Cox, Ignatius W.

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The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 8 | Number 3 Article 2July 1940Why a Federation?Ignatius W. CoxFollow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqRecommended CitationCox, Ignatius W. (1940) "Why a Federation?," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 8 : No. 3 , Article 2.Available at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol8/iss3/2'"' i . --.. THE LINAORE QUARTERLY WHY A FEDERATION? By REV. IGNATIUS W. COX, S.J.• Are we dreaming right in our dream of a Federation of Catholic Physicians' Guilds in this _co!-lntry today? We can see the answer written large in the American pan-orama and ' in the streamlined, mechanized world parade of today. In that world man has become a slave to economic, financial, polit-ical, materialistic forces which control him as relentlessly as the slave-driver's whip in our former southern plantations. Man was formed and fashioned free and master of the world about him. Man lost that freedom because for liberty under law which is freedom he substituted license, which is the revolt of free will against the natural and positive r estraints and laws which guide free will along right ways. Man was propagandized to make that substitution and he has been prop-agandized by false slogans and ~y subtle advertisement whenever m the course of history he renews that substitution. "Now the ser-pent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree in paradise? And the woman answered him say-ing: of the fruits of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: but of the fruit of the tree which is in • The address delivered at the Federa-tion Banquet, June 12, 19.40, by the Na-t ional Moderator. the midst of paradise, God has commanded us that we should not eat: . nd that we should not touch 'it lest we die. And the serpent said to the woman: no, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as gods knowing good and evil. And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat and gave to her husband and he did eat." Genesis c. 3. 1-7. And so man, deceived by lying propaganda and false promises, substituted true freedom for li-cense and plucked that forbidden fruit which brought death into this world and all our woe. License is reducible to the prin-ciple that man is an independent, autonomous, without master, either individual man or · the so-cial man organized in the modern god, the state. License is founded on the conviction that man himself makes truth and makes what is right and wrong, good and bad; that what man wants or desires or finds useful either as a unit or as united in the social organism that is good and right. Just before the rise of dictator-ships and the totalitarian idea. in our day man was again bartermg his liberty and his essential free-dom for a cheap imitation, a li- . cense which c&lle~ itndf lib<!ralism ( 67 1 TilE LINAORE QUARTERLY but which because it was license brought about the economic, po-litical, financial, international dis-integration and debacle which pre-pared the way for the strong arm of the totalitarian regime. And so in the economic order license reigned under the name of liberal-ism and in the place of true liberty which is hcedom under law. 'Vealth was accumulated in the hands of the few and men decayed, whether those few were individuals or those few controlled a few states so that other states prevented from access to raw materials be-came the have-nota and the pa-riahs among nations while the have states propagated with the unctu-ous slogans the name of democ-racy. Liberalism abused the very no-tion of freedom of speech, freedom of teaching, freedom of science, freedom of art and literature. All these became license under the fascinating name of liberalism so that man lost his integrity and his virtue and his strength and his manhood and tried to conceal his nakedness by clothing himself and his sinfulness in the lying, deceitful clothing of propaganda, the so-called scientific slogan. And all this false liberalism working in our atheistic and evolu-tionary colleges, in our organs of public expression, the press, the mnga1.ine, the book, the radio and the movie, has so weakened the Ycry foundations of our American wny of life thnt I for one would 11 pt be su rpriscd to sec it tottering to its fnll. The founders and framers of our American way of life were dreamers too. They dreumed of a political' system where true liberty, not license, would rule and gave it flesh and blood in the Declaration of Inde-pendence and in the Constitution now one hundred and fifty years old. That philosophy was the political philosophy of the Jesuit theologian Suarez and the Jesuit Cardinal St. Robert Bellarmine of the 17th century and they derived it from St. Thomas of the 13th century and the age of scholasti-cism. So absolutely untrue it is that real freedom and political democracy are products of our own time! It was from Suarez and Bcllarmine that the American po-litical philosophers of the 18th century ~earned that the right to govern is transferred by the con-sent of the governed to their gov-ernors. 'Vhat our modern Amer-ican leaders of thought and life have not understood is that you · cannot have real freedom by merely enshrining your ideas in paper documents. To have real freedom you must have free men. And no man is really free who claims that he is autonomous, not dependent upon any one but him-self; that freedom of man is based on man's freedom from God and the natural law, the supreme law-gi,·er und the supreme law, under which alone man can gain liberty which is freedom under God and law. God and the natural lnw are nlonc the guarantees of humun fl-cedom and their only safegunrd. 