II. Nationality Defined, One Asks What Influence it May Have on the Preservation of the Faith and Vice Versa.

No doubt the idea of nationality is one of those sentiments called to exercise a large and at times decisive influence on the preservation or loss of the faith of a people.

In the same way that philosophical ideas have their impact on the social life of a people, as ancient and modern history proves, the idea of nationality always influenced religious sentiment, and much more so as more alive was the patriotic sentiment.

As it has been said, to consolidate schism and Protestantism much contributed the conviction that those two forms of Christianity were a guarantee of national independence. The great founders of religions almost always tried to combine the concepts of fatherland and religion, so that the national sentiment could support the faith of the people and serve as the lever with which they could raise it from the old condition, lead it into the new way, and tie it to their wagon.

Thanks to the contribution of the national idea, incarnated in a belligerent and conquering spirit, Islam could win the first trials and then propagate among the Arabs first, and later among the Ottomans, to the point of becoming a most serious danger to the Christian nations and to the Papacy.

Pagans, especially Greeks and Romans, never separated the national idea from religious beliefs, and this served them to strengthen both principles of fatherland and religion. They were recognizing the influence that the nationality exercises on religious sentiment and how faith and patriotism were two strictly connected realities.

Unfortunately, as it has been mentioned, every time that religious sentiment seems in conflict with the national idea, the latter rebelled. Since people are more sensitive to concrete things than to abstract ones, apostasy of the nation, or more or less, hostile indifferentism resulted.

I have referred above the examples of Northern Germany, Holland and England, where the conflict created by persons of different opinions (Protestants or Spanish oriented ultra-Catholics) annihilated Catholic religious sentiment to the profit of the Reformation.

I mentioned also the example of Ireland and Poland where, notwithstanding the powerful efforts of the British, Russian and Prussian conquerors, the religious idea remains intact as a storm-proof fortress, and this because the religious identity had become the defense of the national identity. The British in Ireland, the Russians and Prussians in Poland, understood this well, and they did not persecute Catholicism in those countries nor try to substitute it with schism and heresy, only because they were certain that the religious idea was the bulwark of the national idea and vice versa. The national idea then influences the preservation or loss of the

faith of a people. In fact, it is a basic element of the fidelity of such a people to the Church or of its apostasy.

This applies to countries taken in general and to individuals. Coming more directly to the latter, it is certain that in individuals the same symptoms become manifested than in the whole social and national body. As long as a person lives in his own country he more or less preserves the sentiments that have flown through the majority of its compatriots. There are exceptions, but they don’t change the rule.

The situation changes for the migrant. He lives uprooted in a foreign land and almost drowns in the big sea of another people or, in pluralistic countries, of many nationalities with customs, traditions and habits quite different from his own.

Faith is perhaps what a Catholic loses more easily in a foreign land, when the country where he lives is Christian but heterodox. What preserves Catholic life is the religious environment. The ideas are the patrimony of a few. An educated person can be Catholic in Rome, in New York, among the Laplanders, the Eskimos, the Chinese and the Turks. A worker who doesn’t think, and is dominated by material concerns, is kept in the religion of his fathers when he is thrown in a foreign land, only if he finds something that reminds him of the environment left when he abandoned his fatherland, and by preserving an intense and inalterable affection for its national traditions. Also in Catholic countries, as in South America, the national sentiment comes to support the religious one and the poor immigrant needs not only the assistance of a Catholic priest, but the affectionate care of an apostle, who cultivates in him the ancient traditions of fatherland and family, the foundation of his faith.

As long as the immigrant considers himself a foreigner and keeps intact his affection for the distant fatherland, the family traditions remain intact in him. Thus, we see that the Irish, who wherever they migrate never forget their national identity and dear Ireland, almost always preserve the faith, even though assimilated to the American, to the Cape of Good Hope settler or to the Australian. For the Irish there are two advantages completely lacking for the Italians, i.e.,: 1. The language spoken in the United States, in a large part of Canada and in the great English colonies of the Cape and Australia is the same that is spoken in Ireland. 2. The Catholic clergy of those countries, with very few exceptions, is Irish or of Irish origin.

Besides, in the Irish is powerful the national hatred against Anglicanism that he associates with the political oppression of his country. The Italian

instead does not have, nor can have, national and religious hatred against the British. He has to oppose Protestantism only from a religious point of view, so there is one less obstacle ( and what an obstacle) to his apostasy.

If the immigrant preserves his patriotic traditions, he will remain Catholic; if he loses them, he will slowly turn Protestant, in Protestant countries, a free-mason or religiously indifferent in Catholic countries. Unfortunately additional incentives will not be lacking, even on the part of mislaid compatriots, to push him into apostasy.

But tradition is the greatest obstacle to apostasy. The populace, which does not think, and is therefore subject to a lesser variety of sentiments, holds on more tenaciously to its traditions than the learned person. On the other hand, when these traditional sentiments, the unforgettable memory of the native place, that is summed up in the paternal home, in the Church, in the sacred ceremonies, in the pastor, weaken in the immigrant, he is radically transformed and assimilates into the new environment, or he loses every principle, becomes isolated, a man for himself, all given to material pursuits without ideals and without supernatural principles.

It is certain that a worker who loses his national traditions, loses to a great extent the reasons for his faith; vice versa, when he keeps intact the faith, he preserves intact national traditions.

The millions of Italian, Spanish, German Catholics, etc. who got lost in the great sea of Protestantism or religious indifferentism in North America, were lost because from the moment they disembarked on that distant and foreign land they saw themselves abandoned and isolated.

Now, a person cannot live for a long time abandoned and isolated.

The human being is essentially social. He can resist for a while in isolation, but when in a foreign land, if he is not caught up in nostalgia, he ends up by adapting to the environment and when, as with the majority of our emigrants, he is ignorant, with the new national habits, he takes on also the religious habits of the adopted country, apostatizing from the two great sentiments of the human heart: the national and the religious.

The Protestantization of uneducated Catholics is more easily understood: once they abandon the faith of their forebears, Catholics adapt easily to a religion that is so elastic it accepts with equal easiness as members souls ardent with religious feelings and skeptical, cold or indifferent persons. In a word, if it costs to become or to remain a Catholic,

to become or to remain a Protestant, for the person who has little religious sentiment, it is a small burden.

The Germans, not only the Catholics, but also the Protestants, have understood long ago the close link existing between national and religious sentiment. Thus they took care that wherever their immigrants are, they may find priests. . ..

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