civic Guard for Rome, even Cardinal Gizzi resigned, realizing what the Pope, in his credulous enthusiasm did not see, that putting arms in the hands of the people was tantamount, at that time, to arming the revolutionaries. Metternich completely despaired. Nor did the stories of the Pope’s angelic personal life, his purity, charity, preaching, devotions, console him. The old statesman wrote, in 1847, from the depths of his anguish:

The Pope reveals himself every day more and more lacking in practical sense. Born and nurtured in a liberal family, he has been formed in a bad school. A good priest, he has never turned his mind toward matters of government … he has allowed himself, since he has assumed the tiara, to be taken and ensnared in a net from which he does not any longer know how to disentangle himself. And if matters follow their natural course now, he will be driven out of Rome.

Tragic and deplorable as all this is — for Metternich’s prophecy came true — we have the glad relief of knowing that Pio Nono’s Liberalism was political and not religious, except for two flares of unfortunate utterance which, characteristically, no one regretted more than he and no one tried harder to undo. And although, man being one and integral, life cannot ever be so departmentalized that thought in one territory does not flow over and influence another, nevertheless, in his allocution Ubi primum, given in secret consistory on the seventeenth of December, 1847, Pope Pius IX showed himself deeply distressed that he should have been declared to be Liberal in matters of the Faith.

Many enemies of the Catholic Faith direct their efforts in our time mainly to trying to bring to the same level of the doctrines of Christ any monstrous and extravagant opinions, or they try to mix these opinions with Catholic doctrine. And so they plot to propagate more and more that impious system of religious indifferentism. Finally — frightful to say — there are some who have offered such insult to our name and Apostolic dignity as not to hesitate to make us appear as sharers of their folly and as celebrated promoters of this wicked system.These people … conclude that we entertain kind feelings toward any manner of men, in such a way that we think that not only the sons of the Church, but others also, however foreign they may remain to Catholic unity, are equally on the way of salvation and can attain to eternal life. Words fail us, from very horror, in detesting and abhorring this new and horrible insult against us. … Let, therefore, those who wish to be saved come to the pillar and ground of truth … to the true Church of Christ which has, in its bishops and in the Supreme Head of all, the Roman Pontiff, a never-interrupted succession of Apostolic authority, whose first office it is to preach, to guard and to protect with all its might the doctrine preached by the Apostles in accordance with the commandment of Christ; which [Church] therefore has grown from the time of the Apostles in the midst of difficulties of every sort, and has flourished renowned through the whole Earth by the splendor of its miracles, enlarged by the blood of its martyrs, ennobled by the virtues of its confessors and virgins, strengthened by the testimonies and most wise writings of its Fathers, and will flourish in all the regions of the Earth, and will shine forth perfect in the unity of its Faith, of its Sacraments and of its sacred government. We who, though unworthy, govern in this supreme Chair of Peter the Apostle, in which Christ Our Lord placed the foundation of this His Church, shall never at any time whatsoever abstain from any pains and labors so as to bring, through the grace of Christ Himself, those who are ignorant and erring, to this one and only way of truth and salvation. Let them, moreover, who are against us remember, that Heaven and Earth shall indeed pass away, but nothing can ever pass away from the words of Christ, nor can anything be changed in the doctrine which the Catholic Church received from Christ to guard, protect and preach.

Pope Pius IX had already, in his first encyclical, Qui pluribus, of November 9, 1846, renewed the condemnations of his predecessors against “those baneful secret sects who have come forth from the darkness for the ruin and the devastation of the Church and State,” and in the same encyclical he condemned:

the dreadful doctrines … by which men pretend that they can obtain eternal salvation in the observance of any religion whatsoever.”

He then exhorted his bishops to foster, with great firmness, in everyone “union with the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation, and obedience towards the Chair of Peter, on whom, as on a firm foundation, the whole Faith of our most holy religion rests.”

These are most reassuring proofs of orthodoxy, with no hint of religious Liberalism. As the year 1848 opened, however, Pope Pius IX was genuinely alarmed. For 1848 was again the year of Revolution, carefully dated, painstakingly planned and diabolically carried out. And the Pope, to his profound dismay, found himself everywhere acclaimed as on the side of the revolutionaries, everywhere counted as one with them, as everywhere the insurrectionists advanced to the cry of Viva Pio Nono! Throne after throne toppled, in the year 1848. Catholic ruler after Catholic ruler, whether he be the chancellor behind the throne or the president of a country, was forced to flee.

For the order had been sent out, the fuse had been lighted, by the supreme, secret head of Freemasonry, who at this time was none other than the to-all-appearances highly respectable, exquisitely appointed, last man in the world to suspect, British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston! It was Lord Palmerston who made and broke the Masonic rulers of Europe. It was he who set up and hurled down the Freemason Emperor Napoleon III of France, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Lord Palmerston who made and broke Mazzini — he of the great sad eyes, ascetic countenance, slender frame, and mien of a mystic and visionary, but who actually was Lucifer’s able first agent, the head of the dreaded secret society of the Carbonari, the lone founder of the bitterly anti-Catholic Young Italy, and the successor of the corrupt Italian nobleman who went under the assumed name of Nubius (whom Mazzini is said to have poisoned), who was the Grand Master of the Alta Vendita, which, as Monsignor Dillon tells us, “ruled the blackest Freemasonry of France, Germany and England.”

It was Lord Palmerston who aided the extraordinary rise of the Prussian Chancellor Prince Otto von Bismarck, and set the stage for his victory over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, the war which brought into being the German Empire of the Kaisers at the expense of the defeated Catholic Austria and France. It was Lord Palmerston who provided the Freemason Cavour, Prime Minister of Sardinia, with the money whereby that poor little Italian state, comprising Sardinia and Piedmont, would later war on Pio Nono and annex the Papal States, all Italy and finally Rome itself, and set up in the place of the Pope-King the rotund, bewhiskered little man, Victor Emmanuel, who, while claiming to be a Catholic, would, like any common thief, rob the Holy Father of the patrimony which was Saint Peter’s!

It was Palmerston’s England which would open its arms and accord a hero’s welcome to Mazzini and Garibaldi, fresh from the pillage and plunder and ravage of Italy. Garibaldi, whose face was “so like the face of the Christ of the Renaissance pictures that the students of Italy could not help but follow him,” and of whom the infamous, revolutionary 1866 Catechism in Italy uttered the following appalling blasphemy by way of diabolical parody:

Make the sign of the cross: In the name of the Father of my country, the Son of the people and the Spirit of liberty, Amen.Q. Who has created you a soldier?

A. Garibaldi has created me a soldier.

Q. Who is Garibaldi?

A. Garibaldi is a spirit most generous, blessed of Heaven and Earth.

Q. How many Garibaldis are there?

A. There is only one Garibaldi.

Q. How many persons in Garibaldi?

A. In Garibaldi there are three persons really distinct: the Father of his country, the Son of the people and the Spirit of liberty.

Q. Which of the persons became man?

A. The second, i.e., the Son of the people.

Q. How was he made man?

A. He took a body and soul as we did in the most blessed womb of a woman of the people.

Some awful premonition of all this was in the heart of Pio Nono as the year 1848 began to unfold. In January, revolt broke out in Sicily, moved on from there to Naples, and finally included practically every Italian city, from Lombardy to the tip of the Peninsula. The Paris revolution, which for a while threatened to rival the days of 1789, broke out on the twenty-fourth of February. In March came the revolution in Vienna, and the flight, at last, of Metternich. One by one, the rulers of the small kingdoms and duchies and republics which comprised Italy — and upon the precarious existence of which the Supreme Directory of the Masons had placed their hopes for the eventual absorption of the Papal States in a Masonically controlled and united Italy under one carefully chosen head — were forced to grant constitutions, the first step in the whole plan. The Revolution’s leaders reasoned that once the Pope’s temporal power was over, his spiritual power soon would follow, and the institution of the papacy would be no more.

Finally, in March also, the sadly awakening, overly generous and trusting Pope found himself forced, too, to give in. On March 15, 1848, he granted a constitution to the Papal States. And the end was in sight! In April, the Piedmontese General, Durando, made a proclamation to his troops, deliberately and on his own authority placing Pope Pius IX behind a war against Austria (calculated to take advantage of the revolution going on in that country), and naming him as the leader of a crusade of all Italy against foreigners, with the end that Italy should become a united republic with the Pope as President!

All during April, matters went from bad to worse. The lay ministers of the papal government beseeched the Pope to declare war against Austria. The Cardinals in consistory opposed it. The ministry resigned, and Rome was immediately filled with armed men and milling, riotous mobs. The mobs were soon joined by the Pope’s Civic Guard! Pio Nono was virtually a prisoner in the Quirinal, and it was necessary to place a guard at the residences of the Cardinals day and night. The press and the Masonic clubs, which very much resembled the Jacobin clubs of the French Revolution, openly discussed an alliance with the Piedmontese Government and the necessity of abolishing then and there the papal rule!

It was at this moment that the scales fell from the eyes of the hitherto lavishly loved and popular “Liberal Pope,” Pio Nono. It was at this moment that the various masks fell from the face of the whole anti-Christian conspiracy, and Pope Pius IX saw beneath the Liberal, Radical, Progressive, Socialist-Communist fronts to the Thing that beneath all of them was plotting for the souls of men and the overthrow of the Church with malignant malice and consuming hatred. And the Holy Father at last realized that never could peace be made with It, never could It be converted, never could It be baptized, for the choice of the Father of Lies, the Progenitor of Evil and the Dispenser of Spiritual Deformity, in every one of its monstrous, hideous, revolting forms, is forever fixed against Him Who is All Truth, All Beauty and All Goodness.

Pio Nono was never again the same. In the thirty years which were to follow, he presented to the hordes of the ancient enemy of his beloved Blessed Virgin Mary a face of such implacable, unrelenting resistance that he became as universally hated by the Liberals, Protestants and Radicals all over the world as he had formerly been lauded by them.

On April 29, 1848, in an act of supreme courage, with reports of revolution coming to him, it seemed from every corner of the Earth, its roar reaching his ears most threateningly from beneath his own windows in the Quirinal, Pope Pius IX published the allocution which froze the smiles of adulation on the faces of the Liberals and the Radicals and turned them, in the space of seconds, into grim, deadly and dangerous enemies. For the Pope not only refused to declare war on Austria, since the Austrian people were one in the “undivided sentiment of his fatherly love,” but he disavowed any connection with Mazzini’s sly schemes for an Italian republic and he broke, once and for all, with the Risorgimento (Resurgence), the name given to the Italian Nationalist movement.

He warned all Italians against the “perfidious designs and counsels of men who would detach them from the obedience due their respective sovereigns.” “As to ourselves,” he went on, “we declare in the most solemn manner that all our thoughts, our cares, our endeavors, as Roman Pontiff, aim at enlarging continually the Kingdom of Christ, and not at extending the boundaries of the temporal principalities which Providence has bestowed on the Holy See for the sole dignity and free exercise of its supreme apostleship.”

Violence followed upon violence when it was fully realized that Pio Nono had served notice on the world that he was neither the knowing nor the unknowing leader of Liberalism. Young Italy and the secret societies under Mazzini raged, conspired and plotted. So did Cavour, the Prime Minister of Sardinia, for the interests of the Piedmontese. Lord Palmerston worked openly through his special envoy in Rome, Lord Minto, whose policy it became to encourage the most dangerous revolutionaries in Italy. Pio Nono was fully aware of all this, and to those who had the honesty and courage to reproach him with the folly of his former credulous and childlike trust in the success of his “reform program,” his vain belief that he could win by kindness where his predecessor, Pope Gregory XVI, had failed by severity, and his misplaced confidence in the “gratitude of the people,” he would answer simply that he was “very like the unwise and doting parents who had made over their goods to their children before their death, and are turned out of their house and home in their old age!”

“I am like the little shepherd boy,” he said, “who had for companion a great necromancer. The boy had seen him again and again call up the Devil, and had learned the formula of incantation. So he too one night tried the power of the spell. The evil one arose at his call, and the frightened child would fain have got rid of him, but he had not, however, learned the spell that could lay the fiend, who henceforth haunted and tormented him.”

