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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1935. Volume 6. Number 13.

Religion or Revolution?

Religion or Revolution?

After a bellicose excursion to the back benches, suggesting that he was either Dempsey or George Walker, Ian Campbell assumed a cherubic smile and assured us that he was not Professor Murphy, Adam Smith, or the Apostle Paul. The fundamental assumptions were that he was Ian Campbell and we were the intelligentsia either steeped in a "proud, timeless idealism" or "ricketty and neurasthenic chatterboxes who occupy themselves in interplanetary oscillations somewhere in the great space between the Communist Party and the Labourists." He proceeded to paint the empty and hollow life before the mere intellectual seeking to maintain "a delicate equipoise on the fringe of things," the inhabitant of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land:

. . . . . What shall I do to-morrow? What shall I ever do?

The hot water at ten, and if it rains a closed car at four And we shall play a game of chess Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for

a knock upon the door. As an alternative to this waste land there are but two orthodoxies: religion or revolution—Catholicism or Communism. These two are similar only in their relentless attack on things as they are, and in the manner with which they revile Liberalism and pragmatism, "that most homespun and unphilosophical of all philosophic systems."

What then, is to be done? No sooner is the question asked than these rival Messiahs are furiously opposed. The fundamental difference is that the Church relies on a spiritual interpretation of history and a warm rejection of any form of economic determinism. For the Communist, God is an imaginary picture projected upon the universe, which reflected the daily experience of Government among men. These pictures change, it is claimed, with changing political experiences. For the Catholic, man's political forms are very largely shaped by his religion It follows that the root of all social injustice lies not in the fact that capitalism in a system of exploitation, but simply in the absence of human charity. "Material greed is the cancer of our system—for which Socialism has no cure." The crisis has nothing to do with the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, but is a function of the moral degradation of individual men.

There is thus a cleavage in the final solution offered. For the Church a certain degree of inequality is inevitable, and against the Communist ideal of "classless" society is placed the ideal of classes still existent but permeated with Christian charity. The Catholic supports private property as against the social programme of nationalisation of the Communist.