I. The Idea of Nationality

The idea of nationality is not artificial, but real. Several variables concur to make it concrete: historical traditions, a common race, love for the native place, local or family traditions, shared glories and sorrows, etc.

The idea of nationality suits man’s needs. Not without a powerful reason God divided humankind into different nations, and set boundaries for peoples and nations.

Such a division was necessary for the moral and material progress of humanity. The difference in the genius of the various races, the admirable variety of tendencies, aspirations, affections that distinguish a people from another, contribute to create that great intellectual movement that makes humanity progress and satisfies the new needs of times and places.

The separation of people into various stocks, into various nations, brings about competition, a primary source of the moral, intellectual and material activity of humankind.

Without a doubt fights and jealousies between nations cause errors and often also injustices. But these miserable fights, these damnable forms of greed, do not exclude that the great competition between peoples, the breathless race toward the best, where everyone tries to precede his neighbor and his enemy, should promote true and real progress, and therefore what is good.

In talking of nationalities, it is impossible not to observe that they cannot be and never were an artificial entity, but always answered to some specific needs, some contingent causes that determine their explanation.

It is possible to create a great empire by cutting up and fragmenting territories, islands and continents. Conquerors always behaved this way. If, however, their action has been glorious and rich of consequences, it did not create by itself a nationality: melting various elements, at times dissimilar, is not the undertaking of a day, but of centuries; not the result of a lucky sword, but of a long and slow process of assimilation.

Today’s nationalities are the result of such a patient process, achieved through many centuries, by proceeding with positive criteria, not with capricious expedients. Today, however, it would be impossible to form a new nationality, unless the world, by reverting back to chaos where its great upheavals plunged it, wouldn’t be amenable to new combinations, new fusions, as when the barbarians came to upset the Roman empire.

Properly speaking this empire was not a nation, but an agglomerate of nations, and it owed its power both to the vigor of the dominant and conquering race, and to its very wise policy toward the conquered that, as everyone knows, consisted in imposing its political system while respecting the traditions, the habits and even the religion of the conquered populations. In fact, pagan Rome, while granting the right of citizenship to the nations it had tied to its wagon, appropriated even their gods, whose temples were raised in the very City par excellence where no idol of any subjugated country was foreign.

The barbarians came to upset the ancient world by invading its territory and by setting up their tents in Italy, Spain, France, the Orient, North Africa, etc. Little by little the invading hordes settled in the conquered lands, mingled with the natives and with the Roman colonizers and intermarried. This has been the starting point and the seed of the

new nationalities that only slowly grouped together and again intermarried because of the frequent migrations of other peoples, among these primarily the Arabs, Ottomans, Slavs, Tartars, Normans Germans, French, and Spanish.

The more we move away from the Middle Ages the less migrations take place, because the nationalities are in the process of formation and of taking shape with greater precision. Step by step in their formation they present a more compact and effective resistance to heterogeneous elements, represented by conquest and migration.

The last three centuries have, so to say, concluded the work of a definitive formation and permanent ordering of the nationalities. For this reason I say that unless there is a worldwide great upheaval, unforeseen and unforeseeable, i.e., unless new migrations of the strength and type of those of the barbarians and the Muslims, the present world, and Europe in particular, division into countries will not change.

Generally speaking, the environment and education create the feeling of nationality, a providential sentiment that makes everyone happy with his country, and therefore prevents citizens of a less endowed country to think of abandoning the fatherland in order to form for themselves

by whim another one in a richer place, with a better climate, and easier commerce.

I had occasion to often reflect on this providential consequence of the love of country when I crossed unfortunate countries either because the land was barren or because of little beauty of the places or because of a series of circumstances that make them ugly and boring. Everywhere I have found the natives moved by love for their native place and I told myself: What a good fortune! What a providential disposition of God! If they would see their fatherland through the eyes I see it, they would abandon it right away. Then we would have some lands depopulated and others where people would slaughter each other to take over the territory. In the same country we would have deserted and overcrowded regions.

In that way family and youth traditions, the moral and material environment, relatives, customs make one forget the most serious inconveniences, that not only would not kill but not even weaken the love of country, which is the foundation of the theory of nationality.

Surely looking at things on a large scale religion has a great, in fact perhaps the main part, in the sentiment of nationality, but it is not alone in making up the national idea. This idea is constituted by the set of moral,

religious and material elements of the country’s environment, an idea whose benefit and providential consequences for the peace of the world and the happiness of humankind we have noted before.

The culture of a people increases in him the national sentiment, because it better clarifies it in its mind. We see then that as time goes by hostility toward any foreign domination has become irresistible, and that even those people like the Italians and the Southern Slavs who tolerated so much in the past, are vigorously opposed today to what for better or for worse they tolerated yesterday.

On the influence that the national sediment can exercise on religious ideas, or rather on the religion of a people and of the citizens that make it up, much could be said. Suffice to repeat what has been said above, i.e. that since the environment, education and historical and family traditions are very powerful to the point that one could say they are exclusive components of the national idea, religion has a principal part among the causes giving rise to love of fatherland and to national identity.

