I





The Church and The Depression

by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.

Editor of the Catholic World.

Seven addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour produced

by the National Council of Catholic Men with the
cooperation of the National Broadcasting

Company and its associated stations.

(On Sundays from November 4 to December 16, 1934)

I. Nothing Human is Alien to the Church.

II. Hard Sayings in the Gospel of Social

Justice.

HI. Sanity of the Church on the Social

Question.

IV. The Church and the Rich.

V. The Church and the Poor.

VI. Attitude of the Church toward Econ-

omic Experiments.

VII. Bishop Von Ketteler: Pioneer of Social
Reform.

National Council of Catholic Men

Producer of the Catholic Hour,

1312 Massachuetts Avenue,

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor

Huntington, Indiana



[MPRIMATUR:

^-JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.,

Bishop of Fort Wayne.



Dedicated

With Infinite Reverence

to

The Poor Man of Galilee
Whose Life and Whose Gospel

Are the Only Solution

of

The Social Problem.



FOREWORD

It will be observed immediately that these brief essays on

Social Justice make no pretense to being rigidly scientific.
The author doubts that the Social Question can be answered

by scientific means alone. Economics is really a branch of

Ethics, and Ethics, the Science of Morals, needs the support

of Divine Revelation. The helplessness of science to antici-

pate, not to say, solve, economic and sociological problems is

sufficiently indicated by its failure to foresee the depression

and its floundering efforts to discover how the depression is
to be overcome. But science or no science, we have in the
Gospels—if we would but follow them—a way out of our
present difficulties and a preventive of ever being caught

again in so grave a predicament.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 5

NOTHING HUMAN IS ALIEN TO THE
CHURCH

Address delivered on November 4, 1934.

In the correspondence columns of the New York

Times there appeared not long ago a moderately-

worded letter commenting upon a message of the

Federal Council of Churches in regard to the eco-

nomic problems which are now and have been for

the past three or four years so desperately acute.

It seems that the Federal Council, sitting like a

grand jury, had returned an indictment against

three parties. First, it said, “American business

and industry stand at the judgment seat.” Second,

“Labor is also on trial”. Third, “The general pub-

lic is at the bar of judgment”. “Excellent!” says

the gentleman who writes the letter, but he demands

to know why the Federal Council did not “call the

Church itself before the judgment seat along with

the others”. He asks “Is the Church entirely above

reproach as a factor making for the better social

and industrial order? Have its interests always

been identical with the best interests of society? Is

it conspicuously noted for the pointed and fearless

manner in which it has denounced those things in

our social and economic life not making for the

social good?”

Now, after a swift passing recognition of the

fallacy of applying the name “church” to a multi-

tudinous heterogeneous aggregation of denomina-

tions with endlessly varying doctrines, traditions,

and practices, I am willing none the less to confess
the justice and the honesty of that challenge to the



6 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

Church. It reminds me of an historical episode

(perhaps it is only legendary) that happened in our

Church in Germany in the fourteenth century. The

saintly Dominican Friar John Tauler, one of the

greatest preachers of all time, had delivered in

Strasbourg a series of sermons on the sins of the

nobles, the magistrates, the merchants, the lawyers,

and the people; and promised that he would next

consider the sins of the clergy. Thereupon an

attempt was made by his prior to interrupt the

series, but the populace assembled, stormed the

doors of the priory and clamored for the sermon,

arguing with the prior that they had taken their

dose uncomplaining, and that it would be only good

sportsmanship if the monks and friars and priests

should do likewise. The sermon was delivered and

it makes rather spicy reading even after 600 years.

Sauce for the people is sauce for the clergy.

And if, as the writer in the newspaper declares.

Business and Labor and the General Public are

summoned before the bar, there is no reason why

the Church should not also stand trial on the charge

of not having done all that she might to prevent or

to relieve the present economic and social distress.

It would, however, be rash of me to take upon

myself the defense of all churches and of all church-

men. The Federal Council has pulpits, platforms,

and radios of its own. Even for the Catholic

Church I am not the authoritatively appointed at-
torney. And if I were, I would certainly not follow

the impossible procedure of trying to prove that

all Catholics in all times, laymen and churchmen,

have been above reproach on the ground of zeal for

a better social and industrial order. But one thing



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 7

I should be glad to attempt—a demonstration that
the Catholic Church has for ages consistently prom-

ulgated an economic and social philosophy which,

if it had been permitted to prevail, would have pre-

vented these ever-recurring panics and depressions,

as well as the social revolutions that have occurred

in such abundance since the commencement of the

industrial era
;
and would now forestall the threaten-

ing catastrophe of world-wide Communism.

Indeed I do hope in this course of seven talks to

make good that claim for my Church (even though

I do so unofficially and less expertly than any

recognized Catholic economist), but by way of intro-

duction to that larger work I beg leave to set forth

tonight the mind and the spirit of the Church in the

face of the bewildering and bedevilling problems of

the day.

But first I must protest that the Church has

never been given a free hand to impose her ethics

and economics upon any civilization. We are
familiar with the epigram that Christiantiy has

not been tried and found wanting, but that it has

been found difficult and left untried. That applies

not only to- the Gospel but to the Christian ethics of

business and finance. Just as there are many self-

appointed monitors, watchmen as it were on the

towers of Israel, who cry all the day and every day,

“Keep the Church out of Politics!”, so there are

those who cry, “Keep the Church out of Economics
!”

Now no doubt it is wisdom to prevent a coalition of
ecclesiastics with the baser sort of politicians. But

politics is not all cheap politics. In its noble primary

sense it is the science and art of government, and

I can see no harm but rather great good in permit-



8 THE CHUECH AND THE DEPEESSION

ting the Church to inject a dose of Christianity into

government. Machiavelli has had too much sway in

politics, and Aquinas, Suarez, and Bellarmine not

enough. If Catholic theologians and other church-

men, let us say the Pope, the Archbishop of Canter-

bury, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and some in-

ternationally acknowledged representative of Juda-

ism, had been invited to sit in at Versailles in 1918

the treaty might not have turned out such a Pan-

dora’s box of woe, but an instrument of social and

political regeneration.

And by the same token, if at the beginning of

the depression the Church as a moral force and an

exponent of ethics had been called upon to contri-

bute her wisdom to the project of the rehabilitation

of society, the depression would not have dug so

deep, spread so wide, and lasted so long. True,

there was in some of the early utterances of Presi-

dent Roosevelt a recognition with praise of the doc-

trine of the papal encyclicals, but I would not say

that all the champions of the New Deal and still

less all its army of agents were animated by the

spirit that breathes through the writings of Leo

XIII and Pius XL Similarly, Woodrow Wilson, on
the way to Paris, virtually confessed that his 14

points had been borrowed from Pope Benedict XV.

But the Big Four and the minor diplomats who met

in the Hall of Mirrors (I suspect the purpose of the

mirrors was to prevent the passing of secret mes-

sages under the table, but as there are magicians

who “do it with mirrors” there turned out to be

artists in magic who could do it in spite of mirrors)

:

the Big Four and the little forty-four gave short

ishrift to Benedict XV once they got down to the



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 9

real job of partitioning off the continents in such

wise as to make future wars inevitable.

No! In world affairs, governmental, industrial,

and financial, the Church doesn’t really get a look-

in. In fact she is warned away: “Keep out! This

means you ! Back to the sacristy ! Say your pray-

ers, rattle your beads, dress up in your ecclesias-

tical vestments, and perform your religious rites,

but keep away from the Qvm d’Orsay and 10 Down-

ing Street, and don’t let us see the Roman collar

too often around the White House!”

So the Church keeps out. Presently the govern-

mental and financial fabric tumbles down and then

some dear good kindly critic writes to the news-

papers to ask why the Church hasn’t done its bit to

save the world from economic and political catas-

trophe !

And now let me tell you what I think to be the

function of the Church in the promotion of econ-

omic and social welfare.

The Church is no mere philosophical society.

She does not seclude herself in an ivory tower
;
nor

does she pace up and down, back and forth, with

the peripatetics in some academic grove, or sit

about like the logic-choppers and intellectual cur-

iosity-seekers on the Areopagus, who told St. Paul

that he was a madman. She is not, like the Stoics,

“serene indifferent to fate.” When the world is

tumbling to pieces, she is not discovered drawing

geometric figures in the sand and telling the Alex-

anders merely to stand out of the light and not

cast a shadow upon her diagrams. She does not

draw her toga haughtily about her like that ex-

quisite aesthete, the pagan poet Horace with his



10 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

contemptuous odi profanum vulgus. “I hate the

vulgar horde!” To her there is no hoipolloi, no

canaille, no sans culottes, no proletariat (ugly

word!). You shall not hear from her lips the

aristocratic exclamation, “The people? The people

is a great beast!” Rather, like the humane Haroun

al Raschid, she loves the people and studies how

she may help them. She doffs her gorgeous cere-

monial vesture and with it her regal dignity and

goes out into the lanes and byways, mingling inti-

mately with humanity. Better still, like her Mas-

ter, she makes it her delight to be with the children

of men. Her God is not the god of Voltaire or of

Aristotle, a god who concerns himself no more

with the people than a king enthroned in his man-

sion of marble and gold concerns himself with the

fowl in the royal barnyard.

No, the Church is of the people and for the

people. She is governed by rulers from the people

who can never forget their origin amongst the

people. When, therefore, the people, her own flesh

and blood, are persecuted, she goes in boldly to

the tyrant, as Moses went in to Pharaoh—^the mod-
ern Pharaoh may be king, premier, dictator, or fin-

ancial grand mogul—and she cries, “Let My peo-
ple go!”

Those who talk glibly of the “ages of faith,”

imagining that in that fabled era the Church held

full sway over monarchs and subjects alike, forget

the conflicts of the Church with Frederick, Bar-

barossa, Francis I, Henry VII of Germany, Henry

VIII of England, and a hundred other powerful

tyrants. Those who read too narrowly or not at

all and who understand but superficially, complain

because the Church hurled interdicts and excom-



THE CHUECH AND THE DEPRESSION 11

munications at recalcitrant sovereigns, forgetting

that she used these spiritual weapons in place of

knives and swords and guns and bombs and that

her interdicts were to serve the purpose of the

plagues that Jehovah loosed upon Pharaoh when

he refused to “Let my people go !”

The Church, furthermore, makes no pretense

of philosophic calm. She is aflame with enthusiasm

for humanity. Mutatis mutandis, she might very

well make her own the apologia of a modern play-

wright defending himself against the charge of not

being a “temperate writer.” “What interests me

most in the theatre as in life,” he says, “is the

struggle of humanity to liberate itself from fear,

superstition, crushing oppression and social in-

justice. I do not intend to be calm or pleasant.

. . . I believe that there is place in the theatre for

passion, for high words and vivid emotions that

stir the blood and quicken the pulse. I cannot dis-

cuss tyranny with a polite smile or a tolerant

laugh. I cannot depict oppression with a twinkle

in my eye.”

The man is right. Where there is no passion

there is no great drama, no great literature, no

high art, and I dare add, no true religion. And

so you will find in the Epistle of St. James and in

the writings of the early Church Fathers of the

third, fourth, and fifth centuries and in all later

Catholic documents on social justice, such burning

searing sentences as we have come to associate with

socialism or Communism.

