‘For I am thy servant and the son of thy handmaid, a weak man and of short time, and falling short of the understanding of judgement and laws.’ (Wisd. ix, 5.).

What do we mean by the ‘mind of the Church’? In the most obvious sense the Church is an autocracy : the life and the power and the wisdom are from above, from the Head which is Christ. But there is another sense in which the life of the Church has its democratic aspect: for the vitality and vigour of the Church, the degree in which the life and power and wisdom are used and expressed, this depends not least on the masses of the faithful, on their acceptance of and response to what is given. So the development of the Church’s dogma is a process which can be found to begin from below : first the gradual fermentation of the idea in the devout life of the layfolk, then its discussion and analysis in the controversies of theologians, then finally the decisive voice, the consecration, by the wisdom from above, of the truth in these new discernments and elucidations of ancient fact. Can there be a similar process in the realm of morals? We do well to remember the power of the Spirit in giving to the hearts of the simple and unlearned a sense of the right and the good. In two ways this connatural knowledge, as St. Thomas calls it, differs from the work of the theologian and may complement it: it goes straight to the conclusion, while the theologian, working in another medium, must first sift and test the premisses; it concerns the particular fact or type of fact, where theology is concerned primarily with the general principle.

The term ‘democracy’ as used to-day requires a definition. Originally it was applied to a form of government controlled by the people’s voice in a popular Assembly; but with the growth of States and the impossibility of direct expression of the popular will it came to mean representative government; that is to say, government by a parliament consisting of representatives nominally chosen by the people. But for the same reason that ordinary citizens of a modern State were unable to intervene in the processes of legislation and the actions of the executive, it was found to be impossible (or at all events inadvisable) for them to select the men who were to represent them. This was done by the Party caucuses, and all that was left to the citizen was permission to vote for one or other of the caucus nominees. During the last decade or so the term has been so loosely used that its positive content is almost nil, and its main characteristic has come to be a purely negative abhorrence of traditionalism and of certain forms of authoritarian government (though by no means all) confused under the general term ‘Fascist.’ To make confusion worse confounded a social connotation of the adjective ‘democratic ‘has persisted through all these changes. Because in the democracies of the original City States free men were politically equal, the word ‘democratic ‘is now used as a synonym for ‘egalitarian’ in a social as well as a political sense, and this extension of meaning is further extended to cover societies in which there is no true egalitarian spirit, but only an aversion to certain kinds of privilege.

Responsibility implies in the responsible person a nature to be served : our own human nature and that of our fellow men in all its kinship with other creatures and all its dependence on God. The service of nature in this sense involves service in and with our bodies : and it involves the service of bodily nature in others—not only in other persons but in all the bodily creation. For bodily nature, although indeed it is fashioned in accordance with the divine intellect, is answerable to God in man and not elsewhere. And this service of bodily nature is not any kind of task imposed from without, but is implied in the norm of our humanity and thus in the law of our understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in.

Thus the norm of our bodily life implies no bondage to material nature although it implies service in and of the body. Such service is responsible precisely to the extent that it is in obedience to our understanding, free to the extent the understanding we obey is our own. A distinction is noted here between the precise bearing of freedom and of responsibility, although in the integrity of human nature they inseparably imply each other.

‘Outside’ the integrity of human nature is the domain of sin, considered—precisely from the point of view we have adopted—as contra naturam. Thus, in the shattered and scattered consciousness which belongs to sin, freedom—obedience to the law of our own understanding so far as it is ours—may be held as a political or quasi-ethical ideal, even though the understanding be false and its law, absolutely speaking, no law.

‘If we pass in review the long and sorrowful sequence of woes, that, as a sad heritage of sin, mark the stages of fallen man’s earthly pilgrimage, from the flood on, it would be hard to find spiritual and material distress so deep, so universal, as that which we are now experiencing.’ Those are words of Pope Pius XI, written in the Encyclical Caritate Christi Compulsi some twelves and a half years ago. If they were true then, they are more true than ever of to-day when the bloody shroud of war has enveloped nearly all mankind.

But one feels sometimes that too much ink is devoted to the description of what is obvious. Having, therefore, recalled these striking words of Christ’s Vicar, let us not dwell here upon the depressing thought of the plight of modern humanity; rather we will turn to the remedy for such an unhappy state of affairs.

‘As these evils crowd in upon us, what hope of remedy is left to us’ asked Pope Pius XII in his Easter Homily in 1940, ‘except that which comes from Christ, from his inspirations, and from his teaching, a healing stream flowing through every vein of our society? Only Christ’s law, only Christ’s grace, can renew and restore private and public life, redressing the true balance of rights and duties, checking unbridled self-interest, controlling passion, implementing and perfecting the course of strict justice with his overflowing charity.