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8. Fruits of the Agreement: Skin‑deep Catholics
A pact made under the conditions stated above in
section V would bring immense benefits to Communism, If it were to be
fulfilled exactly, for new generations of ill‑prepared and lukewarm
Catholics would arise, perhaps reciting the Credo with their lips, but with
their minds and their hearts saturated with all the errors of Communism. In
short, they would be Catholics only in appearance and on the surface, and
Communists in the most profound and authentic layers of their mentality. After
two or three generations formed in such a coexistence, what would be left of
Catholicism in the peoples?
May we make a comment on this subject which confirms
these assertions. It concerns the very grave pastoral and practical risks which
result sometimes from the unavoidable acceptance of the hypothesis even when the thesis
is faithfully adhered to.
While enjoying full liberty in the present‑day
laicist regime born of the French Revolution, the Church has seen millions and
millions of men fall away from her fold. As His Excellency the Most Reverend Monsignor
Angelo Dell'Acqua, Substitute Secretary of State, said, "as a consequence
of the religious agnosticism of the States, the sense of the Church" (has
become) "weakened or almost lost in modern society." (Letter to His
Eminence Cardinal D. Carlos Carmelo de Vasconcellos Motta, then Archbishop of
Sao Paulo, on the occasion of Thanksgiving Day of 1956). What is the ultimate
reason for this fact? Public institutions, as we said before (cf section VI,
no. 1), exert a profound influence over the majority of men. They accept these
institutions habitually, and even without perceiving it, as a model and source
of inspiration for their whole way of thinking, of being, and of behaving. And
laicism, in being adopted by the States, entirely led astray an immense number
of souls. This certainly would not have happened if Catholics had been much
more zealous in taking advantage of the unrestricted liberty of word and
action which they enjoy in the liberal regime in order to spread and defend all
of the teachings of the Church against the lay State. However, they did not
take advantage of this liberty as much as they should have, because in very
many cases, by being in a laicist atmosphere, they lost the living notion of
the tremendous evil that laicism is. They continued to affirm rarely, and
merely with their lips, the antilaicist thesis;
however, they ended up by considering the hypothesis normal.
Now, in a Communist regime, in which the errors are
inculcated by the State with much more insistence than in the laicist, liberal
regime, either souls will allow themselves to be swept along in an even much
greater profusion or they will act against these errors much more than they did
against the influence of laicism from the French Revolution until the present
day.
Anyone who believes that this would be tolerated by
any Communist regime has not the slightest idea of what Communism is.
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