Theology in History by de Lubac Henri

Author:de Lubac, Henri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898704723
Published: 2013-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

II

I must now approach, in this second part, a subject that it is impossible for me to pass over in silence without betraying the cause of the missions, I would even add: without betraying the Church. For I would betray her if, in discussing as I was asked to do the validity of the Catholic missions in the face of the objections that are made to them, I were to appear to ignore the fact that a brutal objection is rising up today, which intends indeed not to remain enclosed within the spheres of pure thought. We must take care not to be among those Christians of whom His Holiness Pius XII complained very recently, in his Christmas Message (of which only a false summary was available to most Catholics in France). “When earthly authorities make their power felt,” the Pope says to us, “these Christians steal away in a timid flight”, and, by their silence, they themselves become “the intermediaries for theories and prejudices issuing from circles foreign and hostile to Christianity.”29 We are referring, as you have guessed, to the racist objection. In our exposition of it as in our criticism of it, we will hold strictly to what concerns our subject.

To place it in its full light, let us quote first of all this passage from a book that has known the greatest publishing success of our day:

From time to time, the illustrated newspapers place before the eyes of our good common people the portrait of a Negro who, in such and such a place, has become a lawyer, a professor or a pastor (let us say: or priest, or bishop), or something of the kind. . . . These common people, in the process of decline, do not have the slightest suspicion of the sin that is thereby committed against reason, for it is a criminal madness to dress up a being, who by his origin is half-ape, to the point that he is taken to be a lawyer. . . . For it is not a question only of dressing him up, as one would a poodle, nor of a scientific education. If one would devote the same care to the races endowed with intelligence, any of their representatives whatever would be a thousand times more capable of obtaining similar results.30

Certainly this is not because a man becomes powerful as his thought assumes an intrinsic value of which it was until then deprived. The sentences we have just read are nonetheless quite the opposite of a flash of wit. They are part, if we may say so, of a “system”, the whole of which must be brought to mind before judging them.

This system is entirely taken up in the first proposition of the Syllabus that the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities sent on April 13, 1938, to our Catholic Faculties as well as to those of the entire world, enjoining them to apply their efforts to fight against the doctrine thus denounced. “The human

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