Excerpt from: The Society of The Catholic Commonwealth

by: The Revd Fr Hastings Smyth
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Oratory of Saint Mary and Saint Michael, 1941.

...The Christian Religion, therefore, requires a positive attack upon the fallen world's disorders. Under certain circumstances this attack may be so necessarily radical that it will prove revolutionary.

The central tragedy of our age is that most Christianity is today presented as a religious method of salvation by extricating, or "fishing out", individual souls from the evil world and thus getting them into "heaven". This is an almost utter perversion of Christianity and, in so far as it prevails, it turns it into a religion with little to recommend it over Buddhism or Mohammedanism, which are also extrication religions. This is why that in so far as Christian missions are tainted with extricationism they justify the popular criticism that other peoples had best be left in peace with their own native religions, since these are often thought to be better suited to their peculiar needs and circumstances.

The Society of the Catholic Commonwealth rejects Christianity as an extrication religion. It rejects the logical accompaniments of such religion: the individualistic pietism characteristic of both Protestantism and Papalism; sentimental and non-liturgical rituals which pander to subjective [6/7] emotionalism; individualistic preoccupation with "going to heaven"; a legalistic view of rewards for goodness and punishments for sin; withdrawal or aloofness from the natural world; the view that the natural world is a hindrance to salvation rather than potentially the substantial foundation necessary to human salvation; indifference to the character of the political, social and economic patterns of human corporate life.

Therefore it also rejects a Church which can live corporately and organizationally at peace with an evil world, accepting money and power on that world's terms, provided only she herself is left undisturbed to fish out individual souls and to get them into heaven when individual bodies die. The Society asserts that Christian salvation includes the body with the soul and that without a re-created natural humanity there can be no substantial foundation for a supernatural resurrection. And since man is by nature a social animal, individual perfection is impossible apart from an accompanying process of corporate social perfection. Mass cannot be offered without a perfected natural bread and wine. The consummated Kingdom of God is unthinkable without a previously perfected social Kingdom of God in the natural order of human affairs.

The Society therefore also rejects "going to church" as mere comfort, mere refuge from life's storms, mere edification, mere inspiration, all of which things are symptoms of, and stages in, extricationism. In short, it rejects all "purely spiritual" and non-Sacramental idealism; for apart from functional Sacramentalism, the only connection of ideals [7/8] with man's material state rests tenuously and abstractly in what are called the "practical implications" of religion. Implicationism is veiled idealism. The Society rejects idealism as the most subtle and deadly enemy of the Sacramental Religion of the Incarnation.

The Society therefore sets itself anew the task of forming one or more social seeds or cells of that new social order required by Our Lord's extending humanity.