In short, what we want is Catholic Revolution—a revolution transcending the revolt of petty anarchists but not ashamed of harnessing their energy and harmonizing their discordant outcry. Anyone acquainted with conditions in the U.S.S.R. will agree with me that with one fundamental obstruction removed no state could be easier and worthier of adoption. That is why we have spoken with some eagerness on the ‘unsponsored Bolshevism’ detached from administrative protection, and scandalized by the Capitalist-Communist symbiosis favoured by Stalin and Litvinoff. That one obstruction, I need hardly add, is the purely political value placed on the human economy. Nevertheless the transition from the political to the Metapolitic required for entente with Catholicism is not impossible. Long before the publication of M. Berdyaev’s works in England, contact with Bolshevism had convinced us of the subjectively religious nature of Russian Revolution—of the mock-metapolitic set before the Russian people, and the possibility of its substitution by Catholicism.

Are we warned by Austria? Less than a year ago we heard an Austrian Catholic declare that the prosperity of his country depended on an entente between moderate Radicalism and Catholicism in the temporal order, and co-operation in the national economy. For the Linz programme of the Socialists has much in common with the encyclicals of Pope Pius; both advocate a discreet State interference with unprincipled capitalism, both condemn huge profits. And Pfliegler, a left-wing Catholic, in condemning the incontinent greed and anarchical competition of modern Capitalism, in deploring the class war that these have made inevitable, does no more than endorse the Pastoral Letter of the Austrian Hierarchy.