A Vernacular Faith

Extract

The work of Christopher Dawson and others has made familiar the fact that each of the great religions of the world has become the matrix of a temporal culture. Less familiar is the converse truth that such a culture, richly proliferating, can almost smother with the complexities of habit, custom, usage and respectability the faith from which it originally sprang; so that for many selves religion may become at worst the handmaid of civic solidarity, at all events something accepted and taken for granted, and at best a vital pattern of rites, reactions and relationships inherent in a certain place, time, and mode of living, a pattern which fades out of the individual mind directly its circumstances change. Thus, on the one hand stands the ‘catholique non-pratiquant', who clings to the noun rather than the adjective, insists that his children should receive a Catholic education, and has a high regard for faith as the cement of a stable social structure. (This figure is perhaps commoner abroad than in this country; and was well exemplified in those portions of Latin America which abused Costa Rica as ‘Communist’ for trying to organise economic life in accordance with the social encyclicals.) In the centre sit at ease in Zion, as in an overcrowded drawing-room, ladies of pious leisure embroidering in petit point on linen cushion covers ready stencilled designs of the Sacred Heart, such as may be seen in the drapers’ shops of Bruges.