Religion: Substitute for Pollyanna

One of the bright young men of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. is the 44-year-old Bishop of Worcester (Mass.), the Most Rev. John J. Wright, D.D. Boston-born Bishop Wright has had plenty of opportunity to acquire historical perspective: he studied for the priesthood in Rome, earned his doctorate there, and taught philosophy and theology at Boston’s St. John’s Seminary before becoming secretary to the late Cardinal O’Connell. In last week’s Commonweal, he put his perspective to work in a timely reminder to Christian doom-croakers.

“Less than a decade ago men were talking of a ‘brave new world,’ a world of four universal freedoms … of nations united and peoples at peace in a reign of concord and prosperity within a global new Arcady. Such a Pollyanna outlook . . . was described by one astute critic in the early ’40s as ‘Dawnism,’ the ingenuous expectation that the millennium was at hand, or at the very most a political conference or two away . . .

“It is no longer necessary to rebuke the sunny follies of the Dawnists . . . What now calls for diagnosis and cure is the contagious mood of universal discouragement spread on every side by a host of Giants of Despair. These have turned Doubting Castle into a mighty convention headquarters for panic-stricken editors, lecturers, candidates for public office and even clergy, who, disenchanted with prospects for the millennium, bid us now prepare as best we may for the approaching dissolution of every hope and help.”

Bishop Wright does not deny that the world is in a parlous state, but the man of faith and education, he insists, remembers that it was ever thus. Recalling “the small print of his history books, he watches with serenity as once again the tyrants who would tame God’s men . . . are in fact slowly but surely tamed by them, if not in themselves, at least in their descendancy . . .

“The lesson, then … is not that we should be Pollyannas but that we should be Christians, men of a confidence rooted in the recognition that men and events pass, God and His work endure.”

As an example of a good Christian attitude for a bad time, Bishop Wright quotes the recent words of Cardinal Feltin of Paris: “We believe in the future of humanity. We Christians are more optimistic than all others, even though we recognize the vast errors of which human nature is capable. We are not Utopians, but we know that grace is stronger than sin.”