[192] The Catholic Anthropological Conference has issued in pamphlet form ''The Age of the Human Race in the Light of Geology" by Stephen Richarz [sic], S.V.D., Ph.D., which inspires new hope for the intellectual future of Catholicism in the United States. Catholic anthropological work, as inspired and directed by this Conference, provides at least one sound reason for believing that intellectual activity among American Catholics is not entirely stagnant.
Father Richarz, whose work in this field has received due recognition, presents us in this monograph with a splendid statement of the age of the human race. According to him it is an established fact that man witnessed the glaciation in northern and central Europe; second, that man was in Europe even before the last period of severe cold, and, finally, that man was in Europe during a rather genial climate preceding the last glaciation and witnessed this process of glaciation from its beginning to the complete disappearance of the ice.
What does this indicate with regard to the age of the human race? The author concludes that "there are many uncertainties which block any attempt to assign a definite figure for the age of mankind. On the other hand it would be unreasonable and unscientific to reject all figures as uncertain and unreliable. There are facts which are obvious and accepted unanimously by all geologists, and these facts warrant the conclusion that man was undoubtedly in Europe 30,000 years ago. Of this number of millenniums the first half is determined by exact methods, while the other half is based partly on an estimate of the recession of the ice where this recession can not yet be measured directly, partly on a conservative estimate of the time required for the advance of the ice front from northern to central Europe. Future development of these methods as well as new discoveries may raise this minimum figure considerably and place [193] on a more solid basis the theories of those who believe in a much higher age of mankind. However, it seems impossible to the author that the figure of 30,000 years will ever turn out to be too high as a reasonable estimate of the minimum age of the human race. In any case, the present essay shows that it is impossible to reconcile the well-known facts of human antiquity with such figures as 6,000 or 8,000 years.
It may be added in conclusion that no theological problem is involved. Theologians, even the more conservative, acknowledge full liberty to deviate from the figures of the older exegesis and declare that the problem of the age of mankind, like that of the age of the earth and of the universe, is one which has to be solved by secular science.
The presentation of the proof for these statements is made in an exceptionally pleasing and understandable form. We commend to all educated Catholics the careful reading of this excellent monograph. May Father Richarz be permitted to continue his scholarly work and thus help to bring the Catholic cause in the United States into repute among the educated and intellectual classes!
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Source: Anonymous, "The Age of the Human Race," The Catholic Fortnightly Review 36, no. 10 (July 1929): 192–193.
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Fr. Henry Woods, SJ, Standardization and its Abuse (1928)
[45] To have followed year by year the meeting of our Association is to know how large a place standardization has had in its discussions. One can neither grudge the time spent nor complain of the prominence granted. The supremacy claimed for standardization in education has made it a vital question.
Standardization is closely connected with order. Generically it brings in order by referring many things to one taken as the expression of attainable perfection. Thus it is natural to the intelligent creature. His every action supposes it. The adjectives and adverbs of his speech imply it. Operations are right or wrong. He performs each more or less perfectly. In all, efficiency and standardization go hand in hand. Man extends his field of activity by perfecting standards.
Standardization is sought, not for itself, but for the end it facilitates. Its efficiency determines its limits. Once the critical point has been passed, standardization becomes an impediment to personal initiative. Its problem is how to blend these two so as to get the best result. The solution must depend on the nature of the things to be standardized, of the means employed, and of the end to be obtained. Let us begin with what modern educators seek to standardize.
Of all God's creatures man alone is of universal adaptability to the world. Every other living being has its natural habitat. Domestic animals, however wide their range, cannot, like man, live and thrive everywhere. His use of creatures is equally universal. [46] Whatever distributed amongst others is food for life, becomes his sustenance. Their wool and fur and silk and down are his raiment. His intelligence contrives daily more profitable uses of the contents of earth. In the briefest space, one reared in luxury can change to savage life. Another passes after years of toil to wealthy ease as if to the manner born. "For the heaven of heavens is the Lord's: the earth He has given to the children of men."
This singular universality of human capacity must have its correlative in a singular individualism of human initiative, which reduces the standardization of man to a minimum. Whether we consider man's nature or the immense field of his operation, we see that to act humanly is to act freely, to choose from a multitudinous complexity of motives limited only by the actual limits of his intelligence and the actual capacity of things to receive his activity, the proximate reasons of his action. In the irrational creature the specific activity of its nature fixes our attention. In man this specific activity is, as it were, eclipsed by the supreme individualism of the person.
Standardization presupposes in things to be standardized various potentialities which the standardizer by the intelligent employment of means can actuate or not as he wills and to whatever degree he sees fit. These, when actuated, are in a natural harmony, which the standardizer upsets to develop artificially now one potency now another. Learning by experience the limits set by nature to such developments, he establishes permanent standards. Thus in the wild horse is the potentiality of the draught-horse's strength, of the racer's speed, of the action of the carriage-horse, of the charger's mettle and grace. By his art man brings out the standard draught-horse, the standard racehorse, the standard carriage-horse, the standard charger.
Standardization, then, from the point of view of the thing standardized, means sacrifice. In the development of speed much of the horse's natural strength and endurance is lost. The racehorse lasts for a mile, a mile and a half, perhaps for two or three miles at a marvelous pace. To travel at a natural gait twenty or thirty miles a day for a month would be its ruin. The draught-horse retains no trace of equine speed or grace or beauty. So [47] it is always; and the greater the number and variety of potentialities, the greater the sacrifice. In man the exigency of this law is the strictest. To reach a standard in any line one must withdraw from whatever implies dissipation of energy.
"To shun delights and live laborious days"
is the universal canon of excellence.
Since standardization, though within the limits of nature, does, nevertheless, a certain violence to nature, its supreme norm must be the will of the Creator of all nature. Should one question the lawfulness of its dealings with lower creatures, it will not do to answer: "We do them no wrong, since lacking intelligence, they have no rights." It is true that the irrational creatures can have no rights. But it is equally true that in His creatures the Creator has rights supreme and absolute. By the principle alleged we defend our use of creatures according to the divine concession: "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's : the earth He has given to the children of men." But the concessions itself is our sole adequate justification in standardizing the irrational creature. In harmony with universal nature, though doing violence to particular natures, we use irrational creatures to serve our own ends.
With regard to the rational creature the question takes a very different aspect. None is too humble to share in the Creator's gift. It is his because he needs the irrational creature, not only for his temporal wants but also as the means of working out his title to the eternal good. This is a matter purely personal. With the individual must rest the final decision as to how he will use the creature. Laws and their sanctions, governments, social organizations are necessary helps to a right decision because man's nature is social. Nevertheless they are but things of time, ministers only to the heir of eternity.
Wherefore the same Creator who grants the rational creature the fullest useful service of the irrational, allows no such exploiting of man by men, whether individual or organized. Man is social. He engages himself naturally to serve others; and in doing so obliges himself to attain a serviceable standard. He has [48] his duty to the society of which he is a member, and must fit himself for its performance. But because society is a union of wills, though he must avail himself of social direction, he discharges his obligation of his own initiative. Should he fail, the individual or the society could enforce compliance. This, however, would be abnormal, a transient vindication of violated right, not the normal exercise of constant right Man has not been given to the State merely to be formed by it and used for its own purpose.
Coming now to the end to be obtained by a legitimate standardization of education, we must not attenuate essential facts to propitiate those who would hold the fate of the rising generation in the hollow of their hands. To do so would be to betray our trust as Christian teachers, to desert those to whose service we are consecrated, to imperil souls Christ died to save. Should those who have assumed control of education prove so averse to the truth in this matter as to reject as inefficient all education based on it or to exact concessions that will rob the truth of its vitality, mutual understanding must become impossible.
The end of education is the end of man's creation. It is so to train the youth as to incline the man to live a life leading to immortal bliss. We do not say that formal religious teaching should meet the pupil at every turn. As in his after life [i.e. adult life] there will be religious exercises and secular pursuits, so in his pupilage, education will be religious and secular. Yet, as revealed religion must underlie all secular activity, the universal rule to determine the right and wrong of things, giving its color to the entire life; so religion must permeate education, its motive and its norm for both teacher and pupil. A system which separates religion and education, confining this to the affairs of time, excluding from it peremptorily the very mention of God, man's beginning and his last end, provides for its own condemnation.
With this clearly understood, it is plain that education so intimately connected with man's last end cannot be a matter merely social, to be controlled by the civil power. It is supremely personal. Though it is a personal interest in which the child depends necessarily on others, it is so sacred in itself as to generate in those others most sacred obligations. So sacred is it that [49] God Himself indicates those others on whom those sacred obligations rest. To direct the beginnings of education He provides the parent. Because He has raised its end to the supernatural order, making it in a word salvation, He has confided the general direction of education to those to whom the word was spoken: "Go, teach all nations." It is not within the competence of the secular power to define for the citizen the education he is to receive. State standardization is a euphemism for State-usurpation.
For if the putting of the child in the way of salvation be a personal work, it connotes in school, college and teacher an individuality which will enable parent and child to find what the individual practical judgment determines to be most conducive to the satisfaction of the personal obligation. Until recent years such individualism was a matter of course. Christendom could not have understood anything else. Religion permeated all education. Ecclesiastical authority watched over it, protected and encouraged it, leaving its formal provision to individual initiative. Even when an ecclesiastic became a founder, he was such in his personal, not in his official, capacity. William of Wykeham, not the Bishop of Winchester, founded Winchester and New College. The mere material of education was everywhere much the same. Methods, traditions, the genius loci gave to each school its character, that each impressed on its own. To speak of what we are more familiar with, nothing is more plainly recognizable than the distinction between the Oxford and the Cambridge touch. And this was in perfect accord with Christian society so wonderfully organized and compacted of subordinate associations manifold in their variety. The Oxford man had a brother in every Oxford man who would stand by him in any quarrel touching him as an Oxford man. The Cambridge man was brother to all Cambridge men. So too was it of the great schools. Even to-day Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Shrewsbury, Rugby, Harrow, have their own personality, each giving its own formation. The same is true of the London schools, Charterhouse, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors, Christ's Hospital. The minor schools, hardly less famous, such as, Manchester, Bedford Grammar, Abingdon had each its own character; and [50] when to meet the demands of the new age, Marlborough, Clifton, Wellington and their fellows were established, each grew up in its own place an individual complete in itself, distinct from all others, the principle of its own activity, neither seeking favors from universities or associations, nor tolerating discrimination.
And this individualism passed over into our own land. Though John Harvard would fain have named his foundation after his Alma Mater, he could not transplant the spirit of Cambridge to the new world. The name persists by the Charles River. But Harvard is simply Harvard, and could be nothing else. Yale and Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, and William and Mary matured in well-marked personality. Individualism characterized Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter, Roxbury Latin, Boston Latin and all later foundations on similar lines. Attempts to introduce the English public school into the United States have resulted only in new American schools, each with a character all its own. The old common school—the very antithesis of the modern public—expressing the mind of the community administering it, was intensely individualistic; while our Catholic schools and colleges, embodying the methods and traditions of the orders and congregations, vivified by religion diffused through their entire organism—individualism was their very life.
