Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/395

 S THRONE 381

be none, any more than there can be a logic of the Christian story of salvation. Nevertheless every student of the Papacy must carefully consider its own inner definition of itself and its consciousness of its divine origin. If he fails to do so, his story and verdict will not do justice to the theme and will apply the norms of secular statesmanship to what is the government of a superstate. Unfortunately the long school of the past has in neither respect always and everywhere in- structed the present.

The totalitarian theories of the state, which in European countries have been derived from naturalistic thought or deduced from Hegel, are fundamentally in conflict with the Catholic Church. This fact no merely external code of good manners can gloss over. What is most obvious about these states is a program either expressly godless, or hostile to Christianity, or anti-Christian under a Christian name a program according to which the government and the promotion of the national welfare are carried out. Wholly in the spirit of earlier pagan definitions of the state, or it may be in the spirit of a philosophy which regards the people as the highest absolute value, there rises a naked naturalism which is always in open or secret antagonism to the Roman Catholic Church as the theoretical and practical obstacle to a totalitarian control by the State of totalitarian man, including his re- ligious life. One system may lay the emphasis more on humanitarian and popular desires, and another may place it more on the will to power; here the State may assume the pose of a Redeemer, and there it may act as a disciplinarian of bodies and souls. But common to both is a dictatorial system inside which freedom has no place, a con- cept of the world which does not transcend the world, and a definition of society and subservience, of nature and "eternity," of the meaning of the state and the meaning of life, which ignores Christianity as a supernatural revelation and as a society having totally alien definitions of all these things. Or the state may usurp the Catholic religious terminology, give to each sacred word a content derived from the natural order alone, and so seek to depopulate Christendom without expressly declaring war, or indeed even while professing tolerance. If such a state parallels the organic structure of the Catholic Church in a certain sense, its appeal to the masses will not be impaired; and still less of an obstacle is a concurrence in the basic mystical feeling that

382