Second Mencken Chrestomathy (20 page)

I don’t recall ever having a controversy with a man of God that did not end in dreadful bawling. It is impossible to discuss them at all without getting an eye full of sulphur, though surely they are important men, and hence worth discussing. For years it was my high privilege to devote myself mainly to the follies of the Protestant pastors, and so many of them denounced me as an agent of the Pope. This got me friends in Catholic circles, and one of my constant visitors was a venerable monsignor who insisted very charmingly upon treating me as a servant of the True Faith. But of late, for uttering certain trifling platitudes about the American hierarchy, I have been violently denounced by Catholic clergymen, led by the Paulist Fathers. This makes me feel fair again. I am no longer biased.

The ecclesiastical habit of conducting all controversies
à outrance
—of assuming and insisting that every opponent is a scoundrel, and ought to be boiled and fried in Hell forever—this habit, as everyone knows, also marks those laymen whose convictions have a theological color—for example, Prohibitionists and anti-evolutionists. It has been my fortune to have many combats with such fellows: I can recall only one who ever showed any sign of good humor. That one was the Hon. William H. Anderson. He liked controversy for its own sake, and hence could carry it out without bile. The fact later undid him, for when the New York wets took him in some insignificant misdemeanor his brother drys deserted him, and he went to prison.

The rest of the drys all hit below the belt habitually, and as a matter of pious devotion. They saddled Prohibition upon the country, indeed, at a time when hitting below the belt was official, and any man who refused to do it got the attention of the
Polizei.
The anti-evolutionists are quite as bad. I know several of them
who, in their private lives, are amiable enough, but when they mount the tub they get out all the weapons in the theological arsenal, and employ them with great gusto. I have been denounced in my time more than most, but never so violently as by anti-evolutionists.

Some time ago one of the most influential of them printed a long philippic damning me as a paretic, and alleging flatly that my sad state was due to transactions forbidden by Holy Writ. The charge, of course, was not new. It had been whispered here in Baltimore more than once, and by Christians of high tone, along with the hint that I was incessantly in my cups. But here the thing was plainly stated in print, and by a gentleman notorious for his solvency. It was a temptation indeed! The libel laws are very harsh in such matters. But, intrenched behind my lifelong principles, I somehow resisted, and soon afterward the gentleman was called to bliss eternal, and the tenements and hereditaments that I might have collared are now enjoyed by his heirs and assigns.

From the
American Mercury,
Jan., 1928, pp. 123–25.
A Review of T
HE
J
ESUIT
E
NIGMA
, by E. Boyd Barrett; New York, 1927

If this thoughtful and valuable book gets any notice at all from the literati of the Latin rite, it will probably be only abuse—the inevitable reply, from that quarter, to any man who proposes, however honestly and judiciously, to discuss the weaknesses of Holy Church. But that abuse cannot dispose of the manifest fact that Dr. Barrett knows what he is talking about, and deserves to be heard. For twenty years he was himself a Jesuit, and during that time his scholarship—he is a psychologist—shed credit upon the order, and he was in excellent repute both within and without its ranks. When he withdrew at last, it was not because of any apostasy to the faith. On the contrary, he apparently retained his belief in all the salient Catholic doctrines, and actually offered himself
for service as an ordinary priest. What drove him out was simply his conviction that the Society of Jesus offered an impossible environment to a man of his intellectual curiosity and integrity. Its atmosphere of repression, of deliberate obscurantism, of petty intrigue, of childish spying and tale-bearing choked him, and so he departed.

He opens his book with a brief sketch of Jesuit history, proceeds to a somewhat elaborate description of Loyola’s celebrated “Spiritual Exercises” and the Jesuit Constitutions, the two ruling documents of the order, and then launches into a long discussion of Jesuit practises. There is no tedious scandal-mongering in his story. He believes that the Jesuit rule regarding dealings with women is unworkable, and he shows that it is frequently evaded, but that evasion he pictures as due to necessity, not to looseness. For most Jesuits, as priests and as men, he apparently has high respect. But he is convinced that their education tends to make them narrow and bigoted, that the dreadful discipline under which they live breaks down their self-reliance and self-esteem and makes them mere cogs in an ecclesiastical machine, and that preferment among them, instead of going to the strongest men, only too often goes to the most complaisant. The Jesuit system of espionage, as he describes it, is really quite appalling. But it is not directed, as Ku Kluxers believe, against Methodist bishops, members of Congress and the Federal judiciary; it is directed solely against Jesuits. They live under a surveillance that would irk prisoners in a penitentiary. They literally have no privacy whatever, even of thought, and the method adopted for keeping watch over them offers obvious temptations to men with a talent for persecution. Accused, a Jesuit never knows his accusers. Punished, he is forbidden even to demand a trial.

Dr. Barrett offers many examples of the unpleasant workings of this system. It has the inevitable effect, he says, of shutting off the free play of ideas within the order, and it is responsible for the generally hackneyed and uninspiring character of Jesuit thinking. The members of the Society shine only in safe fields. They make capital astronomers, meteorologists, and so on, but where ideas are in conflict they are chained up by a medieval and inflexible philosophy. What that confinement amounts to was shown when
Dr. Barrett, on coming to America from Ireland, was invited to contribute some articles on the new psychology to the Jesuit weekly,
America.
His articles, it would seem, were harmless enough, and the editor at the time, Father Tierney, S.J., began printing them. But presently they were stopped by orders from above, and to this day Dr. Barrett has no explanation of that cavalier affront. Obviously, the new psychology, as banal as it is, was thought to be too heady for the customers of
America.
That the editors of the weekly (many of them able men) cannot do their work effectively under such conditions is plain enough; the fact sufficiently explains the failure of their magazine, which started out with high promise and no little uproar, to make any impression whatever upon American thought. A rival weekly, the
Commonweal
, edited by Catholic laymen, has got further in two or three years than
America
has got in twelve or fifteen. Yet it remains the best that the Jesuits have ever offered in this country. It measures them as fairly and as clearly as the
War-Cry
measures the Salvation Army.

