L'Aube in the Evening

Extract

It is true, replied the Dutchman, we are a small people without a great future. But when early in the morning we hear a loud knocking at the door, we know it is only the milk.

The Times every morning and the New Statesman every week, those cover serious periodical reading for many of us. From them we should assume that the political weight of Catholicism has been thrown heavily to the right for the last hundred years. The association of Catholics with the forces of tradition is, of course, evident; this, at its worst, has meant subservience of vested interests, and, at its best, rallying with the stable and chivalrous elements of society. It is true that altar and throne, farm and nationality were the causes Catholics fought for most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, and that Liberalismus was, to put it mildly, not favourably regarded in the second period of Pio Nono’s pontificate. What is not so generally appreciated is the strength and official standing of the Labourite movement in the Church.

Père Lacordaire died, he said, an impenitent liberal, the Bishop Baron von Ketteler dug deeper to the roots of reform than did our own Victorian Radicals, and cardinals like Manning, Mermillod and Gibbons were scarcely daffodils that came before the sturzos dared. They were the leaders of a Catholic democratic movement that had reached such proportions by the time of the Europe of Locarno that the action of Catholic groups on the whole—I speak quantitatively—lay with Trade Unionism and Parliamentary Democracy.