Coming now to the means and methods of standardization, no one can pretend that the old time individualism made for anything but efficiency. Each school or college or university was standardized for efficiency, not by any outside agency destroying individual character, but by the intrinsic methods, traditions, personal history, which formed that character. The expression of the standard of an institution was in its own performance. In this was its success, the guarantee of its endurance. The inefficient school had no support. It was not an element in a vast system, its existence in inefficiency ensued because any competition had become impossible. Fulfilling its purpose it flourished. Failing to do so it was deserted. If things went wrong, tradition was the standard of reformation. There was no blaming of the essential system, no running after new methods, no proclaiming of a new panacea. This was reserved for the standardizers of to-day, who about every decade announce the failure of what they [51] took up so enthusiastically, and impose upon educators the working out of some fresh theory destined to be abandoned in turn.
It is hard to see how any intelligent being can grant as a principle not to be questioned, that because schools B, C, D, E, differ each in its own method from that of a dominating institution A, they are inefficient and must change what has stood the test of time for methods new and tentative. Saul thought to secure efficiency by standardizing David. Had David consented we should be telling the history of Goliath in another way.
Were the standardizer a logician he would interpose: "Your example betrays you. Your argument is an ignoratio elenchi. You assume that we would standardize men by means of education. Our only aim is to standardize education for the good of man." To answer will, in carrying us to the root of the matter, compel the mention of things painful to hear.
To standardize education for man's good, suppose a norm of excellence drawn from his nature, according to which the education elaborated is an evident good. Such a good is either absolute or relative. There is but one good absolute, the final term of man's progressive nature. Education must be a relative good, a means, as we have seen, to the absolute. But we have already shown that education cannot be standardized according to this norm by those who, as a rule, deny its reality, and insist unanimously on its exclusion. One may say that modern standardized education can be used as a means to the supreme good. This may be true. If so, it comes from man's natural tendency to that good, and God's grace enabling him to overcome the obstacles raised by modern education, much as his longing after liberty enables the prisoner to make a pen-knife and a file the instruments of his freedom. But such a use is entirely outside the standardizing intention. This, the condemnation of religious education, the substitution of education purely secular, proves conclusively.
The term of a standardization ignoring the supreme end of man, operating constantly for the extinction of every method making that end its central element, is obvious. It is man oblivious of his personal end, oblivious, therefore, of his personal rights, of his personal duties; of the same personal rights and [52] duties in every other man; of the obligation of social authority to respect and protect those rights, to facilitate the performance of those duties. What is this but to reform man, to destroy in him as far as possible the image of God, to standardize him according to another standard than that established by the Creator in the creature?
"But citizens must be educated up to the standard of the Republic." Noting that here is an acknowledgment that the standardizer aims at the standardization of man, let us analyze his principle. It seems to mean that to form the American citizen needs a long specialized training. This would imply in our Constitution an unnatural character which every American should reject. Monkeys are by nature gregarious and imitative. With this foundation it is possible to dress and arm them like soldiers and to teach them some military exercises and evolutions. To do so would be to superimpose upon their nature an artificial habit, not without much labor. Not altogether alien from this is the modern notion of educating for citizenship, a corollary perhaps of the popular theory of evolutionary human and social origins. We think better of the American citizen than to make him an artificial product. Our Republic is a noble concept because nobly human. Its theory embodies the largest human liberty. The theory actualized meets an intelligent subordination that has never been surpassed. In the new nation conceived in the spirit of liberty, no special discipline was provided. Men went out to it spontaneously because of its harmony with human nature. Hence it has been wisely said that in every well-ordered commonwealth civic instruction is confined to the positive law; and is the more efficacious as it is easier, briefer and complete according to the subject's condition.
For let us consider. Why do men live peacefully and happily obedient to lawful authority? Not, evidently, through fear of punishment. There are some such in every civil society, for whom are provided police, criminal courts, prisons and death. But they are relatively few. Neither is it through any special study of the nature of society, the origin of authority, the source of supreme civil power. The citizen obeys the law spontaneously. The most learned sociologist follows the direction of the traffic [53] officer without a thought of his science, as readily as his humblest neighbor. The universal reason is man's social nature, whereby he lives intelligently in the society of his fellows with the habitual will to attain the common good as determined by the social intellect and resolved on by the social will. To this add his universal adaptability, which we have already considered, and the adequate reason appears why man lives peaceably and happily in habitual obedience to any mode of legitimate government. Civic virtue, a part of patriotism, is therefore a substantial habit growing out of man's nature, not an acquired habit superadded to nature. Obedience to parents in the family, to the teacher in the school will strengthen it; but no civic instruction could implant it. Because the American Constitution rightly understood is so consonant with nature, those born under it grew up in its spirit; those coming from without were so quickly assimilated as to be hardly distinguishable by any civic note from the native-born. If at times they fell short of the perfect Americanism, it was but an episode in the history of the immigrant population, whence came the American people of to-day. Moreover this must never be forgotten, that whatever civic corruption obtained among the foreign-born, there were always Americans of purest blood to make it possible, to protect it, to profit by it; and there was always the great mass of citizens native and immigrant alike, to reprobate, chastise, and expel it.
"But you cannot deny in the immigrant of to-day a special need of civic instruction." Even so, the immigrant's special need cannot be made the general standard of all American education. The modern civic instruction, therefore, is for the American formed by the traditions of his fathers and the principles of our fundamental Constitution. He it is, not the adventitious alien, who is out of harmony with the new education. As for the alien, his need is not so much of instruction in American principles, as of the extirpation of false social doctrine. One and all must know that between the principles of our government and the theories of the European revolutionist there can be nothing in common. That the fundamental Constitution of the Republic is in danger becomes daily more evident. But the peril is not from the immigrant, but from ourselves. Despising the old education full of [54] the influences of religion recognized by our forefathers as a necessary foundation of the nation, Americans brought in deliberately from Europe its very antithesis, a system saturated with atheism, pregnant with the worst of all tyrannies, the impersonal State. The standardization of modern education works for the fuller development of that system. Vain then, is the hope of Americanizing by such education those who see it ready to reproduce in the land of liberty conditions from which they fled, or of eradicating from their minds destructive social principles embraced through antagonism to those conditions, when they see the fear of such conditions generating the same principles in Americans themselves, in even the very teachers to whom their Americanization has been entrusted.
That the omnipotent, irresistible State, using the citizen for its own purposes, is the term of public education to-day, no one can fail to see. That the effect of all our standardizing is to rivet the chains, intellectual and moral, of such a slavery, is no less evident. Seeking the standardizers we find men and women acting, apparently, through their own initiative. Whether they perceive the trend of their operations is not to the point. We give them the benefit of every doubt. Nevertheless they have assumed exclusive control of education, not only fixing and multiplying standards, but also intimating disaster as the result of not conforming to their rules. Behind them is the whole organization of state-education, controlled at present rather loosely by each State within its own boundaries, yet tending to become a national function organized down to the last detail as a department of the Federal Government. Should this be brought about standardizing will have its full effect, the loss of liberty of teaching, the elimination of the personal element in school and scholar, a new slavery as surely destructive of the nation "conceived in the spirit of liberty" as that other from which the nation was purified in the blood and flame of civil war.
It will not do to say that in the standardizing of the individual denominational school, is sought only the subordination of private interests to the public welfare. Were this all, it would nevertheless rest on an entirely wrong concept of government. This [55] is not primarily the subordination of private interests to public welfare, which would lead inevitably to the exaggeration of the omnipotent State and the neglect of personal rights; but the promotion of the common good by the protection, promotion and harmonizing of private rights. As a matter of fact, however, standardizing as it is being practiced works out for all that is worst in the modem world, for libertinism of thought, the breaking up of the family, the extirpation of Christianity, the denial of God. For instance: "The standard college must have a money-endowment." This gives neither a guarantee of efficiency nor a remedy against inefficiency. Its natural effect is the extinction of all colleges of which the endowment is the consecration to God of teachers, both men and women, who, by their traditions, their talents, their long preparation, their methods and their motives, have proved themselves most efficient educators. We would not say that an endowed denominational school is impossible. We do maintain that secularism is the open road to endowment, and that thirst for further endowment has led one endowed denominational institution after another to change to undenominationalism. Again: "In a standard institution the higher chairs must be held by Doctors of Philosophy." In practice the degree will come from some university purely secular. Thus will prevail in all schools a philosophy always reducible, whatever its momentary form, to its evolutionary Hegelian stock. "The standard college must have a working library, in which students may practice research." Such a library can be obtained at brief notice only from our chief publishers, whose catalogues rarely show anything that is not at least rationalistic. Whether the cribbing a bit here, a bit there from such books can be called research, is very doubtful: the result, however, is certain. "The standard college must therefore promote private study and restrict public teaching." Thus the pupil is to be free to absorb error: the teacher who would save him is to be gagged.
These are some of the more notable examples. Others touching the lower schools will occur to you, all tending the same way. There is no sadder demonstration of the gulf between the older school in which without noisy display loyalty to country and its banner flowed as a sacred duty from man's obligation to his [56] Creator and the modern public school with its tediously unconvincing civic instruction setting before pupils only the impersonal State—than the substitution for daily religious exercise, of the daily salute to the flag, the need of which appeared only when God's place in education had been forgotten.
To sum up, the modern abuse of standardization is: first, unnatural and therefore unphilosophical. Secondly, it wrongs the parent, the child, the individual school. Thirdly, a false ideal of education having been introduced, standardization is used to maintain it. Fourthly, God has been shut out of education; standardization is made to turn the key on Him. Fifthly, it standardizes, not education for the benefit of the citizen, but the citizen for the benefit of the State.
DISCUSSION
RT. REV. MSGR. FRANCIS T. MORAN, D. D.: The philosophy of Father Woods on standardization will not be questioned. The learned educator adequately accounts for the purpose of uniformity and concedes its necessity within certain bounds to promote harmony. In weights and measures it is undoubtedly necessary. But in education there must be allowed a large latitude to meet the individual initiative. Otherwise education will sink to a dead level, and scholars will become automatons doing a set piece of work and unable to venture beyond a particular task. Mass production may be the requirement of industrialism, but after the formulas, as for instance of the four fundamentals of mathematics are fixed, freedom of development should be encouraged in the training of the mind.
It is not surprising that Father Woods takes the position he does. It would be surprising if the member of a great order, one of whose chief purposes is education, with a tradition of several centuries of achievement and the heir to many centuries of tradition, could be definitely led to any other conclusion. The exigencies of the present moment and new conditions may seem to suggest new methods. But an old educational institution of world-wide experience will rightly hesitate before breaking with the past and responding readily to the invitation to reject freedom and to adopt limitation.
The Jesuit Order if so disposed may point with pride to a record in the educational field that has not been surpassed and will not be surpassed for many a day if ever by any body of teachers in the whole world. The libraries are filled with their books. They have produced a multitude of scholars eminent in canon law, exegetics, philosophy, theology, the natural sciences, and in every branch of learning. They have staffed high schools, lyceums, colleges and universities in every country and continent, and their [57] opinion therefore in educational matters is of the highest value and is worthy of the greatest respect. We must not be carried away by the clamor of the period. Each individual has a tendency to think that the world was created the day he was born. Mankind or a given portion of it, is prone to be deceived by the voices of a prevailing sentiment. How far is this true in the matter of standardization? It is well to inquire carefully before making a definite committal.