But of course passion is not enough; honest

eloquence is not enough. As Francis E. Peabody

says in his classic Jesus Christ and the Social Ques-

tion: “Many a Christian preacher, stirred by the



12 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

recognition of social wrong, is called to be a pro-

phetic voice, crying in the wilderness of the social

question; but many a prophet mistakes his office

for that of the economist, and gives a passionate

devotion to industrial programmes which are sure

to fail. Neither ethical passion nor rhetorical gen-

ius equip a preacher for economic judgments. It

is for the prophet of righteousness to exhort and

warn, rather than to administer and organize. A
different temper and training are required for

wisdom in industrial affairs.”

But if you would have a perfect example of

passion controlled by wisdom, of apostolic zeal

wedded to philosophic learning, I commend you to

the encyclicals of the popes on Economic and Social

questions. Those documents are deceptively aca-

demic in expression and in tone. But they are pack-

ed with dynamite. If you look closely into the text

of them, you will find explosives enough to blow

all economic tyranny and social injustice into frag-

ments small enough to be wafted away in the invis-

ible air. In the letter quoted at the beginning of

this address, the complainant against the Church

speaks with well-bred contempt of what he calls

“pious and high sounding pronouncements, vague

and sonorous generalizations.” He alleges that that

is what he finds in the message of the Federal

Council. I pass no judgment upon that opinion,

but I do assure all who feel as he does that they

will find no empty rhetoric, no pious platitudes, no

bombast or bathos, in the official pronouncements

of the Catholic Church in regard to the present

economic debacle. The full import of those papal

and hierarchical utterances has not yet been real-

ized, especially by overly timid conservatives and



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 13

others who imagine that the Church, because of her

opposition to the fundamental faults and the inci-

dental blunders of socialism and communism,

makes herself responsible for all the sins and

crimes committed in the name of capitalism.

Be it understood : the Catholic Church is no-

body’s scape-goat. Capitalists have no right to

transfer the sins of their own souls—or of their
own system—^to her, and then drive her into the
wilderness to be destroyed. Nor on the other hand

will she permit revolutionaries and radicals to lay

upon her their lunacies, their madness, and their

crimes. Some of them have attempted to do so,

preaching a hybrid doctrine which they call Chris-

tian Socialism or Catholic Socialism.

The Church is neither Capitalistic nor Com-

munistic. She has creative genius enough to devise

her own system of economics and ethics, and initia-

tive enough to propose it to the world in her own

idiom.

And this, if you care to listen, will be my task
for the next six Sundays—to communicate to you

unofficially, but I trust accurately, the mind of the

Church upon the problems created or resurrected

by the Depression.



14 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

HARD SAYINGS IN THE GOSPEL OF
SOCIAL JUSTICE

Address delivered on November 11, 1934.

If in these trying^ times a Christian clergyman

makes bold to speak of the protracted and appar-

ently interminable economic depression, and if he

announces as his more specific subject “Social Jus-

tice” and “Hard Sayings,” he will inevitably be

warned by conservatives to speak with modera-

tion, to avoid inflammatory utterance, to beware

the pitfalls of the demagogue, over-emphasis, hys-

teria, bombast, and buncombe. He will be remind-

ed that the Church is a stabilizing influence in so-

ciety, a bulwark against Communism and half a

dozen other forms of economic and social radical-

ism; he will be entreated not to say one word that

could possible be construed as a concession to Com-

munism; he will be commanded to “sit down and

not rock the boat” because we are trying to navi-

gate through some very wicked rapids. Less meta-

phorically, but not less vehemently, he will be told

to “mind his own business,” to stick to the Gospel,

not to profane the pulpit, and indeed to stay close

within the sanctuary; in effect, to be a “sacristy

priest.” Certain “horrible examples” will be held

up to his gaze, of priests who are alleged to have

violated justice and charity and sanity in speaking

of the evils that have befallen us and attempting to

allocate the blame for our tragic predicament. His

memory will be refreshed in regard to pre-pro-

hibition evangelists, who “preached temperance in-

temperately”
;
and he will be expected to draw the

inference that one may advocate justice unjustly;



The church and the depression 15

and he will hear the old familiar jocose invocation

added to the litany, “From the violent ecclesiastic,

good Lord deliver us!”

With all these admonitions—kindly and unkind-
ly—ringing in my ears, it may seem brazen of me
if I decline to be silenced. Perhaps I should call

off the sermon and say “Brethren, let us pray!”

But the truth is that I have heard these warnings

so often that I have become hardened to them. At

first the effect of so much bludgeoning was rather

benumbing, but when I have “come to” and caught

my breath and been able to think clearly once
again, I have recognized that almost all of those

admonitions have come from the mouths of

overly-timid Christians and that they by no means

represent the mind of the popes, the theologians,

the fathers of the Church, the Apostles and Jesus

Christ Himself. I refuse to see in the Church only

a stabilizing influence: to me she is a blaze, a fire,

a driving power, careering through this world like

a meteor—or, if not a meteor that burns itself out,
like the sun in the heavens that scorches and with-

ers as well as enlivens and blesses. I remember the

command of God to Isaias, “Get thee up upon a

high mountain”, “Lift up thy voice like a trum-

pet,” and to Jeremias, “Behold I have given my
words in thy mouth : Lo, I have set thee. . . to root

up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy,

and to build, and to plant”; and the declaration of

St. Paul that “the \vord of God is. . . more pierc-

ing than any two-edged sword”
;
and even the utter-

ance of the gentle Jesus—enigmatic perhaps but
not to be suppressed

—
“Do not think that I came to

send peace upon earth : I came not to send peace,

but the sword.” Particularly I object to the as-



16 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

sumption that my beautiful and majestic Church,

of directly divine origin, with her superb record of

achievement in the face of all opposition, her god-

like autonomy, her independence of all Caesars,

Napoleons, Bismarcks, Mussolinis, potentates great

and small, bogus and bona fide—I say I think it
insufferable that she should be called, in the sense

in which politicians and financiers ordinarily use

the term, “the bulwark” of the existing order. The

Catholic Church is indeed the prop and mainstay

of order but not necessarily of the existing order.

If and when the existing order becomes hopelessly

disordered, she may say with her Divine Master,

“Cut it down therefore: why cumbereth it the

ground?” What I mean (if you fear a metaphor

and prefer crude prose) is that the Catholic

Church does not consider the present economic

system all-perfect and sacrosanct, and that she is

not concerned with maintaining in its present form

with all its imperfections and multiple injustices,

the commercial-industrial-financial system called,

roughly. Capitalism. The Church was here before

Capitalism, and she will be here when Capitalism

has been either modified or abrogated. You shall

not hear the Church exclaim, “Sink or swim, live or

die, survive or perish, I am allied with Capitalism.”

Capitalism is not her child : not even her step-child.

To use the Catholic Church as a support to Capi-

talism would be like asking a mother whose own

child had been stolen and a changeling substituted,

to accept it and protect it as her own. To change

the metaphor rapidly again—Those who are in-
terested in the survival of Capitalism like the culti-

vator of the unfruitful fig tree, may beseech the

master of the vineyard “Lord, let it alone this year



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 17

also, until I dig about it, and dung it. And if

happily it bear fruit: but if not, then after that

thou shalt cut it down.” I think the Church will

say, “Very well, make it bear fruit—-good fruit—if
you can, but if not, and it must be cut down, it

matters not to me. I have another and higher voca-

tion in this world than to be a ‘bulwark’ for anj’-

man-made economic system, especially one that has

been built with studied neglect of fundamental

Christian ethics.”

And now to the “Hard Sayings in the Gospel of

Social Justice.” I refer not so much to the canon-

ical scriptures, or the writings of the Fathers of

the early centuries—^we shall see somewhat of
those in the succeeding talks of this series—but
pressed for time, we shall omit the documents of

antiquity and of the middle ages and concern our-

selves with statements of unimpeachable Catholic

authorities of the present moment.

And first I beg leave to quote a few passages

from Pope Pius XFs encyclical Qimdragesimo

Anno, not— I beg you to notice—not attempting to
present the entire program of social reform spon-

sored by the Holy Father, but with the intention

of showing the position of Catholics in regard to

the permanence of the present economic system in

its entirety, and the hostility of the Church to

many features of Capitalism as we see it in opera-

tion.

The Pope says: “It is the capitalist economic

regime that, with the world-wide diffusion of in-

dustry, has penetrated everywhere. . . It has in-

vaded and pervaded the economic and social sphere

even of those who live ouside its ambit, influencing



18 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

them, and, as it were, intimately affecting them

by its advantages, inconveniences and vices. . . .

“in our days not alone is wealth accumulated, but

immense power and despotic economic domination

are concentrated in the hands of a few. . . “This

power becomes particularly irresistible when ex-

ercised by those who, because they hold and con-

trol money, are able also to govern credit and de-

termine its allotment, for that reason supplying so

to speak, the life-blood to the entire economic body,

and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very

soul of production, so that no one dare breathe

against their will. “This accumulation of power,

the characteristic note of the modern economic

order, is a natural result of limitless free competi-

tion which permits the survival of those only who

are the strongest, which often means those who

fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the

dictates of conscience. . . “Free competition is

dead; economia dictatorship has taken its place.

“Unbridled ambition for domination has succeeded

the desire for gain; the whole economic life has be-

come hard, cruel and relentless in a ghastly mea-

sure.”

It would be a pleasure to me, and I am con-

fident it would produce a thrill, if not a surprise, to

my hearers, if I were to continue quoting from the

Pope’s encyclical Quadragesima Anno. Even some

Catholics perhaps will find the Pope’s language too

strong for their taste, but he does not on that ac-

count cease to obey the Divine command, “Cry,

cease not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet.”

So too, the Bishops of the Administrative Com-

mittee of the National Catholic Welfare Confer-

ence, in “A Statement on the Present Crisis,” re-



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 19

peat many of the paragraphs from the papal en-

cyclical and by way of making local application

of its principles, they add

:

“Industry in our country, through the concen-

tration of wealth, has acquired such complete con-

trol that independent operation, even on the part

of so-called owners and employers, is practically

impossible. . .

“Capitalists and industrialists, driven by greed,

monopolized the sources of wealth and gained

control of the products and profits made possible by

the progress of technological science, to their own

enrichment and to the impoverishment and en-

slavement of the masses. These few, in order to

increase their riches and power, have made the

machine a curse rather than the blessing that it

should be, to lighten the toil and shorten the hours

of the worker.”

Unafraid of the possible accusation that they

are playing into the hands of the enemies of so-

ciety, the bishops say with commendable honesty :

“This extreme of individualism has led to the ex-

treme of Communism. We rightly fear its spread
in our country and see an especial menace in its

insidious presentation of fundamental truths for

its own destructive ends. The brotherhood of man

is loudly proclaimed; energetic protest is made

against injustice done the working classes; the

abuses of the capitalistic system are vigorously

condemned; it is insisted that man shall not ex-

ploit his fellow man, nor class dominate class, but

that all shall be dedicated to a life of service.

“A program of social reform couched in such

language and with such aims and purposes is un-

assailable because it is distinctively Christian in



20 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

origin and purport, but in the hands of the com-

munists it is merely a snare to allure those who

are oppressed by the prevailing economic malad-

justment into accepting the iniquitous social and

religious tenets of Lenin and Stalin.”

“Unassailable because distinctively Christian in

origin!” In other words, the Communists are steal-

ing our thunder. Barring their atheism, their vic-

ious method of arraying class against class, their

denial of the right of private ownership and their

other incidental lunacies, the Communists have got

hold of a big idea and a great enthusiasm, the idea

of social justice and the enthusiasm for suffering

mankind.