September came, in that dreadful year of 1848, and on the sixteenth of the month Pio Nono appointed, as his Prime Minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, the extraordinary man who, although born in Tuscany, had been, in turn, a revolutionary, a political exile, a Swiss politician, a professor of law at Paris, a member of the French Chamber of Peers, French Ambassador to Rome until the Paris revolution of 1848, confidant and close friend of Pio Nono, and now his Prime Minister. And by September, that month apparently so prized of revolutionaries, Mazzini’s “war of the people” had gotten well under way. In the streets of the cities of the north, hired revolutionaries were slaughtering government officers before the eyes of the people. Men were being hunted down like beasts, their bodies left to lie rotting where they had fallen.

Nevertheless, Count Rossi was able to get in long hours of work, straightening out the affairs of the Papal States. During all of October, the war was moving down from the north, and Rome was being agitated by every kind of wild rumor and political intrigue. The air was tense with mystery and the foreboding of evil. Rossi was warned early in November that revolt, bloody and terrible, was planned for the fifteenth, the day set for the opening of the Chambers at the Palace of the Cancelleria.

And as the month advanced and the number of the calumnies circulated about him multiplied — for the revolutionaries knew him to be a strong man and the greatest opposition to their plans for the seizure of the Papal States — and as the people everywhere, in the streets, restaurants, bars, the army and the Civic Guard, were more and more taken in by the inflammatory lies, the warnings to Rossi became more frequent and alarming. But the brave Minister remained firm in his resolve to open Parliament on the appointed day, and to open it himself in the name of the Pope-King.

By way of precaution, he reviewed the Carabinieri — the mounted soldiery — on the fourteenth, in the open square in front of Saint Peter’s, and he had them parade through the streets of Rome, little suspecting that every man had been won over to the enemy! During the night of the fourteenth, warning after warning reached him. “Do not go to the council hall! Death awaits you there!” wrote the Countess de Menon. “Do not leave your house! You shall be murdered!” the Duchess di Rignano begged him. But he continued, late into the night, to add the finishing touches to the speech which he had prepared for his delivery on the morrow.

And over in the slums of the Trastevere, across the Tiber, two leaders of Mazzini’s deadly Young Italy, Dr. Pietro Sterbini and Luigi Brunetti, the latter the son of the wily and evil “Ciceruacchio” whom Pio Nono had once unwittingly trusted, were practicing on the dead body of a recently murdered Italian precisely where and how to strike so as to divide the great artery of the neck, and so insure the instant death of the victim.

Morning came, and with it more warnings to Rossi and to his poor tortured wife. The Pope also had been warned, and threatened. He tried to persuade his Minister from going to the Parliament, and when finally he failed he begged him, “At least, do not be rash and expose yourself needlessly. You must spare our enemies a great crime, and me a sorrow that nothing could remedy!”

“I have no fear, Your Holiness,” Rossi answered him. “These men are cowards and will not dare carry out their threats. Only bless me, most Holy Father, and all shall be well.”

“I defend the cause of the Pope,” he told the Monsignor who stopped him at the door with still another warning, “and the cause of the Pope is the cause of God. I must and will go.”

At quarter past twelve, his carriage rumbled into the courtyard of the Palace of the Cancelleria. A battalion of the Civic Guard was drawn up in the square. And in the courtyard, a hissing, howling, completely hostile mob watched him step out and, with calm and unperturbed countenance and steady step, make for the stairs leading to the Council Chamber. Immediately, they pressed about him. Somewhere, a cry for help rang out, and as the attention of the guard was directed toward it, Ciceruacchio’s son, Luigi Brunetti, drove his waiting knife straight into the throat of the brave Minister of the Papal States.

But one man rushed to aid him, Righetti, the deputy minister of finance who had accompanied him. He raised him in his arms, the great, gaping hole in his neck visible for all to see, and he bore him to the rooms of Cardinal Guzzoli, nearby. A priest from a neighboring church reached him in time to give him the Last Sacraments. And a few moments later, he died.

Righetti, with tremendous courage, then rode through the mad crowd in the courtyard and the square, to the Quirinal, to the anguished Pope, the blood of the dead Premier still wet upon his clothes, his hands and his face. That night, lest his body be outraged in death, they secretly buried the fallen defender of the Vicar of Christ. And that night, too, the murderer of her husband was paraded in triumph before the home of the Countess Rossi, as she sat stunned and broken, with her children. The mob compelled her servants to light her house in celebration of their deed, as they venerated the knife which had achieved their purpose.

Pope Pius IX was now in the hands of his enemies. He was now completely in the power of the carefully planned Revolution, which sought not only his death, but the death of the papacy. One by one his Government had deserted him. The Carabinieri had gone over to the Revolution, broken open the jails and released upon the city frenzied and vicious criminals eager to shed the blood of one or many, for money. The Roman senators, Italian nobles, magistrates and officials, all of whom were indebted in one way or another to the Holy Father, abandoned him and fled to their estates in the country. Only the diplomatic corps were faithful. When they beheld the mob milling dangerously in the streets before the Quirinal on the day after the murder of Count Rossi, and the soldiers acting suspiciously, they came in a body to Pope Pius IX, prepared to lay down their lives to protect him — all, that is, with the exception of the ministers from Great Britain, Sardinia and America! They were conspicuously absent.

The Ambassadors arrived at the Quirinal just in time. When the republican deputies, headed by Galletti, the close personal friend of Mazzini, and the notorious Sterbini, the leader now of Young Italy, together with their “guard of honor” (twenty thousand of the Pontiff’s own troops) burst in upon the Pope — determined to force upon him the five impossible demands they had drawn up, consent to which would mean the end of the Papal States and cooperation with Mazzini’s anti-Christian regime — they found him surrounded by the pitiful few in all Rome who remained faithful in this terrible hour: one hundred of the Swiss Guard, two Cardinals — one the brave Cardinal Antonelli, who would follow the Holy Father into exile and serve as his Secretary of State through the desperate, sorrow-filled years ahead — a few priests, a few servants. Pio Nono was walking calmly up and down in the midst of them, prepared to die rather than give in.

He refused to treat with the revolutionaries. “Go, gentlemen,” the angry Ambassador from Spain, Martinez de la Rosa, told them, then. “And tell the leaders of this revolt that if they persist in their odious project they must march over my dead body to reach the sacred person of the Sovereign Pontiff. But tell them, too, that the vengeance of Spain will be terrible!”

Galletti went out, and on the very spot where Pio Nono had been wont to give them his blessing, during the days in which they thought he would give them everything they wanted — even eventually to handing over the Church which Jesus Christ had founded unto the end of time — the intimate of Mazzini told the people that the Pope had refused their demands. Immediately, a reign of terror broke out. The terrifying beat of drums sounded from every section of the city. It reached the ears of the Pope and his embattled few over the ominous thunder of the crowd. Soldiers, on foot and on horseback, Civic Guardsmen, crack troops back from war, all stormed the papal palace. Men scaled the walls of the Quirinal on long ladders. Twice the mob set it on fire. Bullets were aimed at the windows, and the valiant Swiss Guard returned the fire.

A group of sharpshooters sent a rain of rifle shot into the windows of the Pope’s anteroom, and at four O’ Clock in the afternoon, Bishop Palma was shot dead as he looked out, for a moment, from the window of his apartment. At eight O’ Clock, after the Civic Guard had brought up two heavy pieces of field artillery and trained them on the front gate, the Pope received a deputation bringing to him the “people’s ultimatum,” which was, that if he did not consent to the adoption of the five points previously submitted, they would break into the Quirinal and put to death every person found inside it with the single exception of His Holiness himself.

It was then that Pope Pius IX addressed the Ambassadors. He announced to them that, to avoid bloodshed and still more horrible crimes, he was forced to yield to the choice of a ministry his enemies had selected, which included Mazzini’s friend, Galletti, as Premier, and Sterbini as Minister of Commerce. “But at the same time,” the Holy Father declared in formal protest, “I wish you and all Europe to know that I do not even nominally take any part in the government, and that I remain absolutely a stranger to its acts. I have forbidden any abuse of my name. I have even forbidden the future use of the ordinary formulas.”

The Holy Father had not affixed his signature to the five-point program; that he would never do. On the eighteenth of November, the revolutionary government dismissed the Swiss Guards in spite of their protests, and the Vicar of Christ was left in the care of the murderous men who made up the Civic Guard. On the evening of the twenty-fourth of November, the French Ambassador, the Duke d’Harcourt, arrived in state at the Quirinal, and demanded an audience with His Holiness on urgent business. He was admitted to the Pope’s apartment and engaged him at once in earnest conversation.

Presently there came forth from the rooms of the Pontiff a simple parish priest in the company of Pio Nono’s servant, Filippani. They both entered, very quietly, a private passage, long and winding, leading to a small door which opened upon a dark and little-used corner of the Quirinal courtyard, in which, on this night, there was waiting an old horse-drawn cab. But first, before the cab could be reached, it was necessary to get the door open, and the two quiet figures encountered some very bad moments when it was discovered that the servant had forgotten to pick up the key and nothing remained but for him to return to the Pope’s rooms and get it.

Filippani sped down the corridor, and as swiftly flew back along the fortunately deserted passage, and when he came in sight of the old courtyard door once again, he beheld on his knees before it his companion, lost in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament which he bore upon his breast, in the pyx in which a Pope before him, Pope Pius VI, had carried his Lord with him into captivity. For it was Pius IX, Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ who, in disguise and at the risk of his life, adored his God at the most tense moment of his pontificate. Once in the cab, Filippani directed the driver by the spies and sentries and out through the less frequented streets of the city to the spot where the Bavarian Ambassador, Count Charles de Spaur and his chasseur, both fully armed for battle, awaited them. They left the faithful Filippani behind them, and proceeded to Albano, where the Countess de Spaur with her son and his tutor had been awaiting them since early morning (it was now nine in the evening), through what she later described as the most torturous hours of her life. After safely passing through a grueling challenge from the guards at Lariccia, the fugitives drove on at high speed to the border of the Papal States, and thence to Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples — and freedom.

Back in Rome, in His Holiness’ apartment in the Quirinal, the Ambassador of the French, the magnificently brave Duke d’Harcourt, continued for two long, endless hours to read in a loud voice to the echoing walls of an empty room. He then announced to the guard outside in the corridor that His Holiness was retiring for the night and did not wish to be disturbed. He left the palace in his usual brisk manner and, again in his state coach, flanked with outriders and torchbearers, he set out swiftly upon the road leading to the sea.

It was not until morning that Rome discovered that the Pope, disguised as a simple priest, had fled through the night and put himself well beyond the reach of those God-hating men who, with him in their evil possession, would have spoken to the world and to the Catholic faithful all over the Earth, slyly and subtly robbing them of their Faith and their heritage, in the name of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.

A little outside Gaeta, some days later, after Mass celebrated by the superior of the Sanctuary of the Most Adorable Trinity, and attended by the King and Queen of Naples, the princes, cardinals and foreign ministers, Pope Pius IX, at the moment reserved for his solemn benediction, walked instead to the altar, and kneeling there, prayed aloud:

Eternal God, my august Father and Lord, behold at Thy feet Thy unworthy Vicar, who entreats Thee with his whole heart to pour out upon him from Thy eternal throne Thy divine benediction. O my God! direct his steps, sanctify his intentions, guide his mind, govern his actions. May he be here, where Thou hast led him in Thy admirable providence, or in any other portion of Thy fold to which he may go, a worthy instrument of Thy glory and that of Thy Church, which, alas! is assailed by Thy enemies. If, to appease Thy wrath so justly enkindled by the many indignities that are offered to Thee, in word, in action, and by the abuse of the press, his own life may be an agreeable holocaust to Thy Divine Heart, he consecrates it to Thee from this moment. Thou hast given it to him; to Thee only belongs the right of taking it away when it may please Thee; but O my God! let Thy glory triumph, let Thy Church be victorious! Preserve the good, support the feeble, and may the arm of Thy Omnipotence arouse all who are slumbering in darkness and the shadow of death. ..  Bless the cardinals, the bishops, and all the clergy, that they may accomplish, in the peaceful ways of Thy law, the sanctification of the people. Then may we hope, not only to be delivered during our mortal pilgrimage from the snares of the impious and the machinations of wicked men, but to reach that place which affords eternal safety.

