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June. 1937 The Notre Dame Alumnus 241
BcToare lest any man cheat you by philosophy
or vain deceit; according to the
elements of the world, and not according to
Christ,"—Coloss, 2-S,
Every period of history has its own
peculiar characteristics. The dominant
note of our times is uncertainty,
confusion and instability. There are
scholars of great authority who express
the conviction that we are
approaching a crisis in our civilization,
if in fact it is not already here.
Superficially the crisis appears to be
political, social and economic. Actually
these are only symptoms of a
much more profound distemper. The
world is sick in its soul. It is out of
joint spiritually and religiously.
That this judgment is not merely
an individual one but represents
rather a consensus of world opinion
is abundantly clear from the pronouncements
of contemporary criticism.
Christopher Dawson in England,
the most respected of oar Christian
sociologists, makes this statement:
"Today the world is on the
move again, and no one can tell
where it is going or what will happen
next; whether our civilization is
going to recover its stability or
whether it will collapse in ruins."
Problem Is Religious
In another place he states the
cause and also cites the remedy. "The
central conviction which has dominated
my mind ever since I began to
wTite, and which has increased in intensity
during the last 20 years, is
the conviction that the society or
culture which has lost its spiritual
roots is a dying culture, however
prosperous it may appear externally.
Consequently the problem of social
survival is not only a political or
economic one; it is above all things
religious, since it is in religion that
the ultimate spiritual roots both of
society and of the individual are to
be found."
Let me repeat that this is not an
isolated verdict. Dawson has many
companions who share his views not
only in England but on the Continent
of Europe and here in America. In
The Baccalaureate Sermon
By Most Rev. Karl J. Alter, D.D..
Bishop of Toledo, Ohio
Speaker Charges the 1937 Graduates
With the Responsibility of Being Intel­
lectual, Articulate and on the Offensive.
France v>-e can mention such celebrated
scholars as Jacques Maritain,
Paul Claudel, Gilson and Mauriac.
In Germany there are Peter Wust
and Karl Adam.
In America there is an entire host
of writers who echo the same sentiments.
Among the non-Catholic critics
similar views are expressed. Oswald
Spengler, the German sociologist,
writes a book on the Decline
of the West; Nicholas Berdyaev, the
Russian author, on the End of Our
Times; Irving Babbitt, late of Harvard,
Paul Elmer Moore of Princeton,
and Walter Lippman, of literary
fame, all concur in the same analysis
of our modern unrest and instability.
The latter offers the following trenchant
criticism of present day American
attitudes: "There is nothing
BISHOP ALTER
new in the fact that men have ceased
to believe in the religion of their
fathers, but this is the first age in
the history of mankind when the circumstances
of life have conspired
with the intellectual habits of the
time to render any fixed and authoritative
belief incredible to large masses
of men.—The irreligion of the
modern world is radical to a degree
for which there is, I think, no counterpart."
Ever since the days of the Renaissance
we have been moving towards
a complete secularization of society.
It was the great misfortune of our
world that the leaders of that movement,
otherwise so beneficial, erred
egregiously in their appraisal of
human values and fimibled the relation
and distinction between nature
and grace. They grossly exaggerated
man's perfectibility by merely human
means. They placed a false estimate
on the ability of man to achieve unrestricted
progress by dominating
merely his physical environment and
external nature rather than by mastering
his own inner self, thereby
establishing a divine synthesis between
nature and grace. The train
of events set in motion by the Renaissance
is only now reaching its
ultimate conclusions. Such is always
the course of false philosophy.
Life Has Lost Meaning
Karl Adam states: "The sixteenth
century revolt from the Church," he
tells us "led inevitably to the revolt
from Christ of the eighteenth century,
and thence to the revolt from
God of the nineteenth. . . And thus
life has lost its great meaning, its
\'ital strength and high purpose, its
strong pervading love, that can be
enkindled only by the divine."
Christopher Dawson says practically
the same thing: "Protestantism,
Liberalism and Communism are the
three successive stages by which our
civilization has passed from Catholicism
to complete secularism. The
first eliminated the Church, the second
eliminated Christianity, and the
third eliminates the human soul. We
cannot have a Christian society, or a
Christian economic life until our civilization
has recovered its moral conscience,
its faith in God and its membership
of the Church."
During the past 400 years the
Church has not been able to lead a
normal life. She has been forced to
stand upon the defensive. She has
been like a country that is invaded,
like a city that is beseiged. Her energies
have been absorbed in fighting