Integrity
July 1954
We don't know if our readers have heard the expression "Pollyanna Catholicism" before but we're certain that they'll recognize its manifestations all around them. The logical outcome o f the spirit of "Pollyanna Catholicism" is strikingly shown in the ghastly movie "Demetrius and the Gladiators," in which history is rewritten so that all the early Christians-including St. Peter escape martyrdom and settle down to enjoy life!
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, at present living in Austria, is familiar to American Catholics as a writer and lecturer. He dedicates his article to G. C., who is active in the ecuмenical movement. [I am not quite sure what to make of this however I believe the article is quite good and raises some interesting points]
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: Corruptio optimi pessima is an old Latin proverb implying that nothing is worse than the best things in their decadence, apostatizing from their essence and betraying their mission. A fallen angel like Lucifer, a treacherous apostle like Judas Iscariot, a rotten pope like John XXIII, a wicked king like Henry VIII-they all prove this saying without fail. Yet what is true of persons is also terribly true of nations-seemingly only very great nations can fall very low-and, in a way, can equally be applied to ideas, to verities and even to divine institutions. In this case, of course, man himself is the corruptor.Small sects of little historic importance, one has to admit, have often achieved a remarkable degree of "limited perfection," but if we believe that the corruption of the best is the worst, then the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church must have produced the worst aberrations. This precisely is the case. The Plymouth Brethren never had in their ranks anyone like some of the late medieval popes, and the rectories of the United Southern Four Square Gospel Methodist Church hardly ever were such sinks of iniquities as some of our fifteenth century convents. The very survival of our Church as Boccaccio's Parisian Jєω in his Decamerone knew only too well-is not the work of man, but of God. Without the divine promises and the fact that the Church is Christ's Mystical Body, we would have gone down the drain of history a long, long time ago.
a wart on the Body
Still, when we are talking about "Pollyanna Catholicism" we are not dealing with a grave and universal cancer on the body Catholic. This is a minor and localized disease which has the character of a wart rather than of a tumor. Yet a wart can have a disfiguring effect and on the tip of a fair maiden's nose it might prevent her enjoying the bliss of love or be an unsurmountable obstacle on her road to marriage. For this reason the beauty defects of our Church are no laughing matter and, in a way, have to be taken seriously. How many outside the fold caught glimpses of Catholic life which made them shudder and, sometimes, forever dissuaded them from taking another look at a closer range: the Presbyterian minister who once, out of a mixture of boredom and whimsical curiosity, opened a Catholic periodical which emanated an almost diabolic spirit of hatred, spite and rancor; the sensitive Episcopalian lady who gasped with horror when she ventured into a Catholic church and there saw an orgy of all artistic monstrosities of the late nineteenth century; the inquisitive young Jєω from the University of Chicago, fed a "Catholicism" consisting of oversimplifications, glib phrases and other "shortcuts" to truth everlasting.
All these men and women stumbled over a mere footnote of the Church. It certainly is their fault that they never arrived at the essence of truth on earth. It is their fault to have been thwarted by so little, theirs-and ours, Ours indeed, because we are responsible for the face and the expression of the Church. How can we go on expecting grace swiftly to surmount the needless psychological obstacles engendered by the frightful blemishes of a disfigured Mystical Body?
"Catholicism is fun"
"Pollyanna Catholicism" exists only in English-speaking countries. In all our travels and trips we have not found it anywhere else. The term itself we have chosen because we are here face to face with a phenomenon which not only almost assumes the character of an "ism," but also because its essence is a naive, childish-I would almost say girlish-gladness. Yet this "gladness" is not the deeper, inner gladness which is almost synonymous with joy, but rather the superficial happiness related to the "glad guy." The "message" of "Pollyanna Catholicism" is very simple: "Catholicism is fun." As a matter of fact it is a scream to be a Catholic; priests and nuns are the dearest, jolliest, sweetest and killingest people under the sun; tragedy or sadness is only for the mentally deranged, for atheists and highbrow sourpusses. The truths, truisms and commonplaces of our faith are so simple and so snappy that any child, movie actor or music hall comedian could pick them up and digest them in a jiffy; to see insoluble problems in this world is sheer Jansenism. A cocktail of fragments haphazardly torn out of certain encyclicals plus a pêle-mêle of Summa citations served with a sauce of wisecracks copied from Chesterton solves everything.