The congregation wept audibly, as children, until they thought their hearts would break, from love, from grief, from joy — from realization of God.

Pope Pius IX returned to Rome on April 12, 1850, under the protection of the French Army, after Mazzini’s Republic of Rome had fallen. He took up his residence, no longer in the Quirinal, but in the Vatican Palace. He made Cardinal Antonelli his Secretary of State, and for the remaining twenty-eight years of his extraordinarily long pontificate, Pope Pius IX, every trace of his former Liberalism vanished, struck out, in allocutions, encyclicals and infallible pronouncements, against the more than ever active enemies of the Church.

He brought down upon his head, by his direct, forceful and uncompromising utterances, the bitter hatred of the revolutionaries, Protestants and Liberals, but he earned, throughout the Catholic world, the lasting and devoted love of the people. They flocked to Rome from all over the world, in pilgrimage after pilgrimage, to do him honor. They rose to do battle for him when his enemies oppressed him the hardest. They watched with grief the Rome of Pio Nono, its existence threatened more and more with each passing year as the armies of Cavour’s King Victor Emmanuel — with the secret support of England’s Lord Palmerston and the contemptible Napoleon III (who as a Catholic betrayed his Holy Father) — gobbled up the Papal States one after the other until, on March 13, 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel its king and Florence its temporary capital, and the Pope left with only the old duchy of Rome, the ancient Patrimony of Saint Peter.

However, all this was still in the future when, in 1850, Pope Pius IX, to the intense chagrin of great numbers in England who thought the papacy dead and buried forever since 1848, re-established an ecclesiastical hierarchy in England, with Nicholas Wiseman as Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster and head of the new bishops. Later, the Holy Father did the same thing for Holland, with the same resultant anti-Catholic demonstrations in that country.

On December 8, 1854, having spent all of his holy life — his boyhood, his priesthood, as bishop, cardinal and Pope — at the feet of the Mother of God, the most Blessed Virgin Mary, and having deeply considered also, in his exile at Gaeta, the earnest petitions of Catholics all over the world in its behalf, Pope Pius IX defined, ex cathedra, in the glorious Basilica of Saint Peter’s before one hundred and seventy bishops and innumerable pilgrims come literally from the ends of the Earth, the divine dogma of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. The voice of the Sovereign Pontiff broke and tears filled his eyes as he paused before uttering the infallible words:

We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful …

As the Holy Father finished speaking, the cannon of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo boomed and the bells of the basilicas and churches of Rome long rang out the glorious news, which ushered in the Age of Mary — the last age of the world. The Catholic faithful rejoiced, and grace flooded their souls as they prayed the prayer Our Lady herself had given twenty years before to Catherine Labouré, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”

In May, 1860, although Victor Emmanuel’s insulting order that he surrender Umbria and the Marches had just reached him, and he was also aware that Garibaldi was preparing to land in Sicily, Pope Pius IX serenely beatified Blessed John Sacander, the martyr, Blessed Canonico de Rossi and Blessed Benedict Joseph Labre. On the feast of Pentecost, on June 8, 1862, in the presence of three hundred cardinals, patriarchs, primates, archbishops and bishops, with the little duchy of Rome now perilously threatened by Victor Emmanuel and the south no longer the territory of his beloved son, the King of Naples, who had received him so gratefully in his exile, Pope Pius IX nevertheless solemnly and with visible and supernatural joy canonized the glorious Japanese martyrs who had been crucified for the Faith at Nagasaki in 1597, among whom were the three Japanese Jesuits, Paul Miki, John de Goto and James Kisai.

And then, on the tenth anniversary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, on the eighth of December, 1864, he published the encyclical Quanta cura and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors, which rocked the world, Catholic and anti-Catholic, and raised up a storm of hatred against him which as yet has not, in some quarters, fully subsided! The Syllabus, compiled by Cardinal Bilio from the encyclicals, allocutions and apostolic letters of Pope Pius IX during the eighteen years of his pontificate, was a condemnation by the Holy Father of the errors growing out of the false principles and teachings of the age of Liberalism which, unwittingly absorbed even by Catholics who thought themselves pillars of the Church, were eating away the foundations of the Faith, all Christian government, all Christian morality, and, under the guise of “modern progress, modern science, modern social institutions, liberty and liberalism, enlightenment and civilization,” were ushering in the reign of Antichrist.

There is no question in the mind of anyone who innocently and chastely reads the writings and utterances of Pope Pius IX but that he believed, without any qualification, the fundamental doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. In the year 1863, when he was faced with all the arguments which the Liberals were pushing against him concerning the poor ignorant native who, through invincible ignorance, must be saved outside the body of the Church, Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical, Quanto conficiamur, declared that he knew about this ignorant native, all the arguments in favor of his deliverance from eternal damnation, he had heard all about this invincible ignorance — about which the Liberals were so hopeful — but despite all this, he held that, unless this ignorance in a person of good will were dissolved and clarified by the light of Faith, it could not bring him to salvation. The strong, unchangeable utterance of the Faith, that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, must still be maintained and dogmatically uttered even when we are thinking of the ignorant native on the desert island.

The modem Liberals of our time in Catholic life have never paid any attention to anything else which Pope Pius IX has said except this little half-bow of charity toward the ignorant native. And that the Holy Father knew, that the Liberals of his own day were misunderstanding him, is made clear by the Syllabus of Errors, which was issued in the following year, in which he sets down, without qualification, that it is condemned even to hope for the salvation of such men without the Faith.

Nothing but a desire to live comfortably in non-Catholic society, not to offend and not to make enemies, and a gradual, often unconscious, succumbing to the perpetual and appealing propaganda of newspapers and magazines put out by the rich and powerful anti-Christians, can explain the Catholic Liberals’ selection, in our time, of two or three vaguely worded sentences in all the volumes of Pope Pius’ utterance, and the use of these sentences to build up a whole new Liberal attack on a many times defined dogma of the Church, thereby entering well into the plans of the Church’s enemies. Pope Pius IX, who, by going even halfway politically with the enemies of Christ in the beginning of his pontificate, by the concessions he then made to the Liberals, lost for himself and his successors the temporal power of the Popes — and who learned at such bitter cost that Liberalism in any of its forms, and religious Liberalism in particular, leads to chaos and revolution — strove during every year of his reign to place before the faithful the truths of salvation.

His constant message to his bishops and archbishops was ever the same as the one which he wrote from Naples on December 8, 1849, in his encyclical Nostis et nobiscum:

You must indeed especially see to it that the faithful themselves have firmly fixed in their minds that dogma of our most holy religion, namely, the absolute necessity of the Catholic Faith for obtaining salvation … that dogma received from Christ and inculcated by the Fathers and the Councils, which is found in the formulas of Profession of Faith in use among the Latins and the Greeks and other oriental Catholics …

He told Werner de Mérode, the brother-in-law of Count de Montalembert, in November, 1863, that it was a sin to believe that there was salvation outside the Catholic Church.

On six different occasions, between 1846 and 1873, he condemned Freemasonry and its kindred secret sects. “You are from your father the devil,” he said to them in Singulari quadam, “and it is the works of your father that you wish to do.” He writes, in November, 1865, in Ex epistola, of the rulers of the various countries who had failed to suppress the Masonic sects: “Would that they had not shown such negligence in so serious a duty; we would not then have to deplore such great wars and movements of revolt by which all Europe has been set ablaze. …” And he goes on to condemn the false but widespread opinion, arising from ignorance of the facts, that Freemasons are a harmless and philanthropic body, and that the Church has nothing to fear from them.

On November 21, 1873, in Etsi multa — deploring the persecutions which had come upon the Church in Rome and throughout the whole world, the anti-Catholic activities of the German imperial government (Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and the notorious Falk Laws which were, incidentally, the cause of bringing to America so many fine Germans, forced to flee because of them from their homeland), and the revolutions and anti-Catholic movement in South America — Pope Pius IX attributed them all to the Masonic and allied sects, “of which the Synagogue of Satan that is now mobilizing its forces against the Church of Christ is composed.” He warned his bishops to point out constantly to the faithful the fallacy of those “who, whether deceived themselves or striving to deceive and ensnare others, still presume to assert that these dark associations aim only at social betterment and human progress and the practice of beneficence, pointing out, at the same time, that it is not alone the Masonic body in Europe that is referred to, but also the Masonic associations in America and in whatever part of the world they may be.”

The anxious Pope had already given Jacques Crétineau-Joly (1803-1875), the journalist and historian, permission to publish in his book, The Church and the Revolution, copies of the documents and correspondence of the Alta Vendita which had been seized by the Pontifical Government of Pope Gregory XVI. The Alta Vendita was commonly believed to be, at that time, under the over-all direction of Palmerston, the governing center of Freemasonry. The program for society and the instructions for carrying it out, revealed in these papers, blanched the face of many a strong man.

On June 29, 1868, the Holy Father, having witnessed during the past two years the bitter passion of the Church in practically every land in Christendom, and with Garibaldi’s besieging army but temporarily driven back in its drive on Rome, nevertheless with tremendous courage issued a Bull convoking an ecumenical council to open in the Vatican Basilica on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1869.

This time, the fury of the Church’s foes knew no bounds. The international press acknowledged no restraints on its mingled resentment, scorn, hatred, anger, satire, maledictions and dire prophesies of plots, subplots and dark papal intrigues. They surmised, and published it far and wide — with all sorts of insinuations — that Pio Nono was about to proclaim the doctrine of infallibility. The Liberals and Radicals, the Greek Orthodox and the Protestants raged, in print and on the platform. Did not Pius know that he was the last Pope? And with the fall of the temporal power not far distant, did he not realize that the papacy at long last would be at an end? What was he thinking of, calling an ecumenical council! They suspected, and were prepared for, the worst.

The Gallicans in every country came to life again, and produced their stock in trade, their adamant assurance of the superiority of a council over a Pope. The Catholics, on the other hand, alternately argued that this was not the time to call, of all things, an ecumenical council, and that there never was any real attack on the doctrine of infallibility — real enough to require defining — for had not Pio Nono himself defined ex cathedra the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and had not the Council of Florence, in 1438, proclaimed definitely the Primacy of the Pope?

The great mass of the Catholic faithful abroad thought only that the year 1869 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Holy Father’s priesthood, and millions offered their Mass and Holy Communion for his intentions on the Sunday of the Good Shepherd, the day on which the happy anniversary fell. His great trials had but endeared him all the more to the loving hearts of his people. “No Pope has ever entered into such close and universal relations with the heart of humanity,” the Archbishop of Cologne wrote of Pio Nono on that day.

And in Rome, during the months preceding the Council, the bishops and theologians prepared the subjects to come under discussion, and the question of infallibility was not among them. For it had not been the Holy Father’s express intention of convening a council in order to define infallibility, but rather in order that “a supreme remedy might be applied to the supreme dangers that threaten Christianity,” and because he was resolved, this fearless Pope, “to build up in the eyes of the whole human race the edifice of Catholic dogma, in a form so complete, so beautiful that … the whole Earth must admire it and exclaim that the hand of God is there!”

The great Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council held in the Church since the Council of Trent three centuries before, opened on December 8, 1869, with over seven hundred Fathers present, from all over the world. Eighty thousand people jammed Saint Peter’s, a living, breathing testimony to the hostile enemies outside of the unquenchable spirit of the Church of Jesus Christ, revivified at every second of its existence by the Third Person of the Adorable Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, and constantly watched over by His matchless Spouse, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the tender Mother of all those incorporated in the Body and Blood of her Son.

Even though the doctrine of infallibility was not included in the matters for discussion, it was, nevertheless, in the minds of all as the Council opened. When it became known that no place had been given in the drafts (or schemata prepared for discussion) to the question of papal infallibility, the majority of the Fathers deliberated, since such a hue and cry had for so long been raised against it in the press, whether neglect to define now might not raise a question of its truth in many minds. And so, in April, five months after the opening of the Council — at the urgent appeal of Cardinal Manning, speaking for himself and a large body of the bishops — Pope Pius IX directed that the question of infallibility be prepared for immediate consideration by the Council.

