The period of reconstruction, more than that of the war, will test our national fibre.  The problems we face are in extent, in character, in complexity greater than at any other period of history.  The strain will be greater, for the conflict is being lifted to a higher plane, that of ideas.  And ideas are the supreme realities, the dynamic forces that rule the world, the fulcrum that shifts the axis of the world’s civilization.

In these momentous times, the isolation of Catholics would be a calamity; their participation, a blessing, for Church and country.  To stand aloof from the solution of the problems that stare us in the face and insistently demand attention and solution, to confine our efforts solely to parochial institutions and not enter into the broader field of public life is for Catholics, at this hour, nothing short of a calamity.  The consequences of this abstention will be to limit our action to mere protestation and often useless defence, when our principles are assailed and our positions in danger, when a leakage, through the social activities of others, is but too manifest.  Let us on the contrary, turn the energies we lose in mere defence to constructive work, and our positions will be safer, and our principles better appreciated. “Our liberties are best defended when Catholics throw themselves into the stream of public life.”

And does not Catholic doctrine stand essentially for constructive forces in the social, political and economic life of a country?  We possess the foundation, the plans, the material of all true and lasting social reconstruction.  The Gospel and the natural law form the rock-bottom foundation; the definite and unchanging principles of morality are its structural lines; justice is as the steel girders and charity the fast-binding cement.

“At the present day,” wrote Professor G. Toniolo, the eminent Catholic Italian economist, “the great Encyclicals of Leo XIII, which, sustained by the common light of the Evangelical teachings of Christian philosophy and Revelation, have illuminated all the phases of social, civil and political knowledge in harmonious, logical connections.  At the present day we possess a unified complex of sociological teachings, brought together in a system, which rests against the supernatural, which measures up to the problems of our age, which, absorbing everything, takes unto itself all that is true in modern science and is proven by experience, and thus is prepared to oppose successfully a positivistic, materialistic and anti-Christian sociology.”