To all this must be added the conviction that had we only the right cartoonists, nine more Jimmy Durantes, a hundred-thousandbucks-a-year public relations man in Rome, Hollywood, Washington and Radio City we might get, for our Church, Western civilization neatly delivered in a package. A better hold on television, an all-Catholic baseball team winning the World Series, and a copy of the Cozy Catholic Convert's Catechism in the night-table drawer of every hotel, alongside the Gideon Bible, would make the evils of the world disappear in no time.
mirth is a virtue
These observations do not imply in the least that there is something basically wrong with America, Britain, Canada and the other Dominions Beyond the Sea. Every nation has its virtues and shortcomings, its mediocrities and banalities. Humor is a wonderful thing and it is a concomitant of Christianity because the disproportion between the sublime and the base, the perfect and the imperfect, the eternal and the temporal constantly will appeal to our sense of humor, an advantage the monistic-materialistic world certainly does not possess. The gospels, we must admit, never recorded that Our Lord laughed or that He even smiled. These accounts necessarily are incomplete, yet if, indeed, Christ never gave external signs of having been amused, one might explain this from His divine nature because God sees everything at once in its "completeness" and (potential) fulfillment. The realization of the comic pertains to man's and, especially, to fallen man's psychological structure. Saint Thomas was well aware of that and called lack of mirth positively sinful.
"Pollyanna Catholicism" is not genuinely humorous. It never evokes liberating laughters, because laughing expresses something extreme, and from extremes "Pollyanna Catholicism" naturally recoils. It stands for "small change." It is refined mediocrity. It is "Lilliput Catholicism" for religious pygmies. It is incompatible with sanctity because it is opposed to greatness. With all the joy the saints are carrying in themselves, they make us somewhat uncomfortable, or at least restless. "Pollyanna Catholicism" on the other hand puts us "at ease." It promises us a Mohammedan paradise (minus sex) on earth. It has no understanding whatsoever for the words of Leon Bloy: "Jesus, Thou prayest for those who crucify Thee, and Thou crucifiest those who love Thee."
mournful and medieval
Yet we are convinced that "Pollyanna Catholicism" has roots which are probably British rather than American, English rather than Irish, Welsh or Scotch. It has been born in a spirit of analogy to a particular type of a (more or less) genteel Anglicanism aglow with an aura of all sorts of niceties. This all-too-short allusion surely will be understood by all those familiar with a certain aspect of the English scene dominated by a "dry humor" and a real horror for all absolutes. Still, nursery-rhyme Anglicanism alone does not explain the rise of "Pollyanna Catholicism." Equally important is an old charge against our faith, to wit that it is "medieval," mournful, reactionary, repressive, cruel, morbid and enslaving. And, indeed, in certain areas of the Catholic world, medieval aspects of life and faith still survive. The burial brotherhoods in some of the Mediterranean cities, the Penitentes in the New World, the vaults of the Capuchins in Rome where the skeletons of the Princesses Barberini tastefully assembled as candelabras are dangling from the ceiling, or the corridors of the Franciscan Monastery in Palermo with the deceased brothers leaning as mummies against the wall-all this is a little bit too much for the nerves and dispositions of "enlightened" and "progressive" British and American travellers-among whom, oddly enough, we would have to include our "Pollyanna Catholics."
From Froude and Kingsley to Maria Monk and Coulton there has always been a holy terror inspired by the Catholic faith and Catholic forms as something magic, demonic and immoral. "Pollyanna Catholicism" came into existence in order to deflate this very picture of an ancient, demoniacal and sinister Catholicism and to represent it as something entirely harmless and tame. It rose from the pages of Catholic humorists and apologists, from the drawing boards of Catholic cartoonists and from the lips of Catholic soapbox orators and after-dinner speakers. It was born as a piece of clever defensive action, part mimicry, part counterattack, and intoxicated primarily those busy in manufacturing this brew. We have within our ranks real addicts to "Pollyanna Catholicism," and there is a certain danger that it might become the popular form of the faith of a most important part of the Catholic orbit.
it's all a joke
What then is the essence of "Pollyanna Catholicism"? First of all, it tells to the faithful and the infidels alike that the faith is by no means a "yoke" (the sweet yoke of Christ) but that to be a Catholic is great fun. It tells us that as soon as you become a Catholic almost every problem is solved, every intellectual question is answered, every dilemma disposed of. The cross which every Christian has to carry is naively forgotten. We are being told that there is nothing at all serious, tragic, profound or esoteric about the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith, which are hilarious as a comic strip, easy to understand as an elementary reader, painless as a haircut, modern as a jet plane, chummy as an Elk convention, soothing as a cough syrup, smart and fashionable as a Dior dress, streamlined as a Studebaker and more advantageous for your mental health than five thousand dollars worth of brain surgery. There is nothing, so the argument goes, that we had not ages ago, that we have not the answer for. St. Augustine anticipated Charles Darwin; the mystics with their gift of ubiquity got better service than we from railroads or television; Chesterton, Belloc, St. Thomas and Suarez had all the answers for all the questions. He who does not join the Catholic Church is a fool who misses the best things in life rather than-as in many cases a tragic figure wrestling against terrible odds with the meaning of human existence. Hardly are we aware of the fact that some of those outside the Church have not seen anything but "Pollyanna Catholicism," this pseudo-Catholic clowning on a family circus level which has the tendency to branch out in all sorts of directions.
