18
PARTISAN REVIEW
What is not understood so well is the fact that its official
doctrinal
teachings, although compatible with a "hierarchial, authoritarian
democracy," are incompatible with the specific freedoms in the
Bill of Rights, including religious toleration, which are essential
to the democracy-we know. Christian morality is Catholic morality
and the Christian state is bound before God and man to carry out
the precepts of morality as interpreted by the Church, which
insists that the salvation of the soul is its chief concern, and that
outside of the Church there is no salvation. Insofar as it is weak
and its communicants in a minority, the Church tolerates modern
freedoms and liberties. Where it is strong enough, ·it suppresses
them, particularly the propagation of "false" religious teachings
by other groups that may undermine "true" Catholic belief.
That these are not recondite inferences of a suspicious critic
of church history is shockingly evident in the Papal Encyclical,
Libertas,
of Leo XIII. That American churchmen are faithful
to this doctrine is just as clear. Fathers Ryan and Boland
in
their
authoritative
Catholic Principles of Politics
explicity
say
that if
professing Catholics constituted a IJ?.ajority of the population in
the United States, the state they would set up "could not permit
non-Catholic sects to carry on general propaganda nor accord their
organizations certain privileges that had formerly been extended
to all religious corporations, for example, exemption from taxa–
tion." (p. 200)*
•It
is interesting to note that taxation was one of the means used by the Soviet
State to wipe out Russian churches. The curious reasoning by which Msgr. Ryan
justifies this .position is detailed in another book:
"As we have already pointed out, the men who defend the principle of toleration
for all varietities of religious opinion, assume either that all religions are equally
true or that the true cannot be distinguished from the false. On no other ground
is it logically possible to accept the theory of indiscriminate and universal tolera–
tion
(&ic!).
·"To the objection that the foregoing argument can be turned against Catholics by
a non-Catholic State, there are two replies. First, if such a State should prohibit
Catholic worship or preaching on the plea that it was wrong and injurious to the
community, the assumption would be false; therefore the two cases are not parallel.
Second, a Protestant State could not logically take such an attitude (although many
of them· did so in former centuries) because no Protestant sect claims to be infallible.
Besides, the Protestant principle of private judgment logically implies that Catholics
may be right in their religious convictions, and that they have a right to hold and
preach them without molestation.
· "Such in its ultimate rigor and complete implications is the Catholic position
concerning the alliance that should exist between the Church and a Catholic State."
Ryan and Miller
The State and Church,
Macmillan 1937, pp.36-37
