penance is a fundamental theme in the message of salvation as well as in actual Christian life. Thus the true beginning of penance is baptism and penance for this reason is called "a second baptism." Penance deeply affects holy Mass itself, offered as this is ad gloriam Dei and also in remissionem peccatorum. It strongly affects even certain seasons and days of the liturgical year, when it is emphasized and expressed with unusual vigor and intensity.

It is desirable, then, that Church law and pastoral practice pay special attention to this fuller aspect of both the virtue and the sacrament of penance. Whatever could be done in the discipline and the liturgy in this regard would indeed redound to the advantage of the sacrament itself.37 Its natural odiousness to human nature would be lessened and the sacrament would be more vividly related to the fundamental nature of the Christian-a son of God, much loved, lifted to heights of indescribable beauty, and yet a son who must "return home" almost continually, for natural frailty, inborn tendencies, the influence of the environment, and at times downright wickedness, too often exile him from it.

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D. C.

Јони А. Авво

37 For some practical suggestions on this point, cf. G. Dousselin, “Pour ou contre la 'confession communautaire' des enfants," Paroisse et Liturgie (Bruges), XLV (1963), 171-175; L. Heuschen, "Liturgie de la Parole introductrice à une Confession communautaire," ibid., 176-181; “A propos du Concile-Lettre d'un prêtre à son évêque,” ibid., 211-212.

MUST THE MATERIALIST DENY THAT

"ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL"?

The common universitarian view of the world, called "materialism," holds as its basic principle that human beings, like everything else, are solely matter, with merely the powers of matter, acting only in one possible way and determined solely by the interplay of associated masses and their powers. Holding this view, materialists correctly agree, with most other thinkers, that matter and its powers cannot really choose one of alternative actions, so that in the same circumstances the other alternative could have been chosen instead. Consequently a materialist will hardly admit that matter and its forces has any right to equal treatment by associated matter and its forces.

Suppose that we set in motion on a table a number of billiard balls of various sizes and weights. Each ball when struck by another will move with a speed and direction which is determined by the balls' mass, speed, angle of impact, and circumstances. The balls have no choice of action or reaction; much less have they any right to equal treatment by the other balls. For materialists, such too must be the situation of human beings.

It is beside the point for the materialist to introduce here psychology as a difference of action and reaction of human beings. That too, according to him, must be rigidly determined by the one invariable violence of "the resultant of forces and masses," like all other matter. Ultimately, materialism and mechanism differ only in name. In matter, then, inequality reigns absolutely and universally. Holding that man is only matter, the materialist must hold that absolute and universal inequality is the only possible form of human existence and treatment of others. Call materialism science, if you will; you cannot call it American. For the dialectical -that is, logical-materialist, the Americanism that "all men are created equal" must be like the "campaign promise," not to be taken seriously by the wise, an assertion for the simple-minded, nobly-sounding but impossible.

It is not a rash assumption that the majority of our professors, who form the thinking of our nation's future guides, are mate.

should not be murdered. A baby and an adult have eq
to private property; but the baby has not the dispos
property. In a word, all persons are equally human i
all other persons have the responsibility of treating the
beings. In the concrete all men are unequal in pa
with Bobbie Burns we must sincerely agree: “a m
a' that."

INEQUALITIES IN OUR LAND OF HUMAN 1

It took the bloody operation of the Civil War body politic the cancer of the horrendous inequa human being. The country still needs to re remnants of this inequality in its treatment of by the whites. We have, peacefully in most p of social justice for the wage-earner. We equality of freedom to choose the education ing to our consciences.

In a decent democracy we must not be the equality in liberty which is already e nature, by the Constitution in general a in particular in the Oregon School Ca

The fundamental theory of liberty, upon
Union repose, excludes any general po
its children by forcing them to accept
only. The child is not the mere creatu
him and direct his destiny, have the
to recognize and to prepare him for

Catholics must pay $1.3 billion
ican children and are forced to
exercise of their equal right
American children. Because r
they are forced to send the
is banned and where the te
tions of materialism.

To penali under penali

for or

1

by

tice"

a false quous exle Church, > and pupils by Catholics ation. Salaries hes of learning. : for general edustice be given in a

to religion, it is outas is often done, that Constitution, any indirect

of the Constitution is Church or to school, blic services and governAs are indirect aid to all Catholic religion by supplyNorbidden by the Constituwinch is given to other re

L

v. Board of Eduto supply bus-rides to parochial schools. Catholics equally with unjust, with the U. S.

er of States assert that by giving parochial schoolhey do for other children in

f Maryland decrees that it is w parochial schools to tap into e public schools. In Oklahoma d admission to a public remediale it is a union of Church and State at public expense as other children 1).

which we wish all the world to admire?

bit of it. It is some of their most per

e propaganda utterly discrediting our lofty N. of the human liberties and of men's have plenty of "Truth" broadcasting to reWe preach all over the world the liberté, ité of democracy through multi-million-dollar dio, TV, and printed matter, and through our s and noble Peace Corps. Here at home we give propaganda. Behind their back we cut the ground our faithful representatives, as the world is not slow it to them, by our bigoted inequality of treatment and the liberties of many millions of our minorities. Not reason our American delegates of peace and social develhear the shouts: "Yankee, Go home! We want none of cracy and equality of man! Get equality yourselves beto give it to us!"

THE VIRUS OF INEQUALITY: FEAR OF LOSING PROFIT,

POWER, PRESTIGE

The chief advantage of inequality is money for the dominator. The second is dominance over others' minds and lives. The third is preservation of prestige, or negatively, hate of rising rivals in a free society. Secondary and less disreputable motives are proposed; but they are mostly a smoke-screen under which these three reasons attack human equality without being seen in their shamefulness.

A century ago we saw lucre leading the charge against freedom of the slaves of the South. Bledsoe in his Liberty and Slavery, Christy in Cotton is King, Fitzhugh in Cannibals All, Calhoun in his Works, Hammond, Harper, Sims and Dew in their ProSlavery Argument, to mention a few slavers, make little attempt to hide their money motive for slavery. Human freedom for negroes, they said, would bankrupt numberless slave-owners and the cost of supporting freed slaves would be unbearable, while the cotton-fields would return to forest.

The South's altruist concern for the North-which in general opposed slavery-warned that the cotton-mills of the North and of Europe would have to close with hardship for thousands of workers, if they did not receive the yearly billion pounds of slaveproduced cotton from the South. Eli Whitney's cotton-gin invented in 1793 raised cotton export from the South from 140,000 pounds to a billion pounds in the 1850's; and resulting Southern affluence made enslavement of colored human beings justified.

As for prestige, the Moses of oppressed minorities, Lincoln, indignantly damns that perverse craving for prestige over other men that has sparked much of the enthusiasm for human inequality in social history. The inequality of "kings who bestrode the necks of the people," the superiority of “a lighter skin,” the superexcellence of "the Protestant British gentleman," he said, proclaim "the liberty of making slaves of other people." The Emancipator wrote to Joshua Speed: "When the Know-nothings get control ... [the Declaration of Independence] will read: 'all men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics." "

Hunger for prestige in uncultured "white trash" is ridiculous in their contempt for those of dark skin who are often their superiors