The Races and the Rood

Irish Jesuit Province

The Races and the RoodAuthor(s): R. Ó FaracháinSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 65, No. 769 (Jul., 1937), pp. 455-460Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514159 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 03:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Irish Jesuit Province is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Monthly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.60 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:43:18 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ijp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514159?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


455

The Races and the Rood

By R. 0 FARACHAIN.

N TEVER more than now ' have the Gentiles raged and the nations devised vain things'. Among the vainest is

the idol of Race. In Germany the Aryan, in the United States the 'huindred-per-cent. American despises Jews, negroes, and Latin peoples primarily, and other in lesser

degrees. The thin white line in Australia arrogates to itself the name of ' the Australian people ', wishes us to forget the bush

men, and thinks itself justified in penning-up the yellow peoples within inadequate territory, claiming a continent when they cannot populate a province. In South Africa divisions into ' whites ', ' natives ' and 'coloured ' are as rigid as deter

mination and ingenuity can make them. In India there is the abominable native caste system, and the British domrination of ' the lesser breeds without the law '. These things are sensible to us in Ireland: there remain a few amongst us in whose eyes

we are still ' the mere Irish ', a crime not to be lived dowrn. In what light must one see these things if one looks froni the

foot of the Cross? 'When the Cross is standing it joins the eart and Heaven, and when it is cast down it points to the fouir corners of the world. Christ said 'all nations'; more: 'every creature

But: there may be a ' chosen people'; there has been one. Yes: but 'you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.' A people may have a vocation. But that means (1) that God decides to give it power, not that it has of itself a power which others lack; (2) that it is called to do some opus Dei,



456 THE IRISH MONTHLY

not to seek to aggrandise itself. And taken so, can we say that any people lacks a vocation, or has nothing to give even to those from whom it receives?

Is it consistent with reason that 'blood and soil can make one commnunity as a whole permanently superior to another? So that the one may take from the other liberty, property, equality before the law, and the right to propa gate? These are rights deducible from the rational nature of

man, and German, Turk, Hindu, Negro and Chinaman possess that claim to them.

Further, is it consistent with Christianity that a section of the population of a country, controlling its wealth and power, shall use these to refuse equality of education, opportunities, and social intercourse to the more helpless section? Rather, since wealth and power are vocations, too, has not the temporarily subordi nate section a special claim to such opportunities?

White men did three things to the American Indian. They robbed him, they demoralised him, and they segregated him. They almost exterminated him. They did not, I think, rob the American negro, in the sense of taking from him what he had. They were reasonable: they saw he had nothing, except his labour-power; so they took only that. In addition to being reasonable they were merciful: they took only some of it for nothing. They have partly demoralised him-by allowing his baser products to become their national music and dances. rhey segregate him as far as their selfish need of him will permit.

I am not trying to suggest that the so-called ' negro problem' in the U.S., may be solved en passant. In fact, an American Jesuit, Father John La Farge, has doomed that notion in his book Interracial Justice, just published by the America

Press, New York, at two dollars. He does show that the only possible approach to a solution is that of the Church. The



THE RACES AND THE ROOD 457

Church's duty towards men may be summed up in two words: education and ministration. She has that duty towards all men. Hence she must ally herself with the negro, and welcome him to her schools and churches. The present Holy Father has made it clear that she does not intend him to remain in the benches or out side the altar-rails. He is to be trained for the teacher's desk and for the altar. But Father La Farge is in earnest, and he has had much experience. He knows that priests are sometimes forced, by their own prejudice, or by their weakness in the face of the prejudice of their flock, to act against the mind of the Church. (The classic example is the matter of Church music.)

' Peculiarly painful and anomalous is segregation when it penetrates the House of God. Hlere again there is a bewildering variety of custom, which largely but by no means wholly follows geographical lines. Negroes are frankly excluded, at the whim of some local pastor, from even entering certain northern churches, on the plea that they are being ' provided for else where ',or without any semblance of excuse. In other churches separate -seating is provided. Certain churches, while adhering to the seating restrictions, observe no distinction in their ministra tions of the Sacraments or other evidence of parochial care. One of the largest and most fashionable Catholic churches of New Orleans is said to observe no distinction of any form in its treat ment of white and coloured parishioners in the House of God.'

