—

(cont’d)

With politics, as they are commonly understood, and partisan contentions for place and power, the REVIEW has nothing to do. It little concerns us, who sits in the Presidential chair once hallowed by George Washington, or rules in the Cabinet, or has the dispensing of the patronage that outflows from the seat of government to enrich, not unfrequently to corrupt, our citizens. But we love our country, and we deprecate the sad contingency, that, while she improves in material prosperity, she should go backward in the path of honesty and equity, and give to the world the lamentable example of a commonwealth so changed and depraved by a hundred years’ growth, that her founders, were they to return to earth, would not recognize her for the work of their hands. How could we be indifferent, nor give some expression to the shame and sorrow that we feel, in beholding daily more and more verified amongst our statesmen those terrible words of the prophet, “Thy princes are faithless, the companions of thieves; they all love bribes, they run after rewards.” (Isaiah i. 23.)

Our REVIEW is not only Catholic, but American. Hence we shall endeavor to chronicle and illustrate whatever is worthy of preservation, whether it be matter of history or tradition, in the origin and progress of the Catholic Church in America. But it is also American in another sense. Whilst defending the creed of our Catholic countrymen before the world, and doing what we can to gather up for their love and veneration what yet remains unknown or only partially told of the apostles and founders of the faith in our land, we shall not forget the duty that we owe to our non-Catholic countrymen. There are among them some few, who, embittered by the wicked spirit of sectarianism, do not wish to know the truth, and who, like the Scribes and Pharisees with whom our Saviour had to deal, hated and detested the truth the more, in proportion as they felt its presence and power growing manifest before their eyes. To such men of course we cannot appeal for a hearing. But there is a large class of our non-Catholic countrymen, who are ignorant of Catholic doctrine through no fault of their own, but simply through the chances of birth and education. They have an inherent love of justice and truth, a spirit of religion, though misdirected by unhappy training. They dislike and condemn us, because they know us only, not as we are, but as we have been falsely presented to their view. If they knew us better, if they could but see the Catholic religion as it really came from the hand of its Author, the Church of Christ in her true colors, no longer disfigured by the hideous visage and distorted features, wherewith heresy has chosen to paint her for the last three centuries, her comely and venerable aspect would awaken in them love and admiration. With such we propose to follow the example of the great Augustine, who said in a similar case, “Sanari eos potius, si fieri potest, quam oppugnari, volo.”

Our contributors have no common bond, other than that of loyalty to the Church and devotion to her cause, and that likewise of Catholic charity, which as the Apostle says (1 Cor. xiii. 3, 4) “patiens est, benigna est, non agit perperam, non irritatur, non cogitat malum.” Hence they are free to speak their own individual sentiments on all matters that do not infringe Catholic unity, according to the good old saying: “In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas.“ But above all, they will ever bear in mind the closing words of the same maxim, “In omnibus charitas.”

We are not without misgivings, either as to the arduous nature, or the probable success of our undertaking. We wish that some consciousness of power might enable us to say with the Roman Orator, “neque illud ipsum, quod est optimum, desperandum est; et in praestantibus rebus magna sunt ea, quae sunt optimis proxima.” But at least we may say with the Umbrian poet:

“In magnis et voluisse sat est.”

—

TRANSLATIONS:

Sanari eos potius, si fieri potest, quam oppugnari, volo.

“My wish is that they be healed, if that is possible, rather than attacked.”

Augustine, De moribus Ecclesiae catholicae, I.1.2. He is speaking about the Manicheans.

patiens est, benigna est, non agit perperam, non irritatur, non cogitat malum.

[Charity] is patient, is kind: …dealeth not perversely; … is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil;

St. Paul, I Cor 13:4-5, Douay-Rheims

In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus charitas.

“Unity in necessary things, liberty in doubtful things, charity in all things.”

Curiously, although this maxim was commonly attributed to St. Augustine, it seems to have been coined by Lutheran theologians, and its first occurrence in this form is thought to be a tract by Rupertus Meldenius, Paraenesis votiva pro pace ecclesiae ad theologos Augustanae Confessionis (“A Plea for Peace, Addressed to the Theologians of the Augsburg Confession”), 1626.