The editor of Blaekfrkirs, a Catholic magazine

published by the Dominicans at Oxford for the

particular if not exclusive purpose of promoting

economic and social reform, says : “In some quar-

ters the Catholic argument against Communism

still largely consists in evoking pictures of mongo-

loid Muscovites, with blood-imbrued hands. We are
not fighting a bogey, but an idea, and an idea that

is so strong because part of it is so true.”

In the same number of the magazine, another

of the Dominican Fathers in a stirring article on

“The Christian Revolution” says, “The Christian’s

case against Communism is not that it is revolu-

tionary but that it is counter-revolutionary,” and

he explains that whereas we Christians have in

times past revolutionized society and, if need be,

will revolutionize it again, the Communists are

working on a Revolution against our Revolution.

He speaks of “The immensity of the transforma-

tion which Christianity effected in civil society:

a transformation so profoundly revolutionary



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 21

that the ephemeral upheavals which we dignify

nowadays with the name of revolutions pale by

comparison,” and he adds that the revolution al-

ready achieved by the Christian religion is as noth-

ing compared to the revolution that it is to produce.

The achievements of our religion, he says, in the

field of social reform are “infinitesimal when com-

pared with its dynamic potentialities,” and in

passing he puts the blame for Communism where

it belongs. “Before we speak too harshly of the

Communists,” he says, “it is well to remember that

it is the apathy and infidelity of Chirstians to their

social mission which has made Communism pos-

sible and plausible.”

I believe there is, or there was, on the stage in

New York a play called “A Sleeping Clergyman.”

What it is about I confess I don’t know, and I am

not sufficiently interested to inquire. But the title

strikes me, irritates me, stimulates me. Too many

of us are sleeping clergymen, and too many of the

laity are likewise in a trance. Who was it that said
lately that there is a church militant but there

should be no church dormant? It does seem to me

that what we need is not warnings to “pipe down”

but commands to “cry out”; not taps but reveille

—Surge Qui Dormis, “Arise thou that sleepest”—
not soothing syrup, laudanum, the hashish of con-

tentment with a system that has again and again

eventuated in vast and even universal economic de-

moralization, not a sense of satisfaction with the

sins and crimes of the existing social and indus-

rial order, but a prod, a goad, a stick of moral

dynamite, an ounce or two of mental nitro-glycer-

ine out of the Gospels, the Fathers, and the papal

encyclicals.



22 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

Agree or disagre with that opinion, I hope we

shall all agree upon this, that at least Catholicism

is no Siamese twin of Capitalism, for the day may

come when Capitalism will perish, but the Church

has the promise of God that she shall endure until

the consummation of the world.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 23

THE SANITY OF THE CHURCH ON THE
SOCIAL QUESTION

Address delivered on November 18, 1934.

When passion is aroused it is notoriously diffi-

cult to be judicious. Even if the awakened passion

be a noble one, like righteous indignation or holy

wrath, good judgment may go by the board. When

emotion bursts in at the door, reason often leaps

out the window. Reformers are usually fanatics

and the justice of their cause is no safeguard of

their sanity. Ablaze with honest anger at the sight

of some inhumanity, their blood boils, the fever

reaches the brain, and delirium ensues. So it comes

to pass that men who feel acutely the injustices

and inequalities of the prevalent social system lose

their mental balance and give vent to wild irra-

tional utterance. Even the Gospel becomes a battle

axe in their hands and Christ, the meek and humble

Nazarene, is made over in their image and likeness

into an agitator, a fanatic, an irresponsible dema-

gogue. Communists have called Him a Communist,

and anarchists, quoting Scripture like Satan to

their purpose, have labored to prove Jesus an an-

archist. One writer in a very dignified English

magazine, thinking no doubt to temper the harsh-

ness of the epithet with kindly moderation, added

that our Savior was a “pious anarchist.” Years

ago, before Communism had arrived and when

Socialism was the extreme of radicalism, another

scholar declared that the Gospel of St. Luke was

a socialistic tract and that the Divine Master of

Whom St. Luke wrote was the “great forerunner
of the modern protests against the industrial sys-



24 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

tern which is based on private capital”
;
and a quite

illustrious author, professor in an ancient, honor-

able, and ostensibly conservative university, agreed

with him, adding only the qualification that our

Lord’s “concept of the world” was “socialistic with

a Galilean coloring.” In fact it is a curious phen-

onenon, gratifying perhaps from one point of view,

but none the less disconcerting, that extremists

—

even revolutionists—have claimed the gentle Naz-
arene as their champion and that in their rebellion

against injustice they have thought themselves

fighting under His aegis.

On the other hand, the Gospel and its Great

Hero have been appropriated by capitalists, con-

servatives, defenders of the status quo, optimists

like those upon whom Voltaire emptied the vials

of his wrath—and his scurrility—who maintain
that this is the best of all possible worlds, that it is

perfect as it is, that nothing needs be done to the

present system except to arrange for its perpetua-

tion unto the end of time.

Now, between these two extremes, one quite as

false and as mad as the other, the Church main-

tains the equilibrium of truth and justice and

sanity. Mr. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy, first

published in 1908, concludes a particularly bril-

liant chapter with what amounts to an apostrophe

to the Church for maintaining her balance be-

tween forces which would have led her off on one

tangent or another to a fate like that of Phaeton,

who made bold to drive the chariot of the sun

across the skies, but who came to grief because

he couldn’t control his fiery horses. It is in my
judgment one of the most eloquent passages ever

penned by G. K. C. “People,” he says, “have fallen



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 25

into the habit of speaking of orthodoxy as some-

thing heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was

anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.

It was sanity : and to be sane is more dramatic than

to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind

madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way

and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the

grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The Church in its early days went fierce and fast

with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to

say that she merely went mad along one idea, like

a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,

so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. . . It is

easy to be a madman ; it is easy to be a heretic. It

is always easy to let the age have its head; the

difficult thing is to keep one’s own. . . To have

fallen into any of those open traps of error and

exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect

after sect set along the historic path of Christen-

dom—that would indeed have been simple. . . .
But to have avoided them all has been one whirling

adventure: and in my vision the heavenly chariot'
flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies

sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling

but erect.”

It is indeed a thrilling adventure and a splendid

achievement to keep one’s balance in the midst of

the mad rush of conflicting and chaotic theological

and philosophical systems and it is because she

has done just that, that we Catholics believe our

Church to be directed by a Power that is more than

human. It would have been human, only human,

to follow the vagaries and eccentricities of this or

that scheme for social regeneration, for these

schemes are often presented with great plausibil-



26 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

ity, and the authors of them are at least occasion-

ally, as for example in the case of Henry George,

genuine lovers of mankind, zealous for the good of

the poor and the afflicted. And on the other hand

it would have been so easy to share the philosophy

of the ultra-conservatives recommended as the only

safeguard of law and order in the midst of forces

that ran amuck and deluged the world with blood.

“Come along with us,” cry the revolutionaries. “Let

us reconstruct society upon a new bed-rock founda-

tion: give over the absurd effort to bolster up the

dilapidated structure of capitalism. It is tottering,

it may crash at any moment; it will carry down

with it and crush under it whoever is caught trying

to patch it and prop it up. Come away from that

antiquated building. It is doomed and you will

share its doom unless you abandon it.”

“Stand with us,” cry the conservatives. “See

what the rebels have done to the world. In the

name of justice they do the wildest injustice. They

cry ‘Humanity, Humanity, hosannah to Humanity!’

and then they proceed to crucify Humanity. They

cry ‘Peace, Peace!' but they imbrue their hands in

innocent blood. They proclaim the regeneration of

the human race and the renewal of the face of the

earth, but they proscribe religion, banish the

Church, and blasphme God. Remember the Scrip-

tures. Recall the parable of the man who gets rid

of one unclean spirit which presently ‘goeth and

taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked

than himself, and entering in they dwell there.

And the last state of that man becomes worse than

the first’. Behold Russia, behold Mexico, and be-

ware! Stand with us. Holy Church, if you seek to

survive. We are the party of Law and Order and



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 27

Religion. Stand with us and we will stand by you
!”

But the Church is not to be beguiled. She does

her own thinking. She interprets her own Scrip-

tures. She knows what is Wisdom and she need-

eth not that any man shall tell her. She remem-

bers the warning of the Master, “If any man shall

say to you; Lo here is Christ, or there; do not

believe him.” When they cry, “Lo! here is the econ-

omic system that will save the world; Lo! here is

the cure for the ills that afflict the race!”, she re-

fuses to be stampeded—to be pulled this way or
that: she has a doctrine of her own in regard to

the salvation of the world.

In consequence she pleases neither of the ex-

tremists. When, on one end of the social scale,

some wild-eyed enthusiast explains, “I have a plan

to end poverty in six months,” or “I have the solu-

tion of the riddle of recurring panics,” or “I have a

scheme for maintaining permanent industrial and

financial equilibrium,” or “I have a fool-proof plan

—fool-proof and villain-proof—for the equal dis-
tribution of wealth amongst all men,” or “I have

a revolutionary discovery in the science of econ-

omics,” the Church says with the kind of indulg-

ence that one gives to a child or a visionary, “Yes?

Well now, won’t that be wonderful if it works!”

Whereupon the reformers, sociological experiment-

ers, discoverers of nostrums, inventors of cure-alls,

Marxists, Leninists, Single Taxers, Robin Hooders

(“take from the rich and give to the poor”)
;
Com-

munists in one camp. Fascists in another, but, in

whatever camp, extremists all, grow impatient with

the Church, denounce her as chief of the oppres-

sors of the people, load her down with the sins and

crimes and blunders of the existing system, warn



28 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

their adherents that first and foremost among the

enemies of the proletariat is the Church; that of

the two monsters, Catholicism and Capitalism,

Catholicism is the more to be dreaded, that the

world is not big enough for two International Or-

ganizations, that the Communlisit Interrmtioncde^

must ultimately encounter and utterly destroy the

Catholic Internationale, and so on and so forth.

You, my listeners, will recognize the wild and
whirling phrases: they come from the frothing

mouths of agitators on the street corners, they are

bandied about in nooks and corners, cellars and

garrets where rebels against society “most do con-

gregate,” and after undergoing a change to make

them more polite but not less vicious, they are

heard on the campus and in the seminars at pro-

Bolshevik universities, and they may be read in the

liberal weekly papers which incessantly and indeed

cleverly promote Communism but which will perish

instantly if Communism arrives. Yes, in radical

circles it is axiomatic : the Church is the obstacle

to the millennium;. L’Eglise VoUa I’ennemi!

And at the other end of the scale, the dyed-in-

the-wool-Capitalists, the financial Bourbons who

forget nothing and learn nothing, the stand-pat

industrialists who grew up and grew rich with the

machine-age and who see no imperfection in it, the

old-guard that would rather die than surrender,

and that would welcome the end of the world and

the ultimate dissolution of all things rather than

yield one jot or tittle of the laws, the customs, and

traditions that have produced four panics and one

prolonged profound depression in the last half

century, those Medes and Persians in the world of

industry and commerce who in the face of all pro-



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 29

tests in the name of justice and charity answer, “It

is the Law ! and the Law cannot be changed,” those

champions of the ancien regime, the logical off-

spring of the believers in the Divine Right of Kings,

themselves believers in the Divine Right of Big

Business—these are if possible more determined
in their opposition to the economic doctrine of the

Church than the radicals, the rebels, and the revo-

lutionaries.