'Vhcn man rejects these he soon [ r,s I . .... I :I._ THE LINACRE QUARTERLY falls into license and slavery to himself, to his economic and po-litical overlords, and to the devil by whom he is propagandized. Our fathers understood these basic truths upon which all free-dom must rest. Man must be free in himself before he can have and hold freedom and onlj' the truth of God can make men free. Hence they wrote in imperishable letters in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Destroy man's de-pendence on God and the natural law, and you hand over man's t~ue freedom which is liberty under God, to license, and man becomes the slave to himself and after that to the state. That is what Ameri-cans have forgotten today as they have stood idly by and allowed fifth columnists in our colleges, in our schools, in our press, in our government, in our radio con-tacts, everywhere slowly and in-sidiously to urge man to revolt against God and become his own mas ter in order the more surely to become the devil's slaves through the false leaders intellec-tu al, economic, social, political, medical which he sets up for his own purposes. Now, if you want to know what has brought about this mechan-ized, streamlined, cruel, brutal, slavish, and ensluved, muterialistic world today, you have not far to seek. It has been brought about by propaganda which had told men that by rejecting God and his law that man would become as god and through that propaganda has made man less than the brute. Brutes could not do to each other the insane things that man is doing to man today. The revolt against God has led to man's revolt against man. It is the anti-Christian and anti-God propaganda that has done this thing in every line of human activity, in art and literature, in finance, in economics, by every means of propaganda which man has developed. All this has gone on for years abroad and in Amer-ica under the fallacious and abused slogans of freedom of speech, aca-demic freedom, freedom of science, freedom of medicine, freedom of sociology and freedom for health. Art for art's sake, and business for business' sake, and one's na-tion's sovereignty for that nation's sole advantage even though it at-tack the rights of other nations: As if man were supreme in his ac-tivities, as if they there were not a subordination to be maintained! Man has lost an obvious truth that in human life, all is integrated, nothing stands alone. As Aristotle puts it, "Every art and every science had its own proper end but these are for something higher; the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of ship-building a vessel, that of strategy victory; that of domestic economy wealth; if therefore among the aims at which our actions aim there be one which we wish for its I 59 I THE LINAORE QUARTERLY own sake, while we wish all others for the sake of this-it is clear that this one ultimate end must be the good and the supreme good." Once you propagandize an ideol-ogy such as I have described with regard to man, you leave every individual a prospective slave to the force and power of economic, financial, political dictators. The only thing that balks the totali-tarian is religion and its teaching about the dignity of the individual soul and personality. Liberalism destroyed the influence of Catholic Christianity and thus paved the way for totalitarianism. It has and is paving the way for it here in the states. Religion alone balks the dictator and that is the reason why the fight of liberalism on re-· ligion prepared the way for the dictator as well as the reason why the dictator must tight religion. Under the influence of liberalism and its sequel the totalitarian and collectivistic state there are pop-ular today just two ideas of man and both lead to the same dead end. There is the man of the lib-erals, · conceived as autonomous free from dependence on God or his law or on anything but self, the perverted individualist who has made a wreck of morals, a wreck of a sound economic order, a wreck of a system of sound finance, a wreck of international harmony and good will. Against this view of man and because of it is the col-lectivistic view, of the Nazi and the Communist. Man is for the state, man is for the race, individ-ual man has no autonomy. He is a cog in the machinery of man united in the state. Man has no individual end in himself or in God; he is the creature of the state, the slave of the state; the state is the be all and end all here. That doctrine is the dead end of the liberalism which is still being preached from the house tops in this country and which because it divorces men from God makes him first the slave of self and then the slave of state or race. In these theories there is . no supreme good except the good of the auton-omous man either individual or so-cial. Hence everything was advo-cated in literature, art, science and medicine which seemed to im-prove the state of man in himself without any regard to man's de-pendence on God and God's will. Against these two ideas of man is the only real idea of man which can save man both from himself and the state, the idea that teaches the dignity of human personality as arising from the fact that man, every individual man, is the son of God and destined for eternal hap-piness with God. Add to this the dignity of human nature born of the fact that God became man in Christ to elevate human nature to the divinity, that Christ is come that we may have life and have it more abundantly, and that that life is a