"Pollyanna Catholicism" rests on a profound error as to the true spirit of our faith. There is, as we have stated before, such a thing as Catholic humor and even, believe it or not, Catholic satire. But neither of these has anything to do with that cheap sweetness we get in the comic, darling Little Nuns with their pouting mouths like baby carps or the Father who looks like a clerical Dick Tracy, Jack Dempsey and Bing Crosby rolled into one. Don't misunderstand me; a true Catholic is anything but a "clerical"; there are innumerable priests, friars and nuns who are extremely comical and present excellent targets for humor and satire. There is nothing at all wrong in joking about the terrestrial aspects of the Catholic laity or the hierarchy. "Reverence" of that sort never characterized Catholic civilizations. Yet there is, I am afraid, nothing intrinsically amusing, funny, comical or droll about being a priest or a nun. The decision for entering upon that state of life is deadly serious.
"a vale of tears"
Every conscious imitation of Christ is deadly serious because the Savior's life on earth, thoroughly changing mankind's relation with God, was of unique importance-the whole life of Christ, starting with the dramatic circuмstances of His Incarnation, birth, the flight to Egypt, and leading finally to the Garden of Gethsemani where the Son of Man was sweating blood, to betrayal, to the cruel death on the Cross, the rising from the dead, Ascension and martyrdom of almost all of His disciples. "Jesus will agonize until the end of the world; one ought not to sleep during this time." Naturally one can charge that Pascal, who wrote these words, was a Jansenist which, indeed, he was, but the fact remains that the agony in the Garden of Gethsemani, the darling Little Nuns and the two-fisted crooning priests from the Hollywood movies providing box office records, just do not mix. (Don Camillo may be two-fisted, but we have seen him in terrible solitude, deserted, and with tears in his eyes. No pillar of "Pollyanna Catholicism' he! )
By concentrating on the frills of our faith, by remaining deaf to the nostalgia of tortured souls and honestly inquiring minds outside of our community, by cheapening down and distorting the very character of the gospels, by ignoring the fact that God is still essentially to us a Hidden God, whom man frequently can only approach after terrible struggles, ceaseless efforts and desperate calls-we are doing something truly negative. Of course, real despair for the Christian is not legitimate, but the Christian certainly can be sad. "Pollyanna Catholics" should take notice that this earth is a "vale of tears," and that there is nothing Jansenistic or Manichaean about this passage in a great prayer. A short moment of recollection reminding us of the diabolic suffering of millions of fellow Christians east of the Iron Curtain should predispose us to view the gαy manifestations of "Pollyanna Catholicism" at least with a slight air of skepticism.
One repeatedly encounters a standard defense of this "Catholicism in Six Easy Lessons." The average non-Catholic, so the argument runs, presented with this nifty and charming picture of the faith and the Church, will drop all his odious prejudices and immediately "fall" for the Mystical Body. That this occasionally may be true, we will not deny. Still, one has to doubt that by this sort of bait we will attract the very best outside the Church, those who need the truth and the light most. There is a definite danger that this picture of the faith will primarily appeal to the lightweights who, out of a certain emptiness and metaphysical boredom, are just "shopping around" and are happy to find a "handy," arty and charming religion which now, losing its social handicaps, is getting a foothold in the mink-coat set and also provides their flabby souls with a snugly fitting corset. There is no escape from suffering, and it is the Cross which makes suffering meaningful, thus eliminating despair which is the product of senseless suffering. It was Strindberg who asked for the epitaph on his tombstone: "Ave 0 Crux, Unica Spes." From mere Fish-onFriday people we, again, ought to become the depositaries of the Cross.
"Catholic Smart Aleckism"
No doubt the quest of the very best, of suffering souls and thirsting minds, will not effectively be met by the cheap images, the snap arguments, the sometimes arrogant salesmanship of "Pollyanna Catholicism" and "Catholic Smart Aleckism," the twin brother of the former. The latter reaches much further than Catholic cartoons, movies, wisecracks, bon mots and rectory jokes. "Catholic Smart Aleckism" promises "all the answers to all the questions" and thus acts as the intellectual counterpart to the superficial sentimentalities of "Pollyanna Catholicism." "Problems? Only the others have 'em; we've solved them all," as a Catholic philosophy professor once declared to his students in class. "Catholic Smart Aleckism" implies that if only the papal encyclicals would be put into action, straight Thomism would be taught in Harvard and strict enough laws would be passed to prevent the sale of modern novels and the showing of films with D ratings, the Devil would be licked, the Kremlin would collapse, history would come to a standstill, and all moral, economic, psychological and political problems eliminated.