It goes without saving that during the discussions which followed it never once occurred to the Fathers to debate the divinity of the doctrine, the fact of its divine revelation. They were concerned simply with the question of the opportuneness of the time — violently anti-Catholic and revolutionary — in which, not to change or add to the dogma in any way, for that never could be done either by Pope or council, but to reaffirm and state it in unmistakable language.

On July 18, 1870, despite the overwhelming, hysterical and desperate protest in the press all over the world, the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus, defining the infallibility of the Pope, was adopted. On that day, the Holy Father, Pope Pius IX, solemnly defined:

Faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian Faith, for the glory of God our Savior, the exaltation of the Catholic religion, and the salvation of the Christian people, the Sacred Council approving, we teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra — that is, when in the discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church — is, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that His Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that, therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.”

A violent thunderstorm, threatening since early morning, broke over Rome just as the voting on the doctrine began. For an hour and a half, peals of thunder shook the vast Basilica, and flashes of lightning lit up the faces of the Fathers as each rose, in his turn, to pronounce his assent. The altar appeared out of the pitch darkness, as the lightning lingered upon it, and the great congregation was filled with awe as Our Lord’s Words to Saint Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church,” inscribed on the base of the dome, suddenly stood out clearly for all to read. To many present it recalled the thunders which rolled and the lightnings which flashed round Sinai, while Moses within the storm cloud on the mountain top received the law from the Eternal God.

As the voices of the congregation were raised in the glorious praise of the Te Deum, the storm ceased, and the sun broke through the clouds. It shone with an especially golden radiance, unusual even for Italy, directly upon the exalted face of the Holy Father, revealing the fine, sensitive features of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti grown strong with the exceeding strength he had summoned, with the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in order to bring safely, through the violent storms which for almost twenty-five years had at every moment beset it, the precious barque of Peter. It revealed, this light of the sun, the personal holiness of the “good Pio Nono”! And it revealed, through the supernatural joy which now was habitual to him, no matter how great his trials, the lines of suffering worn deep into his countenance, for indeed he had been well-named by Saint Malachy, “Crux de Cruce,” Cross upon Cross.

Even the hostile London Times, whose columns daily had been filled with articles which gave much pain to the Holy Father, was forced to report of the transcendently moving scene: “The Benediction followed. The entire congregation fell on their knees, and the Pope blessed them in those clear sweet tones distinguishable among a thousand.”

And then, perfectly in keeping with the story of his whole pontificate, on the very same day as the glorious triumph of the Vatican Council, on the very same July 18, 1870, news reached him that war had been declared between France and Prussia.

Within a month. Napoleon III had withdrawn the remnants of the French Army still in Rome. This was the opportunity for which Victor Emmanuel and his advisers had been waiting, and on the twentieth of September, after bombarding the gates of the city, his troops at last entered Rome by a breach in the Porta Pia. “You are whited sepulchres,” the Holy Father told Victor Emmanuel’s envoy. “I know you not, and cannot know you or treat in any manner with you!”

After that, Rome was no longer the City of the Popes. It was become, this chosen city of Peter, the capital of an Italy controlled by anti-Christian forces. The time would come when the Prime Minister of Italy would be the Grand Master of the Italian Masons, Crispi, and the mayor of Rome would be Nathan, a Jew. How Saint Peter must have grieved, even in Heaven, to see his Master crucified anew in the city of his predilection, the new Jerusalem!

In May, 1871, the Italian Government passed the incredible “Law of Guarantees” which, among many other things, after stripping the Holy Roman Pontiff of all of his possessions, proclaimed him a guest of the government and allowed him “to enjoy the apostolic palaces of the Vatican and the Lateran, as well as the Villa de Castel Gandolfo”! — while it went on with the inevitable confiscation of monasteries and convents, abolition of religious teaching in the schools, legislation on marriage, interference with the training of priests in the seminaries, and the rest of the program of the whole anti-Christian regime once it comes into power. The Law of Guarantees made the Pope, indeed, the creature of the State.

Pope Pius IX refused to acknowledge the Law of Guarantees, and became a prisoner in the Vatican, since to step outside it would necessitate crossing the territory held by the Italian Government and would constitute a recognition of its right to that territory. That the imprisonment of the Pope was a real as well as a voluntary one, we know. When, on the twentieth of June, 1874, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of his coronation, Pio Nono appeared at a window of the Vatican, the more than a hundred thousand persons in or around the Vatican Basilica for the Te Deum and Benediction which concluded the ceremonies in his honor, broke into cheers at the sight of him. Victor Emmanuel’s troops immediately rushed into the square, summarily dispersed the crowds and dragged off to prison all those whose outraged souls had caused them to protest. These were many, among them ladies from the oldest and noblest families in Rome. Long prison terms were given four men who had cried out, “Evviva il Papa Ré!”

Pope Pius IX adjourned the Vatican Council one month after the seizure of Rome; it has never since been reconvened. The gloriously intransigent Pope lived on, a prisoner in the Vatican, for almost seven more years. When his faithful Catholics, who flocked to Rome in thousands to pay him honor, would address him as Pius the Great, he answered that God alone was great, and refused the title. When they would offer him a golden throne, he begged that the money be used to ransom theological students from military service. He continued to live as he had always lived, sleeping in “one of the smallest of the eleven thousand rooms at his command,” providing for the poor even in his own great poverty, spending long hours in prayer and meditation, counseling the proud and the intellectual in words similar to those he addressed, at the time of the Vatican Council, to Bishop Dupanloup of France, “Return, brother, I pray you, to that golden simplicity of little ones.” He kept his words of burning love for the poor, of the caliber of the poor women of Rome who, thirteen thousand strong, came and read to him one day their address, “To the Father of the Poor.” They laid at his feet a sum of money “made up of the cents lovingly given by hands and hearts which Pius IX had often bounteously filled.”

He instituted the feast of the Precious Blood. He declared Saint Joseph Patron of the Universal Church. He made Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, and Saint Francis de Sales, Doctors of the Church. No Pope before him in the history of the Church beatified more blessed and canonized more saints than did Pope Pius IX. He raised the Church in the United States from the status of a mission, and established, between 1847 and 1853, the archbishoprics of St. Louis, New York, Cincinnati, New Orleans and San Francisco. In 1875, he named Archbishop John McCloskey of New York the first American Cardinal.

On the seventh of February, 1878, at the age of eighty-six, having served his Lord, Jesus Christ, as His Vicar just four months short of the thirty-two years of Saint Peter’s pontificate, the glorious Pope Pius IX died, consoled and comforted to the last by that other great foe of Liberalism, Cardinal Manning. Pio Nono was mourned by true Catholics all over the world and hated to the end by the Church’s enemies — always the sign of a good Pope. “I have loved justice and hated iniquity,” the great Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, had said, “therefore I die in exile.”

Pope Pius IX died, still a prisoner in the Vatican. And sure proof that his strong and valiant fight against the seed of Lucifer had stopped Our Lady’s deadly and powerful enemy short of his all but complete victory over Christ’s Church is seen in the diabolical hatred and malice with which the fiendish mob, inspired by the Masonic clubs of Rome, attacked his coffin in an attempt to desecrate his body as it was being moved, three years after his death, from the Vatican to his chosen last resting place in the Church of Saint Lawrence-outside-the-walls. The reason for this outrage was not, as some have said, that Pio Nono had allowed foreign troops (the French) to protect him in Rome for so many years, but rather because he had stood out to the last against the Liberals and Radicals, the Socialists and Communists, the apostles of false progress, false liberty and the unlimited power of the State — all of whom preached so compellingly, with all the power of the press of the world behind them — and because he would not refrain from denouncing them whenever the opportunity offered, under whatever name they might assume or whatever mask they might wear.

The tragedy of all tragedies, however, is that Pope Pius IX has not been allowed to rest in peace. The Catholic Liberals, on whom he made unrelenting war during his entire pontificate, have in our day tried to make him the father of the modern heresy! But we can trust the Immaculate Mother of God to take care of this trial as she has all others in the life of her devoted son. One by one, he beheld his greatest enemies die before him, broken and humiliated. And today, what Pio Nono foretold of Victor Emmanuel has come true. “Again I tell you,” he said, “you shall not long enjoy your violence.” The Kingdom of Italy is no more. Nor is the Imperial Germany of Bismarck. The sun has set, at last, on Palmerston’s Britain. There is no longer a French Emperor. Europe is paying the price of its sins against its ancient Father, to whom it owes all that it has ever been, for today it is in the hands of those who are the secret foes even of Masonry.

And the Papal States? That which was lost in 1870 was not the papacy, as the anti-Christian world had planned and thought, but only the land which had guaranteed the independence of the papacy in the performance of its spiritual mission. Some of this land has been returned, and Pope Pius XII, the Pope of our day, is exercising his sublime office from the tiny territory of Vatican City.

And Pio Nono? The glorious Pope Saint Pius X, who took his name and who was ever in joyous admiration of his sanctity, opened the process for the beatification of Pope Pius IX on the eleventh of February, 1907. We pray that it may come quickly, for the triumph of Pope Pius IX is the triumph of the Church. It was the thought of the Church which filled his last moments, and it was concerning the Church that he spoke his last words. “Guard the Church,” he said to the Cardinals kneeling at his bedside. “Guard the Church I loved so well and sacredly.”

December, 1958

In her liturgical generosity, our Holy Mother the Church gives us three distinct Masses every December twenty-fifth. They are known as the Midnight Mass, the Mass at Dawn, and the Mass of Christmas Day. During the second Mass, the Mass at Dawn, the Church presents us with the memory of a noble widow of Rome named Anastasia, the only saint who gets a “feast day” commemoration on Jesus’ Birthday.

Saint Anastasia was martyred by burning on December twenty-fifth in the year 304. Among all the Christmas Day occurrences of nineteen hundred years, the Church has chosen to remember, in conjunction with Our Lord’s Birth, only this one event: the suffering and death of a Christian martyr whose crime before men was to insist that the Holy Infant of Bethlehem is the One, True God.

This Christmas, there are many gods being proposed to the Catholics of America. They are gods with names like Tolerance and Brotherhood, and to fail to worship them has become, in effect, a crime before men. Invoking Saint Anastasia, The Point prays this Christmas for those who will be guilty of the crime, and who will insist, publicly and persistently, that the Christ Child of Christmas is the only True God, and that His Virgin Mother is that same Mother of God who, when our last Christmas is finally behind us, will stand unique and singular as the one Gate of Heaven.

THE PROTECTION OF CHRISTMAS

Thy light is come, Jerusalem, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee, and the Gentiles shall walk in thy light. Alleluia.

In the troubled season of Christmas, 1958, as the last strongholds of our civilization falter before the Jewish siege, let all who are about to despair consider the above words. They are of an antiphon in the Christmastime liturgy of the Catholic Church, and they offer a needed reminder. Though we must not forget that the Jews have rejected the Incarnate God, we must also remember — with thanksgiving and the chanting of alleluias — that God has likewise cast off the Jews, and established His new and eternal covenant with us Gentiles.

“A Child is born to us, a Son is given to us,” is the jubilant shout of Catholics at Christmas. To the Jews, it is a taunt, notifying them that however much they might bedevil the Church with their anti-Christian onslaughts, her ultimate triumph over them is assured. The gates of Hell shall not prevail against her.

The potency of this promise that Our Lord made to Saint Peter has been realized afresh during the past weeks, with the election of Saint Peter’s 262nd successor. And it is especially fitting that, as a consequence, the attention of the Catholic world at Christmastime will be directed toward Rome. For, ever since the seventh century, the relics of the Crib in which our infant Savior lay have been in the Eternal City, at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major; there, each December 25, the Pope himself celebrates the Midnight Mass.

But besides being the “new Bethlehem,” Rome claims our Yuletide interest on another score. That note of exultation sounding through the Christmas liturgy, insisting we should rejoice even in these beleaguered days, has a resounding echo in the history of the Bishops of Rome. Through all the centuries, they have been the authors of a wise and effective resistance to the menace of the Jews — a resistance that has safeguarded Christendom in the past, and offers the best hope for rekindling it in the future.