In capaitalistic circles generally you will hear

no whole-hearted commendation of Pope Leo’s en-

cyclical on The Condition of Labor, and still less

on Pope Pius’ follow-up encyclical on The Recon-

struction of the Social Order. Capitalists—even
Catholic Capitalists—^have been known to stamp
out of the church when those encyclicals were be-

ing read or expounded, crying “the Pope is a Soc-

ialist!”, and others have expressed the fervent

wish that the Holy Father would “stop writing

those inflammatory documents.” In fact a good

many within and without the Church are found

demonstrating the thesis—demonstrating to their
own satisfaction, that the Church has gone over

body and bones, hide, hoof, and hair, to Commun-

ism. They point to such and such a radio lecturer,

or to such and such a professor in a Catholic uni-

versity, or to such and such a weekly journal edit-

ed by a venerable and quondam conservative reli-

gious order, which, as they declare, are constantly

undermining the confidence of Catholics in the es-

tablished order and which in all ignorance and

simplicity are preparing the way for world-wide

Communistic chaos.

Not alone here in the United States, but even in

old-fashioned England the Catholic press, weekly



30 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

and monthly, has (so say the frightened capital-

ists) gone even deeper into economic and social

radicalism. When they see, for example, a stete-

ment like this in, a book on Private Property writ-

ten by a professor in the Catholic College of May-

nooth in Ireland (and the Irish Catholics, as you

must know, are traditionally more conservative

than the English Catholics)
;
when they read, I say,

such a sentiment as this: “Our present social con-

ditions are not only utterly unsatisfactory but so

completely discredited that they cannot possibly

continue. . . the only question is, how are they to

go? Does their abolition involve the destruction or

merely the reformation of the social organiza-

tion?”*—^timid Catholics cry out in alarm, “How
can such a book get an imprimatur? What can the

bishops be thinking of who tolerate such dangerous

utterance?”

So it would seem that the Church is between the

devil and the deep. But marvelously—shall we
say miraculousy?—she goes on her way steadfast-
ly, frightened by neither the Devil of Communism

nor the deep blue sea of Capitalism. The cause of

her survival in the midst of enemies to the right

and to the left is, apart from divine grace, her re-

fusal to grow hysterical. When things go wrong

with her (as just now in Mexico and a little while

ago in Spain, and during the last 1900 years here,

there, everywhere) she does not wring her hands

in despair, her voice does not become strident, she

never becomes melodramatic, you do not find Holy

Mother Church tearing her hair and crying “Woe

is me!” And so too when Communism seems to

* Rev. J. Keleher, Private Ownership, p. IX. M. H. Gill &
Son, Dublin.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 3l

be theatening like a tidal wave, and timid persons

inside and outside the Church are getting panicky,

she doesn’t so much as lose her poise. Like her

Master, she seems to be asleep in the midst of the

storm, but when the time comes she will speak the

words, “Peace, be still.” Serenity is essential to

her character, not the serenity of indifference, not

stoic cold-bloodedness, but the quiet confidence that

comes from a sense of power—inherent, inexhaus-
tible, divine Power.



32 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

THE CHURCH AND THE RICH
Address delivered on November 25, 1934.

By a peculiar paradox in the history of liter-

ature, masterpieces have sometimes been created

by those who had little or no concern with the art of

writing. Of all examples of that strange fact, the

Sacred Scriptures are the most notable. Speaking

of one book in the Bible, the Psalms of David, a com-

petent critic, not himself a believer, has said they

are “the most pathetic and poignant, as well as the

most noble and dignified of all poetic literature.”

And he adds, “the rarest spirits of our race will

always return to them at every epoch in their lives

for consolation, for support and for repose.”

“Consolation,” “support,” “repose,” I dare say.

are what we usually seek in the Scriptures. But

sometimes our mood is different. Perhaps we have

been considering the world as it is in its stark real-

ity, and in consequence, we are aflame with indig-

nation over the injustices, inequalities, and cruelties

inflicted by the powerful upon the helpless. A just
wrath burns in the soul and we feel it would be

sinful to quench the holy fire. We are in the mood
for revolt rather than for repose. At such times

too we may turn to the Scriptures and find our

feelings expressed with incomparable eloquence,

power, passion, dramatic force.

And so, when we come, as we do today, to con-

sider that particularly insufferable phase of man’s

nation over the injustices, inequalities, and cruelties

ages by the rich upon the poor, we find the most

terrifying, devastating utterances ever spoken

in—of all places^—the Gospel of the sweet and



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 33

gentle Jesus, and in the writings of a handful of His

meek and humble disciples. Not in the Oedipus Rex

of Sophocles, not in the Philippics of Demosthenes,

not in Cicero’s diatribes against Catiline, not in

King Lear or in the Inferno of Dante shall we read

more fierce and fiery invective than in the Gospels

and the Epistles. The writers of the New Testa-

ment never dreamed that the vehement condem-

nation of ill-gotten wealth would be seized upon

1800 and 1900 years later by agitators, rebels

against society, advocates of the destruction of

civilization. None the less, so it has come to pass,

and if it were possible for us to take up the Scrip-

tures anew, read them with a mind unblunted by

over-familiarity, we could not profess to be sur-

prised or scandalized at the fact that they have been

considered the pristine source of all modern indig-

nation and wrath against social injustice.

The first phrase in the first sermon of Jesus

Christ is a paradox, a challenge, a warning, “Bles-

sed are ye poor. . .woe to you that are rich” ! We
are so accustomed to that paradoxical declaration

that it fails to sound in our ears as it might, like a

detonation of dynamite, but if our sensitivity had

not been dulled by endless droning reiteration of the

Scripture, the explosion of that sociological bomb-

shell, “Blessed are ye poor. . .woe to you that are

rich”, would terrify us. If it had come from any

other lips than those of the gentle Jesus it would be

considered radical, revolutionary, even mad. All

modern economists look upon poverty as something

to be lessened or abolished : one popular modern

religion calls it a sort of crime to be poor, and all

Christians, except the saints, consider poverty at



34 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

least a misfortune. Yet, says Jesus, Poverty is

blessed. Riches are accursed.

After that first startling ejaculation, our

Savior utilizes the most effective rhetorical device at

His command, the parable, to enforce the lesson of

the danger of riches. It seems almost a sin to

truncate the beautiful story, but in these short talks

haste is imperative.

“There was a certain rich man, who was clothed

in purple and fine linen; and feasted sumptuously

every day.” At his gate was a beggar, Lazarus

“desiring to be filled with the crumbs that fell from

the rich man’s table, and no one did give him!. . . .

the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into

Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man also died : and

he was buried in hell.” The rich man cries in agony.

“Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send

Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in

water, to cool my tongue: for I am tormented in

this flame. And Abraham said to him: Son, re-

member that thou didst receive good things in thy

lifetime, and. . .Lazarus evil things; but now he is

comforted: and thou art tormented. And besides

all this, between us and you, there is fixed a great

chaos: so that they who would pass from hence to

you, cannot, nor from thence come hither.” “A great

chaos,” a gulf, says Jesus, lies between the rich and

the poor in the next life; no mere social separation,

as in this world, but an impassable fiery abyss.

Mark you, there is in all the parable no word to the

effect that the rich man’s goods were ill-gotten. He

simply ignored, forgot, neglected the poor man, and

that was crime enough to merit everlasting torment.

As for injustice in the accumulation of wealth.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 35

that is dealt with by St. James the Apostle as a sort

of fratricide which, like the sin of Cain, crieth to

heaven for vengeance : “Go' to now, ye rich men,

weep and howl in your miseries, which shall come

upon you. Your riches are corrupted: and your

garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is

cankered : and the rust of them shall be for a testi-

mony against you, and shall eat your flesh like fire.

You have stored up to yourselves wrath against

the last days. Behold the hire of the labourers, who

have reaped down your fields, which by fraud has

been kept back by you, crieth : and the cry of them

hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”

The only commentary I dare make upon that

blood-curdling burst of righteous wrath is that the

modern idiom for “defrauding the laborer of his

hire” might be “unjust division of profits between

labor and capital.” Pope Leo-XIII in his ever-mem-

orable encyclical Rerum Novarum utters the point-

blank economic dogma, “it is only by the labor of

workingmen that states grow rich.” Pope Pius XI

quotes and amplifies the statement : “the huge pos-

sessions which constitute human wealth are begotten

by and flow from the hands of the workingman.” He

declares that capital needs labor as labor needs

capital, and that in consequence the relationship

between capital and labor should be an alliance, not

dominance on the one side and subservience on the

other, but an alliance. And yet, he says, “Capital. .

.

was long able to appropriate to itself excessive ad-

vantages; it claimed all the products and profits

and left to the laborer the barest minimum neces-

sary to repair his strength and to ensure the con-

tinuation of his class. For by an inexorable eco-



36 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

nomic law, it was held, all accumulations of riches

must fall to the share of the wealthy, while the

workingman must remain perpetually in indigence

or reduced to the minimum needed for existence.”

To return to our source book, the Gospels. After

the parable of Dives and Lazarus comes the episode

of the rich man who, seeking a more perfect life,

asked Jesus what he should do. “Sell whatsoever

thou hast. . .give to the poor. . .come, follow me,”

was the laconic reply. But the young man “being

struck sad at that saying, went away sorrowful: for

he had great possessions.” Whereupon the gentle

Nazarene, suddenly assuming His awful character

as judge of human souls, exclaimed, “How hardly

shall they that have riches, enter into the kingdom

of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through

the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into

the kingdom of God”. Christ the Lord, amongst

many pleasanter appelations, is called a “stumbling

block,” and men have been stumbling over that hard

saying ever since. Infinite ingenuity has been ex-

pended in the attempt to explain away the terrible

text. I have not time to go into the twistings and

turnings of biblical exegesis and I confess that I

have even less interest than time to summarize and

analyze the intellectual squirmings of bible readers

who find the story of the rich young man, like the

parable of Dives and Lazarus, embarrassing. I think

the best thing we can do with the sayings of Christ

it to let them stand. As Pontius Pilate said, Qvx)d

scripsi scripsi. What I have written, I have writ-

ten. So Jesus might say. Quod dixi dixi, What I

have spoken, I have spoken. “How hardly shall they

that have riches, enter into the kingdom of God !. . .



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 37

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a

needle, than for a rich man to enter into the king-

dom of God.” There is danger of sacrilege as well

as of intellectual dishonesty in the attempt to

whittle away the meaning of the Scriptures. Jesus

Himself never used weasel words that suck out the

meat of the egg and leave only the shell.

Besides, the text does not stand solitary like a

pyramid in a desert. The Gospels and Epistles con-

tain abundant similar startling declarations. For

one example out of many: St. Paul warns his dis-

ciple Timothy, who was Bishop of Ephesus, “They

that will become rich, fall into temptation, and into

the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable

and hurtful desires, which drown men into destruct-

ion and perdition. For the desire of money is the

root of all evils.”

Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Caritate Christi

Compulsi, that is, “Compelled by the Charity of

Christ,” quotes St. Paul, “The desire of money is the

root of all evils,” and adds, “is it not that lust of

earthly goods that the pagan poet called with

righteous scorn ‘the accursed hunger of gold,’ is it

not that sordid egoism which too often regulates the

mutua^l relations of individuals and society, is it not,

in fine, greed, whatever be its species and form, that

has brought the world to a pass we all see and de-

plore? From greed arises mutual distrust that casts

a blight on all human beings: from greed arises

envy, which makes a man consider the advantages of
another as losses to himself

;
from greed arises nar-

row individualism, which orders and subordinates

everything to its own advantage without taking

account of others, on the contrary, cruelly trampling



38 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

under foot all rights of others. Hence the disorder

and inequality from which arises the accumulation

of the wealth of nations in the hands of a small

group of individuals who manipulate the market of

the world at their own caprice to the immense harm

of the masses.”