The conditions in the development of education in our country have been such as to suggest standardization. The country was new. It is only yesterday that we came out of the little red school house. There was a consuming passion for knowledge amongst the masses increased often by the isolation in which they lived. The form of government, participated in by the people, encouraged a desire on the part of the individual to discuss public questions intelligently and to fit himself for the holding of official position. Opportunity for success in the mercantile and industrial fields was abundant and became more assured when accompanied by adequate mental equipment. As a result, schools of all kinds sprang up all over the land. Each school was practically a law unto itself. It speaks well for the earnestness of the people in their pursuit of learning that they came to the determination that the wheat should be sifted from the chaff, and that the dishonest purveyors of distinctions and degrees, the frauds and charlatans, should be driven out. Things had come to a pretty pass when a fake educator could hang out a shingle on an office and advertise university degrees at ten dollars or one hundred dollars or more, according to the gullibility of the recipient. It would seem high time to standardize. This was one reason but of course there were many other reasons for establishing some kind of uniformity so that a student from one institution could readily find his place in another, either in the same course or in a progressive course of advancement. There can be only general sympathy with the purpose of standardization in these conditions.
Again, for colleges and universities the one main assurance of stability was the investment in buildings and the endowment for maintenance and growth. At least such an institution could not run away over night. Situated as we Catholics are, with a large portion of our capital derived from the devoted efforts of our educators who labor without pay and because of their love for their fellowman and especially our youth, the first effect of a money endowment policy was to cause surprise and disquiet. I remember very well when my neighbors, the Jesuits of Cleveland, communicated in conversation their anxiety about the Hipes law which set up a pecuniary qualification. It seemed to involve a hardship and an attack on voluntary personal contribution in the education of the young. There was no such purpose; and when it was suggested that the requirements of the law would be met by capitalizing the voluntary service, a solution was found that the State as well as the different associations were quite willing to recognize. We should clearly understand that in the discussion [58] of standardization the good will of our fellow citizens is taken for granted. There is no intention to visit hardship on any honest effort. We can all therefore readily grasp hands on what makes for the good of the cause.
Now what is the good of the cause? Is it standard production or freedom for initiative for the institution and the individual? Undoubtedly the latter. It was on this basis that the old universities came to achieve their special excellences. Salerno had eminence in medicine, Bologna in law. Paris in theology. We have learned something since the ninth and tenth centuries when these universities were established. This is true, but we have not learned to depart from fundamental principles and formulas. With the impulse given by these great universities there came others in rapid development reaching up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Salamanca, Pavia, Padua and many others. Each seemed to have its own specialty; each was working with its own earnestness. There certainly was not standardization in the sense in which we know it. Scholars were held in esteem and exercised the largest influence on their own and succeeding times. Alcuin, Venerable Bede, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure are names resplendent in light and shedding a lustre over the whole field of learning. One such name is a luminary outshining in brilliancy a whole host of twinkling stars. But the stars also give light and brighten the skies.
With change of times there comes change of methods. In our day industrialism makes its demands, and while this may connote an improvement in living conditions beyond those of the Middle Ages, or at least we need not argue the comparison, it will not be maintained that industrialism should set the standards for education. The mind is above matter; the spirit is more than the body. The smokestack may be the symbol of our prosperity but it should not be the symbol of our education. The Cathedral of an olden day was the shining mirror in which man beheld himself. Here art and religion met. Better by far was it in the development of the race that, let us say, after the time of Gregory VII, 1073, the Cathedral exhibited the hopes and aspirations of mankind than that the era of industrialism should have set in with the smokestack for its chiefest ornament. My plea in brief is: Back to the mind, back to the spirit. Let our universities lead the way and let them stand again for law, medicine, theology. Let the liberal arts be cultivated. If industrialism demands the technical school and manual training, so be it; but let not our whole educational process be based on this material foundation.
I would argue that we should maintain our independence in our educational policy. Surely there should be cooperation and friendship. But we have a heritage in education. We have traditions age-old and we have achievements of renown. We carried the torch through long centuries and our experience is worthy of great consideration. It is incumbent on us to know our own mind and to formulate our own program, and while [59] looking at the subject from our own standpoint to make an honest endeavor to see it from the other man's standpoint.
American educators see the shortcomings of the present system and show an admirable spirit in the candor and frankness in which they discuss them. It is a sincere conviction that if our Catholic educators who have the responsibility of our Catholic higher education will discuss and study and weigh all the elements of this problem and outline some policy or perhaps formulate some program; and if this program has the cordial approval and united support of the Bishops of the country, the position of Catholic education will command the attention and respect of the educators of the country.
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Source: Fr. Henry Woods, S.J., "Standardization and Its Abuse," The National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 25, no. 1 (Nov. 1928): 45–59.
Standardization is closely connected with order. Generically it brings in order by referring many things to one taken as the expression of attainable perfection. Thus it is natural to the intelligent creature. His every action supposes it. The adjectives and adverbs of his speech imply it. Operations are right or wrong. He performs each more or less perfectly. In all, efficiency and standardization go hand in hand. Man extends his field of activity by perfecting standards.
Standardization is sought, not for itself, but for the end it facilitates. Its efficiency determines its limits. Once the critical point has been passed, standardization becomes an impediment to personal initiative. Its problem is how to blend these two so as to get the best result. The solution must depend on the nature of the things to be standardized, of the means employed, and of the end to be obtained. Let us begin with what modern educators seek to standardize.
Of all God's creatures man alone is of universal adaptability to the world. Every other living being has its natural habitat. Domestic animals, however wide their range, cannot, like man, live and thrive everywhere. His use of creatures is equally universal. [46] Whatever distributed amongst others is food for life, becomes his sustenance. Their wool and fur and silk and down are his raiment. His intelligence contrives daily more profitable uses of the contents of earth. In the briefest space, one reared in luxury can change to savage life. Another passes after years of toil to wealthy ease as if to the manner born. "For the heaven of heavens is the Lord's: the earth He has given to the children of men."
This singular universality of human capacity must have its correlative in a singular individualism of human initiative, which reduces the standardization of man to a minimum. Whether we consider man's nature or the immense field of his operation, we see that to act humanly is to act freely, to choose from a multitudinous complexity of motives limited only by the actual limits of his intelligence and the actual capacity of things to receive his activity, the proximate reasons of his action. In the irrational creature the specific activity of its nature fixes our attention. In man this specific activity is, as it were, eclipsed by the supreme individualism of the person.
Standardization presupposes in things to be standardized various potentialities which the standardizer by the intelligent employment of means can actuate or not as he wills and to whatever degree he sees fit. These, when actuated, are in a natural harmony, which the standardizer upsets to develop artificially now one potency now another. Learning by experience the limits set by nature to such developments, he establishes permanent standards. Thus in the wild horse is the potentiality of the draught-horse's strength, of the racer's speed, of the action of the carriage-horse, of the charger's mettle and grace. By his art man brings out the standard draught-horse, the standard racehorse, the standard carriage-horse, the standard charger.
Standardization, then, from the point of view of the thing standardized, means sacrifice. In the development of speed much of the horse's natural strength and endurance is lost. The racehorse lasts for a mile, a mile and a half, perhaps for two or three miles at a marvelous pace. To travel at a natural gait twenty or thirty miles a day for a month would be its ruin. The draught-horse retains no trace of equine speed or grace or beauty. So [47] it is always; and the greater the number and variety of potentialities, the greater the sacrifice. In man the exigency of this law is the strictest. To reach a standard in any line one must withdraw from whatever implies dissipation of energy.
"To shun delights and live laborious days"
is the universal canon of excellence.
Since standardization, though within the limits of nature, does, nevertheless, a certain violence to nature, its supreme norm must be the will of the Creator of all nature. Should one question the lawfulness of its dealings with lower creatures, it will not do to answer: "We do them no wrong, since lacking intelligence, they have no rights." It is true that the irrational creatures can have no rights. But it is equally true that in His creatures the Creator has rights supreme and absolute. By the principle alleged we defend our use of creatures according to the divine concession: "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's : the earth He has given to the children of men." But the concessions itself is our sole adequate justification in standardizing the irrational creature. In harmony with universal nature, though doing violence to particular natures, we use irrational creatures to serve our own ends.
With regard to the rational creature the question takes a very different aspect. None is too humble to share in the Creator's gift. It is his because he needs the irrational creature, not only for his temporal wants but also as the means of working out his title to the eternal good. This is a matter purely personal. With the individual must rest the final decision as to how he will use the creature. Laws and their sanctions, governments, social organizations are necessary helps to a right decision because man's nature is social. Nevertheless they are but things of time, ministers only to the heir of eternity.
Wherefore the same Creator who grants the rational creature the fullest useful service of the irrational, allows no such exploiting of man by men, whether individual or organized. Man is social. He engages himself naturally to serve others; and in doing so obliges himself to attain a serviceable standard. He has [48] his duty to the society of which he is a member, and must fit himself for its performance. But because society is a union of wills, though he must avail himself of social direction, he discharges his obligation of his own initiative. Should he fail, the individual or the society could enforce compliance. This, however, would be abnormal, a transient vindication of violated right, not the normal exercise of constant right Man has not been given to the State merely to be formed by it and used for its own purpose.
Coming now to the end to be obtained by a legitimate standardization of education, we must not attenuate essential facts to propitiate those who would hold the fate of the rising generation in the hollow of their hands. To do so would be to betray our trust as Christian teachers, to desert those to whose service we are consecrated, to imperil souls Christ died to save. Should those who have assumed control of education prove so averse to the truth in this matter as to reject as inefficient all education based on it or to exact concessions that will rob the truth of its vitality, mutual understanding must become impossible.
The end of education is the end of man's creation. It is so to train the youth as to incline the man to live a life leading to immortal bliss. We do not say that formal religious teaching should meet the pupil at every turn. As in his after life [i.e. adult life] there will be religious exercises and secular pursuits, so in his pupilage, education will be religious and secular. Yet, as revealed religion must underlie all secular activity, the universal rule to determine the right and wrong of things, giving its color to the entire life; so religion must permeate education, its motive and its norm for both teacher and pupil. A system which separates religion and education, confining this to the affairs of time, excluding from it peremptorily the very mention of God, man's beginning and his last end, provides for its own condemnation.
With this clearly understood, it is plain that education so intimately connected with man's last end cannot be a matter merely social, to be controlled by the civil power. It is supremely personal. Though it is a personal interest in which the child depends necessarily on others, it is so sacred in itself as to generate in those others most sacred obligations. So sacred is it that [49] God Himself indicates those others on whom those sacred obligations rest. To direct the beginnings of education He provides the parent. Because He has raised its end to the supernatural order, making it in a word salvation, He has confided the general direction of education to those to whom the word was spoken: "Go, teach all nations." It is not within the competence of the secular power to define for the citizen the education he is to receive. State standardization is a euphemism for State-usurpation.
For if the putting of the child in the way of salvation be a personal work, it connotes in school, college and teacher an individuality which will enable parent and child to find what the individual practical judgment determines to be most conducive to the satisfaction of the personal obligation. Until recent years such individualism was a matter of course. Christendom could not have understood anything else. Religion permeated all education. Ecclesiastical authority watched over it, protected and encouraged it, leaving its formal provision to individual initiative. Even when an ecclesiastic became a founder, he was such in his personal, not in his official, capacity. William of Wykeham, not the Bishop of Winchester, founded Winchester and New College. The mere material of education was everywhere much the same. Methods, traditions, the genius loci gave to each school its character, that each impressed on its own. To speak of what we are more familiar with, nothing is more plainly recognizable than the distinction between the Oxford and the Cambridge touch. And this was in perfect accord with Christian society so wonderfully organized and compacted of subordinate associations manifold in their variety. The Oxford man had a brother in every Oxford man who would stand by him in any quarrel touching him as an Oxford man. The Cambridge man was brother to all Cambridge men. So too was it of the great schools. Even to-day Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Shrewsbury, Rugby, Harrow, have their own personality, each giving its own formation. The same is true of the London schools, Charterhouse, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors, Christ's Hospital. The minor schools, hardly less famous, such as, Manchester, Bedford Grammar, Abingdon had each its own character; and [50] when to meet the demands of the new age, Marlborough, Clifton, Wellington and their fellows were established, each grew up in its own place an individual complete in itself, distinct from all others, the principle of its own activity, neither seeking favors from universities or associations, nor tolerating discrimination.