The Catholic Church’s Jewish policy was deliberately arrived at. Centuries of contact with Jews at every level, both in and out of the Faith, taught the successors of Saint Peter some salutary lessons. The much-publicized ghetto at Rome, which the Popes maintained for centuries, was not the eccentric whim of a few conservative Holy Fathers. It represented papal teaching and papal practice that extended back through the ages of Faith to Peter himself, who made it clear in his first Epistle that the Jews were finished as God’s people, and who thus wrote to the new Christians of Asia Minor that they were now “a chosen generation and a purchased people … who in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God.”

A compilation of papal decrees dealing with the Jews would clearly show that the Church’s legislative interest in them is twofold. First, the Jews must be constantly and enforcibly segregated from the Christian faithful, and second, they must at all times be prevented from infecting the world with their hateful and infidel doctrines. These were the two principles behind the Church’s approval of ghettos, her ban on the Talmud, her prohibitions against marriage with the Jews, her demand that Jews in Christian places be distinguished by a badge or other identifying dress, her warnings against Jews in public offices, etc.

With the final loss of papal territories in 1870, there ceased to be any Jews under the direct temporal rule of the popes. Yet, public questions involving the Jewish problem often brought the ancient Church principles into play. Thus, it is not surprising to find that the pope who was most outspoken on modern public issues, Pope Leo XIII, receives the following notice in the Jewish Encyclopedia: “He encouraged anti-Semitism by bestowing distinctions on leading anti-Semitic politicians and authors, as Lueger and Drumont; he refused to interfere in behalf of Captain Dreyfus, or to issue a statement against the blood accusation. In an official document he denounced Jews, Freemasons, and anarchists as the enemies of the Church.”

Rome’s traditional outlook on the Jews is currently reflected in its dealings with the Jewish State in Palestine. Amid a frenzied campaign of high pressure and propaganda, designed to persuade the world that Jewish usurpation of the Holy Land is the nicest thing that could have happened to the place, the Vatican has been notably unmoved. And it has been so despite the fact that vast numbers of conspicuous Catholics (Americans leading the pack) have not only swallowed but are publicly regurgitating the pro-Zionist line.

The Church’s mind has been made up on the matter since the days when Theodore Herzl, “the father of Zionism,” decided to call on Saint Pius X. Herzl hoped to get a papal blessing on his scheme for setting up a Jewish homeland. But the Holy Father told him flatly, “We are unable to favor this movement … The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.”

And despite continual coaxings by Jewish leaders and their friends, the Vatican has refused to this day to give official recognition to the Jewish State in Palestine.

There have, however, been papal emissaries in the Holy Land during the last decade. They have gone, not to promote cordial relations between Rome and Tel Aviv, but simply to care for the interests of the Church and her children. They have gone to see how Catholics are harassed and discriminated against by the Jewish government. They have gone to see the wreckage and desecration of Catholic shrines and institutions by the Jewish army. And they have announced plainly to a heedless world what they have seen.

One of the earliest of these Vatican observers was Archbishop Arthur Hughes, who summarized his findings with the charge that there is a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”

One of the most recent observers is Monsignor Raymond Etteldorf, of the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Church. In his book, The Catholic Church in the Middle East, which has just been published, he reports that Catholics living in the Jewish State are being gradually forced out. They find it difficult to get employment, even harder to set up their own businesses. Most important, the number of priests has been so drastically reduced through impositions of the Jewish government that almost half the parishes are now untended.

It is a troubled time, this season of Christmas, 1958. Our Lord’s Holy Land is in the keeping of His crucifiers. And that outrage is not the extent, but only the epitome, of the evil we are facing.

When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she told them that the people of all nations would have to suffer great afflictions if they did not turn to her. “But in the end,” she told the children, “My Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

Eventually, after whatever terrors and desolations may be in store for us, the world will listen, thankfully, to the message of the Catholic Faith — that Faith which looks for its ultimate protection to the Bishop of Rome, and finds its most joyful celebration in the festival of Christmas.

November, 1958

THE JEWS AND THE SAINTS

What Our Canonized Catholics Are Lately Suffering

Ever since the explosive year, 1789, when the Judaeo-Masonic French Revolution set off the movement to knock down the walls of Europe’s ghettos, and spill their contents into every corner of Christendom, the Jews have been gaining one victory after another. As the nineteenth century progressed, the governments of Europe (whose policies were made in Europe’s lodges) even granted the Jews citizenship on an equal footing with Christians. Belgium did it in 1815, Denmark in 1849, Norway in 1851, England in 1858, Switzerland in 1865, Austria-Hungary in 1867, Germany in 1870.

But as the Jews have climbed from height to height, buying up the world’s Main Streets, and buying off its leaders, they have not lost sight of the depth from which, so lately, they have risen. Nor have they forgotten for a moment who it is that formerly kept them in such effective line. Their continuing bitter hatred for the Church bears witness to this. And since the Church is the communion of all her faithful children, gathered from every age, the Jews have reserved a special contempt for those supremely faithful among the faithful: our canonized saints.

Among the papers and periodicals that the Jews put out for their fellow Jews, it is an exceptional issue that does not contain an attack on some haloed and prayed-to Catholic whose memory is especially loathsome in Jewry. Recent victims have included: Saint Albert the Great, whom the Jews have never forgiven for sitting on an ecclesiastical commission that condemned their Talmud to be burned, over seven hundred years ago; Saint Pius X, whom the “brotherhood” Jews have indicted for his refusal to cooperate with a group of Italian officials because they had taken part in a synagogue service; and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, whom Manhattan Jews have accused of a “disposition to bigotry” for insisting, in one of her prayers, that the Jews killed Christ.

Our Lord’s beloved disciple, Saint John the Evangelist, gets a resounding blast from the American Association for Jewish Education in its widely-discussed book, Of Them Which Say They Are Jews. Saint John, say the Jewish educators, is ultimately responsible for 2,000 years of Christian animosity toward the Jews. His gospel “makes of them utterly ‘the synagogue of Satan.’ Later events hardened the process into the classical anti-semitism of dogmatic theology and the consequent laws and customs of Christian society.”

Another recent Jewish book, Rabbi Ernest Trattner’s Understanding the Talmud, puts Pope Saint Pius V in the same list with Adolf Hitler, as an enemy of the Jewish religion!

Nor is this “publishing” attack on the saints a new strategy for the Jews. Established works of Jewish reference that have been in use for years are riddled with similar hateful accounts. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge, edited by the “scholarly” Jacob De Haas, has a gloating article telling how the Spanish marranos (fraudulent Jewish converts to the Faith) murdered Saint Peter Arbues, the Inquisitor who was exposing their perfidy. “In the crime,” boasts the article, “some of the greatest of the marranos, members of the Santangel family, participated.”

The old synagogue classic, Milman’s History of the Jews, gives vituperative space to several saints, but saves a particular venom for Blessed Bernardine of Feltre. He is the fifteenth-century Franciscan friar who hit the Jewish usurers of his day a mortal blow by establishing Catholic charitable agencies where the poor could get financial help, free of interest rates. Because of the militant preaching of Blessed Bernardine, the cities of Trent, Perugia, Gubbio, and Ravenna passed laws expelling all Jews from their territories.

In the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Blessed Bernardine is described as a “Franciscan monk and Jew-baiter,” but his account is abbreviated to make room for more famous Church “villains.”

That aging set of tomes, the Jewish Encyclopedia, is an arsenal of recriminations against the saints. They are listed individually and also under such headings as Chronology, Councils of the Church, Polemics, Popes, and Church Fathers. The Jewish complaint under this last entry is summarized: “The Church Fathers looked upon the Jews as demons, their synagogues as houses of Satan.”

The Jews will have no rest while the Christian World continues to reverence the canonized heroes of Christendom who, more than any others, were responsible for keeping the Jewish people in the segregated state proper to infidels. Thus, before the collapse of present Jewish power comes, the attack on the saints is bound to be bolder. The reasonable reaction to expect from the Catholic camp is an increased devotion to the saints, a greater solicitude for their honor, a rallying of Catholic writers and publishers to counteract the Jewish offensive.

This reasonable reaction, however, has yet to materialize. Indeed, the trend of the moment could not (even by deliberate plan) be better calculated to aid the Jews. Never before have so many Catholics written and published so many biographies of the saints. Yet, never has such lamentable treatment of the saints been presented to the world in the name of Catholic hagiography.

It is true there are still some reverent lives of the saints being written. It is also true that among the objectionable ones, not all are equally so. But there is a common spirit that, more or less, they share: a condescension toward the saints, as though contemporary authors, being enlightened men of superior culture, are presenting the saints for the first time in their proper perspective; as though they are finally handing us the true picture that centuries of tradition and love had served only to obscure.

Who are the writers of these new biographies of the saints? They are anyone who has the time, the typewriter, and the publishing connections necessary. By no standard are they the people who should be telling our saints’ stories. Even when they are capable writers (and that immediately narrows the field), they are people so pathetically remote from the persecutions, the penances, and the prayers of the saints that the holy subjects of their books emerge either as exotic curiosities, or as pious “good citizens” molded to the sanctity-standards of the author. In no case will the saint appear to be the flowering and fulfillment of all Christian life — the complete successes that balance out the half-tries and total failures of the rest of the Church’s family.

For a number of years, there has been an increasing volume of “convert” hagiography. A broad background of heresy, recently and hastily painted over, is apparently considered an eminent qualification for undertaking a book on a saint. We have, thus, been treated to such unlikely performances as: the biographer of John Wesley adapting his Methodist talents to the story of Saint Peter Claver, and the son of a pair of Salvation Army officers beating the drum for Saint Thomas More.

A popular, and perhaps inevitable, innovation in this field is a book of brief biographies entitled Saints for Now, in which the convert-editor invited lifelong Catholics, fellow-converts, and very-much-unconverted heretics to contribute the life of a saint.

The current big name in Catholic hagiography is a convert from Methodist-Episcopalianism. He has achieved his eminence by re-editing and re-issuing that standard work on the saints in English, The Lives of the Saints, by Father Alban Butler. A kind of self-made scholar, Mr. Donald Attwater has revised the late Father Herbert Thurston’s revision of Father Butler’s Lives, throwing out a number of “uncertainly venerated saints” and discarding all that still remained (after Father Thurston’s axe-work) of the Butler exhortations and homilies.

But in neither of these things does Attwater’s chief vice lie. It is found, rather, in his “scholarship” — the devastating remarks that follow upon the biographical accounts of the saints, most especially the saints of the first ten centuries. Saint Sebastian, the famous Roman martyr who was shot with arrows and clubbed to death in the year 288, is a worthy example. After giving Sebastian’s full story (the way it is found in the Roman martyrology, the priest’s breviary, and all the tradition of the Church), Attwater goes on to discredit the details as merely a “pious fable.” His “scholarly” proof? Well, it seems that among the many representations of Saint Sebastian that have come down to us in art, there are two early ones (a cathedral window in Germany and a mosaic in Rome) which leave out the arrows. Therefore, concludes Attwater, we have been hoaxed by the Church these sixteen centuries. For clearly, from this antique evidence, Saint Sebastian was not shot with arrows, and if this most colorful fact of his story is wrong, well, manifestly the rest can be of no value.

Deserving of particular mention, too, is Mr. Attwater’s London colleague, the Galway-born Jesuit biographer of Jesuit saints, Father James Brodrick. The Brodrick method is more direct. He goes after one saint at a time, bare-fisted, until he levels the holy man to Brodrick-size. A representative example is his job on Saint Francis Xavier. Just once does Father Brodrick commend Saint Francis. With an insidious string of adjectives, he declares the saint was “devout, selfless, chivalrous, and ruthless.” Before he finishes, Father Brodrick has deplored Saint Francis Xavier’s noble birth, his manner of teaching, his parish methods, his “ignorance” of Buddhism, his haste in baptizing, his clothes, his friends, his “abominable” literary style, his appraisal of men, his enthusiasm for the Inquisition, and his firm belief that people who die outside the Church will not be saved.

