Catholic Problems in Western Canada

by George Thomas Daly

Higher Education in Western Canada—Duty of the Hour—University Training Condition of Genuine Leadership—For Catholics Higher Education means Higher Catholic Education—The Concerted Action of all Catholics in Western Canada can make a Western Catholic University a Reality.

Never has the world manifested a keener and more general interest in higher education. The facilities which Governments offer to place within the reach of the mass of the people; the benefits of university education; the enormous sums left by wealthy individuals for the endowment of chairs and the foundation of scholarships; the eagerness with which these offers are grasped by men of all classes; the extraordinary success of the Overseas University in the American Army, which had a student body of 10,000—these are, without doubt, manifest signs of public opinion on the matter of higher education. The world-struggle, we all feel, has shifted to another battlefield, and the future in every realm of human activity rests on the mastery of ideas. In that intellectual conflict, the primary school rooms are the trenches on the first line of defence; the college and university lecture halls stand out as the strategic heights from which the heavy artillery of ideas smashes the way to victory. Hold the college and university heights to-day, and the hinterland of industry, commerce, science, art and politics will be yours to-morrow.

Catholics throughout our Dominion begin to realize that higher education is the price of leadership. "Of the many points of contact between the Church and the modern world, education is the point where Catholicism has most to gain by energetic thought and action, and most to lose by an atmosphere of indifference." We are waking up from our deep lethargy and beginning to understand that we shall not have our share in the shaping of the destinies of our own Country until our leaders, particularly among the laity, impose themselves upon the nation by their number and their value. The magnificent campaign of the "Antigonish Casket" in favour of higher education and the exchange of views this point at issue brought from various correspondents, the successful drive in favour of Loyola College of Montreal, the growing influence of the Catholic student bodies in the various universities, the creation of Laval, in Montreal, as a distinct unit from Quebec; the tremendous success this newly born organization met with in its drive for $5,000,000; all these facts indicate concentration of forces in the direction of higher education. The national Catholic conscience is awakened into action. "One of the most pressing needs of the Church at the present time, is to have a well-connected body of university-trained Catholics." This statement of Father Plater, S.J., is true also for Canada and more particularly for Western Canada. And indeed, this pressing need of higher education has come home of late to our western Catholics as is evidenced by the great efforts made to establish colleges in the various Provinces. As this move is of the greatest importance for the welfare of the Church in that promising part of our country, we thought to be of some service to the Western Church in drawing the attention of Catholics to this important issue and bringing to a focus certain indefinite, hazy views on the subject.

Higher Education—Duty of the Hour for Western Catholics.

"When a reflective man of middle life walks along the embowered paths of Oxford and Cambridge or through their quadrangles whose walls have echoed to the footsteps of so many brainy men of England, he realizes what these institutions have been and still are to Great Britain and the Empire." From the lecture halls of these seats of learning have gone, generation after generation, the men who framed and directed the course of studies of other universities, the legislators and statesmen that have shaped the destinies of the British Empire. "There is not a feature or a point in the national character which has made England great among the nations of the world, that is not strongly developed and plainly traceable in our universities. For eight hundred or a thousand years they have been intimately associated with everything that has concerned the highest interest of the country." (W. E. Gladstone.) This example of the power of Oxford and Cambridge is so typical that one immediately grasps its meaning and appreciates its full value. On that immense background of the Empire they stand out indeed in bold relief as the embodiment of higher education, as the great portals that open on the highway of true leadership. Is not the affiliation, that subtle intellectual bond which units our universities of Canada to those two great seats of learning, a permanent and living proof of this fact?

A university is the vital centre of a nation's life. Around it, by a gradual process of elimination and a natural force of gravitation, centre the master minds; from it, as from a fountain-head, flow with true leadership in every branch of human society, progress, wealth and prosperity. On the force of this centripetal and centrifugal movement of a university depends its value in the community. "The increase in number and efficiency of universities," said Bishop Spalding, "is the healthy proof of the vitality and energy of a nation."

