St Louis University - Archive Yearbook (St Louis, MO)

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■ The center of the University ' s reli- gious life, the College Church is one of the oldest buildings of the University group. . . Aerial view of the Lindell- Grand-Pine section of the University. . . Stepping out for a bite to eat at the noon intermission of class.

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conditions of those living under them, but in seeing the true problem and in even approaching the answer. For, to a world rudely shocked by the disintegration of all it once thought holy, there has come a revulsion from effects without a consideration of cause; the demand for change and more change has produced a complete upset of old forms without the slightest revision of fundamentals, hi materialism was chaos born and in material- ism it continues. That the problem we face is spiritual— spiritual in the broader sense of the term— seems never to have entered the minds of the blind leaders of a blind following. Surely, if such be the cause, the solution can not lie in an increased clinging to matter, in a denial of God or a return to a virile paganism, yet to these modern nations have turned. Our world, then, wanders in circles. And herein lies our problem, a problem of decadent social, political and economic order, a problem fostered by futile attempts to blunder out. Hei-e hes a problem, here is a challenge, the challenge of change. We live today in a whirling vortex. Standards we have long accepted as self-evident are not only questioned but flatly rejected. Belief in the Godhead is subjected to search, held up to ridicule; the principle of private property is made an inherent evil; orators on soap-boxes — literal and figurative — hold forth panaceas traced -with a denial of practice and reason — all this and more, not mere words but actual fact. An old order is passing, passing swiftly, and into its place are rushing new forms, new policies, new precepts. The movement may have been slow in inception; it is unbelievably sw ift in execution. Democ- racy or dictatorship; individual or community; status quo or change, Christ or chaos — these are problems which have left the classroom and entered the arena of practical conflict. To select wisely from that conflict should be the desideratum of every Catholic college graduate; to be aware that change is taking place is his duty. It is no simple matter to vie-vv with equanimity a world when one stands on shifting ground. It is difficult to see with dispassionate eye, to enter into no rash judgments, to follow no popular prejudice. That, too, is part of the problem. The times demand wisdom in careful analysis, force in proper solution; the times demand intelligent action from intelli- gent men. And here, within the following pages, is the Catholic university ' s answer to the problem. In the labyrinth of claims and counter claims it traces the one bright path to a successful conclusion. Harking back to those days when catastrophe first threatened, though quietly, in the material- istic humanism of the Renaissance and seeing there the key to the problem, the Church works for a return to sound philosophy, a return to sound living. We do not stand in siege today, but neither are we freed from conflict; the enemy have laid down their barrage in ne v fields, in new guises. They have flung the gauntlet; change challenges. And from the confusion of the masses rises the gigantic figure of Christ ans vering, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Light. In hoc signo vinces '

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THE REAL ANSWER TO MODERN PERPLEXITIES Catholic education the champion oF sound values and tried principles is the one solution to the problems confronting the modern world. Only here is complete cognizance taken of the influence of God in every phase of human endeavor. IT was the tangible, the reahty of matter, that failed man. Change, confusion, consternation, chaos all are but the disunity of a world groping for new standards that will not shift or change, all are but blind attempts to return to something substantial, something satisfying. The idol of matter and the god of gold have toppled from their places; man, ever anxious to worship some- thing, has raised the State, Humanity, the Prole- tariat, himself to their former eminence, has rein- stated his old gods in new disguises. And, sharply contrasted with the constant change, there is a single standard, unchanging and unchangeable, eternally satisfactory, the only standard with the cure for the cause. ■ Government failed because it had no philosophy; business failed because it had no ethics; man failed because he had no religion. There were pseudo- philosophies, pseudo-ethics, pseudo-religions, but the truth, the Christian truth, had been discarded. There is a single institution voicing authentic claim to that truth. The Catholic Church, translator of His will, does have the solution, does know the way out. And the Catholic university is inextrica- bly bound with that Church. But a university is often removed from the current of the world. It may stand in the heart of a busy city, by it may flow streams of men, but the door of the Catholic college is the door that shuts this little world in itself from the rest of the real universe. Because it moves in realms of thought, because it deals with youth, because it adds religion to the other impracticalities of educa- tion, it seems set apart. And so the university must move with the world, must so move that the principles which she embod- ies can influence the chaos about her. The true Catholic university does that. What others may consider her defect, the fact that she must speak to youth, becomes her strongest asset, for it is platitudinous to say that in youth lies the hope for regeneration of our rotten order. Into the doctrine she gives that youth is infused the leaven of other worldliness. Religion becomes no single course taken and disregarded; it becomes the dominating motif of all education, the correlative of every subject. Spirituality is her purpose; the translation of that spirituality into this world, her duty. ■ But if she should take the plastic clay given her and into that should breathe the suggestion of religion, of dependence on the immaterial, and should stop there, the university would do but half her task. If she would justify her ways and avoid the charge of severance from reality, she must awaken her students to that reality. Educa- tion was never intended to be an opiate, never intended to make men speak of the masses, never intended to draw vapid philosophizing about conflict of principle . When the college class- room becomes a shell for withdrawal from life, it becomes useless. To maintain a sensitivity to problems of the world, yet a certain aloofness from her worldliness — such is the difficult task of the university. Education, Catholic education, supplies to youth thus introduced to life a perspective, a philosophy that places incidents in their proper order, that offers a standard by which all things may be judged. In this lies her leadership. ■ But this leadership, even in a practical sense, cannot end in a purely worldly culture or civiliza- tion. The purpose of Catholicism is not to trans- form Catholics into partisans or to create an economic or political institution, but rather to take truth where it finds it and fuse it into a single workable system. It is in making practical the application of the adjective Christian to our social, political, and economic order that the Church finds her medium. It is in educating men to make that application possible that the Catholic univer- sity succeeds.