And this individualism passed over into our own land. Though John Harvard would fain have named his foundation after his Alma Mater, he could not transplant the spirit of Cambridge to the new world. The name persists by the Charles River. But Harvard is simply Harvard, and could be nothing else. Yale and Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, and William and Mary matured in well-marked personality. Individualism characterized Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter, Roxbury Latin, Boston Latin and all later foundations on similar lines. Attempts to introduce the English public school into the United States have resulted only in new American schools, each with a character all its own. The old common school—the very antithesis of the modern public—expressing the mind of the community administering it, was intensely individualistic; while our Catholic schools and colleges, embodying the methods and traditions of the orders and congregations, vivified by religion diffused through their entire organism—individualism was their very life.
Coming now to the means and methods of standardization, no one can pretend that the old time individualism made for anything but efficiency. Each school or college or university was standardized for efficiency, not by any outside agency destroying individual character, but by the intrinsic methods, traditions, personal history, which formed that character. The expression of the standard of an institution was in its own performance. In this was its success, the guarantee of its endurance. The inefficient school had no support. It was not an element in a vast system, its existence in inefficiency ensued because any competition had become impossible. Fulfilling its purpose it flourished. Failing to do so it was deserted. If things went wrong, tradition was the standard of reformation. There was no blaming of the essential system, no running after new methods, no proclaiming of a new panacea. This was reserved for the standardizers of to-day, who about every decade announce the failure of what they [51] took up so enthusiastically, and impose upon educators the working out of some fresh theory destined to be abandoned in turn.
It is hard to see how any intelligent being can grant as a principle not to be questioned, that because schools B, C, D, E, differ each in its own method from that of a dominating institution A, they are inefficient and must change what has stood the test of time for methods new and tentative. Saul thought to secure efficiency by standardizing David. Had David consented we should be telling the history of Goliath in another way.
Were the standardizer a logician he would interpose: "Your example betrays you. Your argument is an ignoratio elenchi. You assume that we would standardize men by means of education. Our only aim is to standardize education for the good of man." To answer will, in carrying us to the root of the matter, compel the mention of things painful to hear.
To standardize education for man's good, suppose a norm of excellence drawn from his nature, according to which the education elaborated is an evident good. Such a good is either absolute or relative. There is but one good absolute, the final term of man's progressive nature. Education must be a relative good, a means, as we have seen, to the absolute. But we have already shown that education cannot be standardized according to this norm by those who, as a rule, deny its reality, and insist unanimously on its exclusion. One may say that modern standardized education can be used as a means to the supreme good. This may be true. If so, it comes from man's natural tendency to that good, and God's grace enabling him to overcome the obstacles raised by modern education, much as his longing after liberty enables the prisoner to make a pen-knife and a file the instruments of his freedom. But such a use is entirely outside the standardizing intention. This, the condemnation of religious education, the substitution of education purely secular, proves conclusively.
The term of a standardization ignoring the supreme end of man, operating constantly for the extinction of every method making that end its central element, is obvious. It is man oblivious of his personal end, oblivious, therefore, of his personal rights, of his personal duties; of the same personal rights and [52] duties in every other man; of the obligation of social authority to respect and protect those rights, to facilitate the performance of those duties. What is this but to reform man, to destroy in him as far as possible the image of God, to standardize him according to another standard than that established by the Creator in the creature?
"But citizens must be educated up to the standard of the Republic." Noting that here is an acknowledgment that the standardizer aims at the standardization of man, let us analyze his principle. It seems to mean that to form the American citizen needs a long specialized training. This would imply in our Constitution an unnatural character which every American should reject. Monkeys are by nature gregarious and imitative. With this foundation it is possible to dress and arm them like soldiers and to teach them some military exercises and evolutions. To do so would be to superimpose upon their nature an artificial habit, not without much labor. Not altogether alien from this is the modern notion of educating for citizenship, a corollary perhaps of the popular theory of evolutionary human and social origins. We think better of the American citizen than to make him an artificial product. Our Republic is a noble concept because nobly human. Its theory embodies the largest human liberty. The theory actualized meets an intelligent subordination that has never been surpassed. In the new nation conceived in the spirit of liberty, no special discipline was provided. Men went out to it spontaneously because of its harmony with human nature. Hence it has been wisely said that in every well-ordered commonwealth civic instruction is confined to the positive law; and is the more efficacious as it is easier, briefer and complete according to the subject's condition.
For let us consider. Why do men live peacefully and happily obedient to lawful authority? Not, evidently, through fear of punishment. There are some such in every civil society, for whom are provided police, criminal courts, prisons and death. But they are relatively few. Neither is it through any special study of the nature of society, the origin of authority, the source of supreme civil power. The citizen obeys the law spontaneously. The most learned sociologist follows the direction of the traffic [53] officer without a thought of his science, as readily as his humblest neighbor. The universal reason is man's social nature, whereby he lives intelligently in the society of his fellows with the habitual will to attain the common good as determined by the social intellect and resolved on by the social will. To this add his universal adaptability, which we have already considered, and the adequate reason appears why man lives peaceably and happily in habitual obedience to any mode of legitimate government. Civic virtue, a part of patriotism, is therefore a substantial habit growing out of man's nature, not an acquired habit superadded to nature. Obedience to parents in the family, to the teacher in the school will strengthen it; but no civic instruction could implant it. Because the American Constitution rightly understood is so consonant with nature, those born under it grew up in its spirit; those coming from without were so quickly assimilated as to be hardly distinguishable by any civic note from the native-born. If at times they fell short of the perfect Americanism, it was but an episode in the history of the immigrant population, whence came the American people of to-day. Moreover this must never be forgotten, that whatever civic corruption obtained among the foreign-born, there were always Americans of purest blood to make it possible, to protect it, to profit by it; and there was always the great mass of citizens native and immigrant alike, to reprobate, chastise, and expel it.
"But you cannot deny in the immigrant of to-day a special need of civic instruction." Even so, the immigrant's special need cannot be made the general standard of all American education. The modern civic instruction, therefore, is for the American formed by the traditions of his fathers and the principles of our fundamental Constitution. He it is, not the adventitious alien, who is out of harmony with the new education. As for the alien, his need is not so much of instruction in American principles, as of the extirpation of false social doctrine. One and all must know that between the principles of our government and the theories of the European revolutionist there can be nothing in common. That the fundamental Constitution of the Republic is in danger becomes daily more evident. But the peril is not from the immigrant, but from ourselves. Despising the old education full of [54] the influences of religion recognized by our forefathers as a necessary foundation of the nation, Americans brought in deliberately from Europe its very antithesis, a system saturated with atheism, pregnant with the worst of all tyrannies, the impersonal State. The standardization of modern education works for the fuller development of that system. Vain then, is the hope of Americanizing by such education those who see it ready to reproduce in the land of liberty conditions from which they fled, or of eradicating from their minds destructive social principles embraced through antagonism to those conditions, when they see the fear of such conditions generating the same principles in Americans themselves, in even the very teachers to whom their Americanization has been entrusted.
That the omnipotent, irresistible State, using the citizen for its own purposes, is the term of public education to-day, no one can fail to see. That the effect of all our standardizing is to rivet the chains, intellectual and moral, of such a slavery, is no less evident. Seeking the standardizers we find men and women acting, apparently, through their own initiative. Whether they perceive the trend of their operations is not to the point. We give them the benefit of every doubt. Nevertheless they have assumed exclusive control of education, not only fixing and multiplying standards, but also intimating disaster as the result of not conforming to their rules. Behind them is the whole organization of state-education, controlled at present rather loosely by each State within its own boundaries, yet tending to become a national function organized down to the last detail as a department of the Federal Government. Should this be brought about standardizing will have its full effect, the loss of liberty of teaching, the elimination of the personal element in school and scholar, a new slavery as surely destructive of the nation "conceived in the spirit of liberty" as that other from which the nation was purified in the blood and flame of civil war.
It will not do to say that in the standardizing of the individual denominational school, is sought only the subordination of private interests to the public welfare. Were this all, it would nevertheless rest on an entirely wrong concept of government. This [55] is not primarily the subordination of private interests to public welfare, which would lead inevitably to the exaggeration of the omnipotent State and the neglect of personal rights; but the promotion of the common good by the protection, promotion and harmonizing of private rights. As a matter of fact, however, standardizing as it is being practiced works out for all that is worst in the modem world, for libertinism of thought, the breaking up of the family, the extirpation of Christianity, the denial of God. For instance: "The standard college must have a money-endowment." This gives neither a guarantee of efficiency nor a remedy against inefficiency. Its natural effect is the extinction of all colleges of which the endowment is the consecration to God of teachers, both men and women, who, by their traditions, their talents, their long preparation, their methods and their motives, have proved themselves most efficient educators. We would not say that an endowed denominational school is impossible. We do maintain that secularism is the open road to endowment, and that thirst for further endowment has led one endowed denominational institution after another to change to undenominationalism. Again: "In a standard institution the higher chairs must be held by Doctors of Philosophy." In practice the degree will come from some university purely secular. Thus will prevail in all schools a philosophy always reducible, whatever its momentary form, to its evolutionary Hegelian stock. "The standard college must have a working library, in which students may practice research." Such a library can be obtained at brief notice only from our chief publishers, whose catalogues rarely show anything that is not at least rationalistic. Whether the cribbing a bit here, a bit there from such books can be called research, is very doubtful: the result, however, is certain. "The standard college must therefore promote private study and restrict public teaching." Thus the pupil is to be free to absorb error: the teacher who would save him is to be gagged.
These are some of the more notable examples. Others touching the lower schools will occur to you, all tending the same way. There is no sadder demonstration of the gulf between the older school in which without noisy display loyalty to country and its banner flowed as a sacred duty from man's obligation to his [56] Creator and the modern public school with its tediously unconvincing civic instruction setting before pupils only the impersonal State—than the substitution for daily religious exercise, of the daily salute to the flag, the need of which appeared only when God's place in education had been forgotten.
To sum up, the modern abuse of standardization is: first, unnatural and therefore unphilosophical. Secondly, it wrongs the parent, the child, the individual school. Thirdly, a false ideal of education having been introduced, standardization is used to maintain it. Fourthly, God has been shut out of education; standardization is made to turn the key on Him. Fifthly, it standardizes, not education for the benefit of the citizen, but the citizen for the benefit of the State.
DISCUSSION
RT. REV. MSGR. FRANCIS T. MORAN, D. D.: The philosophy of Father Woods on standardization will not be questioned. The learned educator adequately accounts for the purpose of uniformity and concedes its necessity within certain bounds to promote harmony. In weights and measures it is undoubtedly necessary. But in education there must be allowed a large latitude to meet the individual initiative. Otherwise education will sink to a dead level, and scholars will become automatons doing a set piece of work and unable to venture beyond a particular task. Mass production may be the requirement of industrialism, but after the formulas, as for instance of the four fundamentals of mathematics are fixed, freedom of development should be encouraged in the training of the mind.
