Preface

WE FIND A PROVOCATIVE fictional account of the excitement generated by the encyclical that launched the modern phase of Catholic social thought in The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, published in 1936. The unnamed country priest has written a treatise in which he claims that Christianity shattered the institution of slavery, although he recognizes that it took many centuries for the destruction to be accomplished and that slavery persists in disguised forms in contemporary society because slavery "though purged out by the laws, ran rife again in our customs almost immediately, renewing from below its indefatigable onslaught, the same old circuit engendered of hell."¹ The country priest's older friend, the Curé de Torcy, understands the never ending nature of the struggle for social justice as he recalls the revolutionary power of Rerum Novarum issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891:

For instance, that famous encyclical of Leo XIII, "Rerum Novarum," you can read that without turning a hair, like any instruction for keeping Lent. But when it was published, sonny, it was like an earthquake. The enthusiasm! At that time I was curé de Norenfontes, in the heart of the mining district. The simple notion that a man's work is not a commodity, subject to the law of supply and demand, that you have no right to speculate on wages, on the lives of men, as you do on grain, sugar or coffee—why it set people's consciences upside-down! (57)

In spite of such initial excitement, it often happens that the wealthy and powerful try to subordinate the teaching of the church to their own social interests, and the Curé de Torcy found himself branded a "socialist" for spreading the teaching of the encyclical, and he was sent to another parish "in disgrace." Pride reasserts itself perpetually, and the church's social teaching must be refreshed and reinvigorated time and again as injustice assumes new disguises in the laws and customs of societies.

Where might we find the energy for such constant renewal? Throughout the novel, Bernanos suggests that nothing less than the spirit of poverty can overcome the habits of thought and perception engendered by structures of social power and by the adulation given to the illusion of human autonomy at the heart of such structures of power. We might consider in this context the famous comments of William James in Varieties of Religious Experience on the motivating power supplied to contemporary society by the fear of poverty: "it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers."² Dorothy Day, who quotes these words from James in her writings, clearly recognized the power of this fear and confronted it directly in her own life in her effort to live in accordance with the social teaching of the church. If the fear of poverty underpins the pride of the powerful, than a proper love of poverty contributes to the power of the powerless.

However, there may be yet another component of Christian spiritual formation that supplies energy for the constant renewal of the struggle for social justice in accordance with the Church's social teaching: the spirit of childhood. Bernanos illuminates this component as well in The Diary of a Country Priest, and we can better understand the thematic coherence of the novel if we see the spirit of childhood in relation to the theme of social justice explored prominently in the novel's early chapters. John Saward explores the importance of the spirit of childhood in confronting the sins of contemporary culture, examining this theme in great depth in the writings of Bernanos. Saward argues that "the drama of atheistic humanism is a conspiracy against the child, always against his spirit, more and more often against his life,"³ and Saward shows that Bernanos recognized and supported such a view. The child lives in acceptance of dependence and...