RecentReports reach us from England that a notable element in support of the cause of Cardinal Newman's canonization is the unusual extent of American devotion to him and to his thought. Certainly the name of Newman is great among us. Most American Catholic thinkers would agree with Otto Karrer, writing in April, 1947, for The Review of Politics on Newman and the spiritual crisis of the Occident, that Newman is probably “the most illustrious religious mind in the modern Anglo-Saxon world.” It is clear that he is the truly great eminence at the start of the Catholic intellectual renascence of the past hundred years. In our devotion to him and in our praise of him as a foremost thinker in the Church, it is well to consider what is the justification for the esteem in which we hold him.

In contemporary America institutional religion — the great religious bodies, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — grows with a vigor equalled only in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the last two decades church membership has increased at a ratio twice that of the rapidly accelerating population. Nearly every American affirms that he is a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew while three out of every five are actually members of one of the more than two hundred denominations which dot the religious landscape. In a period marked by economic depression, global war, and efforts to contain Communist totalitarianism, Americans look to religion as a major defense of democracy and the “American way of life.”

ToUnderstand the limited accomplishment of American Catholic intellectual activities in the second half of the twentieth century it is not sufficient to examine the immediate antecedents. The American Catholic history since the beginning of the first World War has, indeed, witnessed important efforts to raise Catholic intellectual activities to the level of traditional European Catholic culture, but these efforts have been handicapped by a bad starting point. The absence of similar efforts during the decades preceding World War I — a period in which Catholic intellectual activities were seriously out of step with the intellectual development of the United States — has much to do with the present mediocre status of Catholic intellectual activities and accomplishments. Unfortunately, the period in Catholic history between the Americanist controversy and the formation of the National Catholic War Council in 1917 has not been seriously studied and consequently its effect on subsequent American life is not fully understood.

Few historical challenges are so tantalizing as the attempt to account for the crushing blows which descended in ever-mounting crescendo upon the Catholic Church during the first century of Independence in Central and South America, regions where the population had been and remained close to 100 percent Catholic. The present study must begin by braving this challenge so as to place its subject matter in proper perspective.

In current ethical theory we have been getting two second-order phenomena, each a rebound from a first-order phenomenon.

The first-order phenomena, though with partly the same prompting, come from totally different fields and are miles apart. Even so, a main point of this paper is that the sets of second-order phenomena, rebounding from widely different data, may be tending to converge and, taken radically, may be saying the same thing.

Decline can be defined as the disruption of an established order, and if so defined, does not exclude the possibility of the simultaneous rise of new order. The “Decline of the West,” Spengler's term, is substantiated in the history of Western civilization, though not according to Spengler's theory, in the successive disruption of the community of belief, Christendom, through the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century, of the community of reason, or the Concert of Europe, as it was afterwards named, through the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and of the community of fear, the balance of power, through the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. A revolution, in every instance, is the overthrow of an established order. Whether the new order, if any, was better than the established order does not matter in deciding whether or not there has been a decline. Whether, for example, during the decline of the West there has been the rise of a scientific and technological community that has spread from the West to the world, giving substance to the slogan ”One World,” does not alter the fact that there has been a gradual disintegration of the established order in the West itself.

Diplomacy in the broadest sense is the conduct of foreign relations between politically independent entities through bilateral negotiations, multilateral conferences, or through the forum of multilateral organizations. Although modern means of transportation and communication have greatly diminished the importance of distances and boundaries, for a long time to come man will continue to live in separate political units called states. And in the foreseeable future, inter-state relations will be handled through foreign policy, the executive agents of which are diplomats.

Three topics follow one another in the opening chapter of the twelfth volume of the old Cambridge Modern History (1910), the one proudly entitled, “The Latest Age.” The table of contents identifies them as: the spread of democracy in Europe; the heavy burden of armaments; and the continental preponderance of Germany. The author (Stanley Leathes) expressed no alarm over the threat to European stability of such incompatible developments. Instead, he chose to comment that “The Latest Age” had been prosaic and dull, as if to suggest that Europe had solved its main political problems, and that an era of unbroken progress beckoned to an enlightened humanity.

TheInk used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence barely had time to dry before Americans began talking about a national literature. Debate was initiated which went on actively for 75 years — and indeed is still occasionally revived. From the first, two aspects of the subject were considered, two steps were recognized as necessary. The first was the problem of definition: what should be the materials of an American literature and what should be the spirit and purpose of American writers. The second was, of course, the actual creation of a body of literary work which should be recognizably and worthily American.

InTheFolklore of our national past the Federalist Period is often thought of as a golden age of demigods, who were almost infallible. The noisy dissent from the program of the Federalist administrations has been regarded as only a temporary deviation from the true American tradition.

The most frequently read accounts of the period — especially in college textbooks and other short works of synthesis — have generally tended to reduce the political events of that age to a chapter in the history of the “Age of Reason” and have thereby done some damage to our understanding. Casual readers of the story of this age seem to finish their reading with a mental summary in which the emphasis is on the intellect and logic — in short, on reason. An excellent example of this image as it occurs in the lore of even the learned is a recent comment on Senator J. William Fulbright by Senator Paul Douglas: “He's a child of the eighteenth century, a throwback to that age of enlightenment, trust in reason, temperate argument, and slightly aristocratic tendencies. That, I think, explains why he seems a little aloof, a little different from the rest.”

ToTheAverage American the experience of continuously rising prices in the midst of a business recession is a puzzling phenomenon. He has generally been led to believe that the operation of the economy is fundamentally subject to impersonal market forces, and that when demand falls market prices willalso fall and thus re-establish the balance between supply and demand. By the same token, this faith in the effectiveness of impersonal market forces has prevented the typical citizen from seeing the practical danger of continued inflation. Many have felt that prices could not continue to rise indefinitely without generating the decline in demand which would bring prices down.

In 1891 W. E. H. Lecky wrote a topical essay in which he observed ”that the kind of interest which belongs to Irish history is curiously different from that which attaches to the history of England and tothat of the great nations of the continent.… It is an invaluable study of morbid anatomy.” Irish history is indeed the study of sickness but of an induced, not a natural sickness. While Lecky's diagnosis for Ireland's malade historiqueleaves much to be desired, he was able to isolate a singularity of Irish history which should command more than the limited attention of interested historians. Irish history since 1691 is more than the tragic chronicle of ”the Pope and the potato,” it is the record of one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken to change a people. The magnitude of that effort makes the history of the Irish Penal Code a profitable field of study for all students of the behavioral sciences.

InTheSummer of 1958 the Gallup poll revealed that for the first time since 1955 a small majority of the British electorate favored the Conservative party. The narrowness of the margin made it dangerous for the Conservatives to call for a new election. But an election will take place within a year. The Conservatives are hopeful of another victory — a third successive victory over the Labour party, to cap their feat, unprecedented with the modern electorate, of increasing the parliamentary membership of the Government party in 1955. The Labour party, however, has been duly warned and has already rallied to cover its divisions, banishing them temporarily to the unconscious perhaps only to produce political neuroses in the future.