More devilish than this style of straight-forward punching at the saints, and still new to the world of hagiography, is the psychiatric approach: the evaluation of the saints in terms of those current myths of fantasy and filth which fall under the general head of psychological studies.

Only two years ago, The American Ecclesiastical Review printed the speech delivered by a mid-western auxiliary bishop to the newly-convened Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists. In his speech, the bishop advocated the application of psychiatric principles to many phases of Church activity, but especially to studies of the lives of the saints: “The hagiographer will explore the terrain with greater skill if a capable Catholic psychiatrist be at his side.”

Cited to the assembled psychiatrists as a worthy example of what the bishop meant was a new life of Saint Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. This book, by a French-born English priest, won itself some space in Time magazine under the caption, “Saintly Neurotics,” and has since been hailed in other Masonic and Jewish sheets as a promising sign of new liberalism within the Church.

The influence of this kind of talk about the saints has already begun to be felt. Devotees of the saints should be prepared (as one of them lately was not) to hear nuns in their parochial grammar schools make statements like this: “Lives of the saints? Oh, no, we don’t give them to the children any more. The saints, you know, are very abnormal personalities. It’s too much for a child to assimilate at such an impressionable age.”

Nuns who talk this way, and priests who write like Saint Therese’s new biographer, do not, however, concoct these ideas all on their own. They are not innovators but parrots — repeating, with Catholic accents, doctrines and dialectics that have their origin in the camp of the saints’ pledged enemies, the Jews.

Naturally, the Jews have everything to gain by any Catholic attack on the saints. But there must be an especial satisfaction in Jewdom when a thoroughly Jewish device is adopted by Catholics as a means of depreciating and debunking the saints. The psychoanalytic method of psychiatry, born in the brain of Viennese Jew Sigmund Freud, is purebred Jewish. The Jews boast of it.

Back in 1926, the B’nai B’rith Magazine for March carried an article entitled, “Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Movement?” The answer was resoundingly affirmative, and a subsequent issue of the magazine (July, 1926) flaunted the fact that, “The doctrines of psychology originated by Sigmund Freud were first preached by him from a B’nai B’rith platform.”

Just a year ago last February, the Hillel Society of Harvard University had a full evening on the Jewishness of psychiatry, in a talk delivered by Dr. David Bakan, Jewish psychologist of the University of Missouri. Dr. Bakan had lately done a book on the theme, saying that it is impossible to understand Freudian theory if you do not understand it is Jewish. To an appreciative Hillel audience, Dr. Bakan summarized: “Freud’s psychology and Jewish mysticism are one in spirit. ”

In past issues, when The Point has decried various Jewish inroads and influences in American Catholic life, it has singled out the Church’s saints as exemplars of resistance to, and victory over, the Jews. In ages of Faith, it has been the glory of Catholics to be on the side of the saints, battling against the seed and synagogue of Satan. It is this realization that makes the apostasy of our “psychiatric” hagiographers such an incredible one: they have entered the battle and turned on the saints, with weapons supplied them by the Jews.

Recommended Reading

Those who want orthodox and traditional handling of the stories of the Church’s saints are urged to look for an old edition, pre-revision, of Father Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Another valuable set of volumes, lately hard to get in English, is Dom Prosper Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year. Dom Gueranger, the tireless restorer of French monasticism in the last century, presents the saints in the light of their annual feast-day commemoration, reproducing the details of the saints’ lives which appear in the priest’s breviary.

Absolutely the best and, sadly, the hardest to find copies of, are those lives of the saints that were written by saints. Steady searching, however, will be rewarded with (for examples) Saint Gregory the Great’s life of Saint Benedict, Saint Athanasius’ life of Saint Anthony of the Desert, Saint Jerome’s life of Saint Hilarion, Saint Bonaventure’s life of Saint Francis, or the lives of Saints Malachy, Romuald, and Dominic Savio, written respectively by Saint Bernard, Saint Peter Damian, and Saint John Bosco.

October, 1958

CATHOLICS, THE BIBLE, AND THE JEWS

On the fifteenth of this month, the Church commemorates one of her most brilliant and faithful daughters: that sage among the wise virgins, Saint Teresa of Avila. Looking out over sixteenth-century Europe, from the heights of Catholic Spain, Saint Teresa saw the Protestant Revolt gaining ground. She saw the rending of Christendom and, amid the pieces, the multiplied troubles that awaited the Church. She could only conclude that the times were evil ones, indeed. And, after meditating on this conclusion, Saint Teresa made the following entry in her Autobiography: “All the evil in the world comes from ignorance of the truths of the Holy Scriptures in their simplicity, of which not one iota shall pass away.”

Taking advantage of Saint Teresa’s wisdom, American Catholics will find that no current evil in their world can be resolved so immediately in terms of the Bible as can the problem of the Jews. In the light of Holy Scripture, there is revealed, and divinely so, the complete Catholic answer to the Jewish question.

The Seed of Abraham

Realizing the power of the Bible, the Jews have consciously promoted the notion that they are the “people of the Book,” the Scriptural “chosen people.” The truth, as the Bible plainly tells it, could not be more contrary.

The Jews were the chosen people of God’s revelational plan, but it is the central theme of the Bible to explain how ungrateful a people they proved to be in their privileged position; how contemptuous and murderous they were toward the prophets God sent them; how patient God was for centuries with them, until, finally, sending His Divine Son and seeing Him mocked, rejected, and crucified by the Jews, God turned His blessing of the Jews to a curse. The seventeen prophetic books of the Old Testament had repeatedly foretold that God would do this. The entire New Testament confirms it as done.

The nature of this curse, as revealed by Our Lord’s own words in the Gospel, is twofold: it cuts the Jews off from their previous holy tradition and it establishes them in a new and hateful status. In chapter eight of Saint Matthew, Our Lord tells the Jews that all connection with the few faithful Jews of the Old Testament is now denied them. “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven: But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

In that exterior darkness, according to Our Lord’s further words in Saint John, the ejected Jews are not to be left fatherless. They, who were once the children of Abraham, now become the sons of the Prince of Darkness. “If you be the children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me,” says Jesus to the Jews. “You are of your father, the Devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth … ”

The curse on the Jews brought the corollary election of the Gentile nations. The “many” who in fulfillment of Our Lord’s prophecy would come “from the east and the west” are the armies of responsive Gentiles who have heeded the message of the Apostles, believed that Jesus was the promised Christ, and so joined themselves to that holy tradition that God established with Abraham, two thousand years before the Incarnation.

The Christian faithful who fill and over-flow the places forfeited by the Jews, become now truly the rightful beneficiaries of the promise made to Abraham. It is in this profound sense that Pope Pius XI proposed his much-abused statement, “Spiritually, we are Semites.” The Holy Father had no intention of saying (as the Judaeophiles would have it) that Catholics are one in spirit with present-day, Christ-despising Jews. Pope Pius XI was reiterating the Scriptural truth that, by spiritual means, through Faith and the incorporation of the Holy Eucharist, Catholics have supplanted the Jews as the “chosen people,” and they now claim for their ancestry the great names of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. It is in this spirit that the Church, the new Israel, prays in all her public worship. And it was in this same spirit that Our Blessed Lady prayed in her New Testament canticle, the Magnificat, when she referred to all the faithful as “Abraham and his seed forever.”

The Gospel Under Fire

A few years ago, when Jews everywhere sat back to count the blessings that the second World War had reaped for them, a very prominent New York rabbi, Dr. Mordecai Kaplan of the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote a book called The Future of the American Jew. Things looked good to Dr. Kaplan, but not universally. There was one area that worried him: the sizeable Christian area. “The Christian Church,” he wrote, “from its very inception, sought to justify its repudiation of Judaism by vilifying the teachings of Judaism and branding the Jews as deicides. The role of the Jewish people in history, according to orthodox Christian tradition, has been that of anti-Christ.”

Dr. Kaplan went on to blame the New Testament for much of the Jews’ troubles. And in this he joined a fashionable movement. For it has become, and remains, a smart thing with Amencan Jews to make public attacks on the New Testament — attacks that a prudent fear had heretofore kept within the bounds of synagogues and the Jews’ own, Jewish-read press. The following pair of statements are representative samples.

Mr. Leo Pfeffer, counsel for the American Jewish Congress, in his Beacon Press book, Church, State, and Freedom, writes: “To the Jewish child devoted to the religion of his fathers, the New Testament in its entirety is blasphemous for attributing divinity to a human being.”

Rabbi Julius Nodel of Portland, Oregon, in a speech reported by Portland’s leading newspaper, says: “The New Testament is a work of malicious libel and the story of events leading to the trial and crucifixion, a dragon seed from which has come misery, bloodshed, and suspicion.”

Synagogue Theology

Despite their flaunted contempt for the New Testament, the Jews have managed to sustain among the Christian majority the notion that somehow Jewish belief is still Biblical belief, that the Jews still have a Scriptural faith, and that for this reason we must respect the synagogue. “Don’t Jews still believe in a Messias to come?” asks the credulous Christian. “And don’t they believe in the same Biblical Heaven and Hell that we do?”

The answer to both these questions is — no. And it is an emphatic “No!” as the subsequent Jewish testimony will verify.

Concerning the Messias: The Jews of today reject the notion of a personal redeemer who will be born of them and lead them to the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. The Jews believe that the whole Jewish race is to be elevated to a position of prosperity and overlordship and that, when this happy day arrives (the Messianic Age), they will have achieved all that is coming to them by way of savior and salvation. In his recent book, The Messianic Idea in Israel, Jewish theologian Dr. Joseph Klausner explains: “Thus the whole people Israel in the form of the elect of the nations gradually became the Messiah of the world, the redeemer of mankind.”

Concerning Heaven and Hell: A succinct summary of Jewish teaching on “life after death” was given in the May, 1958 issue of B’nai B’rith’s National Jewish Monthly. Under the caption, “What Can A Modern Jew Believe?” there appeared: “Judaism insists that ‘heaven’ must be established on this earth. The reward of the pious is life and happiness in this world, while the punishment of the wicked is misery on earth and premature death … By hitching its star to the Messianic future on this earth, Israel became the eternal people.” The article goes on: “The best Jewish minds have always held that a physical hereafter is a detraction from mature belief.” And the conclusion: “There is neither hell nor paradise, God merely sends out the sun in its full strength; the wicked are consumed by its heat, while the pious find delight and healing in its rays.”

The Unholy Scripture

No one should conclude from the above paragraphs that the tenets of modern Judaism are to be found only in the occasional comments of rabbis or in chance reports of Jewish magazines. When they rejected the doctrines of the Bible, the Jews took care not to leave themselves bookless. They have enshrined their entire religious and moral code, in all its naked blasphemy and foulness, in the pages of that teeming, reeking document, the Talmud.

First published, about 500 A.D., this supreme Jewish book consists of two main parts: the Mishna, or text, and the Gemara, or commentary. And to indicate how intoxicatingly to their taste Talmudic teaching is, the Jews have fashioned a proverb: “The Bible is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara like aromatic liqueur.”

It is not necessary that a militant Catholic wade through the mud of the Talmud in order to be informed of its contents. Popes of the past have published a number of condemnations which indicate the nature of the book and outline the general objections. Further, there are detailed studies of the conflict between the Bible and the Talmud, done by Catholic scholars at the request of the Church, that give a complete picture of the Jews’ unholy scripture. One such book is L’Histoire et Les Histoires dans la Bible by the late Bishop Landrieux of Dijon, which was published at Paris in 1921. Writing on the Talmud, Bishop Landrieux makes the following acute summary.

“It is a systematic deformation of the Bible … The pride of race with the idea of universal domination is therein exalted to the height of folly … For the Talmudist, the Jewish race alone constitutes humanity, the non-Jews are not human beings. They are of a purely animal nature. They have no rights. The moral laws which regulate the mutual relations of men, the Ten Commandments, are not of obligation in their regard. They oblige exclusively among Jews. With regard to the Goyim (non-Jews) everything is allowed: robbery, fraud, perjury, murder. When the Talmud became known, especially in the sixteenth century, thanks to the invention of printing, such indignation was aroused throughout the Catholic world that a General Jewish Assembly in 1631 gave orders that the most obnoxious passages should not be printed, but added that, ‘a little circle, O, should be put in place of the suppressed passages. This will warn the rabbis and the school-teachers that they are to teach these passages orally so that the learned among the Nazarenes (Christians) may no longer have any pretext for attacking us in this regard.’ In our day, the Talmud does not provoke either astonishment or anger among Catholics, because it is no longer known.”