Now since in the first talk in this series I admit-

ted that not only the laity but the clergy need to

have the Gospel preached to them, it may be proper

at this point to quote from St. James a warning to

those of the clergy who succumb to the temptation

to pay too much deference to the rich and too little

reverence to the poor. “My brethren,” says he, “If

there shall come into your assembly a man having

a golden ring, in fine apparel, and there shall come

in also a poor man in mean attire, and you have

respect to him that is clothed with the fine apparel,

and shall say to him : Sit thou here well
;
but say to

the poor man: Stand thou there, or sit under my

footstool: Do you not judge within yourselves, and

are become judges of unjust thoughts?. . .hath not

God chosen the poor in this world. .
.
[and] you

have dishonored the poor man ?”

God is no respecter of persons: the priest of

God must be no respecter of persons
;
or if he must

choose, he will choose those whom God hath chosen,

the poor.

The Holy Father in private conference with a

bishop has said that the greatest catastrophe in

Christendom is the alienation of the poor man from

the Church. It may also be said that it is the

supreme tragedy of our times that many millions

of workers are looking not to the Church but to

Socialism and Communism for salvation. These are



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 39

our 'people, and it is ironical to a painful degree

that we have lost them because they think we are

in league with the rich against them. They are the

little ones of whom our Savior speaks and if we have

scandalized them it behooves us to remember the

threat of the mill stone around the neck.

And here, if I must explain, is my chief solicitude

in this talk and in all such addresses : we must win

back the multitudes of the poor in every country,

save them from false Christs and false prophets,

and this we cannot do if we leave any doubt in their

mind that the Christian religion is by divine war-

rant, by inheritance, by tradition, and by predilec-

tion, the religion of the poor.

Now, my friends, I cannot pretend to be bliss-

fully unaware that a good many timid souls will

consider a talk of this kind indiscreet and even

incendiary. But I flatly decline to accept responsi-

bility for whatever incendiarism there may be in

these utterances. The doctrine is not mine but His

that sent me. I can only say, “Woe is unto me if I

preach not the gospel.” If any of my hearers is

irritated and feels like uttering a denunciation, I beg

of him to place the denunciation where it belongs,

not upon my slender shoulders, but upon those of the
Pope, or of St. Paul, or of St. James. I refrain from

quoting the early Fathers of the Church on the

curse of riches, but if I were to do so, my own
brief passing observations on the words of Jesus

would seem pallid and feeble in comparison. But in

self defence they would allege that they do but re-

peat the Gospel. Ultimately the responsibility, if

we may say so, rests upon God, for we hold as a

dogma that the Scriptures have God for their



40 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

author. And will any one blame God, or call Jesus

Christ the Incarnate Son of God an incendiary?

Some men have indeed done so. Perhaps you

recall that in a preceding talk I gave the names of

certain scholars who called Jesus a “pious anar-

chist,” declared His pronouncements on the social

question “slightly distinguishable from the curb-

stone rhetoric of the modem agitators”; and that

these utterances “have been quoted as. . .establish-

ing Christ’s place in history as the great forerunner

of modern protestants against the industrial sys-

tem which is based on private capital,” that His

“conception of the world was socialism with a Gali-

lean coloring”; and that Christianity was a “vast

economic revolution and nothing else.”

I repeat these accusations now because this is

the time and the place to declare them false. Jesus

Christ was not concerned with economic systems.

It is beside the point, therefore, to claim Him as a

prophet or a sponsor of Socialism, or Capitalism, or

Communism. He is concerned with man, the in-

dividual man, and only indirectly with society—poli-
tical or economic. He is the very antithesis of the

Socialist and Communist. They, blunderers that they

are, concentrate upon the body of man, his food and

drink, his house, his clothes, his wages, his physical

status “right here on this earth,” as they are fond of

saying. To Christ religion is the first thing and the

last, and all-important; to the Socialist religion is

the “opiate of the people.” It is Christ’s philosophy

that reform commences from within; it is the So-

cialist’s philosophy that reform is imposed from

without, and the Communist’s that reform is

wrought at the sword’s point or with bombs and as-



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 41

sassinations. Christ’s doctrine and the Socialist’s are

therefore poles apart, or if you prefer, socialism is

at the periphery, Christianity at the centre. Social-

ism scratches a man’s skin, Christianity enters into

and purifies his heart. Socialism is therefore doomed

to failure.

And here too is the danger of riches. They

corrupt the heart and suffocate the soul, and they

generally involve injustice between man and man.

If any rich man can look square into the eyes of the

Judge of the living and the dead and call Christ to

witness that his heart remains tender and that his

wealth has been accumulated and is now administer-
' ed with justice and charity, such a one need have no

fear of the terrifying denunciations that we have

quoted from the Scriptures. There are such per-

sons. It has been my privilege to meet some of
them. They are friends of Christ, like Zacheus the

rich man who said, “The half of my goods I give to

the poor; and if I have wronged any man of any-

thing, I restore him fourfold.’’ (Luke 19:8) Christ

promised him salvation, and doubtless the promise

holds for all such as Zacheus, but for the rich who

are unjust or pitiless, the scriptural condemnations

stand. This is obviously the mind of Christ and the

mind of Christ is the mind of the Church.



42 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

THE CHURCH AND THE POOR

Address delivered on December 2, 1934.

The Catholic Church is the Church of the poor.

Friends and enemies agree upon that. Her enemies

say it with scorn, and they particularize: to them

she is the Church of housemaids and day-laborers,

peasants and immigrants, the Church of slum-

dwellers and of those that live on the wrong side of

the railroad tracks
;
the Church of the rilf-raff, the

rag-tag, and bobtail, and by way of good measure

they add, the Church of criminals, the Church that

has its adherents in the death cell and the execution

chamber.

Under this bitter scorn we are supposed to

wither. But with what may seem an insane per-

versity, we don’t deny the allegation; we plead

guilty to every count in the indictment. We are
the Church of the poor, the ignorant, the unfor-

tunate. We are the Church of sinners, the Church
to which the criminal instinctively turns when in

durance vile he reflects, repents, and seeks abso-

lution.

Stranger still, we claim to see in the fact that

we are the Church of the poor (“poor” in any one of

a dozen senses) a proof that we are the Church of

Jesus Christ. In our catechisms you may read the

question : “By what marks shall we know the

true Church?” And the answer, “By four marks

—

the Church is one, holy, catholic, apostolic.” But

there is a fifth mark; the Church is poor and of the

poor. We feel that we could drop all theological
argument, make short shrift of controversy and

say, “If you seek the Church of Jesus Christ, by



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 43

this si^ you shall know her: she is the Church

of the common people, the Church of the poor”. If

in search of the true religion you make bold to enter

a house of worship wherein the intellectual and

social elite most do congregate, where every man

looks prosperous and every woman is richly gowned,

where nice manners prevail and soft distinguished

speech
;
where the atmosphere is redolent only of

carefully chosen, harmoniously blended perfumes,

where the poor, the rough, and the ragged, if they

ever dared enter, would swiftly be made to feel out

of place; if in a word you venture into a congrega-

tion entirely composed of “nice” people, well-to-do,

respectable people, well-clothed, well-groomed, all,

without exception, well-washed, sweet-smelling

people, you have no more chance of finding the true

religion there than of finding John the Baptist

alive in Herod’s dining hall, or Jesus Christ sitting

down to a Lucullan banquet in the pretorium with

Pontius Pilate. The shepherds in the stable of Beth-

lehem did not, I fear, smell so sweet; the fishermen

on the shores of the sea of Tiberias, the peasants,

truck-gardeners, workingmen, small tradesmen, who

heard the Sermon on the Mount, were not faultlessly

dressed and immaculately groomed.

Be it never forgotten that the Divine Founder

of our religion, Jesus Christ, was a poor man, not

poor in :Jancy or fiction, not picturesquely poor, but

poor in truth, poor with the poverty of an Orient-

al peasant in a provincial village. The keynote of

His life was the startling sentence from His first

sermon, “Blessed are the poor” ! And for fear that

the unbelieving, skeptical, critical world would



44 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

say that He was only playing with a paradox, that

His parables were prose poems, or experiments in

rhetoric, beautiful indeed but hopelessly unrealistic

;

for fear that in later days a race of weak-kneed,

milk-and-water, God-and-Mammon-serving Christ-

ians would interpret away His plainest utterances.

He chose to be born in a stable, live in a wretched

cottage, work at a humble trade, live a hand-to-

mouth existence, to be hungry, to sleep often on the

bare ground, to die all but naked, to depend upon

charity for a winding sheet and a grave: “Born

in another man’s stable, buried in another man’s

tomb.”

Not He alone but His mother Mary and His

foster father Joseph were poor^—^too poor to offer
the usual gift at the Child’s presentation in the

temple, poor enough to be compelled to substitute

a couple of pigeons in place of a lamb for sacrifice.

His apostles were poor, so poor as sometimes to be

hungry. The people who flocked after Him were not

only poor but largely outcasts, publicans and sin-

ners, the lame, the halt, and the blind. So obviously

indeed were He and His followers of the non-“re-

spectable” classes that the Pharisees asked the

scornful question, repeated as we have seen until this

very day with slightly variant phrasing, “Hath any

one of the rulers believed in him, or of the Phari-

sees, but this [accursed] multitude?”

To sum it up briefly in the words of ^t. Paul,

“not many wise according to the flesh, not many

mighty, not many noble : But the foolish things. .

.

hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise;

and the weak things. . .hath God chosen, that he

may confound the strong. And the base things



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 45

of the world, and the things that are contemptible,

hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he

might bring to naught things that are.” And un-

afraid, as always, of a powerful expression, St.

Paul says, “We are made as the refuse of this

world, the offscouring of all.” In the Latin the

words are purgamenta and peripsema, the meaning

of which may almost be surmised from the sound.

We are like filth or dung under the feet of the
haughty. Whatever vile epithet the scornful may

hurl at us, we accept—indeed we accentuate. We
glory in our shame, if it be shame for the Church

to be the assemblage of the weak, the unfortunate,

the disillusioned, the world-weary, the sin-stricken,

the heart broken, of all who are poor in the broad-

er meaning of the word, not merely without finan-

cial resources, but without social standing or poli-

tical influence or place or power, without learning,

without wisdom, “Poor People” in the sense of

Dostoievsky, “little ones” as Jesus called them. In

the Litany of Loreto, we salute the Mother of

Christ as Refugium Peccatorum and Consolatrix

Afflictorum, “Refuge of Sinners,” “Comforter of

the Afflicted,” and we apply those titles to the

Church, the Mother of us all, as well as to Mary, the

mother of our Lord.

