Henri Bourassa, La Langue, gardienne de la Foi (1918).
II
The
Church, protector of national tongues
The right to one’s mother tongue, to
one’s national tongue, is one of the best established of natural rights, one of
fundamental bases of the essential human societies: family, tribe, race,
nation. The first and the most constant preoccupation of the worst violators of
the natural right of peoples — conquerors, dominators, brutal majorities — who
want to enslave a vanquished nation or a minority, and to wipe them out as a
social group, is to tear their national tongue from them. The ultimate and supreme
resistance of races who choose not to die, is the fight for the preservation of
their ancestral idiom. Victors and vanquished, killers and victims, both
understand that he who guards his language holds
the key which looses him from his chains.[1]
This natural right — no authority has
better understood its force, none has respected its free and legitimate
exercise more than our holy and tender mother, the Church Catholic, Apostolic,
and Roman. No power has so constantly confirmed the right of peoples to their
national language in education, management, and government, as the Papacy —
from Saint Peter to Benedict XV.[2] We
can say more: the Church has always
seen the conservation of the use of national tongues as the most precious human
element of her apostolate, and she has drawn her inspiration from this thought
every time she has been called upon to make a judgement, from the point of view
of the faith and of natural law, on the conflicts bred in the Church by the
rivalries of races or peoples. The decisions or contrary acts of this or that
man of the Church, priest, bishop, or pope — if such should ever happen — ought
to be examined in light of the particular circumstances of time or place. An
attentive and impartial study demonstrates that none of these decisions, none
of these acts, undermines in any way the doctrine and general practice of the
Church, always in agreement with the natural law.
It is in the annals of false Churches
— heretical or schismatic, in thrall to the secular power — that one must
recount the history of systematic oppression by means of language. When,
unfortunately, this violation of natural rights is carried out in certain
particular Churches which remain in communion with Rome, it is always following purely human politics,
under the direction of prelates more worried about pleasing Caesar-the-King or
Caesar-the-People than about building the Kingdom of God; and this complacency
(happily rare and passing) of some men of the Church towards the caprice of
despots or the passions of brutal majorities, has always accompanied a
dissident or hostile tendency towards the Holy See, that is to say an
inclination towards schism or heresy: Gallicanism, Josephinism, Polonism,
Americanism, Anglo-Saxonism.[3] In
other words, particular Churches, members of the universal Church, have
violated or misjudged the right of minorities to their mother tongue, and did
the work of national assimilation and religious perversion; in that measure
they have separated themselves from the catholic spirit and tradition to
incline towards becoming national — as
if the Church of God, one and indivisible, could ever become, even partially, one
nation’s thing! — that is to say, schismatic. Those, on the other hand, and by
far the most numerous, which have respected the right of the conquered, of
minorities, are the Churches whose angels
— to use the language of the Apocalypse — have not ceased to obey God rather
than men, and to practise towards all the faithful the charity of the great apostle
of all nations, who did not see Jews nor Gentiles in the Church anymore, but
only children of Christ.
[1] Words
of Mistral, the most illustrious félibre of Provence, ardent defender of
regional dialects.
[2] One shall read with
advantage, on this particular point, the learned study of R. P. Leduc, dominican, reproduced
following the conference.
[3] Let this not be confounded
with its ancestor, Anglicanism: the one has crossed over the straits of schism
to plunge into full heresy and end in the abyss of agnosticism; the other
stands on the good side of the water, but so near the bank that it throws in
many souls through mixed marriages, neutral or protestant schools, and drinking
from the most anti-Christian literature that exists on earth. As for
Americanism, we know towards what misadventures it is heading, when the
vigilant authority of the Holy See has just upbraided it.
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