For the Feast of St. David, Father of Wales

A LAYMAN OFFERS A SERMON ON TRADUCIANISM
EVERY year the only daily newspaper of Wales, the Western Mali, gives prizes to children for the best essays in Welsh and in English upon some subject connected with the celebration next Thursday of the Feast of St David, patron of Wales.
Apart from certain indigenous Welshmen-the population of rural Radnor, south-west Pembrokeshire, Gower and large parts of the Vale of Glamorgan and Gwent-there are many thousand inhabitants of Wales of English, Irish, Scottish, Continental, even Asiatic extraction who know no Welsh.
Catholic children capable of speaking Welsh are, alas, very few. And if any of them compete it is almost certain that they will write in English. There is an irony, for Catholics in Wales have a special reason for writing an essay upon anything even remotely connected with the feast of that great Catholic Welshman, Dewi Sant.
MEANINGLESS
THIS year, however, the three
subjects chosen for the competition have nothing whatever to do with the Feast of St. David. The organisers seem to have so far forgotten what March 1 stands for that all the subjects relate to the Festival of Britain and its celebration in Wales, Am I too finicky in holding that this ie a sign of something critically wrong in our life-whether we are Welshmen or nationals of any other land of Christian background ? I fancy.l am not.
The Festival of Britain is doubtless all very well as far as it goes, but how far does it go ? Not very far. " Britain " is a land we hardly know and the finest Englishmen prefer to describe their fatherland as England.
" Britain," whatever it means as a geographical expression or what it once meant to fite tribes that inhabited it about A.D. 300 and to their overlords. the Romans, is a meaningless word today. It is too vague and falls between the two stools of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Still, I gather that the Festival aims at giving a fillip to life in these isles and that is a good aim.
To those of U.S who belong to the despised and persecuted world-wide body of Christians, it may ern the other hand be worth while to consider the life and work of Dewi Sant, that early Welsh Christian.
I am afraid that he does not receive as proper an honour as he deserves from Christians who je Wales carry out his first command, "Keep the Faith."
IRISH MOTHER
CATHOLIC Christians in Wales number over one httndred thousand and it is well known that the bulk of them are of Irish stock. On March 17 they will throng the churches to honour St. Patrick, the Welshman who is the patron of Ireland. But they ought to honour the saint whose mother, St. Non, was Irish, and who is the patron of the land in which they live and from whose soil they gain their livelihood.
put this forward as evidence, knowing very well that others have observed what I have.
Item March 1. Welsh Catholic churches about as full as any other day (unless H fall on a Sunday). rtem : March 17, churches well filled and shamrock at the door,
Passianist friar told me that penitents in Wales still assume that St. Patrick's is a day of obligation in Wales. In fact it is in Wales a lesser feast than that of St. David, as you will sec if you look at your calendar or Catholic diary.
To crown it all I have more than once been told by several Catholics in Wales: (1) That St. David was a Catholic (as if I thought he was a Calvinistic Methodist); (2) That it did not seem quite right to honour St. David because all the Welsh Protestants made such a great fuss of him, which hinted that he was not " quite."
In much the same vein I have heard objections to the growth of a Catholicism in Wales which used wherever possible the vernacular and took to itself the living tradition of the Welsh people.
In this connection I once listened with dismay to someone who should have known better describe a Welshspeaking Catholic as practically a Nonconformist (there are no Nonconformists in Wales, but he meant chapel Protestant) and to another who solemnly asked me whether it would be sinful to learn Welsh" such a Protestant language...
To these good and not by any means unintelligent people, I must say " Beware the heresy of the tra clue ia n ists."
My lay sermon on St. David's Day is one against traducianism.
I HAVE said before, but it can he said many times, that St. David's work partly consisted in welding into a nation a welter of mixed peoples. They were Catholics, whatever their racial origin. And Wales is the work of Catholic architects and builders as any other nation is, But traducianism is a subtle thing. Formal traducianism is rare. It would greatly surprise me were a Catholic to tell me that a man has the religion of his parents and ancestors because they had it, and that the unhappy words, " a born Catholic," were literally true. 'Yet material trachicianisen flourishes as the words, "a born Catholic," demonstrate.
I confess that I dislike the curious segregation of Catholics into "born Catholics " and converts. All Catholics are converts or have been converts, for the baptism of an infant is a conversion.
To take a practical example, let us face boldly the fact that to many Of us the fact of being an Irishman (from Southern Ireland especially) is confused, to say the least of it, with being a Catholic. My brotherin-law bears the magnificently Irish name of Denis Redmond Moriarty, yet his parents were Protestants and he is a convinced Quaker. An Irish priest to whom I mentioned this felt considerably disturbed. "There must be something wrong somewhere."
How right he was ! In the past some Irish Moriarty had lapsed. But consider the terrible lapse of the Evanses. the Jones', the Edwardses. the Morgans, the Lloyds and the Llewelytts 1
TRADITION
fF I were a traducianist, I might
conceivably argue that I ought, as a Welshman, to revere my ancestors sufficiently to cleave to the faith of the majority of them.
And it is possible that whenever a Welsh-Welsh Catholic bothers overmuch upon the Catholic tradition of pre-Reformation Wales. a traditon which remained for at least a century after the Reformation, he may tend to fall into the traducianist trap.
" Faith of our Fathers!" " He ffydd em n todaul "
So long as we know what we mean, we arc quite safe. But the Catholic Faith is not to be defended because our fathers held it. That sort of argument appeals especially to a Tory traditionalist like myself and it has force in the natural order.
But we arc not in that order. The Catholic Faith is above it. We are horn "not of blood nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."
When we see the full and universalistic implications of that, we may then profitably turn to the other truth that grace crowns nature and that just as we honour our parents and in consequence our fatherland, so we must especially honour men like St. David who brought it into being-who changed it from a mere geographical expression to a land, a patria. It is the Catholic Faith in Wales today which, in spite of Catholics' ignorance of the Welsh speech and the Welsh " way," is the preserver Of the Welsh " thing." At least it has within it that power. But the action lies with Catholics in Wales.
I find it extremely significant that when I conveyed these thoughts to a prominent Irish anti-partitionist in South Wales, he vigorously agreed with me. And I have a hunch that many of the deliberately patriotic Irishmen in Wales would agree also.
They know that to cultivate Welsh
Catholicism in Wales is as natural as Irish Catholicism in Ireland and that nothing could be so unfortunate as a hybrid affair with a large Mass attendance on March 17. the result of habit and conditioned reflexes.
If in our land Catholics started to make a conscious, reasoned practice of Mass attendance on March 1. we would be able then to march confidently forward to the conversion, under God, of our people.