Obviously, then, our standards of value in reli-

gion differ widely from those of “the world,” for in

the world wealth is held the touchstone of value,

the criterion of success; wealth is the measure of

men and of nations
;
wealth, not charity, is the

mantle that covereth a multitude of sins
;
wealth is

the corner-stone of the social fabric; wealth is the

open sesame, the magic word that opens the gate



46 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

to honors and distinctions, not brains or virtue, not

even noble blood nowadays, but wealth. Individuals,

institutions, governments, even churches and reli-

gions—all are measured by the one simple con-
venient infallible formula “How much are they

worth?” To avoid the charge of exaggeration and

extremism, let me concede that the money-mania

is not absolutely coextensive with the human race,

that not every man or even every rich man is

afflicted with it. Now and again even amongst

pagans you may find a wise man who despises

wealth. Diogenes was content with his tub. Crates,

they say, melted down his gold and dropped it into

the sea, saying, “I drown you lest you drown me.”

Epictetus was happy to be poor and a slave. So too

among modern pagans, here and there you find a

moneyed man who is not money-mad, a business or

professional man more concerned with probity than

with profit. And perhaps if you travel far you

may even happen upon a poor man who is satisfied

to be poor.

But human society as society, business, govern-

ments, men and women by and large, are dominated

by the money-standard.

Now over against this belief in the power and
prestige of riches stands the Gospel of Jesus Christ

and with it the Catholic Church. Nor has she ever

suffered, in things that really matter, because of

her predilection for the poor. She has survived

the ages, the shocks, upheavals, and revolutions in

the political and social order, because she has been

loyal to the poor. Occasionally when certain eccle-

siastics have been or have seemed to be too closely

allied with what are called “the moneyed interests,”



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 47

the effect has been disedifying and sometimes

locally disastrous. Clergymen cannot afford to be

found on the side of the rich, and indifferent or

hostile to the poor. The people—^the common people
whom, as Lincoln said, “God must love since He

made so many of them”—^the people are easily
alienated by the wealth or the suspicion of the

wealth of churchmen. Even the reputed wealth,

falsely reported wealth, of priests and ministers

sends the people scurrying away from the Church.

Anti-clericals in so-called Catholic countries invari-

ably allege the wealth of the Church as the basis of

their complaint against her: Socialistic and Com-

munistic agitators play up the riches of the Church

(real or imaginary, it matters not to them) as the

first and strongest of arguments for her repression

or even extermination. Call them demagogues, un-

scrupulous and untruthful, as you often justly may,

the fact remains that their stock-in-trade is the

accusation that the Church is rich and that church-

men lead luxurious lives.

That accusation is frequently libelous. Some ten

or twelve years ago, I had the opportunity of wit-

nessing anti-clerical demonstrations in four South

American countries. On the way down, the purser

of the ship, a Peruvian who gave me lessons in
Spanish, instructed me also in the causes of anti-
clericalism. “In my country,” he explained, “the
clergy have been rotten with riches since the days

of Pizzaro,” He was not lying, but the statement,

even with allowances for exaggeration, was untrue.

The Clergy of Peru are poor. On the street corners
in Buenos Aires I heard frenzied harangues by

socialists demanding that the Church be taxed—in-



48 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

deed taxed out of existence—instead of being, as
they maintained, heavily subsidized by the

.
State.

Later I found that the State allowance was ridicu-

lously small. Crossing the Andes into Chile, half a

dozen men informed me that the bishop of Valpar-

aiso was fabulously wealthy. Meeting the bishop the

next day, and seeing him often, I found that he was

poor as a church mouse and that many of his

priests were badly clothed and even under-nourish-

ed. But there may have been a time in the distant

past when there was some ground for the suspicion.

The legend remains for generations and for cen-

turies. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the

teeth of the children are on edge.

It would doubtless be easy to discount these at-

tacks on the Church. Prejudiced critics are not in a

position to know and still less in the disposition to

believe that high ecclesiastical dignitaries may

handle large sums of money and yet not possess it or

use it, any more than the teller in a bank may own

and spend what he counts. Bishops and cardinals in

general live simply and even austerely, like Cardinal

Merry del Val, Papal Secretary of State, who lived in

cheaply furnished rooms and died on an old iron

bed that might have come from a second-hand shop.

St. Charles, Cardinal Borromeo, had palatial accom-

modation for guests, but a wretched little cell for

himself
;
and he wore a hair shirt under his cardi-

nalatial robes.

The lives of saints and of churchmen are replete

with instances like these, but the point I would

make is that, right or wrong, true or false, the argu-

ment against the Church and the ministers is the

argument that they are rich. Every socialistic



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 49

philosopher whom I have read from Karl Marx to

Upton Sinclair harps on the riches of the Church

and asserts that Christianity is the religion of the

“respectable” moneyed classes. The self-evident

fact that priests and prelates for the most part, the

Pope at Rome and his court, live simple humble lives

does not concern the agitators or deter them. What

they see is what are called “fashionable congrega-

tions,” and certain multimillionaire patrons of reli-

gion who build churches that are popularly called

by the patron’s name, or others considered “male-

factors of great wealth” who, though laymen, domi-

nate synods and general conventions of churches

that specialize in respectability; or church corpora-

tions which own great tracts of land in the heart of

busy cities: these things scandalize the poor and

make them easy victims of street corner dema-

gogues who vociferate against churches and church-

men without discrimination.

Of course, the poor ought not to be so easily

deluded. They should know that where there is

frenzied oratory there is seldom truth. But the

fact remains that any argument with the accusation

of a wealthy church seems unanswerable and irresis-

tible to the disheartened or the disgruntled poor.

And who shall say that the argument is entirely

false or fallacious? Who can deny that somewhere
deeply lodged in a remote crevice of the brain of the

poor, even the unchurched poor, is a remembrance

of certain texts of Scripture, as for example that

“the disciple is not above the Master”, and that in

consequence those who call themselves Christians,

be they laymen or churchmen, should practice if

not the poverty, at least the charity of Christ.



50 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

When all is said and done, the conflict that rends

the world asunder today is identical with the ages-

old clash of the rich and the poor. It is not an

academic contest of economic systems. It would be

absurd to imagine, for example, that 300 millions

of Russian peasants had deliberately compared the

philosophy of Karl Marx with that of Adam Smith,

or the economic teaching of Lenin with that of Pope

Pius XI, accepted the one and rejected the other.

Nonsense ! The peasants were easy victims of Com-

munist agitators bcause they knew that the Czar,

and with him the ruling class, was rich—^rich,
tyrannical, cruel—and that the Orthodox Church
stood, or seemed to stand, with the rulers rather

than with the people. Therefore when the time

came, they dealt out fierce and fanatical punishment

to the one and to the other.

Now one fact is evident in our own country and
in all the world today: a change in the economic

system, perhaps even a radical, essential change is

imminent; and indeed already in progress. That

change has become necessary, not because philosophi-

cal ideas have changed, but because there has been

developing a strong conviction that “the forgotten

man”, as our President calls him, must be remem-

bered. When that change comes, it will be fatal if

churchmen and church members are found in the

wrong company. We must be where we belong

—

among our own, the common people. We belong to
the poor and they to us. One way to hold them or

to win them to Christ, to God, to salvation, is to

make it evident beyond the possibility of suspicion,

that we are now what we were 1900 years ago, the

Church of the Poor Man of Galilee.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 51

THE ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH
TOWARD ECONOMIC EXPERIMENTS

Address delivered on December 9, 1934.

It is a plausible proposition that the Church has

no right to enter the field of economics, and that if

she does enter, she is an intruder. Industrialists

and financiers of the old order,convinced that the

exclusive sphere of the Church is the invisible

world, attempt to frighten her away from what they

think their preserves, with the familiar inhospi-

table warning, “No Trespassing”
;
and acting on the

theory that clergymen must be congenitally dull of

comprehension, they specify: “Priests, Prelates,

Popes, this means you ! Keep out
!”

Oddly enough, they might seem to find warrant

for this interdict against clerical interference in

economics in a sentence from Pope Leo XIII’s ency-

clical, On the Christian Constitution of States. The

Pope says : “The Almighty has appointed the

charge of the human race between two powers, the

ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over

divine and the other over human things. Each in its

kind is supreme
;
each has fixed limits within which

it is contained.” “Good !” answers the laissez-

faire capitalist. The ecclesiastical sph^e is the

Church, the altar, the pulpit, and the pews. That is

territory enough for the cleric to cover. If he de-

mands more, let him take heaven, purgatory, and

hell. But the world, this world, the real world be-

longs to us.

Unfortunately for these touch-me-not, disturb-

me-not monopolists. Pope Leo in that epoch-making

encyclical went on to explain that the civil power



62 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

and the ecclesiastical power sometimes overlap,

since every human being has two allegiances which

may coincide or conflict, but in either case are as

intimately associated as body and soul. An essen-

tial constituent of human nature is conscience, and

short of making himself a mental and moral mon-

strosity, a man cannot separate himself from his

conscience. Where he goes, conscience goes. When

he sets out for the office on Monday morning he can-

not leave his conscience behind with his Sunday-go-

to-meeting silk hat, frock coat, and walking stick.

There is a fable, I believe, about a man without a

shadow. But of course there is no such man, at

least this side of the river Styx. Neither is there a

man without a conscience, this side of the infernal

pit. Conscience clings closer than a man’s shadow.

Welcome or unwelcome, seen or unseen, articulate or

silent it goes to business, to the factory, yes, even to

the bank with him. It has been recognized even in

the dubious precincts of the stock exchange, in

brokers’ offices, and there is a rumor that conscience

has been occasionally present and vocal at the table

in a directors’ meeting in Wall Street. Stranger

still, believe it or not, conscience tags along when

a citizen goes to the polls to vote. The voter marks

a cross with a pencil on a ballot, and the mark, often

a very black mark, is written on his conscience too

:

or he pulls down the lever of a voting machine and it

clicks in conscience.

That is to say, dropping all parables, man is a

moral being and whatever he does, he does as a re-

sponsible moral agent. He needs guidance for con-

science in business, in politics, in the exercise of a

profession; and therefore to shut out the Church,



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 53

the divinely appointed mentor of the moral life

from the field of business, or politics, or finance, or

industry, or commerce, would be tantaniount to

saying that all human aifairs except religion are

to be conducted without regard to the moral law.

And so the present pontiff, the courageous and

enlightened Pius XI, explains : “She [the Church]

never can relinquish her God-given task of inter-

posing her authority, not indeed in technical mat-

ters, for which she has neither the equipment nor

the mission, but in all those that have a bearing on

moral conduct.”

“A hearing on moral conduct!” There in one

phrase is the justification of the Church’s entrance

—

call it not intrusion—into economics, and there you
have at the same time the solution of every economic

and social problem. Economics is no independent,

isolated, self-created, self-sufficient science. It is

associated with ethics as intimately as the light of

the sun is associated with the heat of the sun. The

analogy, if I may say so, is excellent. If, because of

some inconceivably terrific cataclysm, the light

waves were separated from the heat waves at their

source in the sun, the ensuing catastrophe would be

comparable in the physical world to the calamity

that has befallen us in the business world because of

the separation of ethics from economics, and the

elimination of the moral law from business, finance,

politics, and all other human affairs.

It is a favorite fancy of mine that the cause of all

the woe that afflicts the human race is divorce; not

merely the divorce of husband from wife, but the

divorce of morals from politics, from diplomacy,

from government, the divorce of thought and action



54 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

from conscience, the divorce of man from his soul,

the divorce of man from his God.

Ethics and economics have been called twin

sciences. They are not twins. One twin may live

and the, other die. Ethics and economics are more

like the right and left lobes of the brain, or the

right and left ventricles of the heart. If you stab

and paralyze one, if you remove one with the sur-

geon’s knife, the other will not survive. All the

financial and commercial catastrophe that has be-

fallen us has been caused by forgetfulness of that

fact.

