A Catholic Dilemma?

Extract

That Catholic social teaching has made but little impact on the public life of this country is a fact too well known to require emphasis here. We are now well accustomed to hear public speakers bewail Catholic apathy from cur platforms. Apathy is, however, but a partial explanation of the failure of the Church’s social teaching to make a deep impression even upon British Catholics and it is urgent that, instead of continuously bewailing this state of affairs, our writers and lecturers should make diligent inquiry as to the causes.

In so far as making an endeavour to shape the future social order of this country is concerned, it is, of course, quite true to assert that Catholics, as a whole, have shown little but indifference. But it is also true that this indifference is by no means confined to Catholics. Communist infiltration in Great Britain and, indeed, throughout the world (save where Communism has been imposed by armed force) has been made possible only by the neglect of the ordinary man to carry out his duty as a citizen in a democratic state.

This widespread indifference lies not so much in lack of interest (for the ordinary man of reasonable intelligence is keenly interested in discussion of at least those social problems which he thinks he can easily grasp) as in lack of energy—energy to acquire the necessary knowledge, energy to think out conclusions and energy to enter public life and act upon such conclusions. This lack of intellectual energy is, I think, a product of our industrial system, which, in the interests of increased production, has removed all pleasure from work, often leaving undiluted drudgery.