' Negroes listen, in northern churches, to sermons that impress upon the congregation the duty of sending Catholic children to Catholic schools, from the parochial school to the University. Yet if they attempt to comply with this rigid requirement of the Canon Law of the Church, as well as of the natural law of

God, they are infornmed in many instances that they are not wanted, and that their presence would amount to a revolution. But in a neighbouring town or parish they will find that exactly




similar conditions prevail, and yet negro children frequent the school without any semblance of disturbance.'

Compare this, from African Adventure by Father James, O.M.Cap.: ' It is almost incredible, but white people do object to frequenting the same church as ' coloured '. His Lordship, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Henneman, the present Vicar Apostolic of

Cape Town, wvas making an effort, when I was in Cape Town, to form a Catholic Younig Men's Society that would ignore the

colour problem. Many expressed the fear that nothing would come of his attempt: the trouble was too deep-rooted.'

And yet, if these problems are to be solved, only the doctrine of Christ can solve them. The attitude of the normal Catholic

mind towards the colour-bar was shown in the Phoenix Park five years ago, after the children's Mass of the Eucharistic Congress. The cars of the prelates glided out of the Park to the youngsters' cheers, and none got such rousing ones as a negro bishop, whose name I have forgotten.

In the book to which I referred just now, Interracial Justice, the author sets out" A Catholic Interracial Programme ' which is the fruit of fifteen years' missionary experience. This, and the rest of the book, is marked with sanity and understanding.

The race problem arises not only within a community, but between communities. It is one of the alleged raisons d'etre for the League of Nations. For the Christian it is elementary to deduce from the amorality of the League its impotence. I'here

are, however, Catholics who believe that it has done, and may yet do, great good among the nations. Comte de Sainte Aulaire is niot one of these. I have seldom read a more able, pitiless or wvitty indictment than that he has made of the Ljeague in Geneva versus Peace.1

M. le Comte has held high rank in the French Diplomatic

iSheed & Ward, London. 7/6.



THE RACES AND THE ROOD 459

Service in Morocco, Madrid, and London. The wide experi ence he gained in the service, with his alert, cultured mind, and his gift for words, make him a critic difficult to answer.

Should anyone attempt to do so sufficiently I should follow the struggle with interest and relish. For the present it is enough to suggest the quality of his book.

First, matter: Twenty-three member States have not paid their subscriptions for years, and none has been expelled. Hlow is the deficit made up? The author surmises that possibly the subscriptions which are paid are so liberal that the League is solvent. But then the rich States must get control for their

money. Freemasonry, as the agent of Jewry, established and directs

the League. The application of sanctions against Italy was Free masonry's revenge on Mussolini for his successful drive against them in his country.

The New York bankers financed the Bolshevist Revolution. The League was Hitler's electioneering agent in the Saar.

Second: manner: ' . . . . all democracy sinks into plutocracy. This fact emphasises the imposture of an institution which givesV itself (the League) out as a new religion and invites France to

sacrifice herself at the foot of a tabernacle which is nothing but a strong box.' 'The League of Nations, like a woman, loves to be thrashed and was at once subdued. Having become the,

Reich's humble slave, the League could refuse nothing to keep him, and abeve all else to bring him back to Geneva.'

It pleases the ironic sense to pass at once to a German's study of the race business: Christianity and Race.2 It, too, is written

by a Catholic, and it offers instead of M. le Comte's adroitness and ebullience, depth of thought and theological learning. It is not less unexpected in its opinions: for example, Dr. Pinsk

?Sheed & Ward, London. 2/6.




detenninedly asserts that not only does each nation receive from the Church, but each contributes to her. He does not press this so far as to find in it a justification of the German revolt against the concrete, Roman-Hellenistic forms through which the Church works in time. On the contrary, he holds, as perhaps other Catholics would not, ' that these forms, through the fact that the all-embracing Divine Life is given shape in them, through their union with the Divine Life, have received an abso lute character similar to that received by the human nature of Jesus, despite its creaturely particularity '. But he pierces down to such profound psychological bases that he honours Latin and German:

' Indeed, it is the precise mark of the Latin man, taken as a type, that he preserves the forms, and so even after centuries of torpidity, offers succeeding generations the possibility of regain ing and activating the life preserved in these forms. The religious fervour of the German, on the other hand-the genuine ness and mystical character of which need not be disputed in the individual-which longs passionately for self-sufficient, that is to say, direct personal union with God, shatters in very virtue of its passionateness the religious forms which nevertheless are and remain the irreplaceable bearers of the Divine Life in the economy of salvation established by Christ.'

A difficult little book to read, but profitable.



Documents

The Races and the Rood