So, Enters the Church! The most powerful

moral organism in existence, the only God-sent

custodian and exponent of immutable right and

justice, the only indefatigable champion of the

moral law and of conscience.

But the Church—^be it immediately confessed

—

though she enter the field of economics, has no

magic formula for putting an end to the depression.

She sponsors no particular economic system. She is,

as we have said previously in this series, committed

neither to Capitalism nor to Communism. The Pope,

speaking the mind of the Church, has indeed boldly

criticized Capitalism, but he has not condemned

Capitalism. On the contrary, he says, in so many

words, “The system itself is not to be condemned

. . .it is not vicious of its very nature.” Nor, on the

other hand, does he condemn Communism of every

sort, in any and all circumstances. A form of Com-
munism is in vogue in the religious orders. It is the

excesses of Capitalism that the Church condemns.

And apart from one essential heresy inherent i/i

Marxist communism, it is the excesses and aber-



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 55

rations, the inhuman cruelties of the Communism we

see operating, for example, in Russia, that the

Church abhors.

Perhaps it is disappointing to some militant cru-

saders for social justice that the Church does not

definitely align herself with one party or another,

or barring that, come forth with an entirely new

and independent economic program. Most men

seem lost if they cannot join a party, and it must

be confessed that human nature is instinctively par-

tisan. Demagogues are only too well aware of

that fact. They all have a party cry. In mediaeval

Italy it was “Guelphs,” or “Ghibellines”. In Eng-

land during the Wars of the Roses it was “The

Whites,” or “The Reds”. At Constantinople in Jus-

tinian’s day, citizens separated into parties and

fought under the different colors of charioteers in

the hippodrome. So, in our day the cry used to be

“Vote Republican and prolong prosperity”. Now it
is, “Vote Democratic and bring back prosperity”.

But also, now, a new battle cry is heard : “A plague

on both your houses, vote Communist and drive all

the rascals out!” And—I say it with respect—^not
the least element in the creation of the vast popular-

ity of President Roosevelt was his happy choice of a

phrase, “The New Deal”.

But the Pope, on his part, though obviously

lacking in the art of political strategy, is too wise

and too conscientious to promise economic salvation

with a word or a phrase or with a program or a

party. A sympathetic but dispassionate observer,
the Pope looks from his watch tower and sees all

the nations of the world, and the glory of them—sees
furthermore what Satan thought to hide from



56 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

Jesus, the misery of them. To his gaze Australia is

as near as Italy, China no further away than Vati-

can City
;
to his vision Constantine and Charlemagne

are as vividly present as Hitler and Mussolini. In

the long, long memory of the Church, and therefore

vicariously in the memory of the Pope, ancient em-

pires and kingdoms, mediaeval republics, oligarchies

and city-states, are as near and as clear as the

heterogeneous jumble of modem governmental ex-

periments. The Pope has inherited the experience

of the ages
;
he knows all the economic and social, as

well as political, expedients that have been devised

from time immemorial—immemorial to all but to the
Church. And, like wise old Solomon, he knows that

there is nothing new under the sun. He knows

furthermore that man is not saved by magic, that

economic, like moral reconstruction, cannot come

in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. Being no

quack doctor, he promises no return to health with

the slapping on of a poultice or a plaster. He knows

and he tells the patient that there is no health save

in slow constitutional rehabilitation. So, he pins

his faith to no party, places hope in no particular

system, writes no testimonials for any economic

panacea.

He knows, what any of us could know if we were

not blinded by partisan prejudice, that no system,

political, social, financial, is proof against human

depravity. Any system—almost any system—will
work if men play fair: no system, even though It

were divinely revealed, let down from heaven with

charts, graphs, explicit directions, and full ex-

planations will work if men do not play fair.

I have said that the Pope has no magic formula.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 57

but perhaps after all he has—if you can call an ob-
vious fact a magic formula. I know of a sick person

whose malady baffled half a dozen physicians. So

the family brought in a very famous diagnostician

who scarcely looked at the patient before saying

brusquely, “Typhoid!” It seemed too simple.

Absurdly simple. But it turned out to be correct.

So, the Pope, without any “fuss or feathers”, with

no mystery in his manner and no professional bun-

combe, has looked at the sick world and said

“Greed”. Neither the learned economists nor the

unlearned man in the street take any stock in that

swift diagnosis, but it is none the less as sure as ic

was swift. Professionals and amateurs alike keep

repeating the silly phrase, “Nobody knows, nobody

knows, what happened to us all in 1929”. Most of

them, experts and inexperts, like to explain that the

machinery of production and distribution which

had become exceedingly intricate and delicate some-

how slipped a cog and now goes limping. Optimists

say, “If only we could find that cog and slip it back

into place, the machine would run again as well as

ever”. Pessimists say, “No, it is not a single cog

that got out of place, it’s the whole complicated

apparatus. It’s all gone ‘bust’ at once, like ‘the

deacon’s one-hoss shay’
.”

But some one having authority (we Catholics

naturally suggest the Pope), should be given three

minutes of absolute control of every radio network

in the world, all jazz and jokes should be ruled off,

all crooning, yodelling, and coloraturing, all ballyhoo

and propaganda, while some one to whom the
world would listen says with a voice that will be

stepped up and carried to the corners of the earth:



58 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

“It is not the machine but Man in control of the

machine that has broken down. It is futile to fix

the machine unless you fix man. It is likewise

foolish to change the machine unless you change

man. Man can ruin any machine, new or old.

Select any machine you may, Capitalism, Commun-

ism, Fascism, Nazism. They may All have their

points, but look about you, see Russia, see Italy, see

Germany, see Mexico, see France, see Britian and

the United States, four, five, or a half dozen differ-

ent economic systems and not any one of them is a

going concern. Can you not see—it is not the
system, it is man

!”

That will do. The channels of the air were

clear for a moment, let them now be congested with

their usual bewildering traffic. The message went

forth: “Never mind the machinery! Mind man!”

Or if we must be precise, mind the machinery less

and man more. It wasn’t the war, though God

knows the war was a vast and enduring calamity ; it

wasn’t the peace at Versailles, though the peace

contributed to the confusion amongst nations; nor

was it Wall Street that did the damage. Wall

Street couldn’t fleece the lambs if the lambs didn’t

wander into Wall Street. Those who went to Wall

Street and whined when Wall Street “took them”

are like those who expect to break the bank at Monte

Carlo and commit suicide when the bank at Monte

Carlo breaks them. Not the bank, not “the street,”

not the war, not Versailles, not the economic-finan-

cial-industrial system, but Man is responsible for the
universal catastrophe.

Our President—God direct and assist him—is



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 59

making a valiant effort to repair our own machine

by introducing important if not essential changes in

the Capitalistic system, while Communists and their

allies (witting and unwitting allies) sit on the

fence by the side of the road and jeer at him for

tinkering with the old broken-down bus. And

while he works, political jobbers and chisellers are

also at work. Worse then jobbers, worse than

chisellers—wasters, if we can believe the evidence
submitted to a United States senator, are doing

their damnable worst to neutralize and nullify the

President’s efforts. He is a powerful man in him-

self and the people have committed to him in ad-

dition more power than any man ever had in our

country before. Even more than Woodrow Wilson

in war times. But with all his power, he cannot

defeat human nature. If men will not be good, he

cannot make them good. You cannot make a silk

purse out of a sow’s ear. And the President cannot

make patriots out of spoils politicians.

So once again, what we need is moral regenera-

tion, more than economic reconstruction. Economic

reconstruction will never come—never come to
stay— without moral regeneration. That truistic
but infinitely valuable fact, it seems to me, is the

warp and woof of the papal encyclicals. The popes

do indeed expound certain economic and social doc-

trines, but they are all deducible from the eternal

principle of social justice, “Render to every man

his due,” and that other principle both of justice and

of charity, “Do unto others as you would that others

do unto you.”

If we don’t adopt and follow those principles, no

brain trust can save us, no New Deal, no fine-spun



60 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

economic theory, no system, however skillfully de-

vised, will be able to lift us out of the slough of

despond and set our feet upon the solid earth of

economic and social welfare.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 61

BISHOP VON KETTELER: PIONEER OF
SOCIAL REFORM

Address delivered on December 16, 1934.

In the course of a debate in the German Riech-

stag in 1881, the Socialist members Rebel and

Liebknecht flung at the Chamber the taunt, “When

did you begin to take notice of the workingman?

When did you begin to study the Social Question?

Not until we Socialists reminded you of your duty.”

The accusation may have been just when applied to

the Reichstag, but a full generation before 1881

there had arisen in Germany a pioneer in the field of

social justice, not a Socialist but a Catholic bishop,

whose doctrine was destined to be embodied in the

epoch-making encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope

Leo XIII and thereby to influence sociological

thought in all the modern world.

Born at Munster in Westphalia, Wilhelm Eman-

uel von Ketteler, scion of an ancient Catholic family,

heir to the title “Baron,” related to royalty, at first a

bright and shining light in the profession of the

law, later ordained priest and consecrated bishop, he

became, notwithstanding his aristocratic lineage and

high social standing, famous as champion of the

poor, advocate of the natural rights of man, oppon-

ent in that capacity of the high and mighty Bis-

marck, “the man of blood and iron” : recognized by

Pope Leo XIII as his teacher and “great predeces-

sor”, in social science, and—last and best—^he was
something of a saint.

We have heard much in recent years of the papal
encyclicals on Social Reform, Rerum Norarum of

1891, and Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, but perhaps



62 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

we are not all familiar with the fact that those two

priceless papal documents virtually and indeed

actually quote von Ketteler and reproduce his

teaching. Von Ketteler in turn resumes and applies

to modern conditions the doctrines of St. Thomas

Aquinas, of 700 years ago, and St. Thomas does but

present with Schdlastic accuracy the social doctrine

of St. Augustine, St. Basil, St. Jerome, St. John

Chrysostom, who lived and taught and fought the

poor man’s battles 1500 years ago. So, the Catholic

Church welcomes the Socialist challenge, “When did

you begin to take notice of the workingman ? When

did you begin to study the Social Question?”

We began before Capitalism came into being:
before Socialism was heard of and when the word

“Communism”, if spoken at all, was a synonym for

conventualism, the community life of the Catholic

religious orders. Sometimes here in the United

States, when we Catholics are referred to as “aliens”

and “intruders”, we find it necessary to refresh the

memory of Americans who have forgotten the rudi-

ments of the history of this continent. We were
here first. America was discovered, explored, and

evangelized by Catholics a hundred years before any

others came. Similarily it may be necessary to ex-

plain that in the field of social justice we are the

discoverers, explorers, pioneers—1500 years before
Lenin and Stalin and at least 1400 years before Karl

Marx, Liebknecht, and Lasalle. What is more, we

stand prepared to prove, or shall we say admit, that

the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church in the

fourth and fifth centuries was every bit as “radical”

(in the good sense) and quite as hostile to exag-

gerated and perverted Capitalism as contemporary



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 63

Communism, but with none of the insane excesses

now on exhibition in Moscow and in Mexico, and

with none of the childish Utopianism of demagogic

politicians.

