Understandable Discontent
Entering A New Social Order
In a recent address to his clergy, Cardinal Verdier said that the Church lives by her traditions, but new things must constantly be added to the old. Our services and our teaching must be adapted to the Deeds of the present.
Does not the Pope ask of religious communities for women that their action should be more intensive and more enlightened, that they should take degrees and make themselves increasingly efficient in their calling as educators or nurses; that they should break with a certain timidity and the exaggerated cult of traditions?
Such a development is the duty of priests as of nuns.
Thousands of unemployed, thousands of families who have lost their all, thousands of young people whom the lack of security in the future fills with distress and prepares for revolt, have a deeply-rooted discontent in the face of a social order which refuses them the very substance of life.
A New Social Order
That social order does not allow them to live, hence they conclude that it should disappear. Who would reason otherwise in the same circumstances?
Thousands of the men of our day, some consciously, the majority unconsciously, are turning to spiritual powers, to the Church; they no longer expect salvation outside her.
The discovery of a technique, the carrying out of a specific material programme will not bring salvation. Of that the unemployed and the unhappy are vaguely aware.
Only the revivification of the moral sense can bring us peace. The question is one of entering gradually into a new social order.
The cardinal besought his clergy to devote themselves, body and soul, to that new social order which is the great problem of the hour.
The social and political teaching of the Church must be made known, especially to opponents and to those who have a distorted idea of it, and we must not weary in being patient, good, kindly and loving.