Mccabe--1 of 5
Chapter I
THE ALLEGED BEAUTIFUL SERVICES
In approaching this subject it will be useful to state again the angle from which I write the present series of booklets. It is to show that the scandalous action of the Vatican and most of its national hierarchies which I traced in the first series of booklets was just what you would expect if you know the Church of Rome. It is not a religious body like any other, and the venerable antiquity of which it is so proud merely recalls, to the informed mind, the violence and unscrupulousness of the methods by means of which it has survived. Its path through the ages is marked, not by the flowering of new cultures or new civilizations, but by the graves of rival religions and of masses of rebels. It consists essentially of a Black International which in every age wages an economic struggle for survival and has, in view of the absurdity of the creed on which it lives, to use violence and deception to hold together the body which supports it. However many million devout laymen and however many thousand sincere priests there may be in the world this is its broad structure, and only when you see that can you understand its proved action in modern life.
Some American apologists have pleaded in excuse for their very un-american efforts to suppress criticism that the critics would like to drive a wedge between the Catholic laity and their priests. The man who could succeed in doing this would render an outstanding service to the country. We say that the international army to which their priests belong is Fascist. The name "Fascist" was, it appear's, taken from a bastard Italian word (fascio) which means a bunch or a group, but it goes back ultimately to the emblem of authority, the axe and the rods, in the ancient Roman army. That emblem is so characteristic of the Roman Church that, we saw, even while. it protested in a dozen tongues -- English, French, German, etc. -- that it is now tolerant and humane it still claimed in Latin its possession of the axe and the rods. In an age when the Fascist banner seemed destined to float over three continents it threw off the mask of meekness and openly joined the aggressors.
This involved a larger use than ever of its second weapon, suppression of truth and mendacity, in the lands that were not yet conquered, and I have endeavored to expose this and enable the reader to understand the Church. In the world at large it is, instead of being the impressive institution it represents in America, a tragic-comic spectacle. If you grant it the 250,000,000 subjects it claims today, one-third of these are men and women who curse it in their hearts and go to church only under the shadow of its bloody emblem of the axe and the rods, and more than a third of the remainder are either children or illiterates. The only point of serious interest is how it keeps in its fold in America and Britain so many out of the teeming millions who have come from less educated lands, and I have, I think, explained this. There remain, however, two elements of explanation that are so frequently claimed that we must examine them. The first is the fairly common opinion that the Church of Rome appeals to the heart and, the emotions, far more than any other Church does, and this, it is thought, distracts the mind from the intellectual absurdity or moral repulsiveness of its doctrines. The second is the familiar cry -- the parrot-cry, one might justly call it -- that it "does good," and on a scale that ought to impress even the skeptic.
Postponing the question whether the Church has rendered a service to art itself we may consider first the sensuous appeal which it makes, and against Protestant writers confesses that it makes, to the general body of the faithful. That this is one element of it, success in inducing millions to continue in the profession of beliefs which are as incongruous in our modern world as an iron-clad knight would be, we fully admit. Statistics, it is true, do not show that the sensuous services give the Catholic Church any advantage over the leading Protestant Churches except in a preponderance of female church-goers over males, but in fact a high proportion of Catholics would tell you that the character of the services attract them. It is, part of my work to warn folk against generalizing from one or a few cases, but it may be of interest to give one. I have a neighbor, an elderly woman, a bombee of shattered nerves, who was brought up a strict Roman Catholic. Intelligence and education poor. She is ready at all times to join her son (a full apostate) in cursing the Pope and the priests, and she incurs eternal damnation cheerfully most Sunday mornings by refusing to go to mass. But she often does go, and she explains that it is because she "likes the services." I should add that she has a dull and lonely life.
What is important here is not the type but the psychological factor. We must not exaggerate it. About a third of the Catholic body discharge only the minimum of obligation and attend a "low" mass (without music) on Sundays. They take no part whatever in it and do not understand a word of the priest's Latin gabbling; and instead of having any sensuous or artistic enjoyment they just kneel uncomfortably and impatiently until it is over. The church itself which they attend is "artistic" only to a low taste, like the "best room" in the apartment of workers or small-middle-class folk with more money than education. A few of these may also attend the evening service. It is nearly all in Latin and they take no part in it, but the sanctuary is gay with surplices and silk, the altar ablaze, the service and choral, and the sermon usually short. If the alternative is anything like that of the old lady I have quoted, to be left alone in a drab room, one usually prefers to be "a Catholic." Remember that it is cheap -- two cents or a nickel. These folk are not interested in doctrines. The "real presence" of Jesus on the altar, which seems almost grotesque when you coldly dissect the dogma as a theologian does, is vague in their minds. The church is "the house of God," and they do not make the theologian's subtle distinction between God and Jesus or between the human and divine persons in the "hyostatic union" of the theological Jesus.
