Christian Crisis

Christian Crisis by Michael de la Bedoyere, 210 pages

Surveying the world in the dark year of 1940, Catholic journalist de la Bedoyere chose to explore the truth and meaning of the cliche that the solution to the world's ills could be found in Christianity.  He begins with the fundamental truth that man is a moral animal - that is, that all human beings seek the good.  It is the identification of the good that is at issue in the struggles between men and nations.  In these conflicts, Christianity has yielded its place as the major spiritual force in Europe to "Dawnism", the progressive drive expressed in distinct yet complementary ways by British laissez faire capitalism and the demands for egalitarian utopia and national renewal emerging out of the French Revolution, inspiring the mass movements of Socialism and Nationalism.  Unfortunately, in de la Bedoyere's view, the response of Catholics to the discontinuity this shift introduced between the sacred and the secular spheres has generally been either to retreat into an entirely ecclesiastical understanding which wholly denies the importance of the secular or to prioritize the secular and restrict the sacred sphere to what happens inside a church.

For de la Bedoyere, these changes are self-destructive, both for secular society and for the Church.  The values central to Dawnism and its offspring are Christian values, but removed from their Christian context and fetishized.  This being so, what the Church offers society is a framework into which these values are integrated and within which their competing claims can be assessed, without which they become warring absolutes and end in tyranny, as with fascism and communism.  In order to carry out this task, however, the Church requires an educated and energized laity aware of the dignity of both the secular and the sacred.