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Jan Kanty ROSTWOROWSKI (1876-1963)
Jesuit, essayist,
and preacher. B. Nov. 8,
1876, Górka Narodowa (near Cracow). Studied in the Swiss Freiburg and in Cracow,
ordained 1905. During World War I exiled to Siberia, where he spent
three years, preparing the popular Obrazki
z życia Chrystusa ("Pictures from the Life of Christ", 1916).
Upon his return to Poland, he became Superior in Cracow (1918-1919),
Professor of theology in Stara Wieœ (1919-1920), editor of
Sodalis Marianus (1920-1924),
Wiara i ¯ycie (1921-1924),
Pos³aniec Serca Jezusowego
(1921-1922), G³osy Katolickie
(1921-1923), Moderator
(1929-1930), and Przegl¹d
Powszechny (1933-1936), and director of the Jesuit publishing
house in Cracow, and after it was partly moved to Warsaw, he became
Superior of the Writers' House in Warsaw in 1936. Wrote Charakter
i znaczenie biskupstwa w pierwszych dwóch wiekach dziejów Koœcio³a
("The Character and Significance of the Bishopric During the
First Two Centuries of the History of the Church", 1926); in Oct.
7-15, 1939 he was held in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw; he spent
World War II as a priest and preacher in Warsaw, Otwock, Szymanów
and Kielce. After the war he was Superior in Poznañ (1945-1949),
also contributing to Przegl¹d
Powszechny and Przewodnik
Katolicki. D. Jan. 13, 1963, Warsaw.
The selected fragments are from the article "Sprawozdanie
z ruchu religijnego, naukowego i spo³ecznego. Bolszewizm a Hitleryzm"
("A Report from a Religious, Scientific, and Social Movement. Bolshevism and
Nazism"), Przegl¹d Powszechny,
v. 208, 1935, pp. 424-427.
Very serious thinkers and essayists, both past and present, have been of
the opinion that all the indisputable differences between bolshevism
and Nazi racism are something minor and non-decisive, while the
deepest substance of both these tendencies is very similar, and
in some measure identical. [...]
They are both vast attempts at complete remaking of human life and setting
it on new foundations. And do these foundations really differ? In
their positive and immediate aspect they do; in their negative aspect
- and as we shall soon see, this is the essential aspect - and deep
down they do not. For as far as the most profound assumptions of
these outlooks go, despite all the superficial differences, nazism
and bolshevism are quite unanimous that they are both building a
new order of things not on
personal God, Creator and Legislator, not on natural law, placing
man in a fundamental dependence on God, not on the equivalent of
natural law, that is human nature and its laws, not on the wonderful
completion which human thoughts and strivings found in the Gospel.
National socialism puts in this place the myth of race and blood,
and of some godhead inherent in humankind, which develops and fulfils
itself in parallel with the strivings of which race and blood are
the fundamental source. Bolshevism worships the myth of material
progress, submitting humanity, mechanized and completely devoid
of all ideals, to its service. But as a matter of fact - because
it is an inevitable consequence of the stance taken by both systems
towards the foundations of the Christian worldview - in both of
them, although differently, the place of the true foundation of
life, that is personal God, is taken by man himself. And since this
man, once he breaks away from his dependence on God, must follow
natural instincts, capable of little change, there is no doubt that
despite all protestations to the contrary, the ultimate form of
life generated by the Bolshevik and Nazi systems will be as close
to each other as are the methods which these tendencies are employing
today.
For let us just compare point by point these actions of the Bolsheviks
which nazism censures them for the most severely, with those which
it carefully conceals on its own ground. Bolsheviks are cruel, they
bathe in human blood - has nazism not shed a fair amount of blood,
in June last year, to name but one example? Have there not been
many instances of official oppressing not only the Jews, but also
the co-nationals, if they did not want to submit to the ruthless
dictatorship of the party? [...]
Bolsheviks are savage and uncivilized in their assaults on religion and
its representatives - how far removed from these patterns is the
infinite amount of abuse which the Hitlerite youth has been showering
on Catholic venues, including the churches, Church dignitaries and
ceremonies? Are the songs sung by this youth in the streets so different
from the famous marches and spectacles of the Russian Union of the
Godless? Bolsheviks spread indecency and subvert the family - does
the heinous law of sterilization, sometimes compulsory, which is
nowadays implemented to a widening extent, not come under the same
category of trespasses? Bolsheviks carry out an ignoble propaganda
of their principles and try to cover the world with a net of their
secret organizations. And what did we see, and in part are still
seeing in Austria? Have Nazi agents not used all means of illegal
propaganda, right up to bombs and handgrenades, right up to assassinations?