It can be argued that this cocksure optimism has to be understood against the background of the ghastly failure of modern civilization, but modern man, however miserable and desperate, vaguely senses that our "Catholic Smart Alecks" overreach themselves. "The history of every human being is the history of a failure," is a sentence from Sartre, but in earthly relations it is quite correct. Wye can hope for heaven, but not f or paradise. We cannot promise paradise because man's nature is a fallen nature, and because emphatically while having some answers, we do not have all the answers. God alone has then, To put ourselves in God's place is sheer blasphemy. For every answer we find (and we constantly find new, valid answers) there are ten or a hundred more new problems to be solved. To the uneducated or uninitiated in or outside the Church our knowledge looks like the huge, concrete surface of a giant airdrome, but once the plane is high up in the air the solid, immutable concrete mass appears hardly to be larger than a postage stamp.
no more problems!
Much of this particular evil, which repels rather than attracts the non-Catholic, is due to the training in Catholic colleges. Mr. (now Father) William B. Hill in a brilliant article published in America (March 13, 1943) acknowledged that "there is ample evidence that medieval philosophy and sixteenth century apologetics, as they are combined in our colleges, have been largely responsible for some of the imperfections of our graduates." No wonder that after leaving college the student's "tendency henceforward is to become an angry champion of faith and morals." He engenders "Smart Aleckism" on the highest level. Fully confident that he will crash the gates and shake the world by coldly building up mountainous arguments out of dry syllogisms he remains blissfully ignorant that "life lays a trap for logicians. The more logically sound they are, the less psychologically sound they may be."
Again and again we have witnessed discussions in which the Catholic participants have pulled out arguments with the ease and good-humored contempt of a magician pulling rabbits out of his top hat. Again and again we have heard concepts like the "Natural Law" glibly mentioned by these terribles simpli ficateurs as if its existence could be proved with a swift legerdemain. Boundless irritation on one side and the thinly veiled accusation of invincible ignorance suggested on the other, with the abyss wider than ever before, have been only too often the result of such "conversations"-conversations, not conversions. Yet invincible ignorance characterizes fallen man and we all are invincibly ignorant in some matters. No wonder therefore that this failing frequently appears where reason alone is bound to founder and ("incalculable") grace has to co-operate. Our faith cannot adequately be approached by an intellectual "Smart Aleckism" because its great mysteries will always escape the "deft handling" by "thinking machines," be they of a human order or a product of I.B.M. Of all this St. Thomas was acutely aware when years before his death he had laid down his pen.
And since we have alluded to the soap box before, let me remind you of a brilliant orator, the late Father Vincent McNabb, whose saintliness captivated and impressed all those who listened to him. Though certainly capable of "thinking on his feet" his honesty never permitted him to reply to hecklers and sincere inquirers with snap answers. Again and again. he would humbly say, awkwardly smiling: "I just could not tell you," "I really don't know," "I would have to think that over." Yet curiously enough, each time he confessed his ignorance, he scored for the cause he defended.
the Church Militant
"Pollyanna Catholicism" and "Catholic Smart Aleckism" with their racy clichees, their arrogance and oversimplifications have, to the "outsider," another meaning than to the addicts of these deviations within our ranks. These two phenomena help to convince the non-Catholics that the Church is something like a colossal industrial enterprise, a super Standard Oil with armies of devoted, slogan shouting, unthinking partisans on the march and a variety of circus performances as a "come on," running at the same time. Yet the Church is by no means a smoothly functioning mammoth institution of clowns and robots, directed by a general manager with twenty-four table phones and seventy secretaries. Neither is she an international chain of soul clinics and life guidance centers, nor is her theology a gigantic file of ten thousand little drawers with "all the answers" in form of a streamlined, divine "Information, Please! " Indeed it is good to be a Catholic, it is a noble thing and pleasing in the eyes of God to be a good Catholic, and God wants everyone to be a good Catholic. But it is by no means always "great fun" to be a Catholic. It may involve inhuman suffering-and not only from the hands of fanatic enemies of Christ and His Church. Worse than that: one may suffer not only with the Church, but also within the Church and through the Church.
This, our Church, is the Church Militant and this implies a real, live organism with all the human passions on the loose and which, therefore, can go through every imaginable crisis in which obedience is clashing with disobedience, loyalty with disloyalty, intelligence with stupidity, generosity with greed, sanctity with real evil, surrender to God's will with naked ambition. The two thousand-year-old tradition, the rational character of our doctrines, infallibility on the highest plane-all this does not dispense the individual thinking, struggling Catholic from wrestling in a very personal way with each tenet, each new cognition, each problem in life. The tasks may be clear, but they have to be mastered nonetheless. The true Catholic is fully a human being, home sapiens, proles Dei, dedicated to the quest of truth, "condemned to be free," exposed to all risks, called to create-and neither a clown, a parrot or a robot.