THAT STATUE OF LIBERTY

it stands for a Protestant civilisation
BUT CATHOLIC CULTURE IS STRONG IN AMERICA
AN intelligent man—and a man with a sense of humour— could form a number of pretty accurate deductions about the nature of American civilisation from the vast Statue of Liberty which guards the maritime entrance to New York.
Although I have been to New York several times / have never given the Statue of Liberty more than a passing glance, because I do not care for such things. But Americans do care for such things. They do care for ideas, or abstractions, if you will. They are perfectly convinced that America is the home of liberty. They have freedom of speech, of assembly, and--to a large extent—of conduct. But if you ask them whether they have economic liberty, or inquire what liberty really means, or whether any liberty is worth having that is not a leg-up to a better life—well there, as one says, you have them beat.
Does the Statue of Liberty, one asks, stand for anything more than a Good Time without God?
Two Civilisations Perhaps the question is a little unfair. But I am sure that the intelligent observer would deduce from the statue a Protestant rather than a Catholic civilisation. If the prevailing ethos in America were Catholic the Statue of Liberty would be the statue of Christ or of Mary. It would have been raised to the Source from which all good things, Including Liberty, proceed and to the Sovereign whose service is perfect freedom. Catholics, with all their sins, do tend to put both first things and last things first, and they would have regarded the great gleaming thing as an idol.
This brings me to the question as to Why a continent of whose population twenty-five million are Catholic should have received so little impression of Catholicism.
I understand nothing whatever about money, but no one would maintain that Wall Street exemplifies the principles of the Pope's Encyclicals. There is a reason for that; the great majority of American Catholics belong to the proletariat. And that is also the reason why you do not find wayside shrines in Virginia, The Irish, the Germans, the Poles and the Italians who migrated during the last century from Europe nearly all went into the cities, and Catholicism is labouring under the lack of that traditional culture of the land which it is its especial genius to produce.
There is this great difference between the position of the Church in Nevertheless, the Church must always remain a prisoner within an industrial civilisation, and many Catholics are beginning to realise this. Not only is there the truly Franciscan work of the Catholic Worker settlements, in which the victims of industrialism are cared for, but there are visible everywhere the first fruits of Catholic culture. You can see them in many of the great colleges for girls, where you will find a grace and tranquillity strongly in contrast with the haste and scramble and disorder of much American life—a really Christian humanism proceeding from, and returning to, prayer.
Then there are the Catholic universities. One of these is very well known to me, and It is in many respects a microcosm of Catholic life. There you have all races from the Continent represented among the students, and on the staff are French, German, Austrian, English and Irish professors from Europe. There is much eager discussion about philosophy and politics; a zealous frequentation of the Sacraments; and a simple, not to say a Spartan, way of living. Yet you have only to spend a few weeks in this great university to realise how different, superficially at least, is the approach of the English and the American Catholic to his religion. What would the young Cambridge undergraduate from Downside say if he saw the following notice on the door of Fr. Gilby's exquisite chapel:
To-morrow is First Friday. Confessions 6.30-7.30 this evening. GET BACK ON THE BAND WAGGON
They are an enchanting people, the Americans. . . •
The Responsible Life Seriously, though, I have in mind two friends on the Arts and Letters Faculty of this university, each of whom illustrates the spontaneous growth of a Catholic culture from American soil. One of these, a tcholar of high distinction, has a farm about ten miles away from the university. Here, in a short time, he will grow enough of everything to feed himself, his wife, his father and a family of four children. I saw the house when he first bought it, and I have seen the changes he has worked with his own hands. Order and beauty out of chaos.
This, I said to myself, is a man's life, free precisely because it is responsible. I was aot surprised when my friend, after giving me wine of his own vintage, quoted to me with glowing pride the conclusion of a Belloc sonnet:
Children for memory; the Faith for pride.
Good land to have; and young Love satisfied.
My other friend had not gone in for subsistence farming, but he had, practically, built his own house. He had certainly added a breakfast room, a study, and a garage to the existing and not very attractive nucleus. And when I made some admiring remark about the furniture in his sitting room he told me that he had made all of it himself and asked me what sort of thing I should like to take back to England, and he would make it for me. He imposed no limits to my choice. This man is a poet and a musician, and he, too, is married, with three children.
Both are examples of the kind of person Catholicism produces, and the sort of mind from which Catholic culture proceeds. It is the distinguishing mark of a Catholic culture that it is the product not of machines but of men.
Traditionalism is Suspect
So firm and fresh is this grafting of Catholicism on to American roots that it is not difficult to understand why the " traditionalism " of many European Catholics is suspect to our American co-religionists, and why the latter are so reluctant to be drawn into European quarrels. They are convinced that civilisation must be reborn, and that there is very little of it left that is worth preserving. I think that many of them would say that the government of the Church should be overhauled and the proportion of Italian Cardinals drastically reduced. They have a genuine fear lest the Universal Church may appear to be an Italian or even a European perquisite. Also, they are ardent for Liturgical reform and for a revival of the contemplative life. They distrust a Catholicism which is too rigidly organised. I need hardly say that M. Maritain had a warm welcome in these circles, just because he showed so true an understanding of the Church's opportunity in America. That opportunity is unlimited, and it is being seized by these humanists with their large intellectual courage and their profound spirituality. It is being missed by those who prefer the way of legalism to the way of love, and the way of fear to the way of faith. In a word, it is being missed by the Puritans, who, like the poor, are always with us.
They Will Rebuild Civilisation
It is very encouraging to notice how the importance of Catholic philosophy is becoming recognised in non-Catholic circles, and is having a gradual effect on the utilitarianism which is the bane of American education. Mr Roosevelt in his recent public definition of democracy; the social programme of the Southern Agrarians; the work of Mr J. K. Hutchens, the President of Chicago University, and Mr Stringfellow Barr at St. Jehn's College, Annapolis; Dr. Mortimer Adler's notable tontribuLions to Thomistic thought and his many close contacts with Catholic circles — these are all proof of the great opportunity awaiting American Catholics to-day in rebuilding Christian civilisation on the ruins of secularist materialism.