CHRIST THE KING AND PARTY POLITICS

telAM a confirmed Tory " " Nothing would ever shake me from my &leglance to Labour."
As it happens, the writer of these lines heard both these sentiments expressed in the past week by excellent Catholics. Are they compatible with a full and lively allegianee to Christ the King whose feast we celebrate on Sunday?
LET us, first of all, rentose the kind of misconception which is sometimes entertained by the fervent Catholic who feels that devotion to secular interests forms no part of the Catholic outlook.
The Catholic religion is no substitute for the secular and ternporal activities which fall in the natural order on mankind. It is not the Church's business to rule countries or to undertake the social and economic ordering of human life. The Church teaches spiritual and moral truths, " the things that are God's." and it leaves to temporal society the job of so organising secular life (" the things that are Caesar's ") that while it will fulfil human requirements it will also fall within the general spiritual and moral pattern revealed.. and conserved by the Church.
If anyone is paled to under. stand why this is so, he has but to ask himself what is the alternative. The alternative would be a spiritual or ecclesiastical State in which the clear and certain authority of a Church concerned to carry out Christ's commission would inevitably be transferred to matters that in themselves are morally indifferent. In other words God's Church would degenerate into the kind of spiritual tyranny, exemplified in ancient history and revived today in atheistic totalitarianism. Christianity, the true religion, the religion of the Incarnation, has perfectly distinguished between the ends. which are spiritual and revealed, and the immense number of different temporal means which are compatible with the reaching of these spiritual ends.
Therefore it is always right and necessary that the Catholic should further the cause of God's Kingdom through his love for his country. his political zeal within the workings of his country's affairs, his various allegiances in social and business life to the order and technique of these temporal concerns.
BUT this doctrine is not of course tantamount to saying
that our Christian allegiance does not enter into temporal affairs. It is true that for most of the history of the West, it looked as though political and social allegiances had
ii little to do with religion. But this was due to the fact that Christian morals were widely accepted as the foundation of temporal and ance has generally disappeared, secular life. Today that acceptand instead of it the State and society are in process of more or less forcibly imposing secularism, i.e. a pattern of human life which virtually denies God and the supernatural altogether.
Obviously in these eircumstances, the Catholic cannot take his secular allegiance for granted, but has to be asking himself all the time whether his service of Caesar, political party, society, business, what not, is compatible with his duty to Christ thc King.
This is the position in which we find ourselves. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that in this country there is no room left for many a sincere choice between the political and social means that are compatible with working for the supreme Catholic end. Hence it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Catholics cannot belong to one or other of the great parties or to one or other of the trade associations. But anything approaching complete commitment to such secular societies in an increasing secularist age would surely be very rash.
RATHER to our surprise, a
number of our Conservative readers have written to complain of what they consider to be this paper's support for the Labour Government.
This paper does not support the Government as a Labour Government, and never has. It does try, however. to be helpful to the duly elected Government as such since a Government bears responsibility for the good of the people and, while it is in power. has a right to a reasoned and intelligent Christian allegiance for the country's good.
As a wholly independent Catholic paper, we believe it to be right to expose fallacious political arguments from whatever quarter they come. Many of the mistakes and fallacies of Labour—not least its presumption of possessing a monopoly of social justicer-have been denounced in our columns. As for the Conservative suggestion that Labour is responsible for all our present troubles, we are glad enough to quote the authoritative and certainly not Labour Economist. What is happening," observes that paper, " is not the crisis of a single party or a single creed, to be cured by the application of another party and another creed, but the crisis of a whole political and social system, the crisis of a whole nation which has to shake itself out of habits of sloth for which the Tories are as responsible as the Socialists, the FBI as much as the TUC."
Obviously, the political allegiance of the individual Catholic citizen can be much firmer than what seems to be desirable for a Catholic paper, but it does seem to us that in these days there is increasing room for the temporal and secular activities of Catholics to be expressed in terms of an impartial Christian judgment as to the facts behind the political scenes rather than in either a blind political allegiance or an escape from such considerations altogether.
Without wishing to lay down any law in this difficult matter, we would suggest that this would be a more effective means of promoting what all Catholics will hold to be dearest and most important, the promotion of the cause of Christ's Kingdom.