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We present the Michael Journal to the public reader: What is this newcomer doing in a world that is so burdened with disorder, hatred, distrust, disunion, misery, discontent, and chaos? Is it tomorrow that we think we can find immediate solutions in the midst of so many problems? Michael wants instead to remind us that today is just the day after yesterday and that, if we debate in confusion, it is because yesterday humanity could not orient itself towards a tomorrow that has become today. But contestations, regrets and lamentations do not give us anything if we continue in this same passivity. Man is a being who can reason and is free, but if he abdicates the use of his reason and his liberty he suffers conditions that are atrophic. Modestly, but with tenacity, the Michael Journal aims to form, in the blood of the people, an elite that is more and more numerous. We hope they will with reflection, study, and actions, determine new ways in the progress of history. Our role principally consists of an orientation towards a temporal social order in which man can develop. This is purely a layman’s mission. It is not the mission of the Church to form the temporal order, but ours, the lay people. Without, of course, losing sight that if politics has its correct end, this end should be arranged with the final end of man in view. Otherwise this is disorder and the vigilant Church knows how to signal it out. The Michael Journal wants to form an elite, as we have said before, an aristocracy that consists of citizens; but it looks for the great multitude, not only those who have benefited from a superior learned culture. An experience of three years convinces us that it is possible to educate the people. If they remain in almost complete ignorance to these great political, economic and social problems, it is because we did not give them the occasion to learn or that we presented to these problems in an unintelligible form, with the design sometimes to fascinate or inflict the silent acceptance of the worst absurdities. The Michael Journal is a journal of opinion. Not revolutionary, but disengaged from certain conventional formulas that we are used to considering as dogmas in politics and economics. We are not shy to denounce the nonsense of the political parties, nor the hate among the classes, or the restriction of production before immense needs, and the rarity of money in the face of mountains of goods, the reverse of the order which places the end as the means and the means as end. It is not the Michael Journal that preaches patience and resignation. We make our own the remark by Jacques Maritain, “the Christian, it is true, is never resigned. His conception of the world in regards to himself is a preparation of the valley of tears that procures earthly happiness, relative but real, of the assembled multitude.” Louis Even |