" RERUM NOVARUM " I

" Reception Areas For The Encyclical
Wilful Ignorance Of Authoritative Teaching
[The Jubilee of Rerum Novarum is to be celebrated in the middle of May. To prepare for it we have invited one of the best authorities on the famous Encyclical—a priest who prefers to write under a pseudonym—to write four plain, simple, and yet forceful and fearless articles, once and for all demonstrating the authority, relevance and vital importance of a document that is so often conveniently forgotten and even more often referred to without understanding as a kind of magic charm.
This is the first article of the series. The remainder will follow weekly.—Ent nat.] A CATHOLIC and a Protestant missionary were having a heated theological debate. They had reached a deadlock when the priest proposed that they should consult the Hebrew text of the passage. The Hebrew Bible was rescued from an obscure and dusty corner on the top shelf, the accumulated cobwebs removed and the book opened at what was presumably the correct page. The priest pointed to the printed text and the Protestant minister, after glancing at it, handsomely capitulated. The point was settled, the book closed and restored to its dim corner. The restoration was hurried because both were ashamed to confess that they had forgotten all the Hebrew they ever learned, and the priest had realized that they were reading the text upside down.
Does not the same apply to the use of those two Latin words, " Rerum Novarum," which arc often invoked as a kind of magic in any reference to the social question? They form a nice sonorous phrase in any introduction or peroration, and once enunciated seem to dispense the speaker or writer and the audience from a mutual confession of their appalling ignorance of the contents and principles of the greatest Papal document of the nineteenth century—a document so important that it took another Papal document to re-confirm it and re-emphasize it in our own century. Pius XI has given us ten years in which to prepare the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Leo's Encyclical. We have been truly warned.
Shall we, then, confess? In our preliminary examination of zonscience the real thing we have to discover is whether our ignorance is of the kind which theologians class as " affectata "—a " wishful ignorance," or has it been the downright ignorantia crassa et supina. But this decision and acknowledgment of sin will come only at the end of the examination. There is a lot of probing to be done beforehand. At the outset we may well be asked: why should we have to examine our conscience about our knowledge of a Papal Encyclical? In this first article we propose to give an answer.
THE CATHOLIC "RECEPTION" AREA APAPAL Encyclical is directed to the minds of all those who acknowledge the Pope to be the Vicar and Representative of Christ our Lord. It also reaches other minds, which do not possess the supreme gift of faith. If we are to determine how the Catholic mind ought to respond to the Pope's teaching, it would be well to consider in a simple way the make-up of the Catholic and nonCatholic mind.
Both kinds of mind were made for truth, which is the equation of the mind with the reality outside the mind. Both kinds of mind have two states—the state of certainty and the state of opinion or doubt. When the state of certainty exists, the mind is at rest in the possession of that which it knows to be truth—the facts of sense experience. the facts of experimental science, mathematical proposi tions. But there are many other propositions—in politics, in economics, in theoretical science, in history—about which we are in a state of hesitancy and doubt. We hold tlym with greater or less probability, but they are always held with the fear that the opposite may be true. Now the gift of faith was intended to introduce a balance into the human mind with regard to these two states of certainty and opinion. Faith is a gratuitous and supernatural gift of God, by which our mind is made capable of accepting with absolute conviction such truths as God may choose to reveal. Now God chooses not only to reveal mysteries, which are beyond and above the power of all created minds, but also truths of the natural order, i.e., truths which are not beyond the capacity of human reason, e.g., the existence of God, of the moral law, of the future life, etc. In the phrase of the Vatican Council divine revelation gives us truths, which can be known by all, without difficulty, with a firm certainty, and without any admixture of error (ab omnibus expedite, firma certitudinc et nullo admixto errore). Hence that first department of the human mind is enriched for the Catholic by a host of truths, which are guaranteed by divine authority. For the Catholic there is a sense of satisfying permanence in regard to the great fundamentals of individual and social life—especially the fact of God. The Catholic need not torture himself in weighing the soundness or unsoundness of the proofs for the existence of God. He enters a Catholic Church. For him God is not the conclusion of a long syllogism. He genuflects and speaks direct to God in the tabernacle. For him God is concretized in a living human person—not a person who lived 2,000 years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean but a person, who is really, truly and substantially present.
CONTRASTED WITH THE NON-CATHOLIC iN a similar way the Catholic has an all-pervading security about all A the major fundamentals of life and its meaning. Marx, with his Economic Determinism, and Spengler, with his pessimistic determinism of cycles, pass him by. He takes his stand with St. Augustine in explaining the world as ultimately depending on the free choice of an all wise and good God. He has definite clear ideas on the nature and destiny of his own person. God made him to know, love and serve Him in this world and to be happy in the next. In the same way with regard to the fundamentals of marriage and the family, the Catholic is in possession of clear-cut, steadying certainties. Thus the Catholic can set out with confidence to construct a system of the knowledge of things in their ultimate causes, which we call Philosophy, because he is helped and guided at every step by revealed dogmatic truth. Thus the Catholic mind is one of great security and tranquillity. It is the permanence of a long historic experience reaching through the medieval to the Patristic and the Early Church, and through the Old Testament to the very beginning of things. It is the heir to the ages in the true sense.