John XXIII invoked the maxim in his first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram (1959):

Verumtamen commune illud effatum, quod, aliis verbis interdum expressum, variis tribuitur auctoribus, semper retinendum probandumque est: In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas.

“Nevertheless, that common saying — which is attributed to various authors, sometimes expressed in different words — must always be upheld and approved: in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.”

For the other two see the first post of this revived Review.

Some observations:

1. Compare what they say about philosophy of history in the first paragraph with what Jim Hankins and Allen Guelzo just posted on their Substack, The Golden Thread:

The Golden Thread

Fifteen Theses toward a Natural-Law Theory of History

However much we aspire to a just society – which is to say, one in which moral character, fairness and equitability are the foundations – even the most earnest thinkers have too often sought the pattern for such a society in theories of economics or politics. These earnest thinkers have done so at the expense of a grim reality of modern times, namely, that the human catastrophes of the last eleven decades have been primarily the product of theories of…

Read more

2 days ago · 24 likes · The Golden Thread

2. Then look at their assessment of Europe: “it is simply the moral power of her presence that prevents European society from taking the final plunge into the anarchy and barbarism, for which three centuries have been striving to prepare it.” This was written forty years before World War I, the outbreak of which, in Europe—you will remember—was greeted with shouts of jubilation. This was written two years before the election of Leo XIII and his first encyclical in 1878, Inscrutabili Dei Consilio, which has the following memorable line, but which is in general alignment with the diagnosis of Europe found here: “ It is perfectly clear and evident, venerable brothers, that the very notion of civilization is a fiction of the brain if it rest not on the abiding principles of truth and the unchanging laws of virtue and justice, and if unfeigned love knit not together the wills of men, and gently control the interchange and the character of their mutual service.”

2. Notice how, remarkably, in an American context, they regard Public Opinion as an authority which makes claims of absoluteness and which would usurp the rule of God. Lincoln saw the problem: in his September 16, 1859 speech in Columbus, Ohio, he famously said:

   “Public opinion in this country is everything.”

   And in his 1858 debates:

   “In this age, and in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”

   

3. Although he spoke with softer articulations, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger expressed a similar view about philosophy in his Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, delivered April 18, 2005, the day before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI:

“How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — thrown from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth.”

“We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

5. This document appeals to “the infallible Church of God” six years after the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870. The phrase is helpful for understanding how papal infallibility was understood then. It was not understood as a free-standing power but as a protection which must in some circumstances fall upon the chief authority of a community, if that community is preserved in truth. This was Newman’s argument: if some disputes risk dividing the Church, and if the last word is held by Peter, and if the Church remains in the truth assuredly, then Peter must remain in the truth assuredly, in those circumstances in which he speaks that last word—but then (Newman’s important hedge in his letter to the Duke of Norfolk) not elsewhere, except when speaking with the Church.

6. When you read language like “how different is the base counterfeit of the same, wickedly forged to our discredit by some,” keep in mind that Catholics in the United States, especially recent immigrants, commonly suffered persecution. This statement was written barely two decades after the peak of the Know Nothing movement. Overt anti-Catholic nativism was still well within their living memory

I won’t use block quotation for the text.

SALUTATORY

OUR REVIEW, as its name points out, is to be Catholic and American. Its aim, therefore, will be to explain and defend the Catholic theory of revealed Truth, moral and dogmatic, as it really is, as it has been left us by the Apostles and defined by the Church; and to let men see how different is the base counterfeit of the same, wickedly forged to our discredit by some, and received in good faith as our doctrine by many others outside of our communion. It shall be our endeavor also to show the practical development and working of Catholic principle in the history of the world, in the lives of great and good men, and in the destinies of nations. In the history of mankind before and after the establishment of God’s Church on earth, we recognize no chaotic mass of events huddled together like Lucretian atoms by blind chance, or produced merely by the caprices and passions of men. We look upon it as a great book in which the true philosopher as well as the devout Christian may trace on every page the finger of Divine Providence. In it we find, as all must who study and reflect dispassionately, the perpetual presence and action of God, who moulds men and things at His will; calls into being, guides, preserves or destroys kingdoms and peoples for His own wise purposes; in a word, makes of nations, as well as of individuals, either trophies of His mercy, or standing memorials of His avenging justice.