It is not surprising that Father Woods takes the position he does. It would be surprising if the member of a great order, one of whose chief purposes is education, with a tradition of several centuries of achievement and the heir to many centuries of tradition, could be definitely led to any other conclusion. The exigencies of the present moment and new conditions may seem to suggest new methods. But an old educational institution of world-wide experience will rightly hesitate before breaking with the past and responding readily to the invitation to reject freedom and to adopt limitation.
The Jesuit Order if so disposed may point with pride to a record in the educational field that has not been surpassed and will not be surpassed for many a day if ever by any body of teachers in the whole world. The libraries are filled with their books. They have produced a multitude of scholars eminent in canon law, exegetics, philosophy, theology, the natural sciences, and in every branch of learning. They have staffed high schools, lyceums, colleges and universities in every country and continent, and their [57] opinion therefore in educational matters is of the highest value and is worthy of the greatest respect. We must not be carried away by the clamor of the period. Each individual has a tendency to think that the world was created the day he was born. Mankind or a given portion of it, is prone to be deceived by the voices of a prevailing sentiment. How far is this true in the matter of standardization? It is well to inquire carefully before making a definite committal.
The conditions in the development of education in our country have been such as to suggest standardization. The country was new. It is only yesterday that we came out of the little red school house. There was a consuming passion for knowledge amongst the masses increased often by the isolation in which they lived. The form of government, participated in by the people, encouraged a desire on the part of the individual to discuss public questions intelligently and to fit himself for the holding of official position. Opportunity for success in the mercantile and industrial fields was abundant and became more assured when accompanied by adequate mental equipment. As a result, schools of all kinds sprang up all over the land. Each school was practically a law unto itself. It speaks well for the earnestness of the people in their pursuit of learning that they came to the determination that the wheat should be sifted from the chaff, and that the dishonest purveyors of distinctions and degrees, the frauds and charlatans, should be driven out. Things had come to a pretty pass when a fake educator could hang out a shingle on an office and advertise university degrees at ten dollars or one hundred dollars or more, according to the gullibility of the recipient. It would seem high time to standardize. This was one reason but of course there were many other reasons for establishing some kind of uniformity so that a student from one institution could readily find his place in another, either in the same course or in a progressive course of advancement. There can be only general sympathy with the purpose of standardization in these conditions.
Again, for colleges and universities the one main assurance of stability was the investment in buildings and the endowment for maintenance and growth. At least such an institution could not run away over night. Situated as we Catholics are, with a large portion of our capital derived from the devoted efforts of our educators who labor without pay and because of their love for their fellowman and especially our youth, the first effect of a money endowment policy was to cause surprise and disquiet. I remember very well when my neighbors, the Jesuits of Cleveland, communicated in conversation their anxiety about the Hipes law which set up a pecuniary qualification. It seemed to involve a hardship and an attack on voluntary personal contribution in the education of the young. There was no such purpose; and when it was suggested that the requirements of the law would be met by capitalizing the voluntary service, a solution was found that the State as well as the different associations were quite willing to recognize. We should clearly understand that in the discussion [58] of standardization the good will of our fellow citizens is taken for granted. There is no intention to visit hardship on any honest effort. We can all therefore readily grasp hands on what makes for the good of the cause.
Now what is the good of the cause? Is it standard production or freedom for initiative for the institution and the individual? Undoubtedly the latter. It was on this basis that the old universities came to achieve their special excellences. Salerno had eminence in medicine, Bologna in law. Paris in theology. We have learned something since the ninth and tenth centuries when these universities were established. This is true, but we have not learned to depart from fundamental principles and formulas. With the impulse given by these great universities there came others in rapid development reaching up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Salamanca, Pavia, Padua and many others. Each seemed to have its own specialty; each was working with its own earnestness. There certainly was not standardization in the sense in which we know it. Scholars were held in esteem and exercised the largest influence on their own and succeeding times. Alcuin, Venerable Bede, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure are names resplendent in light and shedding a lustre over the whole field of learning. One such name is a luminary outshining in brilliancy a whole host of twinkling stars. But the stars also give light and brighten the skies.
With change of times there comes change of methods. In our day industrialism makes its demands, and while this may connote an improvement in living conditions beyond those of the Middle Ages, or at least we need not argue the comparison, it will not be maintained that industrialism should set the standards for education. The mind is above matter; the spirit is more than the body. The smokestack may be the symbol of our prosperity but it should not be the symbol of our education. The Cathedral of an olden day was the shining mirror in which man beheld himself. Here art and religion met. Better by far was it in the development of the race that, let us say, after the time of Gregory VII, 1073, the Cathedral exhibited the hopes and aspirations of mankind than that the era of industrialism should have set in with the smokestack for its chiefest ornament. My plea in brief is: Back to the mind, back to the spirit. Let our universities lead the way and let them stand again for law, medicine, theology. Let the liberal arts be cultivated. If industrialism demands the technical school and manual training, so be it; but let not our whole educational process be based on this material foundation.
I would argue that we should maintain our independence in our educational policy. Surely there should be cooperation and friendship. But we have a heritage in education. We have traditions age-old and we have achievements of renown. We carried the torch through long centuries and our experience is worthy of great consideration. It is incumbent on us to know our own mind and to formulate our own program, and while [59] looking at the subject from our own standpoint to make an honest endeavor to see it from the other man's standpoint.
American educators see the shortcomings of the present system and show an admirable spirit in the candor and frankness in which they discuss them. It is a sincere conviction that if our Catholic educators who have the responsibility of our Catholic higher education will discuss and study and weigh all the elements of this problem and outline some policy or perhaps formulate some program; and if this program has the cordial approval and united support of the Bishops of the country, the position of Catholic education will command the attention and respect of the educators of the country.
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Source: Fr. Henry Woods, S.J., "Standardization and Its Abuse," The National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 25, no. 1 (Nov. 1928): 45–59.
Standardization and the "Socialized School" (1929)
[14] Few social institutions of our time have been subjected to so much criticism and have furnished the theme for so much discussion as the modern school. This perennial interest in educational methods and in the many cultural agencies connected with the school is reflected in pedagogic journals and in the many "meetings" of teachers that are constantly being held in one or the other part of our country. The annual meetings of the National Catholic Educational Association are, of course, equally useful gages for measuring the alert attitude of our people towards everything bearing on work and welfare of the school.
The latest Bulletin of this Association is before us—Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting, Chicago, Ill., June 25, 26, 27, 28, 1928. There is the usual rich variety of papers, most of them showing signs of much labor and study in their preparation. As in former years, we do not think it worth while to mention every paper, but shall refer to one topic, which, as it was discussed at one of the "General Meetings," seems to have been of outstanding interest. This is "Standardization and its Abuse," by the Rev. Henry Woods. S.J. The writer said in his opening paragraph : "To have followed year by year the meeting of our Association is to know how large a place standardization has had in its discussions." This is very true, as the present writer is well aware from attendance at previous meetings. We hold with Father Woods that the "thing has been somewhat overdone." Father Woods sums up the "modern abuse of standardization" as follows: It is, "first, unnatural and therefore unphilosophical; secondly, it wrongs the parent, the child, the individual school; thirdly, a false ideal of education having been introduced, standardization is used to maintain it; fourthly, God has been shut out of education; standardization is made to turn the key on Him; fifthly, it standardizes, not education for the benefit of the citizen, but the citizen for the benefit of the State."
Of course, the advocates of standardization and of the "socialized school" will quarrel with these arguments; but it only shows that schools and their methods and technique will be a bone of contention for many a year to come.
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source: Fr. Albert Muntsch, S.J., "Standardization and the 'Socialized School'," The Catholic Fortnightly Review 36, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1929): 14.
The latest Bulletin of this Association is before us—Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting, Chicago, Ill., June 25, 26, 27, 28, 1928. There is the usual rich variety of papers, most of them showing signs of much labor and study in their preparation. As in former years, we do not think it worth while to mention every paper, but shall refer to one topic, which, as it was discussed at one of the "General Meetings," seems to have been of outstanding interest. This is "Standardization and its Abuse," by the Rev. Henry Woods. S.J. The writer said in his opening paragraph : "To have followed year by year the meeting of our Association is to know how large a place standardization has had in its discussions." This is very true, as the present writer is well aware from attendance at previous meetings. We hold with Father Woods that the "thing has been somewhat overdone." Father Woods sums up the "modern abuse of standardization" as follows: It is, "first, unnatural and therefore unphilosophical; secondly, it wrongs the parent, the child, the individual school; thirdly, a false ideal of education having been introduced, standardization is used to maintain it; fourthly, God has been shut out of education; standardization is made to turn the key on Him; fifthly, it standardizes, not education for the benefit of the citizen, but the citizen for the benefit of the State."
Of course, the advocates of standardization and of the "socialized school" will quarrel with these arguments; but it only shows that schools and their methods and technique will be a bone of contention for many a year to come.
---
source: Fr. Albert Muntsch, S.J., "Standardization and the 'Socialized School'," The Catholic Fortnightly Review 36, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1929): 14.
Catholic Culture and Our Higher Institutions of Learning (1928)
[354] Who can deny that American Catholic cultural life is at the lowest ebb ever recorded in our history? There are, of course, many reasons for this lamentable condition, and the foremost may be laid without argument to the maelstrom of materialism into which the whole Catholic body is being sucked, to the destruction of innumerable souls. And, alas, there is little to be done about it, so far as removing the cause is concerned, at least during the next few generations. But defensively, we are abominably and culpably negligent. American Catholic culture will look up only when we have leaders active in what should be the centers of our culture, namely the Catholic colleges, the seats of Catholic higher education. But these latter are doubly isolated, both from the influences of Catholic culture in its sources and from the means of disseminating what culture is generated and nurtured from within. Specifically our Catholic colleges are isolated from cultural influences in their sources. What little Catholic historical research, e. g., is carried on, seldom reaches our schools, there being no effective nexus between the researchers and the colleges. In this connection who ever heard of junior branches of the American Catholic Historical Society established in our Catholic colleges for upper classmen? True, the membership would never run into typical American figures, but how else can we expect Catholic culture to trickle ever so little beyond the doors of our institutions of learning?
The same indictment holds for scientific work of all kinds conducted by Catholics, who, either because of a lack of encouragement, or for economic reasons, or because of plain indifference, have neither a direct nor an indirect connection with Catholic colleges and universities. Many who are engaged outside of purely Catholic circles would gladly place at least the fruits of their labors at the disposal of Catholic institutions of learning, which in turn would have to digest and re-assemble such material for further distribution. It is to be hoped that this latter indictment can, in the course of time, be dismissed as regards Catholic anthropological endeavors.
Specifically, our Catholic colleges are hopelessly inadequate in their methods of disseminating and keeping alive Catholic culture. The Catholic Educational Association, for instance, is an air-tight clerical affair which has shut out all lay contacts and influences. One specific problem, which we need not enter into here and which is giving our faithful Catholic educators grey hairs beyond their years, could easily be solved if the Association would but throw open its doors—not its control—to suggestions from lay Catholics who are in a position, as no cleric could possibly be, to help and give assistance. And thus, too, could Catholic culture be canalized to our huge American desert.
