Excerpt from Handbook of the National Catholic War Council This Handbook is written primarily for the purpose of describing in brief outline the causes which brought the National Catholic War Council into being and the problems which face the Catholic Church of the United States during the present war. To make the world safe for Democracy, to establish peace in the world upon the tested foundations of political liberty, to champion the rights of mankind - such, in the words of President Wilson, is the task to which the American people have dedicated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. To accomplish this, the American Republic has had to sacrifice a principle upon which its policies have almost always been based; that of "Splendid Isolation." The President has told us that the chief obstacle at the beginning of the war was to overcome this traditional aloofness in world affairs. "The world is no longer," he has said, "divided into little circles of interest. The world no longer consists of neighborhoods. The world is linked in a common life and interest such as humanity never saw before... What disturbs the life of the whole world is the concern of the whole world, and it is our duty to lend the full force of this nation, moral and physical, to a league of nations which shall see to it that nobody disturbs the peace of the world without submitting his case first to the opinion of mankind." In the world today the strongest response to this new internationalism must come from the Church of the ages. The Catholic Church cannot remain an isolated factor in the nation. The Catholic Church possesses spiritual and moral resources which are at the command of the nation in every great crisis. The message to the nation to forget local boundaries and provincialism is a message likewise to the Catholic Church. Parochial, diocesan and provincial limits must be forgotten in the face of the greater tasks which burden our collective religious resources. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.