The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 5, 1927, Page 7

TPR ES LINEN Rete Staaten pponentieesitr weap A Pox Upon Pagans. I am not much given to criticizing the reverend gentlemen who each month endow the newsstands with copies of “The Catholic World.” ‘Theirs is a ifficult task, editing “a monthly magazine of gen- 1 literature and science” (to quote the flypiece) when all their expressions of fact or opinion must be so colored as to harmonize with the pernicious doctrine they profess and preach. Had the article to which I shall shortly refer aroused my ire, this essay would never have been written. I have read so much catholic literature that its perversions no longer anger me. But when I find a paragraph or two that amuses me, my pen, or my twe typewriter fingers rather, are inspired, This article, I might add, caused me to give birth to many guffaws, at the expense of. the bespec- tacled und ever-so-serious minded Paulist apolo- gists. Among the religious laity in the Church of Rome, one would naturally expect to find many strange opinions. But those expressed in the Editorial Com- ment column of the January issue of this leading christian journal, rival al! others for that adjec- tive, especially in the weirdness of logic, naivete, and innocence of .knowledge displayed. The general subject of the four essays that make up the column appears to be “paganism.” “We are surrounded by pagans, and by pagan ideas, pagan morals, pagan ethics,” the good father tells us, with the same assurance as when he informs us that it we pray to any one of the thousands of saints the church, for business reasons, created, that par- ticular halo wearer will cure our ills, lighten our burdens, and lessen our woes. At this juncture in his writing, we can imagine him throwing- up his hands in horror at the propensity of the thought, as the true follower of the “christian” St. Paul shonld. He does not stick to his subject—but that is a trick of apologetics; hy wandering he makes many a point that would otherwise be stillborn. Il. I can almost concede, for example, that the sen- tence to death of Sacco and Vanzetti is a “pagan” act, for among the few tablets the Phoenicians have left us we find accounts of the burning in pitch of heretics. In pagan civilizations, heretics, saturated in pitch of course, were found te serve most ef- ficiently for THumination; indeed, if we are.to be- lieve ancient history, the street lighting system of ancient Rome depended to a large extent on such human torches. But 1 must insist on drawing the line even here, for in ancient times, and even up to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, heretics were burned for their heresies. In the case of Saceo and Vanzetti, their heresy was in not. accepting the Rotarian in- terpretation ef economics: they are to be executed for a murder they had no hand in committing. And pagans gave their transgressors an opportunity to prove their innocence by drinking hemlock tea; a fairer test, to my way of thinking, than a trial be- fore a Massachusetts judge. I hold no brief for paganism, but the least I can say for it is that it was frank and honest, ° Then there is the “loony gas” case of*four years ago, in which a seore of Jersey workers were driven insane during the manufacture of a gasoline com- pound which ‘includéd in its formula the health- ~~ wrecking tetrathyl gas. A richly colored advertise- nent of the gasoline, appearing in a current pe- riodical, recalled to my mind a woodcut on Fox’s “Martyrs and Martyrdom,” which was captioned: “Christian martyrs sacrificed to make a Roman holiday.” But, as Johndee and his fellow Standard Oi! directors will hasten to correct me, these were no “christian martyrs,” only goddam foreigners. Even the antics of Benito Mussolini I hesitate ‘Gnostic. But murder has always a favorite sport of 3—I do not I have any right to lay its source at the doors of the pagans. Uh I mentiéned, several editorialist’s wanderings extra point or so on paragraphs ago, the holy from i zg $& S oe i ! : 4 ; i : 5 a é g F ; i i z i J FS 3) 3 A j = < upon this point, and calling Holmes a “Wells- Shaw-Bergson agnostic” (each epithet, by the way, contradicting the other), assails his doctrine as a “eomposite of ancient and modern paganism.” The good father should pull his own fose; but more of this later. IV. It is in his analysis of Ludovic:’s “Lysistra” that the catholic apologist reveals that his education, like ls church, is several hundred years bebind the times. Ludovici sets forth that “the tendency will be in a society whose principle is to sacrifice the less to the greater, to proceed to some sort of controlled and legalized infanticide. “Abnormal, defective, in- eurable, undesirable people will no longer be al- lowed to grow up . . The gradual} elimination of the undesirable dregs of humanity will clear the air... It is noble and virtuous to sacrifice the less for the greater, the rubbish for the precious.” “Such a plan!” the holy man exclaims in horror. He calls it, revealing an inhibited clerical obses- sion for Latin phrases, the “ultima thule” of pa- ganism. The “last word” in paganism, really? Can it be that the good father has never, having faithfdlly limited his reading to those books not . inseribed. in the Index Expurgatorius, heard of é Friedrich Nietzche?. The German philosopher's doctrines of the “many-too-many” and the “Su- per-man” are clearly expounded in “Zarathustra,” written half a century ago—I would advise the reverend to procure a copy. = Vv. An article rambling ‘around the subject of “pa- ganism” could not be considered complete if it did Structural Worker Two dimensional in space he stands Moving arms in broken rythm Against a crimsen background. Now one hand; Now the other Going up and down Up and down Making clandestine gestures To a huge beam of steel That juts and groans As it is hoisted to its place. —MAX GELTMAN. By Will de Kalb not include at least one whack at Communism. The exclusion of Madame Kollontai, Soviet Ambassador to Mexieo, furnished food for “thought,” given birth by the Roman writer’s vitrielie pen. He raises the question “if the Soviet Ambassa- dor is a lady and a scholar, why do we debar her from the country?” He quotes an Associated Press dispatch which states that Kollontai’s trunks. in- stead of containing Paris gowns, held a library con- sisting of “a wide range of general literature in half a dozen languages.” He attempts to dispute her classification as a scholar by asserting that the dispateh “does not give us much of an idea of what is in her library of books, ‘largely philo- sophical’.” What the black-cassocked editor implied, but hy- pocritically hesitated to state, was that the books chiefly dealt with the various aspects of Commun- ism. I do not doubt that this may not be true. but even if it is, may one not be a scholar of Com- munizm, just as one can hea scholar of catholi- cism? * : The literary clergyman questions her standing as a “lady” because she has radical views copcern- ing the family relation. But is Kollontai any less a lady than Gloria Gould, whose divoree was re- cently legalized by the Roman Rota? VI. _ Upon mentioning his attack on Holmes’ doctrine as a “composite of aneient and modern paganism,” T said that the holy seribbler should pull his own nose. A catholic writer should be careful how he attacks paganism, for he thereby attacks the very institutions that are the foundations of his Holy Church. fs a church that has for its sacred: symbol the phallus, its highest ceremony the cating of its god (one of the mest ancient forms of worship, Fra- zer tells ms in “The Golden Bough’), its liturgy almost taken hodily from pagan religious ceremon- is, its supernatural beliefs concerning heaven and helt and the resurrection of the body plagiarized ‘vem the Zoroastrian, not whelly and unequivocally pogan? “We are surrounded by pagans,” the saintly auibbler reiterates. Perhaps we are, for he. a pa- gan preacher of paganism, shouff know. But like most statements emanating from a clerical source, that ene must be taken with a grain of salt, In- deed, it must be very well seasoned to be accepted ww cmaowha thinks, for himself, and.is not afraid of “radical” ideas.