Beyond our Catholic halls of learning, Education toils not nor does she spin. Surely the German Fortbildungsschule idea could be used in this country, not for accounting and mathematics and such vocational subjects, but for humanistic study and conference. There is no thought here of education for the masses, a much abused phrase and effort, for the numbers would be small, small to the despair of anyone given to thinking in large figures, as is the American habit. But there are graduates (at least one person of limited acquaintanceship has known such) who would welcome the opportunity to confer with others and with a leader concerning problems, not of adding a dollar or two a day to his wages—an American obsession—but rather by adding to his cultural equipment.
One might add many more suggestions which would assist our Catholic [355] colleges in making themselves the centers of Catholic culture, as they should rightly be; but as there is little likelihood that the present consumption of such suggestions will deplete the few laid down here, the remainder can wait for another day—or, better still, another generation.
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Source: Spectator, "Catholic Culture and Our Higher Institutions of Learning," The Catholic Fortnightly Review 35, no. 18 (Sept. 15, 1928): 354–355.
The same indictment holds for scientific work of all kinds conducted by Catholics, who, either because of a lack of encouragement, or for economic reasons, or because of plain indifference, have neither a direct nor an indirect connection with Catholic colleges and universities. Many who are engaged outside of purely Catholic circles would gladly place at least the fruits of their labors at the disposal of Catholic institutions of learning, which in turn would have to digest and re-assemble such material for further distribution. It is to be hoped that this latter indictment can, in the course of time, be dismissed as regards Catholic anthropological endeavors.
Specifically, our Catholic colleges are hopelessly inadequate in their methods of disseminating and keeping alive Catholic culture. The Catholic Educational Association, for instance, is an air-tight clerical affair which has shut out all lay contacts and influences. One specific problem, which we need not enter into here and which is giving our faithful Catholic educators grey hairs beyond their years, could easily be solved if the Association would but throw open its doors—not its control—to suggestions from lay Catholics who are in a position, as no cleric could possibly be, to help and give assistance. And thus, too, could Catholic culture be canalized to our huge American desert.
Beyond our Catholic halls of learning, Education toils not nor does she spin. Surely the German Fortbildungsschule idea could be used in this country, not for accounting and mathematics and such vocational subjects, but for humanistic study and conference. There is no thought here of education for the masses, a much abused phrase and effort, for the numbers would be small, small to the despair of anyone given to thinking in large figures, as is the American habit. But there are graduates (at least one person of limited acquaintanceship has known such) who would welcome the opportunity to confer with others and with a leader concerning problems, not of adding a dollar or two a day to his wages—an American obsession—but rather by adding to his cultural equipment.
One might add many more suggestions which would assist our Catholic [355] colleges in making themselves the centers of Catholic culture, as they should rightly be; but as there is little likelihood that the present consumption of such suggestions will deplete the few laid down here, the remainder can wait for another day—or, better still, another generation.
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Source: Spectator, "Catholic Culture and Our Higher Institutions of Learning," The Catholic Fortnightly Review 35, no. 18 (Sept. 15, 1928): 354–355.
Friday, November 8, 2019
Hard on the Girls (1928)
To the Editor:—
"Our sympathy may be wholly wasted, but occasionally these cold mornings, especially on the draughty street cars, we feel a tug of pity for the girls. They sit huddled in their knee-length coats, their legs protected only by sheer stockings, holding them close together, perhaps unconsciously in a pitable [sic] attempt to encourage warmth. The gooseflesh is sometimes visible. It may be true, as some contend, that the average woman, and more particularly the young girls who never wore long skirts, are seldom 'legconscious.' But that isn't true on such mornings as Jan. 3rd. They are 'legconscious,' painfully so, but it's their business, and perhaps they count the cost small for the effect obtained."
The above is an editorial from the N. O. Item-Tribune. It is timely and the point is well taken. These girls, and many older women too, expose themselves and their health to the cold and to the ridicule of others. From a sanitary and from an aesthetic point of view this abominable fashion stands condemned; but what of the moral point of view? According to the laws of God and of nature, and according to the teaching of Catholic theologians and the rules laid down by the Holy Father and the members of the hierarchy, this modern fashion is immoral. The average woman may not be conscious of the fact, but those of the other sex are. By tempting men and boys to commit sin, the women of to-day [sic] give grave scandal, and our Lord says of those who give scandal: "It were better for them that a millstone should be hanged around their neck and they should be drowned in the depth of the sea."
But what about Catholic girls and women who, in defiance of the laws of God and the regulations laid down by the Holy Father and the hierarchy, appear indecently clad even in the house of God! Not only for Holy Mass and Communion, but in particular for weddings? During the month of December, at several wedding ceremonies, in one of our "fashionable" churches, the brides and bridesmaids appeared half nude, and this is no exaggeration. Sleeveless, low-necked with bare backs and bare sides down to the waistline, they appeared in the sanctuary and remained there during Holy Mass. O tempora, o mores. "Woe to the world because of scandals," says our Lord (Matth. 18, 7). I am an old man, have seen the world, old and new, and I have some experience; but in all my life I had never to witness marriage ceremonies such as those I witnessed during the month of December, 1927. The parents of to-day have not the authority to regulate the dressing of their daughters and (sad to behold) some pastors have not the courage to enforce the laws of God and the regulations of the Church.
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Source: An Old Pastor, "Hard on the Girls" The Catholic Fortnightly Review 35, no. 5 (March 1928): 97.
"Our sympathy may be wholly wasted, but occasionally these cold mornings, especially on the draughty street cars, we feel a tug of pity for the girls. They sit huddled in their knee-length coats, their legs protected only by sheer stockings, holding them close together, perhaps unconsciously in a pitable [sic] attempt to encourage warmth. The gooseflesh is sometimes visible. It may be true, as some contend, that the average woman, and more particularly the young girls who never wore long skirts, are seldom 'legconscious.' But that isn't true on such mornings as Jan. 3rd. They are 'legconscious,' painfully so, but it's their business, and perhaps they count the cost small for the effect obtained."
The above is an editorial from the N. O. Item-Tribune. It is timely and the point is well taken. These girls, and many older women too, expose themselves and their health to the cold and to the ridicule of others. From a sanitary and from an aesthetic point of view this abominable fashion stands condemned; but what of the moral point of view? According to the laws of God and of nature, and according to the teaching of Catholic theologians and the rules laid down by the Holy Father and the members of the hierarchy, this modern fashion is immoral. The average woman may not be conscious of the fact, but those of the other sex are. By tempting men and boys to commit sin, the women of to-day [sic] give grave scandal, and our Lord says of those who give scandal: "It were better for them that a millstone should be hanged around their neck and they should be drowned in the depth of the sea."
But what about Catholic girls and women who, in defiance of the laws of God and the regulations laid down by the Holy Father and the hierarchy, appear indecently clad even in the house of God! Not only for Holy Mass and Communion, but in particular for weddings? During the month of December, at several wedding ceremonies, in one of our "fashionable" churches, the brides and bridesmaids appeared half nude, and this is no exaggeration. Sleeveless, low-necked with bare backs and bare sides down to the waistline, they appeared in the sanctuary and remained there during Holy Mass. O tempora, o mores. "Woe to the world because of scandals," says our Lord (Matth. 18, 7). I am an old man, have seen the world, old and new, and I have some experience; but in all my life I had never to witness marriage ceremonies such as those I witnessed during the month of December, 1927. The parents of to-day have not the authority to regulate the dressing of their daughters and (sad to behold) some pastors have not the courage to enforce the laws of God and the regulations of the Church.
---
Source: An Old Pastor, "Hard on the Girls" The Catholic Fortnightly Review 35, no. 5 (March 1928): 97.
John Henry Newman on Offences and Scandals in the Church (1850)
[144] And if Satan can so well avail himself even of the gifts and glories of the Church, it is not wonderful that he can be skilful [sic] also in his exhibition and use of those offences and scandals which are his own work in her now or in former times.
My Brethren, she has scandals, she has a reproach, she has a shame: no Catholic will deny it. She has ever had the reproach and shame of being the mother of children unworthy of her. She has good children;—she has many more bad. Such is the will of God, as declared from the beginning. He might have formed a pure Church; but He has expressly predicted that the cockle, sown by the enemy, shall remain with the wheat, even to the harvest at the end of the world. He pronounced that His Church should be like a fisher's net, gathering of every kind, and not examined till the evening. Nay, more than this, He declared that the bad and imperfect should far surpass the good. "Many are called," He said, "but few are chosen"; and His Apostle speaks of "a remnant saved according to the election of grace."
There is ever, then, an abundance of materials in the lives and the histories of Catholics; [145] ready to the use of those opponents who, starting with the notion that the Holy Church is the work of the devil, wish to have some corroboration of their leading idea. Her very prerogative gives special opportunity for it; I mean, that she is the Church of all lands and of all times.
If there was a Judas among the Apostles, and a Nicholas among the deacons, why should we be surprised that in the course of eighteen hundred years, there should be flagrant instances of cruelty, of unfaithfulness, of hypocrisy, or of profligacy, and that not only in the Catholic people, but in high places, in royal palaces, in bishops' households, nay, in the seat of St. Peter itself? Why need it surprise, if in barbarous ages, or in ages of luxury, there have been bishops, or abbots, or priests who have forgotten themselves and their God, and served the world or the flesh, and have perished in that evil service? What triumph is it, though in a long line of between two and three hundred popes, amid martyrs, confessors, doctors, sage rulers, and loving fathers of their people, one, or two, or three are found who fulfil [sic] the Lord's description of the wicked servant, who began "to strike the manservants and maidservants, and to eat and drink and be drunk"? What will come of it, though we grant that at this time or that, here or there, mistakes in policy, or ill-advised measures, or timidity, or vacillation in action, or secular maxims, or inhumanity, or narrowness of mind have seemed to influence the Church's action, or her bearing towards her children? I can only say that, taking man as he is, it would be a miracle were such offences altogether absent from her history. Consider what it is to be left to oneself and one's conscience, without others' [146] judgment on what we do, which at times is the case with all men; consider what it is to have easy opportunities of sinning; and then cast the first stone at churchmen who have abused their freedom from control, or independence of criticism.
My Brethren, with such considerations before me, I do not wonder that these scandals take place; which, of course, are the greater in proportion as the field on which they are found is larger and wider, and the more shocking in proportion as the profession of sanctity, under which they exhibit themselves, is more prominent. What religious body can compare with us in duration or in extent? There are crimes enough to be found in the members of all denominations: if there are passages in our history, the like of which do not occur in the annals of Wesleyanism or of Independency, or the other religions of the day, recollect there have been no Anabaptist pontiffs, no Methodist kings, no Congregational monasteries, no Quaker populations. Let the tenets of Irving or Swedenborg spread, as they never can, through the world, and we should see if, amid the wealth, and power, and station which would accrue to their holders, they would bear their faculties more meekly than Catholics have done.
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(Preached Oct. 27, 1850, in St. Chad's, Birmingham, on occasion of the Installation of Dr. Ullathorne, the first Bishop of the See.)
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Source: John Henry Newman, "Sermon 9. Christ Upon the Waters—Part Two," in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 144–146.
