One has been hearing much of late about the organic nature of culture. Your author must confess to a certain haziness upon precisely what this neat idea means, which haziness is not cleared up by reading the many treatises on the subject, Herr Spengler included. Yet many things which are happening today throw themselves so forcibly upon the mind of any reflective person that they simply cannot be ignored. We who live today are apparently going to have the good fortune to observe the break-up of a culture and the relativity of its erstwhile eternal truths, and also the misfortune to live through the same period.

All of which brings me to the subject in hand. Why did the Austrian Roman Catholic Bishops suddenly order the clergy to refrain from all participation in political activity after December 15? For about fifty years, and especially in the last fifteen, the priests have played a major and often decisive part in the Austrian parliament, provinces, and municipal councils through the Christian Socialist Party, and more particularly in their more personal roles as keeper of the consciences of the faithful.

The fact that no reason was given for the action in no way obscures its obvious aim. The Church has succeeded in the elimination of the Communists and hence have no desire to support either Dollfuss or the Nazis, both of whom they agree with. The clerics have waged a long and bitter fight against the steady rise of Marxism, with especial success among the doltish peasantry. As was pointed out by me last week, the Marxian socialist party, long Austria's most powerful party, is now practically dead. The man who did this was Engelbert Dollfuss, the party who made him was the Christian Socialist Party. This was publicly symbolized in the great "Catholic Day" held last summer, at which Dr. Dollfuss was openly honored by the Church.

Now that Marxism has been exorcised, the Catholic Church very cleverly ceases active support of Dollfuss, whose only opponents are the Nazis. Thus they avoid a possible loss of favor, should the Nazis win. The issue is now between Austrian capitalism and Austro-German capitalism. The Church has conclusively proved that its interest was not in Austria, but in capitalist, Austria.

* * *

The Catholic Church today occupies in politics and economics a position parallel to the one it occupied in the later Middle Ages. It is fighting for the old and dying and is doing its best to strangle the new and rising. At that time it was defending precisely what it is opposing today. It was defending the concept of community regulated according to function, one aimed at spiritual ends with commerce as a mere thing to keep the body alive until death. It was fighting the rising concept of material progress, the search for wealth as an end in itself or as the sole way to happiness, the new idea of selfishness as an eternal law which made this the best possible of all worlds.

The new order of things won. And having won, capitalism created a whole new culture in its own image, gradually absorbing even the Catholic Church, until today we find the Church fighting for its own inherent enemy, fighting the social doctrines of Karl Marx, "the last of the schoolmen," as Tawney puts it. The Catholic Church may be eternal, but its social philosophy is a part of the prevailing cultural organism and is as mortal as is that culture. TERTIUS.