I say the fathers of 1500 and even 1600 years

ago were quite as “radical” as any modern revolut-

ionary. Three or four times in this course of talks

I have promised—I might almost say, have threat-
ened—to quote Jerome, Chrysostom, Ambrose,
Augustine, Gregory the Great, and others. But I

have refrained from doing so because their doctrine

is so startling that it requires a lengthy exposition

and explanation which I have not time to give. But

I shall venture to present just one point of the pat-

ristic doctrine of social justice which will show what

I mean by “radica;lism” in the early fathers and

will at the same time show us some of the antece-

cedents of von Ketteler. In place of biographical

data concerning that great pioneer, I shall give one

or two of his leading ideas, thinking that you would

like to know something of the mind of the man
rather than the bare facts of his exterior life.

Without doubt the most sweeping statement ever

made in the name of Communism is the axiom

usually attributed to Proudhon, “Property is theft”.

But Proudhon, who lived in the nineteenth century,

borrowed the maxim from Jean Pierre Brissot, who
died at the ehd of the eighteenth. Brissot had

said, “Exclusive property is theft”.* Now, strange

though it seem, believe it or not, that most extreme

dogma of Communism stems from St. Basil who had

* See Bishop Ketteler by George Metlake, p. 38. Preface by
his Eminence Cardinal O’Connell; the Dolphin Press, Philadel-
phia, 1912.



64 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

said in the fourth century, “Personal property is

theft”. Now I beg you to mark well this all-impor-

tant circumstance, the saint was speaking of pri-

vate property in a monastery, where all members of

the community take a vow to have no private pos-

sessions but to hold all things in common. How-

ever, St. Basil, speaking again and repeatedly not

to monks in a monastery but to rich men in the

world, told them too that under certain conditions

the very possession of private property is tanta-

mount to theft. “Who is a robber?” he asks. “He

who takes the goods of another. Are you not

avaricious? Are you not a robber?. . .That bread

which you keep, belongs to the hungry; that coat

which you preserve in your wardrobe, belongs to

the naked; those shoes which are rotting in your

possession, belong to those who have no shoes;

that gold which you have hidden in the ground, be-

longs to the needy.” Today of course we don’t

bury gold in the ground (not if we keep the law),

but to bring the expression up to date, the saint is

saying that if we have money in the bank (more

than we need) and some one else has none, our

money in the bank belongs to him and we are rob-

bers if we keep it from him. I warned you that

the Fathers are “radical”.

St. Augustine at about the same date, 400 A. D.,

says epigrammatically, “The superfluities of the

rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who pos-

sess superfluities possess the goods of others."

And St. Ambrose, friend and teacher of St. August-

ine : “God created. . .the earth and all things to be

the common possession of all. Nature created the

common right: usurpation made the private right.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 65

[If you give to the poor man] you do not give what

is your own, but what is his. The earth belongs to

all, not to the rich.”

I cannot delay to pile up more of these startling

sentences. The writings of the Fathers are full of

them. Again and again they explain that the rich

man is a usurper and a robber.

Now, in view of the suspicion that these state-

ments and a hundred others that might be quoted

are a bit rhetorical and oratorical, let us come to a

statement of von Ketteler, inspirer of popes, who

with considerable warmth of feeling but none the

less with theological accuracy makes his observa-

tion upon the axiom that “property is theft.” “The

false doctrine of the rigid right of ownership is a

continual sin against nature, because it sees no in-

justice in using for the gratification of the most in-

satiable avarice and the most extravagant sensuality

what God intended to be food and clothing for all

men; because it kills the noblest sentiments in the

human heart and engenders a callous disregard for

the misery of others such as is hardly to be found

even in the brute creation. The notorious dictum,

‘property is robbery’, is something more than a mere

lie; besides a great lie, it contains a terrible truth.

Scorn and derision will not dispose of it ... As

long as it contains even a particle of truth, it has

power to overturn the whole order of the world. As

deep calleth unto deep, so one sin against nature

calls forth another. Out of the distorted right of

ownership the false doctrine of Communism was

begotten.”

One might have imagined that an orthodox Cath-

olic economist would have repudiated without qual-



66 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

ifi'cation or reservation the maxim of Proudhon,

“Property is theft”. He does indeed call it a “notor-

ious dictum” and a “great lie”, but with rare intel-

lectual courage and equally rare penetration into

the source of all social injustice, he states the par-

adoxical fact—^paradoxical but not impossible—^that
a great lie can contain a terrible truth. And he

adds, a full generation before the rest of the world

discovered it, that the occasion if not the cause of

Communism is Capitalism.

Courage I claim for von Ketteler: intellectual

penetration : the gift of prophecy
;
and we must now

add, moderation, balanced judgment. He writes:

“In radiant letters above both these false doctrines

[the doctrine of the rigid right of ownership on the

one hand, and on the other the doctrine that prop-

erty is theft] stands the true teaching of the Cath-

olic Church. She recognizes and makes her own

what is true in each; she rejects what is false in

both. She does not recognize in man an uncondi-

tional right to ownership over the goods of earth,

but only the right to use them in the manner or-

dained by God. She safeguards the right of owner-

ship by insisting that, in the interests of peace, ord-

er, and industry, the division of goods as it has de-

veloped among men must be acknowledged; she

sanctifies Communism by making the fruits of prop-

erty the common property of all.”

“Catholicism sanctifies Communism !” A strange
phrase to those who know Communism as exempli-

fied in the French Revolution of 1798, or the Com-

mune of 1848, or the present hideous Russian ex-

periment. But Communism is capable of being

sanctified, perhaps with less difficulty than Capital-



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 67

ism. Indeed, sanctified Communism is in operation

in the Catholic Church. All religious orders are

communistic and have been since the first of them

w^ere founded nearly 1780 years ago. Communism

—

religious Communism—has lasted a long time. Cap-
italism seems to be dying after a short life of only

one hundred years.

We Catholics are not afraid of Communism. We
have tamed wilder beasts than that. The French

Republic began, for example, quite as mad and quite

as bloody an enemy of the Catholic Church as Com-

munism. But the time came when a pope entreated

the French people to forget the Monarchy and ac-

cept the Republic; and today in France you may

hear the Marseillaise, the fiercest and wildest of

revolutionary songs, played and sung by devout

Catholics : indeed I have heard it before the altar in

Catholic churches. A purified, civilized Communism
is not unthinkable. But a reformed and sanctified

Capitalism is, in the judgment of a great many en-

lightened observers, unimaginable.

But there is another fundamental principle cf

Catholic ethics which must be explained, and which

when explained will throw a clearer light on the

startling pronouncements we have quoted from St.

Basil and other early churchmen concerning private

ownership.

I shall hand this knotty problem also over to von

Ketteler, but first let me explain a word that will

occur in his explanation. It is a rather unusual

word, a difficult word to define with precision, the

word “usufruct”. It comes from Roman law. With

the Romans a man was said to have “usufruct” when
he had the right to use and to enjoy something that



68 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

belonged not to him but to another. I speak of the

Romans, but it would seem that the idea and the

custom prevailed further back amongst the Greeks.

For, says Aristotle, “the Spartans use one another’s

slaves and horses and dogs as if they were their

own, and if they happen to be out in another man’s

fields, they appropriate whatever provisions they

want.” The property was private but the use of it

was public. One man owned the field, or the or-

chard, or the domestic animal; other men were al-

lowed to make use of it. This right or privilege

was called “usufruct.”

Now the Roman and Greek idea of “usufruct”

was carried over into the Catholic doctrine with the

additional note that no man is entitled to absolute

ownership. At best he has the right of usufruct.

Von Ketteler says : “St. Thomas lays down the prin-

ciple that all creatures, and consequently all earth-

ly goods, can, of their very nature, belong only to

God .... God possesses all rights, man none. Be-

sides this essential and complete right of ownership,

which can belong to God alone, St. Thomas recog-

nizes a right of usufruct and only in regard to this

right of using and enjoying them does he concede

to men a right to the goods of earth. Hence, when

men speak of a natural right to ownership, there

can be no question of true and complete proprietor-

ship, but only of a right of use and enjoyment ....

_The Catholic doctrine of private property has noth-

ing in common with the conception current in the

world according to which man looks on himself as

the unrestricted master of his possessions. The

Church can never concede to man the right of using

at his pleasure the goods of this world, and when



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 69

she speaks of private property and protects it, she

never looses sight of the fact that the true and com-

plete right of property pertains to God alone and

that man’s right is restricted to the usufruct.”

There, my friends, is a revolutionary principle

if ever there was one : No man owns anything. What-

ever he has, he has as steward of God ; he is not an

owner but an administrator.

It may be that in some remote epoch, human in-

genuity will succeed in ordering the world so that all

men may have the use and enjoyment of a sufficient

amount of the goods of earth. Let the crusade for

social justice aim at that ideal. But until that ideal

becomes real, as long as inequality remains on this

earth, as long as human society is divided into the

“haves” and the “have-nots”, so long will there be

wars and rumors of wars, revolutions and counter-

revolutions, social upheavals and economic catas-

trophies, unless the human race once more gets hold

of the Catholic principle that no man owns anything

but that all men are entitled to use and enjoy the

goods that God has provided on earth, goods to

which God alone holds the title of ownership. One

is our Father, God; and all we who have God for

our Father are children together in His house. In

God’s house no one child must be surfeited while an-

other starves, no one child must go ragged or naked

while another is clad in purple and fine linen, as

the Gospel says, or as we say in the more modern

idiom, in silks and furs and jewels. Do I hear some

one- say that this is high-flown poetry and religious

mysticism? Very well then, let us have the Catholic

doctrine of social justice in hard cold prose; if any

man has more than enough of the goods of earth



70 THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION

and another man has less than enough, he that has

is bound in justice—mark the expression, hound in
justice *—to share what he has with the one who has
not. To a starving man he nmst give food. If a

whole country be in dire distress, he is bound in jus-

tice to give as large a part of his possessions as is

possible without endangering his own family.

And here you may readily detect another so-

called “radical” economic measure, the “conscrip-

tion of wealth”. The inventors of that phrase think

of it as applicable in time of war, and they seem to

think it needs apology even then. But the idea, if

not the phrase, is a commonplace of Catholic ethics,

as ancient as the Fathers, as ancient as the Gospels.

With us who have inherited the Catholic tradition

these so-called radical ideas are not new or revolu-

tionary or dangerous. They are in the papal en-

cyclicals, they are in von Ketteler, they are in every

Catholic manual of ethics in every Catholic disserta-

tion on Social Justice. We teach that wealth must
be conscripted not only in war time, but in time of

emergency, and indeed at all times, so long as some

have too much and others not enough.

So, when Socialists and Communists ask us when

we became interested in the poor man and his prob-

lems, we reply that we were the poor man’s friend

and his champion long centuries before demagogues

got hold of his ear, stirred up his passion with in-

centives to violence, and beguiled his poor fond

heart with promises that never can be fulfilled.

But be it observed, the idea that all human beings

are one family implies God ! Do away with God and

you destroy the only substantial basis of human

’^See the Science of Ethics, by Cronin, vol. 11, p. 135.



THE CHURCH AND THE DEPRESSION 71

equality. We can accept the principle of “usufruct”,
the principle that no man owns anything absolutely

but that all men are entitled to use and enjoy the

fruits of the earth, only on one condition : the condi-

tion that there is a God. Either to God or to man

must be conceded absolute, ultimate ownership. If

to men—any man or group of men—^you shall never
solve the social problem, for man will always fight

man for possession. If to God is attributed the

ownership of all things under God, man may have

peace and justice and happiness.



CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIM

OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inau^ral program in the

studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New

York City, March 2, 1930.)

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