In the educational system of a country the university stands out as the apex, the culminating and crowning point of its intellectual life. For, as the college course develops the studious and acquisitive powers of the mind, the university course has in view its creative and formative powers. "Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school," says Morley, "but it is at college that aspiring talents enter into their own inheritance." "It is the function of education in the highest sense, to teach man that there are latent in him possibilities beyond what he has dreamed of, and to develop in him capacities of which without contact with the highest learning, he had never become aware." (Haldane.) We may well call the university "the brains of a nation." It equips the student with standards and tests of objective truth. . . . It makes him dig down to the bed-rock on which truth in its various manifestations rests. . . . Universities are indeed the nurseries of the higher life, the living sources from which knowledge and culture flow in abundant streams. They do the thinking for the teeming masses who have neither the leisure nor the opportunity to think for themselves and who live on that mental atmosphere we call "public opinion." From the heights of our universities, ideas and principles gradually filter down into the lower strata of the nation. The novel, the Sunday supplement, the stage, the cinema screen—these post-graduate courses of the working man—are popularizing to-day the theories and ideals that were yesterday honoured in our secular institutions of higher education. It may take time, perhaps centuries, for this process of intellectual filtration; but ideas, like the stream, are bound to follow the incline of the water-shed.

If the change that takes place in the mind and conscience of the individual is a slow and subtle process, what should we not expect when there is question of a nation? Yes, the process is slow but it is sure. The permeation of evolutionism into every domain of human thought is a recent and most striking illustration of it. This fact stands out conspicuously on the pages of history. "Lord Acton's view of history," said Shane Leslie, "was that ideas, not men or events, made the differences between one era and the next." The mind is always the storm centre of revolutions, the breeding ground of the most conflicting theories. The great storms that sweep over humanity always gather on the high summits of religion and philosophy, blackening the mental horizon; sooner or later, they break out on the lower plains of the economic social and political world, spreading everywhere revolution and destruction. The blasphemous Proudhon gave utterance to a great truth when he wrote: "It is surprising how at the bottom of every political problem we always find some theology involved." We lay stress upon this aspect of universities, for, in our mind, from a catholic view-point, it is of the greatest importance in the discussion of the present issue.

The university is not only the focus of the intellectual life of a country; by its research work, by its applied science it becomes also the very fountain head of all national progress and prosperity. The natural resources lie dormant, the soil—that perennial source of wealth, is stagnant, the export-trade of manufactured goods and agricultural products is at its lowest ebb, until touched by the magic wand of the university expert. It is he who discovers, develops and shows how to make use of with profit, the hidden wealth of the land. The research bureaus instituted by the Government of Canada and the United States, co-operating with the various universities, are now considered as the most important factors of national prosperity. The Reclamation Service of the U.S. by irrigation, drainage and the pulling of stumps will reclaim nearly 300 million acres for colonization. To bring the economic value of a university nearer home to us, who does not know the beneficial influences of Saskatoon University on the agricultural pursuits of Saskatchewan? This relation of the university and the material prosperity of a country is so marked that the Mosely Educational Commission sent by England to the United States, most strongly emphasized that living connection and necessary correlation between the universities and the industrial and manufacturing prosperity of the United States.

A university is therefore not a mere luxury, but rather a necessary asset in a nation's life. "The development of the true spirit of the University among a people is a good measure of the development of its soul, and consequently of its civilization" (Haldane). "No country," we will conclude with "Catholic" in the Antigonish Casket, "ever attained to any degree of political influence, nor have any people ever risen from a lower to a higher level of intellectual and social culture, without the light and inspiration that flow from a genuine university." This vision was before the eyes of Cecil Rhodes who founded scholarships throughout the British Empire. These scholarships glean every year in the wide fields of the Empire the brightest minds and throw them as a beautiful sheaf at the foot of the great English Alma Mater, Oxford. Millions and millions have been left for the same purpose to the American Universities.