This one-third of the Catholic body is, numerically, the chief source of leakage. To them the religion is, as I said, a practice or a sentiment, not a belief. Where there is no particular emotional response to the rhetoric of the pulpit and the weekly paper about the Holy Faith and Holy Father and the devouring thirst of the world and the devil to destroy them they are easily drawn off. The men and youths and many of the young women secede as soon as they get a live faith and ideal like Socialism. Others just drift away if the general atmosphere is non-Catholic. In a Catholic country these folk are held by the gaiety of the show. The wine- shop and the church are the two bright spots in their heavy lives.
The nice-minded skeptics who resent this coupling of the wine- shop and the church, who (with no knowledge of Catholic life) say that "religion" is the real uplift in these people's hearts and it is wicked to try to remove it, may be recommended to read some such book as Prof. J.L. Mecham's Church and State in Latin America (1934). He has the very correct professorial attitude -- you try so hard to stand up that you fall backward occasionally -- especially as his university (North Carolina) publishes the book. It is mostly concerned with history but incidentally it tell's Some painful truths about the Church in those Catholic countries, to which the Catholic likes to refer you if he thinks that you know no more than he does about them. The clergy are admitted to be, as a body, sensual, lazy, and grossly ignorant. The bishops are fanatically conservative and more attentive to their political interferences than to the moral and spiritual welfare of the mass of the people. The Indians, the vast majority of the population of Latin America, are at the lowest level of ignorance and superstition, ready at any time to serve the political purposes of the hierarchy, though often barely Christian in religion and permitted by the priests the wildest license. The Church festivals are orgies. In fact, Professor Mecham approve ugly quotes from another authority, "Bacchus is the one absolute and essential God. Sex-morals are as usual, inadequately and therefore untruthfully discussed in the book, but I have elsewhere shown that the general attitude is such that priests and monks indulge in the most open and ingenuous fashion. A more candid, and worse picture will be found in Braga and Grubb's work, based on intimate knowledge, The Republic of Brazil; and for a concrete richly-informed picture of the state of the people and the brutal exploitation of them by unscrupulous priests see Alan Hillgarth's novel The Black Mountain. And remember that these books were written and published before the victory of clerical Fascism in Latin America. In most republics the situation is worse today.
To these 60,000,000 or so Catholic worker's and peasants of Latin America add those of Cuba and the Philippines, the rural parts and small-town populations of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Portuguese. French, and Belgian colonies. I gave an authentic picture of life in such regions in Book IV of this series. The entire body of Catholics coming into this category are considerably more than half the whole number of the Pope's subjects; and you may not be disposed to put the majority of the Catholics of Eire, Poland, Hungary, Mexico, Quebec, Slovakia, etc., on a much higher level. Then remember that half the remaining Catholics, of the world are children, and that half the adult Catholics of the United States come from some such environment and to a great extent reproduce their old atmosphere in American cities. The conception of them -- as so many tens of millions of simple folk elevated for an hour above their daily level by beautiful services in which they absorb themselves every Sunday and Holy Day is as ingenuous as the Sunday School idea of George Washington.
As I said, the Catholicism of this larger half of the subjects of the Black International no more requires study than does that of children. It is an ingrained attitude or set of practices, protected from interference from the rebel who appears here and there by the power that the priest's have: a power which in all Catholic countries Fascism has made absolute. To an extent their minds are drugged on Sundays and Saints' Days, but it is hardly necessary in their case. It is at the higher levels that the intellectually depressing effect of the Catholic services becomes important, and the more artistic they are the more effective the opiate.
Two illustrations of the truth of this at once occur. I have not the Catholic Who's Who for America but the situation is much the same as in Britain, and I have already pointed out that, confining ourselves as far as possible to the same cultural level converts to the Church from the world of art are three or four times as numerous as from the scientific world. It would be quite natural to suggest that artists feel the charm of the beautiful services more than scientists, but it is a poor compliment to pay to any artist of distinction to suggest that he will enter a Church and on his knees make a solemn declaration of literal belief in all its doctrines, repeated one by one, just because its churches and services are artistic. He is free at any time to attend the services and, if he feels inclined, see a pretty symbolism in them, but if he calls himself a Catholic he in the same breath denies that he takes a symbolic view of the services and doctrines. That is a comprehensive and deadly heresy in theology; though, of course, we are aware that a priest will, to secure or retain the name of a distinguished artist for the Church, not press him about his beliefs any more than he will be too inquisitive about a wealthy man's amorous adventures.