Indeed, the alleged polar opposition of these two systems under closer
scrutiny turns out to be completely illusory. Bolshevism and national
socialism are two branches grown out of the same trunk, they are
the fruit of the same spirit. Even in minor, external details similarities
spontaneously appear. The notorious German GESTAPO is the spitting
image of the Russian GPU, not only in the sound of the ugly acronym,
but also in the methods employed. Of course, one drama is played
out in the West, where the age-old traditions of the Christian culture
cannot be completely ignored, the other in the Russian East, which
deep inside has remained alien to Christianity; but once we take
these different backgrounds into account, we must come to the conclusion
that these warring tendencies, although starting from different
places, through the very consistency of their essential negations
end up as close neighbours.
And it is hardly to be doubted that they will arrive at the same destination.
Despite the delusory appearances of prosperity and development,
so radical a rebellion against God's laws and principles of social
order must necessarily end in ruin. No matter what shape the calamity
might take, no matter if it comes sooner or later - in the minds
of everybody capable of looking at history from the deeper side,
often revealing the writing of God transmitting His judgement, calamity
is inevitable. One must only wish that when it comes, freeing
humanity from the most deadly diseases, the social foundations will
not have been shaken too profoundly.
The campaign of Christianity,
or to be more precise, Catholicism against socialism is deeply
justified by the fact that socialism attempts to be a religion,
more, that it aims at becoming the only religion of the future.
[...]
This is not a paradox: socialism is a religion
despite the reiterated claims that religious problems are alien
to it; socialism is, should I say, an inverse religion, like a
coat worn inside out, a religion without God, a materialist religion,
but nonetheless a religion. [...]
Socialism presupposes, at least implicitly,
solutions diametrically opposed to the Christian teaching. It
abolishes the dependence on God, it asks that nothing be expected
from Providence and that God's law be disregarded: man, at least
taken collectively, is and should be a sufficient legislator and
providential agent for himself. The theory of materialist progress
of history blocks from the view of the socialist the guiding hand
of God in human matters. And by removing God and Christ from human
life, socialism undoes the only bond which was able to tie humanity
into a mutual whole, an organism. For on what do you base the
obligation of human mutuality and equality before the law, if
you forget about the common Father and about the infinite dignity
of souls generated by the hand of the Creator, and instead you
want to base everything on the necessary laws of materialist nature?
The socialist solidarity does not rise above the solidarity of
a herd of animals, competing with another herd for food. It is
not an accident that the theoreticians of socialist ethics oppose
the old ethics - which they understand as feudal or bourgeois,
that is class-based - not with a universal one, but with another
class-based, proletarian ethics, which is a mechanical inversion
of the former one. True, socialism also believes in its paradise,
paradise on earth - it leaves the heavens for sparrows and angels
- a paradise where every inequality will vanish, while all appetites
will be satisfied with minimum physical effort. It is the true
paradise of Adam and Eve, but transported from the past into the
future and divested of the human relation with God, a paradise
which appeared to the ancient millenarists in their dreams, but
without Christ, unlike in their visions. Visions of such a paradise,
which go counter to all experience and even to mathematical calculations,
visions completely ignoring human nature, such as has been revealed
by history and everyday life, this genuine "chiliasm" yet even
more materialistic than the chiliasm of ancient heretics - such
visions invest socialism with all the marks of a blind, dogmatic
faith, founded neither on reason nor on experience, but also not
based on any higher authority, which the Christian faith invokes
when it presents to us the possibility of the Kingdom of God with
its justice. Socialism evidently demands blind faith of its followers.
[...]
Socialism, then, has its dogmas, and on account
of it has to be regarded as a religion, a crippled, inverted one,
but definitely something closer to religion than to a scientific
system of a future social economy.
The desire to take the place of religion provides
the only explanation of socialism's fanatical hatred of Christianity
(Jan Urban [1874-1940], "Socjalizm jako religia" ("Socialism as
a religion"), Przeglšd Powszechny 1921, v. 151, p. 8-9)
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