In the days of old, when God was known only in Judah, and His name was not great outside of Israel, He abode quietly in Salem; and the Church of Sion was simply the depository of His revelation, the treasure-house in which were silently laid up the hopes of humanity. But the Church of the New Law has a more active mission; and hence in the history of the world, since the days of Christ, she is seen perpetually foremost as God’s visible agent in bringing peoples to the knowledge of divine truth; in renewing, or to speak more correctly, creating afresh their moral life; in educating and civilizing them, in improving and bettering their condition in all that concerns their intellectual and moral welfare. Whatever there yet remains of good and creditable in the civilization of Europe is the work of her hands, the legacy she has bequeathed to ungrateful states and kingdoms. Even now, buffeted and persecuted as she is in Europe, stripped of all earthly influence and humbled to the very dust by infidel statesmen — it is simply the moral power of her presence that prevents European society from taking the final plunge into the anarchy and barbarism, for which three centuries have been striving to prepare it. And in spite of many, who may be disposed to deny or doubt or sneer at our conviction, we feel assured, and have no hesitation in saying that our own country — if it is to be saved from the deluge of irreligion and immorality that is gradually threatening to submerge people and government — can only be saved by the influence of Christianity, as it is preached by the True Church of Christ. No paltry sects, born of human caprice, and, true to their origin, bending with all the whims and changes of human opinion, can ever succeed in drawing back our people from the abyss to which they are hurrying. Nothing can save us but the true Christian Creed, the only one in the world which has the boldness to teach our countrymen, in word and deed, that we are freemen not in name only, but that the freedom given us by Christ is our inalienable heritage with which we must not part; that neither the State nor Public Opinion is our lord and master, nor has either a right to command us in the moral, any more than in the intellectual sphere; that it is as unlawful for them to usurp power not their own, as it was for George III. and his Parliament; in short, that neither the State nor Public Opinion is the God of the true Christian, but that if either sets itself up against God and His Christ — as every modern State and the Public Opinion of our day seems mostly disposed to do — it becomes simply an engine of Satan for the destruction of souls, and the ruin of the commonwealth.

Some portion of our pages will be devoted to philosophy and science. True philosophy is, in some sense, the creation of Christianity. Nothing else could have purified the old Greek philosophy of its dross, superstition and skepticism, and confirmed by a divine unerring standard the old truths that primitive tradition had transmitted more or less distinctly to successive ages. All right-minded men may see what philosophy has become, ever since it shook off the guardianship of True Religion. From Bacon and Descartes there has been a logical succession of false teachers down to Kant, Fichte and Schelling, to whom we may add those boldfaced dogmatists, Büchner, Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, etc. The road is easy enough from mild skepticism down to Pantheism, Atheism and Nihilism.

Science has ever been, when not lifted out of its proper sphere, the willing handmaid of religion; and this for the simple, evident reason that truth being one can never contradict herself. Just before the outbreak of the so-called Reformation, the Catholic Church condemned the assertion that anything can be true in theology, which is false in philosophy. And to that teaching she still adheres. The sects may go down and perish before the advances of science “falsely so called.” They have this much in common, that both are born of private judgment, the fallibility of which is made a boast of by sectarians. But the infallible Church of God, besides her consciousness of divine origin, knows too that her Author is the same who gave laws to nature — “qui omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuit“ (Wisdom xi. 21 [“who has ordered all things in measure, number, and weight”]), and that His undivided sway rules all worlds, material and spiritual. Hence she looks undismayed upon the pretended science, born of heresy, that, while scouting her claims, pretends likewise to dethrone her Divine Founder. She may well afford to laugh at their pretensions, when she remembers that whatever constitutes the foundation of European science is due to her own fostering care; and that to her children the world owes all the important discoveries that have been made, from the starry pathways of heaven down to that dread amalgam, in which “villainous saltpetre” holds no little part, and which forms one of the chief elements of our boasted modern civilization.

[Text continues on the following page. To be republished tomorrow.]

Our Review, as its name points out, is to be Catholic and American. Its aim, therefore, will be to explain and defend the Catholic theory of revealed Truth, moral and dogmatic, as it really is, as it has been left us by the Apostles and defined by the Church; and to let men see how different is the base counterfeit of the same, wickedly forged to our discredit by some, and received in good faith as our doctrine by many others outside of our communion. It shall be our endeavor also to show the practical development and working of Catholic principle in the history of the world, in the lives of great and good men, and in the destinies of nations.

