The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1915-04-10

failure because the nations of Europe
protesting the religion of Christ, the
Prince of Peace, are now engaged in
one of the most terrible wars of his
tory. Why, they ask triumphantly,
had not the church sufficient spiritual
and moral power to prevent such Il
conflict? Why can it not restrain the
animal in man? They who speak thus
have wrong idea Of human nature,
entertain an erroneous view of the
relative worth of the material and the
spiritual, of the temporal and the
eternal, and labor under misappre-
hension of the mission of the Christian
religion. They forget that man has
free WILL that the heart has passions,
and that there exists in human nature
an inclination to evil. They lose sight
of the fact that the primary, super
natural work of the Church is the
sanctification of souls.
Not the prevention of scourges and
misfortunes such as war, famine, pes
thence and other physical calamities;
not the promotion of material pros
perity; not the well-being of the body,
but the salvation of the soul is her
chief concern. She puts the care of
the soul in the first place always, be-
cause the soul is precious beyond all
earth's richest treasures and even be-
yond human life itself. She considers
the affairs of everyday life important
in their own spheres. And they are
important and necessary as a means
to the final end of human life-as
stepping stones to the higher life-as
materials out of which ones future
home must be built
Much of the confusion of thought on
this subject may be traced to dis
torted conception of the reason why
Christ established His Church. They
who ignore the supernatural character
of the Church consider it principally
as an organization for the furtherance
of civic, humanitarian, philanthropic,
and educational activities; for the in
culcation of the principles of natural
ethics: and, if something of a religious,
spiritual nature must be added, the
commandments may be taught i'm q
diluted form. Starting from this prfn-
eiple they expect the church to make
Il specially not of the supreme inter-
tafs of the SOL, but ofsthe sralfaEe and
comforts of the body. "By its social
service alone" you shall Judge it. is
their motto.
On the other hand there are those
who regard Christianity as entirely
unsocial and even as antisocial They
claim that it must attend so exclu-
sively to the interests of the soul and
of eternity as totally to neglect and
despise and discourage the interests
of the body and of time as matters OF
absolute insignificance. B t we en
these two extremes lies the true esti-
mate of the mission of the Christian
religion. The gospel has an immense
social value. Though the Church exists
pre-eminently for souls she has not lost
sight of man as social being. Though
her teaching is not primarily trea-
tise on social reform it contains the
great, saving principles from which
the right organization of the social
order naturally follows. She attends
to the whole man, soul and body, and
has in view all his complex relations
to God and to his fellow beings, ac-
cording to their relative Importance.
By perfecting the individuals compos-
ing society she cannot but improve the
social world.
Nations ImperfectIy Christian.
1t is sad but true that the nations
of the world today are but very i'm
perfectly Christian. The Holy Father
in his encyclical letter writes: Never
perhaps was human brotherhood more
spoken of than at present. 1t is even
pretended though the words of the
gospel and the work of Christ and
His Church are forgotten that this
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and joined the Pious Society OF Mis-