Dr. Barrett’s description of the Jesuit scheme of education is devastating. Himself a doctor of a secular university, he is in a singularly favorable position for judging it. It is in the main, he says, a witless ramming in of flyblown nonsense. Nothing is taught objectively; everything must be turned to the glory of the Church, and especially of the Jesuit order. The philosophy on tap is strictly Thomistic, and was abandoned by non-Catholic philosophers, save as an interesting curiosity, centuries ago. All the modern philosophers of any account, even including Kant and Hegel, are under the ban. The sciences are approached in a gingerly fashion; literature is simply Catholic literature. Worse, the pedagogical method is medieval and the teachers are often unprepared. Dr. Barrett himself, a psychologist, was put to teaching sociology at Georgetown University, despite his protests that he knew nothing of the subject. When he was relieved of that impossible duty at last, it was to be made professor of catechism. Finally, he was allowed “one short course of psychology toward the latter half of the school year.” It was after this that he resigned from the order, and applied to Cardinal Hayes for assignment as a parish priest. In vain! The long arm of the Black Pope reached out from Rome. No ex-Jesuit
may join any other order or serve as a secular priest. Shortly after Dr. Barrett resigned, a friend sent a letter to him at Georgetown. It was returned marked “Unknown.”

His case is impressive, but it seems to me that he yet forgets something—that, in the last analysis, he seriously misunderstands the order he served for so many years. He appears to see it, ideally, as a sort of intellectual aristocracy within the Church, grounded in learning by a harsh, laborious and relentless process and devoted to widening learning’s bounds. It is, I believe, nothing of the sort. Founded by a soldier, it remains essentially military, not scholarly. Its aim is not to find out what is true, but to defend and propagate what Holy Church says is true. All the ideas that it is officially aware of are fixed ideas: it knows of no machinery for changing them, and wants to hear of none. For a Jesuit to engage in free speculation would be as incongruous and as shocking as it would be for General Pershing to flout the ideals of the Elks. The black-robed and romantic brethren have a quite different opinion. It is to spread out fanwise where the Catholic ranks are thinnest, and there do battle for the Church—for God too, of course, but principally for the Church. They are at their best on the remotest frontiers. In Catholic countries they are suspect; more than once, indeed, they have been thrown out. But where the faithful are few and far between and the enemies of Peter rage and roar, there they yet use their ancient weapons effectively and are mighty soldiers of the Lord. As soldiers, they deserve a far easier testing than Dr. Barrett gives to them. A psychologist by trade, with a leaning toward psychoanalysis, he prods into their heads a bit too scientifically. Let him try to figure out what a competent Freudian would have made of St. Louis, or the Cid, or Washington, or even Robert E. Lee. The very hallmark of the military mind is repression. The moment soldiers begin to think, the war is over and there is Bolshevism. If Dr. Barrett had his way the Jesuits would be marching upon Rome (as they came near doing once before) and His Holiness, like his colleague of the Quirinal, would be a gilded prisoner in a very tight cage.

From the
American Mercury
, Jan., 1924, p. 78

A number of years ago, in my newspaper days, I received a circular violently denouncing the Catholic Church. The circular stated that the Church was engaged in a hellish conspiracy to seize the government of the United States and put an agent of the Pope into the White House, and that the leaders of the plot were certain Jesuits, all of them foreigners and violent enemies of the American Constitution. Only one such Jesuit was actually named: a certain Walter Drum, S.J. He was denounced with great bitterness, and every true American was besought to be on the watch for him. Something inspired me to turn to “Who’s Who in America”; it lists all the principal emissaries of Rome in the Republic, even when they are not Americans. This is what I found:

I printed the circular of the
Ur
-Klansmen—and that eloquent sentence from “Who’s Who.” No more was heard against the foreigner Drum in that diocese.…

Eight or ten years later, having retired from journalism with a competence, I was the editor of a magazine. One day there reached me the manuscript of a short story by a young Princeton man, by name F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was a harmless and charming story about a young scholastic in a Jesuit seminary. A few months later it was printed in the magazine. Four days after the number was on the stands I received a letter from a Catholic priest, denouncing me as an enemy to the Church, belaboring the story as blasphemous and worse, and stating that the writer proposed to make a tour of all the Catholic women’s clubs in the East, urging their members to blacklist and boycott the magazine. The name signed to the letter was Walter Drum, S.J.

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1923, p. 53

In no field does God work in a more mysterious and facile way, His wonders to perform, than in that of human plastic, or, as they say, physiognomy. I once knew a man who was, in head and face, the exact duplicate of the late Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He had precisely the same piercing eyes, the same Niagara of a moustache, the same watermelon brow, the same bellicose glare. He was the superintendent of a Methodist Sunday-school in a provincial town.… You think I lie? Unquestionably it seems probable. I therefore append his name and address. He was Thomas Gordon Hayes, and the scene of his theological endeavors was a house of worship on Edmondson avenue, Baltimore, opposite Harlem Square.