So begins the Salutatory in the first issue of The American Catholic Quarterly Review (ACQR), published January 1876, auspiciously, in the centenary year of the nation’s founding.

At its founding, the ACQR was, and understood itself to be, the successor to Orestes Brownson’s Quarterly Review, which for three decades prior had been the premier national journal of opinion for Catholics. Brownson from failing health had to give up publishing his review in October 1875. He was able to write a last essay before he passed away in April 1876, which was published as “The Philosophy of the Supernatural” in the ACQR’s inaugural issue. (We will reprint that essay here, with commentary, next week.)

The ACQR went on to publish 48 full volumes. It ceased publication after its first, January issue in 1924. (I do not know the reason why it suspended publication. One can see, from the many pages of advertisements in its issues from the 1920s, that it enjoyed widespread and substantial support among prosperous Catholics.)

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Our goal here is to revive the ACQR. We shall do so with the means we have currently available and in the manner which is most appropriate for publication in our day. Quarterly reviews are no longer a standard, while Substack is appropriate for a start-up, which is also an upstart. We will keep it as an open question whether we move towards a print publication and whether subscribers may receive if they wish a collection of our best work on a quarterly basis.

If you are a Catholic, perhaps you have a sense that there was once a serious and broad community of educated Catholics who engaged together in reflection at a high level, much to the benefit of the country. This community produced for instance the astounding Catholic Encyclopedia, published 1907-1914. You probably go to that Encyclopedia frequently and reflect that, now more than a hundred years later, it has not been superseded. Would a similar project today even be possible? (A new Catholic encyclopedia was attempted in the ‘60s, with many supplementary volumes to follow, but who consults it?)

If you were to dip into the pages of the ACQR, you would find your sense amply confirmed. You might even tear your garments. You would certainly attain the conviction, “They were builders then. We seem to be in ruins. How can we begin to rebuild?” One rebuilds with whatever tools are to hand. But one must have the intention to rebuild.

So, we wish to work towards the rebuilding of such a community, and, if it seems sensible, towards the full revival of the ACQR. For now, we call our endeavor the American Catholic Quarterly Review (which legal counsel says we may do) to signal that we wish to stand on the shoulders of those giants, and that our spirit is analogous. We are American, Catholic, and a review. Quarterly periodicity is incidental and may follow later.

Throughout this week, we will post the full content of that Salutatory I mentioned, with some light commentary. Often our posts will be to reprint and comment upon articles from the ACQR or Brownson.

That Salutatory ends as follows:

We are not without misgivings, either as to the arduous nature, or the probable success of our undertaking. We wish that some consciousness of power might enable us to say with the Roman Orator, “neque illud ipsum, quod est optimum, desperandum est ; et in praestantibus rebus magna sunt ea, quae sunt optimis proxima.” But at least we may say with the Umbrian poet: “In magnis et voluisse sat est.”

As if already to prove how disadvantaged we are—they left the Latin untranslated. It was assumed apparently that anyone interested in the Review would be able to construe it. But do not worry: we plan to translate all sentences not in English!

In the first, Cicero reassures aspiring orators that even if Roman orators cannot equal Demosthenes, they can approach him, just as some contemporaries of Demosthenes did: “We ought not to give up because the very best thing is unattainable: even to come close to the best thing is great, in any matter of surpassing excellence.”

The second is from Propertius (Elegiae 2.10.6) and means "In great undertakings even to have willed them is enough.”

These sayings easily represent the intentions of our project as well.

—

Yes, we certainly will reprint the essay in volume 1 of the ACQR, “The Classical Education of the Day.” And here’s a tease:

—

Your most obedient humble servant,

Michael Pakaluk

Editor-in-Chief

I am pleased to announce also that I will be assisted by several learned Associate Editors, who are Fellows at the Gibbons Institute and faculty at The Catholic University of America:

Joshua C. Benson, Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology

Jonathan Buttaci, Associate Professor of Philosophy

Thomas Clemmons, Associate Professor of Church History

David Elliot, Associate Professor of Moral Theology/Ethics and The Grace P. Hobelman Chair in Catholic Moral Theology