The truth is, however, that it is not the higher artistic sensitiveness but the comparatively lower intellectual vitality or equipment of the artist that explains why he is willing to make a profession of the creed I described in an earlier book. Probably in most cases these artist-converts flatter themselves that they have one sound reason which may be classed as intellectual. They are convinced the Roman Church has been, and is, a great inspirer of high art, and this at least predisposes them to endorse a creed that, in marked contrast to science, has had, they say, so beneficent an influence. Catholic literary artists have written this, and I have heard them say that art and the love of beauty are in danger of perishing in our drab, cold, materialistic age and they must rally to the Church as the best guarantee of survival. G.K. Chesterton, who when his earlier good nature was dissolved in the acid of the Holy Faith wrote of its critics as "mad dogs," was strong on this point. It is, as I will show presently, a sheer fallacy. But the artist who enters the Church in such a frame of mind loses any inclination to criticize. He has taken an opiate.
The second illustration is the preponderance of women over men in the richer and more artistic Catholic churches. Here I rely neither on impressions nor on the common belief that women are more religious than men. In the less artistic Protestant churches there is no material disproportion of the sexes, and it is not notable in the poorer Catholic districts. A Strict census of church-goers, spread over six months, in the city of London (England) in 1903 proved this. In the whole city (6,250,000 people) 372,264 men and 607,257 women attended church. But the disparity of the sexes was far and away the greatest in the artistic churches of the rich West End of London. In two Anglican churches there were 160 and 249 men and 886 and 1,034 women. In three Romanist churches there were 267, 276, and 237 men and 1,105, 807, and 701 women. In Methodist and Baptist churches in a poor quarter there were 3,336 men to 4,127 women. It is clear what conclusion we must draw from such figures. Educated men are far less disposed to let their intellectual life be stupefied by emotional satisfaction. Religion, again, is a practice or an emotion rather than a belief.
The Church professes that it appeals to the emotions only as a preliminary appeal to the intellect. That is clearly false. It appeal's to the senses because if they find an attractiveness in the services less demand need be made upon the intelligence of the worshiper. To contrast the Protestant version of Christianity with the Roman as cold and unemotional is absurd. The Protestant service makes a very powerful appeal to the emotions of a believer. The prayers are heavily emotional and are not muttered in a tongue that any of the laity understand. The congregation silently takes part in them, and the emotions stirred are then released in the community-singing of the hymns, of which there is very little In the usual Catholic service. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Protestant service appeals to the emotions through the ideas or doctrines which are embodied in the prayers, hymns, and sermons, while the Catholic service aims at a direct gratification of the senses by florid music, flowers, candles, colored silks and white robes, ornate altars, incense, stained glass, and a general artistic scheme according to the cultural quality of the congregation of each particular church.
In this sense it stupefies the intelligence or dulls its alertness and critical tendency by ensuing this gratification of the senses or, in wealthier churches, of the esthetics sense. A friend of theirs once gave me the broad explanation of the Catholicism of Belloc and Chesterton that they regard a Catholic church as a center of light, warmth, and color in an materialistic world. One might carry the analysis further. One does not today suffer economically and socially by joining the Catholic Church as one does by quitting it, as Chesterton found. Soon after his conversion my mail brought me, doubtless because some careless person had simply taken a list of names and addresses from Who's Who, an appeal by a group of important Catholics for a subscription to a large fund to provide Chesterton with a basic income for the rest of his life. But we have in an earlier book considered the Church as a mutual aid society.
The field here is so large, the variety of types so great -- from Seymour Hicks or Charles Laughton to the Irish dock-laborers or the Italian street-vendors of New York, from St. Patrick's Cathedral to the dauby, garnishes of a poor Polish chapel -- that it is difficult to cover the facts usefully with a formula. The title I have given this chapter is the one usually selected by critics of the Church. It is valid if by "stupefying" we mean that the emphasis of faith is deliberately transferred from the intellectual confrontation of doctrines to the enjoyment of sensuous experiences as a discharge of religious duty. A writer who was intimate, and on the whole sympathetic, to Italian life, Axel Menthe, has said that most of the uneducated or poorly educated Catholics rarely thought about Jesus or anything but the cult of Mary and the saints. For the majority everywhere the doctrinal ideas retire behind a vividly colored screen of emblems, symbols, statues, pictures, and material rites and ceremonies. It is one of the reasons why those doctrinal ideas, which seem so crude and outrageous when you consider them apart from the churches services, linger in a world to which they are as alien as the ten-gallon hat or the crinoline. |