Man has two great loves that accompany him everywhere, love of God and of parents and family. Both, together with some other elements, form the idea of nationality. Thus, as long as a person, even passively, remains faithful to the religion of his forebears, he feels the love of family and with it the love of country. The person that abandons religion, this apostate abandons also the national identity. Therefore one must conclude that faithfulness to religion takes along faithfulness to fatherland, unless a fatal conflict, putting in contrast the two great loves of religion and fatherland, would push the persons so deceived to sacrifice the former to the latter, as it invariably happened in the past where such conflict lasted.

The great religious upheavals had this origin. The schism of the Oriental Church was to a great extent caused by the impatience of the Orientals with having to obey Rome. It was not enough for them to know that in Rome could rule an Oriental or a Western Pope. The fact alone that, by God’s will, the first seat of Christianity was in the West made them jealous. It seemed to them that their fatherland was humiliated, and when a rebel arose, the wrong national self-love made easy its advance and allowed the implementation of the deplorable schism. In this way one after another were lost the Oriental Churches. The fact is so true that Leo XIII has acknowledged it when, to bring back these Churches to the desired unity, he ordered that their rites and their ancient traditions not in opposition with Catholic doctrine should be respected. He formally forbade that Oriental

converts should be Latinized in order to make them understand that in Catholicism all people have the right of citizenship and that, as a universal religion, it respects all nations, their rights, their legitimate aspirations, and their patrimony.

The Protestant heresy was also supported by a badly interpreted national sentiment. The traditions of Arminius, the desire to crush the Papacy, considered a Latin institution, and therefore what many Germans still call “the Latin wickedness”, helped much in expanding Protestantism not only in Germany, but also in the Scandinavian countries and in England. Once the Pope was portrayed as a foreign, though spiritual, sovereign, they incited against him the national feeling, and this more than sufficed to strengthen heresy. I will note here that the heresies that couldn’t find support in a badly understood patriotic sentiment could neither spread nor consolidate. It is the case of the Albegensians, Hussites, of John Leyda and his sect, and lastly of the Jansenists, who remained still are very few.

In Holland the hate for the dreadful Spanish tyranny provoked the apostasy of the nation, and so it happened in England under Elisabeth threatened by Philip II, and in part also in Scotland. Without this decisive cause of apostasy, Protestantism would not have become general in these countries. At the same time, if Catholicism remains solid in Ireland and Poland, it is because Anglicanism and schism are the religion of the foreign conquerors and that the people see in the Catholic religion the safeguard of the country. In the past, however, before the Emancipation of Catholics (1827), the British wanted to turn Ireland Protestant by the sword, certain that, having abandoned the religion of their forebears, the Irish would have also lost their national identity.

The same can be said of the Russians in Poland without any better success. They don’t feel secure because they see in Catholicism the hinge of the patriotic sentiment of Poland and think that if they crush it, this would vanish and a complete assimilation would follow between conquerors and conquered.

With more political skill, Prussians do the same thing in the Duchy of Poznam and Protestant propaganda aims at this goal in that country.

Conclusion: Religion then plays a great part in the sentiment or idea of nationality. A people that feel opposed in its national sentiments by religion, look unfortunately to apostasy for a remedy and a bulwark. On the contrary a people conquered by another people of a different religion cannot

preserve the national identity if it doesn’t preserve the religion of its fathers.

What prevented the annihilation of the patriotic sentiment in Russian and Prussian Poland and in Ireland was the unshakable fidelity of those peoples to Catholicism. In a parallel way what allowed the weakening and the shattering of the European part of the Turkish Empire was the impossibility faced by the Ottoman conquerors to convert millions and millions of Christians to Islam. Had they been converted, the Kingdom of the Crescent in the Balkans and North of the Black Sea would have become solid and lasting; instead it sufficed some weakening of the Muslim master to have the Christians rebel. If the national sentiment was preserved in the Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians notwithstanding centuries of brutal oppression, history proves that, it is owed to religion.

The national idea was dormant for four centuries in Romania and Serbia and for five centuries in Bulgaria. They were young people without the Hellenic traditions, but faith saved them and after hundreds of years, led by their priests, they freed themselves from the Ottoman control.

Religious sentiment therefore has a large part in the idea of nationality; keeps it intact in danger; and saves it from shipwreck during catastrophes. It survives any disaster, preserving in the heart the seed that even after several centuries will make rise from the tomb that nation that has not apostatized.

This, however, comes about when there is no conflict between the two most noble sentiments of nationality and religion. If unfortunately conflict emerges, and continues as an endemic illness, then peoples are fatally dragged to abandon religion. Apostasy arrives: it takes the forms of schism or of heresy in times of living faith or of ready religious disputes; of practical apostasy, i.e., unbelief, indifference, etc. in our times, little inclined to new heresies.

To avoid so much evil then we must remove every cause of conflict, especially permanent causes, between religion and fatherland.