The Catholic Times

U.S. Becoming Nation
Of Refined Pagans,
Archbishop Says

ST. LOUIS-The United States is fast becoming a nation of "refined pagans," Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis declared here.

Speaking to parents on the necessity of a Catholic education at all levels, the prelate said there is little wonder that Catholics are becoming "infected with the virus of worldliness and materialism."

For this very reason all of us whether we be lettered or unlettered, poor or rich, should see the necessity of giving absolute and unconditional obedience to the Church in everything that it commands," he said.

"We are living in an age of almost total indifference to spiritual things and to things pertaining to faith and morals.

The vast majority of people do not bother themselves about God, about sin or about eternity. They are only concerned about their material and physical well-being, with pleasure and enjoyments, licit or illicit, of the things of this life."

In such an age, a religious education becomes even more important as a needed part of a growing youth's development, the Archbishop said. In secular education there is a great deal of confusion about aims and purposes, he pointed out. Catholic education, on the other hand, has a definite and true philosophy of life to guide it.

The Archbishop contrasted the advantages a child could receive in a Catholic school where he gets a "complete" picture of reality, with the view he gets in a secular school where the view is distorted.

"The underlying principle of Catholic education," he said, "is that there exists an inviolable bond between education of the mind and religious education.

Religion is not a mere adjunct of the curriculum, it is the very center and inspiration of the whole system.

"But the study of nature without reference to God, the study of human ideals without mention of Jesus Christ, the study of human legislation without divine law is, to say the least, a distorted and incomplete education."

Bereft of religion, the teaching of morals becomes an appeal to expediency or the inculcation of a form of morality which might be called "social responsibility," so prevalent today, he said.