The pique of Monsignor Ellis and his allies over the present state of Catholic mental development prompts us to have a look at the non-Catholic “intellectual leaders” whom the American faithful are being encouraged to imitate. Since these mutually acclaimed potentates are mainly men of science (“Salks, Oppenheimers, Einsteins”), we shall limit ourselves to a study of the ways and habits of this sect.

To begin with, it should be noted that modern scientists, by and large, are men of gross unintelligence. In view of the prodigies lately wrought by them, this judgment may seem a little outrageous. We can hear someone snapping at us: “Let’s see you shoot a ten-pound hunk of aluminum into outer space!” The unexpected truth, however, is that shooting a ten-pound hunk of aluminum into outer space, or devising an explosive force that could pulverize New York, or transmitting the likeness of a human face, in color, across a continent, are not necessarily the achievements of great intellects. They are the results of experimentation, of hundreds and thousands and millions of tests and re-tests. And it is not brilliance of mind that is required to produce them, but dogged patience; plus the ability to observe carefully, to measure, to count, to note what causes produce what effects, and to link one usable discovery to another, till gradually, finally, the Great Thing is arrived at.

“The conquests of physical science,” the indomitable Hilaire Belloc has written, “were due to minute and extensive observation conducted by vast numbers of men and, therefore, for the most part, by the unintelligent. Science attracted some few men of high culture and some even (much fewer) of strong reasoning power; but in themselves, mere observation and comparison, the framing of hypotheses and the testing of them by experiment, need no intellectual qualities above the lowest and are therefore an obvious occupation for those who despise or do not grasp the use of reason. It has even been maintained that the ceaseless practice of exact measurement dulls the brain.”

The scientists might have kept their intellectual deficiencies a secret, had they stayed within the protective covering of their laboratories. But the public lured them out. Dazzled by the magnitude of scientific achievement, Americans have decided that the men who can produce such marvels as atom bombs and striped toothpaste must surely be the wisest and cleverest of all men, and supremely qualified to speak on every subject. The scientists have modestly agreed, and proceeded to do so. Ranging freely over the affairs of God and man, they have regaled us with their notions on everything from United States foreign policy to the miracles at Lourdes. In most instances, when those opinions are not flagrantly anti-Christian, they are notoriously anti-American.

But still, bad as they are when prattling their opinions on matters of religion or philosophy or politics or art, the scientists are at their impossible worst when they invade such territories with the methods and tools of their profession. We are smilingly assured, for instance, by a tin-eared physicist, that the “only” difference between Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony and the Third Avenue El is in the length and frequency of the sound waves that strike the ear. Or, not content with a gratuitous denial of the Virgin Birth of Our Lord, a biologist announces that “careful and extended scientific observation” has proven that the event was impossible.

In the light of all this, no one should be surprised at the consequences suffered by those Catholics who have tried to temper their Faith and intelligence to the demands of science. For the most part, such Catholics are not scientists themselves, but scholars. That is, they do not formulate scientific hypotheses but, once formulated, they accept them gratefully. Moreover, their studies of Scripture, history, etc. are built strictly upon the scientific method.

“Science does not bow down before precedent, nor custom, nor dogma,” a University of Chicago professor has declared. Anxious to merit the regard of such men, the Catholic scholars of the moment have likewise been unbending in the face of Catholic tradition. They will not, they want it understood, be swept off their feet by the mere fact that a belief has been held or a devotion cherished in the past. If their researches turn up an adverse “authority,” nothing less than a Papal mandate can keep them from denying the belief or disparaging the devotion.

The following is a sobering instance of this scholarship. It is from the account of the Holy House of Loreto (Our Lady’s home in Nazareth; miraculously transported to Italy in 1294) given in Donald Attwater’s A Catholic Dictionary: “The tradition has been approved by many popes and saints and numerous miracles are recorded there; but the most recent research tends to show that the tradition is mistaken and rests on some unexplained misunderstanding.”

Catholic scholars have been especially zealous of late to show that the recent exposures of fake fossils (e.g., “the Piltdown Man”) have not shaken their belief in the bestial ancestry of man. These Catholic friends of evolution were recently given a calling down by His Eminence Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini, in a front-page article in L’Osservatore Romano. Asking whether the evidences of science have given any good reason for abandoning the “traditional conviction” about the origin of the human body, narrated in the book of Genesis, the Cardinal answered, “We do not think so.” He asked all Catholics to hold firm to their belief in the creation of Adam from the slime of the earth, which is “the obvious sense of the Bible.”

The Bible’s “obvious sense” has no more determined American adversary than the Very Reverend Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., of Catholic University. In the modest tones of the scholarship jargon, Father Connell is currently developing an outer space “theology” which blasphemously allows for other Divine Births from other Blessed Virgins. Defiant of all previous Catholic teaching, and of an explicit condemnation by Pope Saint Zachary, Father Connell teaches the possibility of numbers of other man-inhabited worlds. And for good measure, he throws in his theories about additional races of men that may have occurred here in this world, before Adam.

Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, the founder of Father Connell’s own Redemptorist Order, has condemned at length this theory of Pre-Adamites in chapter thirteen of his History of the Heresies. And in speaking of a heretic who espoused the notion, Saint Alphonsus tells us: “He fell into this error because he rejected tradition.”

When some future saintly historian is reviewing the errors of the twentieth century, we trust that Father Connell will be dealt with as neatly and decisively.

Chapter III —

Beneath all the discussions of science and scholarship and intellectual inferiority that Monsignor Ellis and his friends have occasioned, there lies a more basic problem. It is this: that American Catholics need a clear view of their proper relation to the non-Catholic society around them.

Whenever the subject threatens, the Ellisites step forward with a loud chorus of “Let’s liberate ourselves from the Catholic ghetto we are in!” As it is well calculated to do, this cry leaves all the conservatives standing in the back row, burdened with the impossible label, “ghetto-Catholics.”

In this situation, the best answer is the disarming declaration, “Yes, we do want a Catholic ghetto.” And while the liberals are catching their breath, we will have time to explain that the kind of ghetto we want ought really to have a brand new name. For ghettos, historically speaking, are areas of enforced confinement, however extended or comfortable they may become. They were, and still would be, invaluable for keeping the Jew in his proper place in a Christian state. But they are hardly adequate situations for a community of Christians who are bound by the Gospel charge to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.” It is Our Lord Himself, in fact, who defines for us what the Catholic community must be. He tells us in chapter five of Saint Matthew that we must stand out and apart like a “city built upon a mountain peak” and that from such a prominence we must let our “light shine before men.”

Clearly, this ideal was the one that set up the struggling young Church of the catacombs and saw it established on the ruins of decadent Rome. It was from this height that the Catholic community won the barbarians and lifted them to itself by preaching and example. It was a full realization of this “city on a mountain” that gave us the high Middle Ages. And it was a relaxation of our ideal, a coming down halfway to meet the pagan values of the Renaissance, that unsettled us so generally at the time of the Protestant Revolt. And we have been going downhill ever since.

We agree with Monsignor Ellis, Father Weigel, and Father Cavanaugh that our schools and colleges have fallen upon dark days. They are sharing a fate which has hit the Catholic community in every department. But the solution does not lie outside us. Association with the pitch-blackness of secular education, its norms and its methods, will not enhance our present dim achievement. We, not they, have the commission to be the light of the world. And when we begin once more to act as though we think so, we will be on our way back up the mountain.