participation in the Divine nature by grace and fed and nour-ished by a di"inc food which is the body of Christ. The supreme good in life therefore is the development of this divine life, "This is eternal r r " 1 THE LINACRE QUARTERLY life to know the one true God and Him whom He has sent." Art, liter-ature, science, government, health, medicine are all subordinate or should be to this supreme good. Men rise to the highest peaks of perfection and happiness as they preserve this subordination or sink to the lowest depths of degrada-tion as they reject it. The dignity, happiness and freedom of human nature depends on man, individual and social, preserving this subor-dination of all his activities to the supreme good. The evidence for . all this lies about us in the pathetic condition of the world because of an attempt to break that subor-dination of man to his supreme good which is God through Christ. The practical effects of the doc-trines ·of the atheistic, autonomous man, the man of license, have made progress in American medicine and that progress is gaining progres-sive momentum. Here then is our dream of the function in American medicine of the F ederation of Catholic Phy-sicians' Guilds. 'Ve are organized to keep before our own eyes the truth that will make us free, that medicine is not a final end in itself, that it can be used for the good of man; nnd even under its slogan health can be used for his tem-poral and eternal perdition . l\Iedi-cine needs n direction of a sound moral code as well as economics and politics need it. It is our privilege to point out to our fel-low physicia ns this eternal verity, that medicine is for man, the whole man, not only his body, and that the whole man is for God, and that when medicine or medical practi-tioners claim that they are auto~­omous, not dependent upon God in their aims and purposes, this in the long run is doing not only an iujury to man but also to medicine and preparing the way for medi-cine's enslavement to political rul-ers . Medicine must hold fast to the doctrine that man and medi-cine are dependent upon God if medicine itself is to survive free and independent. Take God out of medicine, let medicine defy the law of God, let medicine substitute, under propaganda, license for the liberty which is its own and its dig-nity under God, let medicine give itself up to the practices to which it is urged because it can do them, birth control, euthanasia, sterili-zation, therapeutic abortion, and medicine will become the slave of the collectivistic state, as property and economic processes and the whole citiz enry have be<;ome abroad and are likely to become here. This means that for the love of medicine, lest she become a harlot in the hands of the fifth columnists within her ranks, who would de-bauch her and divorce her from God, for the love of mankind which looks upon the forbidd en fruit s ns fair to behold but which will bring death, for the love of God whose truth alone will make men free, Catholic phys icians must organize and ot·gnnize speedily through Catholic Action to fight vigorously that medicine may follow the Code [ 61 l THE LINACRE QUARTERLY of Conduct given to the Jews on Mt. Sinai and to Christians through Christ, elevated by His teaching on the mount. That is the dream and vision of those who are working for the establishmeht and the federation of Catholic Physicians' Guilds throughout the United States. Let us make this dream come true. REPORT OF THE CONVENTION FEDERATION OF THE CATHOLIC PHYSICIANS' GUILDS New York, June 12, 1940 The meeting of the Federation of Catholic Physicians' Guilds con-vened in the Catholic Club, W al-dorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, Wednesday morning, June 12, 1940, at eleven o'clock, Dr. Thomas M. Brennan, Brooklyn, New York, President of the Feder-a~ion, presiding. PRESIDENT BRENNAN: Father Cox, will you open the meeting? REVEREND IGNATIUS W. Cox: Direct, 0 Lord, all our actions by Thy Holy inspirations and carry them on by Thy gracious assis-tance so that every prayer and ac-tion of ours may begin from Thee, and through Thee be happily ended. Amen ! PRESIDENT BRENNAN: Since the last session of the Federation of Catholic Physicians' Guilds we have sustained a serious loss in the death of the President who was elected at that meeting, Dr. Joseph A. Dillon. He gave to this organ-ization every thing that was in his power, of his ability, of his time and his material aid. I ask at this time that the mem-bers rise for a short space to show respect to his memory. The membership arose, and prayers were offered by His Ex-cellency, Archbishop Spellman. PRESIDENT BnENNAN: Your Ex-cellency, Very Reverend Monsig-nori, Reverend Clergy, Members of the Federation of Catholic Phy-sicians' Guilds: At this time we will depart a little from the usual order of business. His Excellency, the Archbishop, has favored us by coming here today. He has been most generous and most gracious toward us. He did not hesitate a moment when we called upon him and asked if we might have Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. He said anything the doctors wanted, he was willing and anxious to do. He has done that very thing. He graciously said that Mass for us this morning. He is here now to greet us and to give us his approval, his blessing and his en-couragement. I take great pleasure in present-ing to you at this time, His Excel-lency, Archbishop Spellman, of New York. The membership arose. (Ap-plause.) Hrs ExcELJ.ENCY, AncHBISHOI, FnANcrs J . Sr>ELI.MAN: Dr. Bren-nan and Members of the Catholic I 62 I ·~ 

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