Now contrast this with the non-Catholic Western mind. Let us confine ourselves to the West, or rather to all those who derive from the revolt of the sixteenth century in Europe, America, Australasia, South Africa. It began in heresy, and we use the word in its technical sense. Heresy means selection. The Reformers started by selecting certain truths of faith and rejecting others. The precise point is that the " selectors " held these truths by private choice and not by the divine gift of faith. The " selector " may held the truths of his choice with passionate conviction, but there is not in him that complete subjection of mind and will to God. which is essential to divine faith. Gradually each of these truths has been abandoned, i.e., they have passed from the department of " things known with certainty " to the department of opinions. While Protestantism ietained or still retains any part of Catholic truth, it may be said to be Christian, though in an imperfect sense.
Note what has happened to this Western non-Catholic mind. The categories of God, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the human soul, the sanctity of marriage—all the certainties about fundamentals have now passed over to the department of opinions and doubts. Hence the opinionative side of the mind has become overloaded. Even the natural fundamental certainties have been attacked and the way opened to a universal scepticism and pessimism. An Oxford professor could say : " Abstract consistency is a superstitious idolatry. There is no need for us to avoid self-contradiction."
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A COMPLETE AUTHORITATIVE CODE WE have described, however inadequately, the two types of " reception " area, into which a Papal Encyclical is launched. It is intended primarily and directly for the Catholic " reception " area; it is presumed that it will receive a "Catholic " acceptance. Behind every Papal Encyclical there is the consciousness of a double fact. The first is that the Pope is conscious that he is speaking and acting in the name of Christ and as His Representative. Secondly, there is the consciousness of the Communion of Saints—of the continuous outpouring of prayer and sacrifice and the linking up and interaction of spiritual forces. Hence Pius XI tells us about Pope Leo's preparation for the issue of Rerum Novarum. " Long did the prudent Pontiff consider the matter before God." And when he spoke he did so " urged by the responsibility of the Apostolic Office, lest by keeping silence he should seem to neglect his duty. Hence he decided in virtue of the divine magisterium committed to him, to address himself to the Universal Church of Christ, nay to the whole human race."
But there is in the Quadragesimo Anno a still more convincing proof that both Encyclicals were intended as " Catholic " documents for "Catholic " minds. " We lay down the principle," says Pius XI, " long since clearly established by Leo XIII, that it is Our right and Our duty to deal authoritatively with social and economic problems." This is then further emphasized : " The [Church] never can relinquish her God-given task of interposing her authority, not indeed in technical matters . . . but in all those that have a bearing on moral conduct. For the deposit of truth entrusted to Us by God, and Our weighty office of propagating, interpreting and urging in season and out of season the entire moral law demand that both social and economic questions be brought within Our supreme jurisdiction in so far as they refer to moral issues."
The operative phrases in these sentences are " to deal authoritatively with social and economic problems " and the " office of propagating, interpreting and urging the entire moral law." And from this we may conclude that social and economic problems are dealt with authoritatively as falling within the supreme jurisdiction of the Vicar of Christ.
This means, therefore, that on the fundamental questions, which touch our social and economic lives at every point, we have a complete authoritative code of principles and precepts. Several courses are open to us. We can be openly disloyal and disobedient, like those Catholic employers " who in one place succeeded in preventing the reading of our Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, in their local churches " (Divini Redemptoris, n. 501 We can manage to give the Papal Encyclical a non-Catholic reception, i.e., we can receive it as an interesting expression of opinions from the distinguished head of the oldest Christian body in Europe, or even silently endorse the Nazi innuendo that it is " political Catholicism." But best of all we can retreat into our burrow of " wishful ignorance" and just quietly ignore it. If the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rerum Novarum is to mean anything for us. to have any reality, it must commence with a confession of the fault of more or less conscious neglect and culpable ignorance, and surely the purpose of amendment must be wholly the Catholic reception of the Papal document. And a " wholly Christian reception " means that we must view it from the supernatural point of view of divine Catholic faith. It is the Pope " propagating, interpreting and urging those social and economic questions, which have been brought to his supreme tribunal of jurisdiction." We accept his decisions and resolve to carry out his precepts. He speaks for us in the name of Him. who spoke the Sermon on the Mount. and we accept the Rerum Novarum as the modern application of the Sermon on the Mount. Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia. Ubi Ecclesia, ibi Christus.