My Brethren, she has scandals, she has a reproach, she has a shame: no Catholic will deny it. She has ever had the reproach and shame of being the mother of children unworthy of her. She has good children;—she has many more bad. Such is the will of God, as declared from the beginning. He might have formed a pure Church; but He has expressly predicted that the cockle, sown by the enemy, shall remain with the wheat, even to the harvest at the end of the world. He pronounced that His Church should be like a fisher's net, gathering of every kind, and not examined till the evening. Nay, more than this, He declared that the bad and imperfect should far surpass the good. "Many are called," He said, "but few are chosen"; and His Apostle speaks of "a remnant saved according to the election of grace."
There is ever, then, an abundance of materials in the lives and the histories of Catholics; [145] ready to the use of those opponents who, starting with the notion that the Holy Church is the work of the devil, wish to have some corroboration of their leading idea. Her very prerogative gives special opportunity for it; I mean, that she is the Church of all lands and of all times.
If there was a Judas among the Apostles, and a Nicholas among the deacons, why should we be surprised that in the course of eighteen hundred years, there should be flagrant instances of cruelty, of unfaithfulness, of hypocrisy, or of profligacy, and that not only in the Catholic people, but in high places, in royal palaces, in bishops' households, nay, in the seat of St. Peter itself? Why need it surprise, if in barbarous ages, or in ages of luxury, there have been bishops, or abbots, or priests who have forgotten themselves and their God, and served the world or the flesh, and have perished in that evil service? What triumph is it, though in a long line of between two and three hundred popes, amid martyrs, confessors, doctors, sage rulers, and loving fathers of their people, one, or two, or three are found who fulfil [sic] the Lord's description of the wicked servant, who began "to strike the manservants and maidservants, and to eat and drink and be drunk"? What will come of it, though we grant that at this time or that, here or there, mistakes in policy, or ill-advised measures, or timidity, or vacillation in action, or secular maxims, or inhumanity, or narrowness of mind have seemed to influence the Church's action, or her bearing towards her children? I can only say that, taking man as he is, it would be a miracle were such offences altogether absent from her history. Consider what it is to be left to oneself and one's conscience, without others' [146] judgment on what we do, which at times is the case with all men; consider what it is to have easy opportunities of sinning; and then cast the first stone at churchmen who have abused their freedom from control, or independence of criticism.
My Brethren, with such considerations before me, I do not wonder that these scandals take place; which, of course, are the greater in proportion as the field on which they are found is larger and wider, and the more shocking in proportion as the profession of sanctity, under which they exhibit themselves, is more prominent. What religious body can compare with us in duration or in extent? There are crimes enough to be found in the members of all denominations: if there are passages in our history, the like of which do not occur in the annals of Wesleyanism or of Independency, or the other religions of the day, recollect there have been no Anabaptist pontiffs, no Methodist kings, no Congregational monasteries, no Quaker populations. Let the tenets of Irving or Swedenborg spread, as they never can, through the world, and we should see if, amid the wealth, and power, and station which would accrue to their holders, they would bear their faculties more meekly than Catholics have done.
---
(Preached Oct. 27, 1850, in St. Chad's, Birmingham, on occasion of the Installation of Dr. Ullathorne, the first Bishop of the See.)
---
Source: John Henry Newman, "Sermon 9. Christ Upon the Waters—Part Two," in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 144–146.
Thursday, November 7, 2019
A Reply Regarding the Vatican Standard of Modesty of September 24, 1928
There was a well-intentioned reply to my re-posting of a 1958 article that criticizes and calls into question the existence of the so-called Vatican Standard of modesty, published in a letter from the Sacred Congregation of Religious, dated September 24, 1928. This reply, hoping to prove the existence of the Vatican Standard by referring to reliable sources, unfortunately further demonstrated the problem that exists among Traditional Catholics when it comes to the Vatican Standard, namely, they don't actually provide a credible, on-hand source. They simply quote each other or books that they themselves have published, which quote each other. This ends up being a giant circle that goes no where.
So, do we have reason to despair that the Vatican Standard actually ever existed? No, because we have a reliable source that suggests the existence and provides the substantial content of that Vatican Standard. It is found in a Q&A of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, volume 30, nos. 1-6, pp. 171-173, entitled "Immodest Women's Dress," which article I have republished in its full text here: https://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/07/repost-immodest-womens-dress.html
In my reply, I note that the fool-proof way to discover the existence of the Vatican Standard is if someone can find and provide either of the following:
Anyway, below is the comment on my post as well as my reply.
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Comment (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536709580628#c8522873001587796019)
"Of those girls committed to a policy of modesty in dress, how many perhaps have been won to the cause precisely through the effectiveness of mathematical criteria?"
> Precisely this "mathematical criteria" won me to the cause of dressing with modesty (which is a necessary help to promote that other aspect of modesty, modesty in behavior).
Without specific standards (or mathematical criteria per say), nothing can be followed or enforced. Parish priests in attempting to address immodesty have no way of showing a woman the error of her mode of dress. Parents experience the same issue when they try to teach their children to dress modestly. For example, how can the letter you referenced from the, “Congregation of Religious (Aug. 23, 1928) to teaching sisters in Rome," be enforced without any guideline to define "immodest dress"?
This 1928 letter is referenced in a second letter on the same topic titled: Letter of the Congregation of the Council, Vigilance: To Treat of Modesty in Women's Dress. This 1930 letter can be found in Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1930, Vol. 22, pp. 26-28 (see links below). (1)
Next I would like to clarify a misunderstanding regarding this statement:
"A dress cannot be called decent which is cut deeper than two fingers' breadth under the pit of the throat, which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows, and scarcely reaches a bit beyond the knees. Furthermore, dresses of transparent materials are improper..."
You are correct; this was not issued by Donato, Cardinal Sbaretti, Pref. of the Congregation of the Council. (The document Cardinal Sbaretti issued was the 1930 letter.) This does not mean though, that the statement is fabricated. It is, in fact, an authentic statement issued by the Cardinal-Vicar of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pompilj, on 24 September 1928. I have provided links below to support its authenticity. (2)
Two of these links also mention that the authenticity of the statement is further supported by Rufino J. Cardinal Santos, Archbishop of Manila (a),(c). Cardinal Santos quoted these standards as, “‘The Church’s stand concerning modesty in dress’ in his Pastoral of December 6, 1959. He attributes them to Pope Pius XI Himself, and gives the exact date of issuance, September 24, 1928.” (c)
(1) Find the Letter of the Congregation of the Council, Vigilance: To Treat of Modesty in Women's Dress in Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1930, Vol. 22, pp. 26-28 at:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS-22-1930-ocr.pdf
Translation: https://saintsworks.net/Modesty%20and%20Purity%20-%20Letter%20of%20the%20Congregation%20of%20the%20Council.html
(2) Links supporting the authenticity of statement issued by the Cardinal-Vicar of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pompilj, on 24 September 1928:
(a)https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/
(b)http://cora.dashjr.org/trad/modesty.html
(c)https://www.national-coalition.org/modesty/moddecre.html
(d)http://sicutincaelo.org/downloads/TWSG_Read.pdf (pp. 13)
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My reply:
Part 1 (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536774720394#c7619766449871230137)
1. God bless you for dressing modestly and with dignity in this darkening age!
2. The article you were responding to were not my own words but a reprint of an article (see the citation at the bottom of the original post).
3. There are a number of unresolved problems with the August 23, 1928 letter.
a) The only English translation available online is attributed to the late Fr. John Rubba, OP, and seems to trace back to a certain issue of the Marylike Crusader publication, which does not seem to be available online.
b) Fr. Rubba claimed that his translation came from the Commentarium pro Religiosis (vol. 9, 1928, pp. 414-415). This volume has not been scanned online, and I don't currently have access to it, and hence no one actually knows what the original Latin says.
c) Assuming that the reporting and translation of the Aug. 23 letter is accurate, this letter mentions nothing of the Vatican Standards that Pius XI supposedly issued on Sept. 24, 1928, because the letter obviously predates September. There is nothing in this August 23 letter of what later theologians would call "mathematical standards of modesty" but simply general directives.
d) The reference to the August 23 letter in the January 1930 directive simply indicates the existence of such a letter but does not reveal its contents. Hence referring to the Jan. 1930 letter is no help for finding the August 23 letter.
4. The other links you provided supporting the authenticity of the September 24, 1928 statement do no such thing unfortunately.
All references to Cdl. Santos of Manila claim he cites the Vatican Standard in his pastoral letter of December 6, 1959, yet the original text of this letter is nowhere to be found, and even if we could find it, we don't know what source document Cdl. Santos was quoting from, if any. It would be worth pursuing the original document, but currently I don't have the time to.
Other references to the bishops of Quebec, specifically Cardinal Raymond-Marie Rouleau, are likewise problematic. For example, this website (https://pour-reflechir.blogspot.com/2017/03/limmodestie-des-toilettes-feminines-mgr.html) seems to have Cdl. Rouleau quoting the Vatican Standard, yet the citation given by the blog owner is an Italian quotation from a self-published text from 2016! So we have no idea 1) whether Cdl. Rouleau actually quoted the standard, and 2) what his source was.
A similar reference to the bishops of Quebec issuing a pastoral letter entitled "Purity Crusade" ("Croisade de Purete" in the original French) claims that this letter includes the Vatican Standard. One of your own sources claims this (https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/). Yet when one looks at the original French document (pp. 239-240, https://ia800308.us.archive.org/19/items/mandementslettre17glis/mandementslettre17glis.pdf), these standards are nowhere to be found. Further, a so-called "Decree 102" of the Synod of Bishops from 1940 is also not in this letter, nor does this letter quote Cdl. Rouleau's pastoral of December 8, 1930.
In fact, this website you linked to (https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/) does not make any sense in its references to the Quebec bishops. It seems to say the joint pastoral letter "Purity Crusade" (1946) quotes the decree of 1940, which the website gives as its source Cdl. Rouleau's 1930 pastoral letter! Is it possible that everyone has missed the time travel necessary for this to work?
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Part 2 (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536774743628#c3749831196629159323)
5. Your second source (http://cora.dashjr.org/trad/modesty.html) is likewise unhelpful because it is a reprinting of the Marylike Modesty Handbook. Fr. Kunkel claims there that his source was the October 1928 issue of Osservatore Romano, sent to him by a Father Jesus M. Cavanna, CM. This October issue cannot be found online; hence we don't have the original citation. It would validate Fr. Kunkel's source however!
This second source of yours also repeats the copy-and-pasted claims about Cdl. Santos, but again, if the original pastoral of Cdl. Santos is not available, we have no means of actually seeing the original contents. And as we have seen numerous times, these various pastoral letters have been very inaccurately reported by well-intended traditional Catholics.
6. The third source you give (https://www.national-coalition.org/modesty/moddecre.html) is further unhelpful. It simply copies what is found elsewhere about Fr. Rubba, Cdl. Santos, etc. These are all dead ends without the original letters and original sources.
7. Your last source (http://sicutincaelo.org/downloads/TWSG_Read.pdf) quotes a book "Immodest Dress: The Mind of the Church," by Louise Martin (found here http://www.catholictradition.org/Children/immodest-dress.htm). Once again, this book simply repeats all the same claims about Cdl. Santos, the bishops of Quebec (Martin's book adds a further claim that Bishop Douville of Quebec quotes the standards in his pastoral letter of July 22, 1944, yet gives no source citation for this claim).
Martin's book simply quotes from Fr. Kunkel's Marylike Handbook.
8. Hence we get to the crux of the problem: all of these websites and books are quoting from each other the same so-called proof of the authenticity of this elusive September 24 statement. They all exist in a giant echo chamber, and none provide the original source documents to back their claims.
