| OCR Text |
Show ROME AND SOCIALISM. The General Federation of Catholic Societies, j at its national convention in Boston recently, i adopted resolutions repudiating the main tenet of j Socialism, that "collective ownership of the means ! of production and distribution is necessary for the i welfare of the human race," and urging all Catho- i lies to abstain from joining and to oppose the So-' salistic movement as "materialistic and' atheistic in its leaders, literature and theory. ! The Catholic church is often represented to be conservative and even reactionary in its tendencies. tenden-cies. Yet it is to be observed that the leaders of the Catholic laity, as well as the clergy, have promptly recognized the true character of Social-! ism and have stepped forward boldly to meet and stop it. , j Socialism proposes not only an economic revo-1 lution. It proposes also an atheistic cataclysm. Its universe is confined to the earth. It decrees that men shall think only of this life, and not at all of a hereafter. In it1 there is no room for God and no God is in it. Yet we see many Protestant clergymen of education, edu-cation, who should be able to recognize a fact when it stares them in- the face, playing and paltering with Socialism, patronizing and upholding such institutions in-stitutions for its propagation as Hull House and the Chicago Commons, and refusing to see that the faith of which they are sworn servants is one of those things which Socialism aims to crush. To the minds of thinking laymen, irrespective of denominational connections, the preachers who play thus with Socialism arc as moths around a flame. " They court their own- destruction. While evading the materialism of Mammon, they flutter weakly around the materialism of Karl Marx. How much better and wiser would it be for them to recognize the Socialistic danger promptly and fiffhf it courageously, thus averting the sacrifice sacri-fice which a delay in facing the issue must eventually even-tually cost every Christian church. . |
