The Light of the East February 1942

Simeon knew that if his people had been given a special vocation if it was the elect of the Lord that vocation like every other divine appointment was designed for the good of all : CC I the Lord Have called thee in righteousness And have held thee by the hand ; I. keep thee and make of thee A covenant of the people The light of the nations To open the eyes of the blind To free the capt [...] The recent persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico and Spain the persecution of all the churches nay of all the religions in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany hardly yield the palm of inhumaity to the hands of either Nero or Diocletian. [...] It is thus clear that the work of erecting towers of Babel " of turning a religion into the rallying centre of a whole nation and thus ensuring the perfect unity of the latter is no longer the simple proposition which it was in the past. [...] And not much more is requires to strengthett and to convince the religious. masses that the fate of their religion is bound up with that of their country and thus to create or to maintain what we call communalism: the identification of peculiar religious interests with the interests of a nation or of a party. [...] In times of stress however the masses may easily revert to type and confuse again the spiritual and the temporal the service of God with that of Caesar.