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tional practices. Their doubts are appeased and the role of the
Church in supporting the regimes of Dollfuss, Mussolini and
Franco, its "neutrality" to Coughlin, appear as accidents in its
temporal career, in no way related to its essential nature.
To say that M. Maritain's ideas are dangerous is no argument
against them. M. Maritain would be the first to admit it. For
every idea that bears on social action is dangerous-whether it
be
true or false. The danger of M. Maritain's ideas is greater today
than they could have been at any time previously. For the demoral·
ization of the radical and socialist movements throughout the
world, the one indisputable consequence of Stalinism, gives M.
Maritain his great opportunity. Already many of the literati and
professionals have flocked back to their ivory towers from which
the depression drove them, intellectually defenseless, into the doc·
trinal storms. A few of greater intelligence and moral integrity,
have devoted themselves to the cultivation of a spirituality whose
logical consequence, whether in Tolstoy or in Aldous Huxley, is a
withdrawal not only from politics but from the world. To those
whom Hitler and Stalin have not frightened into making their peace
with capitalism, M. Maritain's "integral humanism" presents itself
more and more as the only apparent alternative to democratic
socialism in any of its reformulated variants.
M. Maritain broaches his philosophy of "integral humanism"
in a subtle and persuasive way. According to him the socialist
movement is a Christian heresy, doctrinally in error, but moved
by the same spiritual dynamism as historical Christianity. Indeed,
when M. Maritain speaks of the aims of Catholic "integral human·
ism," which seeks to found on a secure basis the modern and yet
age.old desire for a better life, his words would not be out of place
in a socialist tract.
This new humanism, which has in it nothing in com·
mon with bourgeois humanism, and is all the more human
since it does not worship man, but has a real and effective
respect for human dignity, and for the rights of human
personality, I see as directed towards a socio.temporal
realisation of that evangelical concern for humanity which
ought not to exist only in the spiritual order, but to become
incarnate; and towards the ideal of a true brotherhood
