Europe and the Faith | Page 5

which his less European opponents are
helpless and silent.
I say "helpless" because in their attitude they give up trying to explain.
They record these things, but they are bewildered by them. They can
explain St. Thomas' particular action simply enough: too simply. He
was (they say) a man living in the past. But when they are asked to
explain the vast consequences that followed his martyrdom, they have
to fall back upon the most inhuman and impossible hypotheses; that
"the masses were ignorant"--that is as compared with other periods in
human history (what, more ignorant than today?) that "the Papacy
engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm." As though the Papacy

were a secret society like modern Freemasonry, with some hidden
machinery for "engineering" such things. As though the type of
enthusiasm produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical
thing produced now by caucus or newspaper "engineering!" As though
nothing besides such interferences was there to arouse the whole
populace of Europe to such a pitch!
As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place at St. Thomas' tomb,
the historian who hates or ignores the Faith had (and has) three ways of
denying them. The first is to say nothing about them. It is the easiest
way of telling a lie. The second is to say that they were the result of a
vast conspiracy which the priests directed and the feeble acquiescence
of the maim, the halt and the blind supported. The third (and for the
moment most popular) is to give them modern journalistic names, sham
Latin and Greek confused, which, it is hoped, will get rid of the
miraculous character; notably do such people talk of "auto-suggestion."
Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when he has read
all the original documents, understands it easily enough from within.
He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very important in
its special claims, and was probably (taken as an isolated action)
unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads and as he notes the
rapid and profound transformation of all civilization which was taking
place in that generation, that St. Thomas was standing out for a
principle, ill clothed in his particular plea, but absolute in its general
appreciation: the freedom of the Church. He stood out in particular for
what had been the concrete symbols of the Church's liberty in the past.
The direction of his actions was everything, whether his symbol was
well or ill chosen. The particular customs might go. But to challenge
the new claims of civil power at that moment was to save the Church.
A movement was afoot which might have then everywhere
accomplished what was only accomplished in parts of Europe four
hundred years later, to wit, a dissolution of the unity and the discipline
of Christendom.
St. Thomas had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy; he fought and
he resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. He fought for no
dogmatic point, he fought for no point to which the Church of five
hundred years earlier or five hundred years later would have attached
importance. He fought for things which were purely temporal

arrangements; which had indeed until quite recently been the guarantee
of the Church's liberty, but which were in his time upon the turn of
becoming negligible. But the spirit in which he fought was a
determination that the Church should never be controlled by the civil
power, and the spirit against which he fought was the spirit which
either openly or secretly believes the Church to be an institution merely
human, and therefore naturally subjected, as an inferior, to the
processes of the monarch's (or, worse, the politician's) law.
A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas was obviously
and necessarily to lose, in the long run, every concrete point on which
he had stood out, and yet he saved throughout Europe the ideal thing
for which he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the
enthusiasm of the populace rose: the guarantee of the plain man's
healthy and moral existence against the threat of the wealthy, and the
power of the State--the self-government of the general Church, had
been defended by a champion up to the point of death. For the morals
enforced by the Church are the guarantee of freedom.
Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non-Catholic, with a
blind, irrational assertion that the miracles could not take place. He is
not wholly possessed of a firm, and lasting faith that no marvelous
events ever take place. He reads the evidence. He cannot believe that
there was a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all proof of such
conspiracy). He is moved to a conviction that events so minutely