Of Men & Dignity

Following custom, the Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. met in annual session last week, and gave thought to the state of the church, the nation and the world. From their meeting in Washington came two carefully pondered messages.

The first, entitled "Peter's Chains," addressed itself sharply to the persecution of Catholic priests and communicants behind the Iron Curtain. "We in the free countries," the bishops said, "still speak of a cold war; these men and women are enduring the bitterest, the bloodiest persecution in all history . . .

"When will men in the free world come to realize that the crisis of today is first of all a crisis of religion, that the Communist debaser of man is essentially a hater of God, and that both his long-range and his short-range purpose is the destruction of Christianity?"

Persons & Things. But it was the second message, issued at meeting's end, which contained the bishops' traditional text of the year. Ignoring headlines and specific day-to-day events, they gave this statement the simple title, "The Dignity of Man." Excerpts:

"The Catholic Church has always taught and defended the natural dignity of every human being . . . She has reminded mankind that there is a great division between 'things' and 'men.' She has never forgotten that 'things' were made for men and that 'men' were made for God . . .

"The practical social theory of the last century enthroned the individual but not the person. An individual can be a thing, as for instance, an individual tree; but in virtue of his rational soul, a person is more than a thing. Yet the depersonalized view of man gained ascendancy, and generated a society which was a crisscross of individual egotisms and in which each man sought his own.

"Against this error, our century has seen a reaction which has sought to overcome the isolation of man from man by imposing upon rebellious individuals a pattern of compulsory and all-embracing state organization, with unlimited power in the hands of the civil government. Hence socialism, in its various guises . . . The Christian concept of man, however, is that he is both personal and social . . . The Christian view . . . avoids the opposing extremes of individualism and collectivism, both of which are grounded on false concepts of liberty . . ."

A Festering Wound. "Liberty . . . is something more than a political phenomenon, as tyrannical dictatorship contends; it is more than an economic phenomenon, as some disciples of free enterprise maintain. It is something more mature than that dream of rights without responsibilities which historic liberalism envisioned; it is certainly different from that terrorism of responsibilities without rights which Communism imposes. It is something wiser than free thought, and something freer than dictated thought. For freedom has its roots in man's spiritual nature. It does not arise out of any social organization, or any constitution, or any part, but out of the soul of man . . .

"Closely connected with freedom and human dignity is the right of private property . . . The Christian position maintains that the right to property is personal, while the use of property is also social. Unrestrained capitalism makes its mistake by divorcing property rights from social use; Communism hits wide of the mark by considering social use apart from personal rights.

"Much of our economic restlessness, however, is the festering of man's wounded dignity . . . modern men have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on economic security and to pursue it at times with the fervor of religious devotion.

"Often the hope is voiced that man will turn to the cultivation of the spirit after all his economic needs are supplied. We are reminded of the delusion of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that man, good in himself, has been corrupted only by society . . . While we acknowledge the evils, individual and spiritual as well as social, which often flourish in a society when many are forced to live in conditions of degrading poverty, yet we cannot refrain from pointing out the fact that man's goodness is from within . . . Economic and social reform, to be effective, must be preceded by personal reform . . ."

Neither Hand nor Stomach. "It is only in the light of the spiritual worth of man that the dignity and importance of labor become evident . . . The worker is not a hand, as individualistic capitalism contends; not a stomach to be fed by commissars, as Communism thinks; but a person who through his labor establishes three relations: with God, with his neighbor, and with the whole natural world . . . God, the Supreme Artist, has communicated artistic causality to men, so that they can now make things and shape events to the image and likeness of their own ideas . . .

"Every day, in Holy Mass, Almighty God is addressed as He who wondrously established the dignity of man, and restored it more wondrously still. Only by regaining our reverence for God can we of America in the 20th century rediscover both our own value and the solid basis on which it rests . . .

"The alternative is increasing chaos. The words of a contemporary historian of culture* may serve to summarize the issues at stake. 'Unless we find a way to restore the contact between the life of society and the life of the spirit, our civilization will be destroyed by the forces which it has had the knowledge to create but not wisdom to control.' "

*Britain's Christopher Dawson, in his book, Understanding Europe.

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