An Eagle Whiter Than A Dove

Extract

During four generations Poland has been specially dear to the hearts of English Catholics. One reason assuredly for this attachment arises from the strong Irish element in our make up, with its memory of suppression of the faith and violent persecution. Yet the native Catholics too share an affinity with the Polish people that is strong and peculiarly English. The English have always shown a keen sense of injustice. The enemies of our race would say it was a sense only outraged by injustice of a continental brand. It is, however, a commonplace that England has afforded an exile’s home for every kind of Ishmael : The Seers of the Enlightenment followed by Bourbons and Eugenie: Dom Manoel and Don Sturzo; Garibaldi and the French émigré clergy, whose names are honoured in the history of many London parishes; Marx and Chateaubriand; Einstein and Chopin. But more than this, for English Catholics Poland typifies splendidly the spirit of resurgent Catholicism. The English remnant can take heart from the example of Poland.

The first lesson I ever learned in the study of the European scene was that there were two bastions in Europe, Ireland and Poland; both were rooted in tradition, both were vital in a dying world, because established on the four-square gospel of a sane social creed : a Faith, the land, family and patriotism—i.e. the love of the hearth I was taught later in the insularity of English University life with its fear of metaphysics and again in the cosmopolitan fever of the Sorbonne that Poland and Ireland were despicable blockhouses of superstition and reaction. It was taken for granted that Weygand had saved Warsaw : so miraculous in achievement was that strategy that it seemed incredible otherwise.