The Abyss

Caught in the blazing light of Holy Scripture, the Jews thus disclose their true colors. They are, in our day, as remote in faith and tradition from believing Jews of the Old Testament as they are from believing Catholics. A gaping abyss divides them from Abraham and Moses, as surely as from St. Augustine and St. Francis Xavier. That abyss is the unrepented rejection and crucifixion of the Messias. As Saint John Chrysostom says in one of his Sermons Against the Jews, “It is not insignificant controversies that separate us, but the death of Christ.”

And because we are separated by this shattering event, we are totally separated. The Jews are strangers not only to our beliefs, but to our whole way of life. The fiction that our culture is a “Judaeo-Christian” one, and that the Jews are anxious to preserve it, has lured us to the verge of cultural collapse. The standards of justice, order, and morality that have made our civilization are rooted in Christian teaching; the Jews neither share those standards nor befriend them. “Is Western Civilization … worth saving?” asked Rabbi Stephen Wise, in the New York Times of December 7, 1930. “Or is it not the function of the Jew to bring about the supercession of that decrepit, degenerate, and inevitably perishing civilization, so-called?”

A stern realization of this Jewish hostility to Christendom has been the main motive behind the “anti-Jewish policies” of the Catholic Church. Since the Jews are so hopelessly estranged from the ways and purposes of Christian society, the Church has advocated complete segregation of the Jews from that society. Thus, in Catholic times, Jews were isolated in ghettos and relieved of all obligations of citizenship. They were forbidden to vote, to hold public office, to serve in the army; they could not teach in the universities, nor publish their Talmud, nor otherwise disseminate their infidel ideas. And when they went outside their ghettos, they were required to wear some distinctive badge, that Christians might know of their presence, and so be on guard.

The Protestant Revolt in the sixteenth century, and the consequent rise of Free-masonry, meant an end to these Catholic practices. For the Church ceased to be the mother and counselor of the men who were making the public policy of western nations. And as the Church’s influence has declined (and in inverse proportion as its influence has declined), there has arisen the power, open and asserted, of the Jews.

Against this rising Jewish tide, the Church can offer her children no surer refuge than the high, solid ground of Holy Scripture.

Commentary

Scriptural teaching on the Jews has been grasped by no one so well as by those most attentive of all Scripture-readers, the Church’s canonized saints. Here is Saint Bernard, Doctor of the Universal Church, commenting on a text from the prophet Isaias:

“O intelligence coarse, dense and, as it were, bovine, which did not recognize God, even in His own works! Perhaps the Jew will complain, as of a deep injury, that I call his intelligence bovine. But let him read what is said by the prophet Isaias, and he will find that he is even less than bovine. For he says, ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel hath not known me, and my people hath not understood.’ (Isaias 1:3) You see, O Jew, I am milder than your own prophet. I have compared you to the brute beasts; but he sets you even below these.”

September, 1958

HOW THE JEWS INVADED THE HOLY LAND

Four Men Who Built The Zionist State

It is a peculiarity of history that the farther back we stand to get a look at it, the better we see it. And thus, with the smoke lifted and the rubble swept aside, those two increasingly distant calamities, World Wars I and II, are every day making a clearer picture.

It may be argued that the abiding effects of a war are not always the precise effects intended by the war’s planners. But when two international conflicts, fought within twenty-five years of each other, have both resulted in the establishment and extension of the same two world powers (to the detriment of all others), then there is more than mere chance to be reckoned with.

Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, are Communism and Zionism. The First World War gave them both a solid footing: the tracts of land they needed if they were to continue. The Communists announced a claim to all of Russia; the Zionists were granted one to Palestine. And World War II more than made good these claims. It gave the Communists the largest empire the world has ever known — stretching from Berlin to the China Sea. More unlikely, it gave the Zionists a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land.

That the fortunes of Zionism and Communism have been complementary, that world events of the past several decades have been to their common advantage, is obvious. That both movements are avowedly anti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. But although the Jewish power of Communism has been quantitatively a greater oppressor of the Church — having killed more priests and desecrated more altars — the Jewish power of Zionism has hit the Church at the very core by seizing and profaning the one land which above all others is the Holy Land.

As an organized program of racism and revenge, fulfilling centuries of thwarted Jewish dreams, Zionism is larger than any one of the men who have been its leaders. Out of the last hundred years, however, there are four of these men who stand as symbols of Zionist progress. Considered in sequence, these leaders of Zionism will tell all of the story that must so urgently be known.

Moses Hess

In the year 1862, a German Jew named Moses Hess published at Paris a book called Rome and Jerusalem. If modern Zionism must be assigned a specific starting point, this was it. Hess’s message was straightforward. “Papal Rome,” he writes, “symbolizes to the Jews an inexhaustible well of poison.” But the Jews should not be discouraged, Hess continues. A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the Jew is to establish Jerusalem in place of it. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”

Hess nailed the whole argument in with the resounding blasphemy: “Every Jew has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa … The Messianic Era is the present age.”

There was no Jew in Europe that was not interested. But, for many, Hess’s call to arms was too dangerous. There would be Christian resentment, they said. There would be a reaction, and all those new liberties so lately acquired by the Jews, as a result of the Masonic revolutions, would be revoked. To these “assimilated” Jews of Western Europe, Hess was a stab of bad conscience. He was telling them that, despite their white gloves and tall hats and changed names, they were still, and irrevocably, Jewish.

On the other hand, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, still confined in the Polish and Russian ghettos, Moses Hess was a prophet. His book begot a dozen secret societies dedicated to a revived Jewish nationalism. And it set the stage for a more versatile Jewish leader.

Theodore Herzl

If Moses Hess was the violent revolutionist that Zionism needed to start it off, Theodore Herzl was the capable calculator who brought order to the Zionist frenzy, won for Zionism the support of Western Jews, and gave permanent direction to the Jewish resurgence by advocating the immediate establishment of a self-governing Jewish state.

With diabolical doggedness, Herzl peddled his plan for a Jewish homeland on every important doorstep in Europe. The Kaiser listened to him. And so did the King of Italy and the Sultan of Turkey. England offered him a piece of her own property in Uganda. But the Zionists were determined against second-class handouts. They wanted Palestine or nothing for their nation, and Jerusalem for their capital.

Herzl dared approach even the Pope, Saint Pius X, to ask support for a Jewish settlement in Palestine. To so fantastic a proposal, the Holy Father (says Herzl’s Diaries): “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”

The Pope did not discount the possibility of some measure of success for Zionism. Himself the virtual prisoner of Italy’s Masonic administrators, Saint Pius X held no illusory view of “Catholic Europe.” The men who were then running Europe’s governments were the offspring of those same Freemasons who had gloried in tearing down the ghetto walls while they sacked the churches. For Freemasonry had set the Jews up; and now that the Masons were in unchallenged power, the Jews could expect great things. But could they really expect Palestine? Besides being the Holy Land of the Christians, the territory of Palestine was the guarded property of the Turkish Empire, the centuries-old home of an established people. It seemed unlikely to the Pope that great numbers of Jews could ever settle there — and unthinkable that circumstances would ever permit the Jews to set up their own government in the place.

The Zionists, on their part, were confident that when desired circumstances do not present themselves on their own, they can be made to order. In a speech before the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl’s colleague, Max Nordau, said (and we repeat that the year was 1903): “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future World War, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.”

Chaim Weizmann

When the World War that Nordau had foretold eventually came, in 1914, Herzl was ten years dead. But a new Zionist leader was on hand to oversee the expected Jewish triumph. This was Chaim Weizmann, an itinerant chemist who had moved from his native Russia to Manchester, England, sometime before the outbreak of the War. It was Weizmann’s task to acquaint the British government with Jewish designs on the Holy Land. In exchange for an official smile on these Zionist ambitions, Weizmann could promise that his race — its financiers, presidential advisors, newspaper publishers and all — would join whole-heartedly in helping Britain win the war. Consequently, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter to Lord Rothschild, English representative of the powerful Jewish banking house.

“His Majesty’s Government,” wrote Balfour, “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … ” Though the letter further specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Jews assumed this clause was meaningless. The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be called, gave the Jews a foot in the Holy Land, and they set out with determination to wriggle the rest of their bulk through the door.

To direct this operation, Chaim Weizmann went to Palestine in 1918, as head of the Zionist Commission. Under Weizmann’s supervision, armies of Jewish immigrants pushed into Palestine (made a British Mandate in 1922) till eventually they had swollen their numbers to one-half the total inhabitants. (Their land-purchases were less prodigal; by 1948 they owned only six per cent of the available property.)

Through all this, the Church remained adamantly anti-Zionist. In a 1921 allocution, Pope Benedict XV expressed his fear that “the Jews should come to take in Palestine a preponderant and privileged position.” Most Catholic observers, however, thought such a possibility remote. Father Bede Jarrett, noted English Dominican, gave the majority opinion when he wrote, also in 1921: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore, he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine when he has the whole world at his feet?”

What Father Jarrett did not realize was that “the Jew” intended to demonstrate just how abjectly at his feet the world was — and precisely by taking over Palestine.

World War I, as Nordau revealed, had been the scheduled means for setting up a Jewish state. But it did not quite do the trick. A second World War was needed to bring the Jews’ otherwise unthinkable scheme to perfection. At the conclusion of World War II, Chaim Weizmann came to America to claim the spoils. Spurred on by him and fellow-Zionists, the United Nations obediently decreed that at the expiration of the British Mandate, the Holy Land should be partitioned into two areas; the smaller to be governed by Arabs, the larger by Jews.

The British were to withdraw on May 15, 1948. At midnight of May 14, Zionist leaders announced the formation of a Jewish State. Ten minutes after their announcement, President Harry Truman, defying all protocol, accorded this infant monstrosity official United States recognition. Later, Mr. Truman was to write in his published memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed me and annoyed me.”

Even if it were not known otherwise, events of the last decade would bear stern witness that the Masonic Mr. Truman overcame his annoyance.

David Ben-Gurion

Though Chaim Weizmann was duly named President of the Jewish State, and held that office until his death in 1952, it was a position of honor only. The Jews were grateful for all Weizmann had done, but they were confident they had come to a new season: the full flowering of that “Messianic Era” that Moses Hess had proclaimed. And they had a new leader: their Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

As effective head of the Jewish State, Ben-Gurion represents the fulfillment of Hess, Herzl, and Weizmann; the achievement of Zionist victory. He is the symbol of Jewry on its own — the crucifiers of Christ free at last of Christian standards and surveillance. How alien the Jews are to those standards, their ten years of sovereignty have enabled them to show.

The acts of Jewish terrorism that had marked the final months of the British Mandate (when Jews were blowing up British buildings in Palestine, hanging British soldiers, mailing time-bombs to members of the British cabinet) seemed like mere schoolboy pranks when the Jews went to work on the Arabs. One million Arab residents of Palestine were forced to flee their ancestral homes — the orchards, pastures, and farms their people had worked for centuries. And as Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee insisted: “They were terrorized out.” The persuasive device employed by the Jews was simple: they massacred one whole Arab village; then they sent a sound-truck through all the neighboring villages, promising each one the same fate unless the people evacuated their homes immediately.

All this was apart from the military aggression, when Jewish soldiers, with arms supplied by Communist Czechoslovakia, invaded the Arab-assigned regions of Palestine and increased their national holdings by forty per cent. Feats like this thrilled the Jews who were watching from afar, swelled the fantastic sums being poured into Palestine by World Jewry, and provoked statements like this one by New York’s Jewish Congressman, Emmanuel Celler: “Maybe the Israelis may have to give the Arabs another lesson and cut through their forces again like a hot knife through butter. Only this time the pleas of the United Nations will not deter them. They will shoot their way clear into Beirut, Amman, and Alexandria.”

When Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s plans for the further expansion of the Jewish state are realized (when international circumstances have been ordered to that end), there will be a fresh field open to the Jews. And it will be open not only for additional confiscation of Arab property, but for further desecration of Christian shrines and churches in those parts of the Holy Land that the Jews do not yet control. Bethlehem, for example, can expect a repetition of the profanity and sacrilege that the Jews have already perpetrated in Mount Carmel, Ain-Karim, Haifa, Capharnaum, Tiberias, Beit-Jala, Katamon, in all of Galilee, and in Jerusalem, the Holy City itself. These previous desecrations, so well calculated by Mr. Ben-Gurion, prompted the well-known but little-heeded warning of the late Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, who stated that there is in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”

The consequences of this “deliberate Jewish effort” will spread in our time far beyond the borders of Palestine. For the once-Christian West has betrayed Our Lord’s Holy Land into the hands of His crucifiers, and already the price of the betrayal is being paid, in kind. It has cost England her empire. And it has put that other chief Zionist supporter, the United States of America, face to face with a Third World War — one that looms like a terror out of the Apocalypse, and that will provide the most fantastic chapter yet in the unfinished story of Zionism.

August, 1958

HE FOUGHT OUR ENEMIES AND KEPT THE FAITH

Tribute to a Courageous Contemporary

Last month’s issue will have driven home the fact that The Point does not care for the writings of Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnot Knox. But it might also have raised a question: Whose writings does The Point care for? Who is a Catholic — of our own day, not the Middle Ages — of whom The Point would say, “There is an authentic voice. There is a man with the Faith.”

This summer marks the fifth anniversary of the death of one such man: Monsignor Knox’s compatriot and contemporary, Hilaire Belloc.

From his first entrance into the public arena, Belloc made it clear where his allegiance lay. Standing for election to Parliament in 1906, he opened his campaign by announcing to the mainly-Protestant voters: “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”

Belloc was elected, and re-elected, in 1910. But when a cabinet crisis necessitated an additional balloting that year, Belloc decided to leave Parliament for more fruitful fields. He had learned some valuable lessons during his four years as a legislator, and left a memorial of his stay in the form of a Sonnet Written in Dejection in the House of Commons. It concludes with the following sestet:

No question, issue, principle, or right;
No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:
No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and night,
The old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;
The while three journalists and twenty Jews
Do with the country anything they choose.

Hilaire Belloc, in his role of defender of the Faith, had one genius in particular. It was his full, piercing realization of what it means to be a Catholic: of having fellowship not just with those who knelt beside him in his parish church but, equally, with Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas More and Charlemagne and the Crusaders. He saw the great sweep from Saint Peter to the present; the Church overriding the centuries; besieged but invincible; supreme; the mother of civilization; the Bride of Christ.

“The fiction that the Catholic Church is a sect,” he wrote, “like any of the various bodies around it in nations of Protestant culture, that She is a sect, like the Mormons, or the Baptists, or the Quakers, is nourished by a score of conventions; by that false phrase ‘the Churches’; by the offensive adjunct, ‘Roman’ — as though the Faith were but one fashion in a hundred Catholicisms, or as if Catholicism were a thing split into numerous factions, of Rome, Canterbury, Boston, and Timbuctoo! Yet the falsehood is so firmly fixed and so long established here that it has recently begun to affect the Catholic body itself. The position is half accepted by them, though in their hearts they know it is a lie. For the line of cleavage does not fall between the various groups, Catholic, Agnostic, Evangelical, or what not, but between the Catholic Church and all else. She is unique, and at issue with the world.”

Yet for all his sense of unity with the Catholic past, Belloc was no remote figure, withdrawn in dreams of lost triumphs. He was in the thick of the present, with interests as large as Christendom itself. The topics dealt with in his more than 150 published books give an idea of his range: history, travel, warfare, poetry, road-building, wine-making, farming, sailing. He knew every peak and plain of Europe almost as well as he knew his beloved southern England. He had journeyed on foot through Spain and France and Italy, across the Pyrenees and the Alps, visiting shrines and battlefields. When he was twenty-one, he had trekked from Philadelphia to San Francisco, making sketches of the American countryside as he went and exchanging these for his meals and nights’ lodging.

In college days, he had been president of the Oxford Union, almost legendary for his brilliance as a speaker; and though Oxford had assailed his Faith, as he mournfully owned, it had not entirely crushed it (once he had infuriated the dons giving an examination by placing prominently on his desk a statue of Our Lady). Later, with the encouragement of Elodie Hogan, the California girl who became his bride, he regained his Catholic loyalties full strength, and never lost them again. He was radically Catholic and incorrigibly human; ardent and enthusiastic; with strong enmities and fierce loves. (After Elodie died in 1914, he wore black for the rest of his life, never let her room be used again, and always traced a Sign of the Cross upon her door when he passed it.)

Belloc wrote with the swaggering confidence of a man who knows he is on the right side. His way of championing the Church was to stay on the offensive. “Thus, if you wish to undermine the false authority of false history,” he wrote, “it is not enough to expose particular misconceptions which have arisen from some ignorance of detail in the matter of Faith; if the man is an enemy of the Faith, then let his whole body of work be battered. Let him be fallen upon. Let it be argued from his bad judgment in particular affairs that his judgment in the main affair is also bad. If there is a lack of good faith in his method, let that be proved, not only by examples pertinent to religion, but also by examples which have nothing to do with the main quarrel in themselves, but which are pertinent to the general thesis that the enemies of the chief truth are the enemies of all truth … ”

Belloc had no romantic conception of the task he had set for himself. His “method” was a fighting one, and could lead only to head-long collisions. “We must expose the confusion of thought in the opposing camp,” he wrote, “its ignorance of the world and of the past, its absurd idols. And in doing so we must face, not only ideas — which is easy — but men, the defenders of those ideas — which is difficult … You will be despised or disapproved if you practice your religion quietly with no effort to oppose its organized enemies, but if you overtly attack these enemies you will get something much worse than disapproval.”

Writing to a priest friend in Ireland, Elodie Belloc put the case even more straight-forwardly: “It is almost impossible for anyone to whom God has not given it to suffer, to know what it is for two militant and convinced Catholics to live in our world in England.”

Nonetheless, the Bellocs’ seventeen years of married life were far from gloomy and resigned ones. Both of them were heartily capable of laughing the whole world off — as Belloc often did in verses like:

Heretics all, whoever you be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.
But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so.
Benedicamus Domino.

Inevitably, Hilaire Belloc’s published pre-occupations with the enemies of the Church led beyond the heretics to the Jews. He summarized: “Wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is powerful, the traditional principles of the civilization of which it is the soul and guardian will always be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp distinction between the Jews and ourselves … The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.”

And on specific aspects of the Jewish problem, Belloc was equally outspoken: “As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionary Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppressions of our deplorable Press.”

Belloc’s battling years, roughly the first forty of our century, did not see the full flower of the organized Interfaith conspiracy as we know it now. But his writings anticipated it, and sternly provided against it. On the singularity of the Catholic Church, he says: “Her corporate unity is not one of which others are tolerant, or which is itself tolerant of others. She has no borderland of partial agreement with error, nor is there a flux or common meeting place between Herself and things more or less similar, more or less neighborly. She has frontiers rigidly defined: not only in Her doctrine and its claim to divinity, but in Her very stuff and savor. Within Her walls, all is of one kind; without, all is of another.”

One would hesitate to judge that Belloc’s prolific militancy was entirely wasted on an unmoved, unaroused Catholic body. Belloc’s courage, in example as well as utterance, no doubt begot lesser courage in uncountable places. But the program which he outlined for himself — indeed, for the Church in his time — has, with tragic consequences, gone unrealized. He had defined the program as this: “ … to arrest, if it still be possible, the decline of civilization, to revive culture, to form of the Catholic body an army of leaders in the preservation and possibly the extension of our old glories, now so grievously imperiled. We are the true heirs and guardians of civilization in the modern race to barbarism, and to reverse the current should be our privilege, as well as our duty.”

No one is likely to suggest Hilaire Belloc as a subject for Canonization, not even those who admire him most. His writing, taken in whole, certainly falls short of that singleness and integrity that makes Doctors of the Church. He had regrettable unfamiliarities with Holy Scripture; he perhaps never learned the significance of the Old Testament. The miracle is that, alone, virtually unsupported either by laity or by clergy, he should have achieved as much as he did.

He was impatient that the Faith be more talked about — more thrust in people’s faces, if need be. Writing to his close friend, John Phillimore, Belloc complains that “ … though there is not the least chance yet of England’s conversion — many disasters must come upon her first — still the immediate future is going to be a chaos of opinion, and in that chaos the order, the civility of the Faith will make a deep impression if it is presented, but it has to be presented. The difficulty just now is that English Catholics do not present it at all. They fiddle about with unimportant things of detail or fill the air with their hymns of praise of Protestants for being allowed to live.”

It is in another letter, to this same John Phillimore, that Belloc’s aloneness, and realization of it, is most poignantly brought out. Writing from France shortly after Elodie Belloc’s death, Belloc asks for prayers and Masses, explaining, “I write you this brief line because I know no one else intimately on earth who is fully possessed of the Faith.”

What sustained Belloc? He himself would be the last to make explicit broadcast of it, but we may well conclude that a soldierly love for Our Blessed Lady figured predominantly in all that he tried to do for the Faith. He once wrote of Our Lady to Gilbert Chesterton: “She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand.”

And in one of his poems addressed to Our Lady, he says:

Help of the half-defeated, House of Gold,
Shrine of the Sword, and Tower of Ivory;
Splendor apart, supreme and aureoled,
The Battler’s vision and the world’s reply.
You shall restore me, O my last Ally,
To vengeance and the glories of the bold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.

When death did come, in 1953, it was not like sudden night to a brilliant career. There had been a long twilight. There was a note of divine favor about the last years of Hilaire Belloc — as though this battling public man, this prosecuting attorney for Christendom, had been granted a well-earned leave of absence. In the care of a devoted daughter and son-in-law, in the air of Sussex, up from the sea, Belloc’s boundless energies settled to the pace of country gardens and a chair by the fire.

It was on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, five years ago last month, that the Catholic soul of Hilaire Belloc passed to the Particular Judgment. The funeral Mass in the village Church of Our Lady of Consolation was, in detail, that kind of rooted Catholic thing that was Belloc himself. His ordinary, the Bishop of Southwark, was the celebrant. The ancient tones of the Requiem were chanted by monks of a Benedictine Abbey. And seated in the midst of the choir, in the habit of a Benedictine novice, was Hilaire Belloc’s grandson.

The anti-climax came within a month, when an “official” Requiem was sung at Westminster Cathedral, during which a panegyric was dutifully preached. The preacher, selected not because of his known love for Belloc, but for the sake of his own well-known name, was, ironically, Ronald Knox.

Monsignor Knox had, of course, been acquainted with Belloc. They had both been notable Oxford men; they were both prominent English Catholics. They had some interests that were mutual, and some friends. But it would be impossible to imagine two twentieth-century Englishmen more separated in their approach, their witness, and their devotion to the things of the Faith.

If new verses may now be put, with propriety, into Hilaire Belloc’s mouth and manner, there is a species of refreshment for the sympathetic reader in the following rough parody of Belloc’s Lines to a Don — that boisterous piece in which he obliterated an Oxford professor “that dared attack my Chesterton.” These would be, perhaps, Lines to a Monsignor:

And then there’s Knox, R. Arbuthnott,
The drudge, the poky scholar;
The chap you’d like to stick with pins
Until you make him holler.
Knox nauseating, know-it-all,
Knox unenthusiastic;
Knox nosy, nebulous, inane,
Knox nasty and sarcastic.
Knox wily, sneaky, weak and soft,
Knox never on the level.
Knox so unlike those good hard knocks
Saint Michael gives the devil.
Chaotic Knox, Knox noxious, Knox
Unorthodox and saucy.
And toxic Knox, Knox noctis, Knox
Impossible and bossy.
O, blear-eyed Knox, Knox bent of nose,
With hair like uncombed shoddy,
You preached my eulogy, but it
Was over my dead body!