Integrity: Volume 2 (January - June 1947)

This second volume collects the first six issues of Integrity for 1947. It was edited by Carol Robinson and Ed Willock. 

Here follows several excerpts from the editorials: 

"The dominant temper is Post-Protestant, pagan, flaunting a shallow optimism which only lightly disguises a profound agnosticism, the cancer of twentieth century society. Doubt is the persistent cloud lowering over a shaking world. Yet hunger for the Absolute haunts men’s minds. Thirst for a synthesis between the subjective and the objective is unsatisfied. The contemplative aspirations of many, deprived of the strong meat of truth and the straight road of morals, are stunted or stifled. They are caught in the sway of a sensate culture that has lost its soul. They are the victims of our chaotic syncretism….

To what degree are directives of the Church being ignored, to what extent are they being obeyed? Since this knowledge must be at best intuitive, it is liable to be a truer judgment the closer we are to that borderline where Religion meets Life. The spearhead of the Church’s thrust is the laity. In the home, the forum, the laboratory, and the workshop the spiritual either clashes or weds with the material. This is the battleground for which the Mass is a preparation. Behind us, tempering our weapons, welding hilt to blade, are the ministers administering and the cloistered praying. The question of the day is: “How goes the battle?”…

Our present world testifies overwhelmingly to one thing: to the hopelessness of men to save themselves. It is folly to disregard the weapons by which, may we repeat, the battle has already been won. As long as we do things our own way the world will get darker and darker. What we need is not an intensification of effort, but a change of strategy…

A good society is the sum total of its families, containing within it as much as possible of the spiritual and material goods necessary to meet the common needs. Any individual within the society who seeks his own good or his family’s profit, apart from the common good, is an enemy of that society. Any individual who preaches a philosophy of self-interest apart from the common good, is guilty of subversive activity. The first end of a good society is the soul’s salvation of its people. Its government adjusts its policies to bring about a state of affairs encouraging to virtue, and discouraging to vice…

We are in that stage today, when learning which has long since ceased to be for Christ is ever more blatantly against Him. But the evil is not corrected by substituting good information for bad information. The situation has to be corrected radically, which means that we have to overcome our spiritual blindness. When, through Mary, we obtain the humility by which we shall regain the light God has withdrawn from our intellects, then we shall know the truth..."