As far as I can tell, there are basically two ways to prove absolutely the existence and content of this letter:
1. Its Latin or Italian original has to be found.
2. The October 1928 issue of Osservatore Romano must be found where the statement is quoted in Italian.
All of these other claims of authenticity referring to bishops living back in the 1930s and '40s are dead ends because none of their pastoral letters are available to us, and those that are available say nothing close to what the promoters of the Vatican Standard say they do, which only further harms their credibility.
9. To close, however, I have found another source, not mentioned by any of these other websites and booklets, that I believe gives us a reasonable certitude of the authenticity of the September 24, 1928 statement. It is found in an article in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, vol. 30, no. 1-6, November 1930, pp. 171-173, in which a question is submitted quoting the exact Vatican Standards and attributing them to the statement of Sept. 24. The responder in the HPR journal in no way disputes the authenticity of the quotation and even affirms its existence, writing, "The words of the Sacred Congregation of Religious quoted by our correspondent are very helpful to the priests and Catholic educators inasmuch as they express the mind of the Holy See on the subject of immodesty in women's dress." (source: https://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/07/repost-immodest-womens-dress.html)
I believe, aside from direct proof of the Sept. 24 statement itself, this is the best evidence we have of the existence and authenticity of the Vatican Standards. Since all the other references to Cdl. Santos, Fr. Rubba, the Canadian bishops, Cdl. Mundelein, are so far removed from our access and all seem to simply copy and paste each other, I do not refer to them at all as reliable. However, an article posted in a reputable theological journal only two years after the original statement was issued is very good for establishing its credibility!
I hope this helps. God bless you.
So, do we have reason to despair that the Vatican Standard actually ever existed? No, because we have a reliable source that suggests the existence and provides the substantial content of that Vatican Standard. It is found in a Q&A of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, volume 30, nos. 1-6, pp. 171-173, entitled "Immodest Women's Dress," which article I have republished in its full text here: https://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/07/repost-immodest-womens-dress.html
In my reply, I note that the fool-proof way to discover the existence of the Vatican Standard is if someone can find and provide either of the following:
1. Its Latin or Italian original has to be found.
2. The October 1928 issue of Osservatore Romano must be found where the statement is quoted in Italian.Since I don't have the time to hunt either down, I invite anyone with the means to please do so for the benefit of all Catholics of good will.
Anyway, below is the comment on my post as well as my reply.
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Comment (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536709580628#c8522873001587796019)
"Of those girls committed to a policy of modesty in dress, how many perhaps have been won to the cause precisely through the effectiveness of mathematical criteria?"
> Precisely this "mathematical criteria" won me to the cause of dressing with modesty (which is a necessary help to promote that other aspect of modesty, modesty in behavior).
Without specific standards (or mathematical criteria per say), nothing can be followed or enforced. Parish priests in attempting to address immodesty have no way of showing a woman the error of her mode of dress. Parents experience the same issue when they try to teach their children to dress modestly. For example, how can the letter you referenced from the, “Congregation of Religious (Aug. 23, 1928) to teaching sisters in Rome," be enforced without any guideline to define "immodest dress"?
This 1928 letter is referenced in a second letter on the same topic titled: Letter of the Congregation of the Council, Vigilance: To Treat of Modesty in Women's Dress. This 1930 letter can be found in Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1930, Vol. 22, pp. 26-28 (see links below). (1)
Next I would like to clarify a misunderstanding regarding this statement:
"A dress cannot be called decent which is cut deeper than two fingers' breadth under the pit of the throat, which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows, and scarcely reaches a bit beyond the knees. Furthermore, dresses of transparent materials are improper..."
You are correct; this was not issued by Donato, Cardinal Sbaretti, Pref. of the Congregation of the Council. (The document Cardinal Sbaretti issued was the 1930 letter.) This does not mean though, that the statement is fabricated. It is, in fact, an authentic statement issued by the Cardinal-Vicar of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pompilj, on 24 September 1928. I have provided links below to support its authenticity. (2)
Two of these links also mention that the authenticity of the statement is further supported by Rufino J. Cardinal Santos, Archbishop of Manila (a),(c). Cardinal Santos quoted these standards as, “‘The Church’s stand concerning modesty in dress’ in his Pastoral of December 6, 1959. He attributes them to Pope Pius XI Himself, and gives the exact date of issuance, September 24, 1928.” (c)
(1) Find the Letter of the Congregation of the Council, Vigilance: To Treat of Modesty in Women's Dress in Acta Apostolicae Sedis in 1930, Vol. 22, pp. 26-28 at:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS-22-1930-ocr.pdf
Translation: https://saintsworks.net/Modesty%20and%20Purity%20-%20Letter%20of%20the%20Congregation%20of%20the%20Council.html
(2) Links supporting the authenticity of statement issued by the Cardinal-Vicar of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pompilj, on 24 September 1928:
(a)https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/
(b)http://cora.dashjr.org/trad/modesty.html
(c)https://www.national-coalition.org/modesty/moddecre.html
(d)http://sicutincaelo.org/downloads/TWSG_Read.pdf (pp. 13)
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My reply:
Part 1 (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536774720394#c7619766449871230137)
1. God bless you for dressing modestly and with dignity in this darkening age!
2. The article you were responding to were not my own words but a reprint of an article (see the citation at the bottom of the original post).
3. There are a number of unresolved problems with the August 23, 1928 letter.
a) The only English translation available online is attributed to the late Fr. John Rubba, OP, and seems to trace back to a certain issue of the Marylike Crusader publication, which does not seem to be available online.
b) Fr. Rubba claimed that his translation came from the Commentarium pro Religiosis (vol. 9, 1928, pp. 414-415). This volume has not been scanned online, and I don't currently have access to it, and hence no one actually knows what the original Latin says.
c) Assuming that the reporting and translation of the Aug. 23 letter is accurate, this letter mentions nothing of the Vatican Standards that Pius XI supposedly issued on Sept. 24, 1928, because the letter obviously predates September. There is nothing in this August 23 letter of what later theologians would call "mathematical standards of modesty" but simply general directives.
d) The reference to the August 23 letter in the January 1930 directive simply indicates the existence of such a letter but does not reveal its contents. Hence referring to the Jan. 1930 letter is no help for finding the August 23 letter.
4. The other links you provided supporting the authenticity of the September 24, 1928 statement do no such thing unfortunately.
All references to Cdl. Santos of Manila claim he cites the Vatican Standard in his pastoral letter of December 6, 1959, yet the original text of this letter is nowhere to be found, and even if we could find it, we don't know what source document Cdl. Santos was quoting from, if any. It would be worth pursuing the original document, but currently I don't have the time to.
Other references to the bishops of Quebec, specifically Cardinal Raymond-Marie Rouleau, are likewise problematic. For example, this website (https://pour-reflechir.blogspot.com/2017/03/limmodestie-des-toilettes-feminines-mgr.html) seems to have Cdl. Rouleau quoting the Vatican Standard, yet the citation given by the blog owner is an Italian quotation from a self-published text from 2016! So we have no idea 1) whether Cdl. Rouleau actually quoted the standard, and 2) what his source was.
A similar reference to the bishops of Quebec issuing a pastoral letter entitled "Purity Crusade" ("Croisade de Purete" in the original French) claims that this letter includes the Vatican Standard. One of your own sources claims this (https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/). Yet when one looks at the original French document (pp. 239-240, https://ia800308.us.archive.org/19/items/mandementslettre17glis/mandementslettre17glis.pdf), these standards are nowhere to be found. Further, a so-called "Decree 102" of the Synod of Bishops from 1940 is also not in this letter, nor does this letter quote Cdl. Rouleau's pastoral of December 8, 1930.
In fact, this website you linked to (https://catholic-modesty.com/the-modesty-guidelines-of-the-catholic-church/) does not make any sense in its references to the Quebec bishops. It seems to say the joint pastoral letter "Purity Crusade" (1946) quotes the decree of 1940, which the website gives as its source Cdl. Rouleau's 1930 pastoral letter! Is it possible that everyone has missed the time travel necessary for this to work?
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Part 2 (http://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/08/repost-modesty-in-dress-june-1958.html?showComment=1536774743628#c3749831196629159323)
5. Your second source (http://cora.dashjr.org/trad/modesty.html) is likewise unhelpful because it is a reprinting of the Marylike Modesty Handbook. Fr. Kunkel claims there that his source was the October 1928 issue of Osservatore Romano, sent to him by a Father Jesus M. Cavanna, CM. This October issue cannot be found online; hence we don't have the original citation. It would validate Fr. Kunkel's source however!
This second source of yours also repeats the copy-and-pasted claims about Cdl. Santos, but again, if the original pastoral of Cdl. Santos is not available, we have no means of actually seeing the original contents. And as we have seen numerous times, these various pastoral letters have been very inaccurately reported by well-intended traditional Catholics.
6. The third source you give (https://www.national-coalition.org/modesty/moddecre.html) is further unhelpful. It simply copies what is found elsewhere about Fr. Rubba, Cdl. Santos, etc. These are all dead ends without the original letters and original sources.
7. Your last source (http://sicutincaelo.org/downloads/TWSG_Read.pdf) quotes a book "Immodest Dress: The Mind of the Church," by Louise Martin (found here http://www.catholictradition.org/Children/immodest-dress.htm). Once again, this book simply repeats all the same claims about Cdl. Santos, the bishops of Quebec (Martin's book adds a further claim that Bishop Douville of Quebec quotes the standards in his pastoral letter of July 22, 1944, yet gives no source citation for this claim).
Martin's book simply quotes from Fr. Kunkel's Marylike Handbook.
8. Hence we get to the crux of the problem: all of these websites and books are quoting from each other the same so-called proof of the authenticity of this elusive September 24 statement. They all exist in a giant echo chamber, and none provide the original source documents to back their claims.
As far as I can tell, there are basically two ways to prove absolutely the existence and content of this letter:
1. Its Latin or Italian original has to be found.
2. The October 1928 issue of Osservatore Romano must be found where the statement is quoted in Italian.
All of these other claims of authenticity referring to bishops living back in the 1930s and '40s are dead ends because none of their pastoral letters are available to us, and those that are available say nothing close to what the promoters of the Vatican Standard say they do, which only further harms their credibility.
9. To close, however, I have found another source, not mentioned by any of these other websites and booklets, that I believe gives us a reasonable certitude of the authenticity of the September 24, 1928 statement. It is found in an article in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, vol. 30, no. 1-6, November 1930, pp. 171-173, in which a question is submitted quoting the exact Vatican Standards and attributing them to the statement of Sept. 24. The responder in the HPR journal in no way disputes the authenticity of the quotation and even affirms its existence, writing, "The words of the Sacred Congregation of Religious quoted by our correspondent are very helpful to the priests and Catholic educators inasmuch as they express the mind of the Holy See on the subject of immodesty in women's dress." (source: https://rugwig.blogspot.com/2018/07/repost-immodest-womens-dress.html)
I believe, aside from direct proof of the Sept. 24 statement itself, this is the best evidence we have of the existence and authenticity of the Vatican Standards. Since all the other references to Cdl. Santos, Fr. Rubba, the Canadian bishops, Cdl. Mundelein, are so far removed from our access and all seem to simply copy and paste each other, I do not refer to them at all as reliable. However, an article posted in a reputable theological journal only two years after the original statement was issued is very good for establishing its credibility!
I hope this helps. God bless you.
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