bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Social Teaching of Savonarola
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Savonarola has been called the first Christian social reformer of modern times. It is as such only that I speak of him.

Social Christianity was for him the work which awaits both the body and the member, a vocation for all rather than the specialised task of a few not so much a struggle or a decisive battle, but a never-ending journey in which the traveller now slackens, now increases his pace, often retraces his footsteps, is ever watchful to the right and to the left of him, endures much hardship and meets strange travellers, but ‘in peace of mind makes always for the shore where he will embark upon the Eternal Sea’.

Writing nearly five hundred years before the secularist State and the Iron Curtain, Girolamo Savonarola reminded his generation that the time had come for words to give place to deeds, vain formula to real feeling. ‘Purify the spirit’, he said, ‘give heed to the common good, forget private interests. . . . Your reform must begin with spiritual things, for these are higher than material things, of which they are the Rule and the Life. And likewise all temporal good must be subordinated to the moral and religious good upon which it depends. And if you have heard it said that States cannot be governed by Paternosters, remember that this is the maxim of tyrants, of men hostile to God and the common weal, a rule for the oppression and not for the relief and liberation of cities.’
Evelyn Waugh and Blimp
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Sitting in club rooms, with cigars and brandy at call, there ‘is a stage in the evening when old colonels talking to younger officers will glance through the day’s news, saying: ‘World’s over-populated, you know. Needs a blood-bath now and then. Terrible things, wars, but they have to be. We’ve had our go. Be your turn soon.’ If the secret thus handed down from generation to generation is a professional one, at least it has the merits of being an open one; and, easy as such a secret is to scoff at, there is still a good deal of sense in it—even though that sense may be considered by some to be a primitive kind of horse- sense. For it conjures up a picture of the world such as it might be today had the Incarnation not yet occurred and, viewed from different angles, this is a theme which has interested Mr Evelyn Waugh for the past two decades.

In Vile Bodies (1930) one comes across its first statement:

‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I’ll be damned’, he said defiantly, ‘if they shall have a war without consulting me. What’s a Cabinet for if there’s not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for, anyway?’

‘That’s the whole point. No one talks about it, and no one wants it. No one talks about it because no one wants it. They’re all afraid to breathe a word about it.’
Liturgical Reform
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

High up in the Vosges, crowning a mountain, stands the sanctuary of Ste Odile. Below there stretches the immense plain of the Lower Rhine, with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral rising in the middle distance. For thirteen hundred years, amidst all the conflicts that have marked the history of Alsace, it has remained a point of rest. It was here, at the end of October, that there took place the third International Liturgical Conference sponsored by the Liturgical Institute of Trier and the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique of Paris. There could have been no more appropriate meeting-place for a work of reconciliation, for such is the purpose of these gatherings bringing together liturgical scholars and pastoral clergy from ten different countries, all alike concerned to render more effective the redemptive work of Christ which the Liturgy exists to declare and continue.

Previous meetings at Luxembourg and Maria-Laach had evoked the sympathetic interest of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Indeed the text of the restored Paschal Vigil issued in 1950 may be said to be a triumphant vindication, of the work of liturgical reform, and that precisely in the direction of the conference’s own efforts. For the Or do Sabbati Sancti is not just a piece of liturgical scholarship, designed to restore with archaeological accuracy a rite whose significance had been largely lost. It is all that, but much more is it a bold attempt to make the liturgical action a mystery in which the Christian people share. Hence the emphasis on a reduction and a simplification of the symbolism of the rite, so that the central theme of death and resurrection, darkness and light, may stand revealed in all its strength. Hence, too, the provision that the congregation should at this point of the Christian mystery, and in their own language, renew the baptismal vows which the Paschal rite enshrines.
A Christian View of Ownership
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

Ownership has both personal and social aspects. One of the main justifications of personal property is that it is an essential material guarantee of a reasonable freedom and is an incentive to productive work. This is commonly called the profit-motive. Certainly what the ordinary man really wants is a fair distribution of private property and not its abolition. And it is his reasonable hope that he may be allowed to enjoy his property in his declining years and hand it on to his posterity.

The right to full ownership really includes two rights: the right of use and the right of disposal. I may use what I own, and others, without my permission, may not use it. I may sell, lend or give what I own, and so transfer to another my own right of exclusive use.

The proprietor or owner is the one who enjoys the full right to dispose of what is his in so far as it is not prohibited by law or harmful to others. It implies a claim to possess something as one’s own, as a due, and therefore imposes constraint (whether by way of forbearance, acquiescence, or active support) on the rest of the world. Thus if a man has a right to a sum of money, this means that someone has also the duty of paying it to him. The thing or object of this right of disposal is property, and the right of disposal itself is ownership. The same principles apply when property is held jointly by a public body or corporation, or by a trust.

Following the conceptions of Roman Law, Blackstone (Comm. I, 138) states that the right of property consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land. Ownership bestows on a person the right to dispose of a thing for his private interests as he sees fit.
Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo
Authors: Lockhart Freda Bruce
Published: July 2007

Foggia must be one of the dustiest, most unattractive towns in Italy; a settlement or conglomeration of utilities dumped at one end of the great drained plain where the only cheerful sights are the trim council villas of a Fascist period housing scheme, standing each in its decent stretch of ground. Occasionally a model village can also be seen bravely starting up round a brand-new modern church.

Driving on beyond Foggia, up into the Gargano peninsula, the mountain landscape grows ever bleaker in the colourlessness of cactus, dust, stone and lime. Above, on the ridge where lie Padre Pio’s great white hospital and smaller Capuchin monastery, the mountains stretch more forbidding still.

San Giovanni Rotondo, when at last we reached it, might have been any township in a Western film, with sand and stone and dust massed into larger lumps to form human dwellings. This must be the very back of beyond, the uttermost edge of the world. Nobody surely would come here except as a fugitive—from justice, from fellow-man, from the world. For here is no single redeeming feature, no single attraction except Padre Pio, the stigmatic Friar at the little Capuchin monastery at the top of the village.

To this unprepossessing place flock visitors from all over Italy and beyond. During my week at San Giovanni Rotondo I met Americans, Britons, Latin-Americans, Swiss, French and others, but mostly Italians. Not just ‘superstitious peasants’, but Italians of every class and degree. They are all there—one soon feels—for the same reason.
The International Prospect for 1953
Authors: Eppstein John
Published: July 2007

It is necessary from time to time to withdraw oneself from the tangle of events and to contemplate the main trends of contemporary history. What are the most significant international happenings of recent months, and what conclusions may be drawn from them?

It is a tribute to the immense power and responsibility of the United States in the world today that Governments outside the Communist orbit almost all marked time as they awaited the outcome of the recent American presidential election. The semi-paralysis of diplomacy has continued during the interregnum between General Eisenhower’s election and his official replacement of President Truman in the White House. The reason is not far to seek. The whole scale of the rearmament effort, which has been getting under way in Western Europe during the last year, depends more than anything else upon the policy of the new President and the appropriations of the 83rd Congress. The prospects of orderly control of the Middle East and Moslem North Africa—which constitute the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—depend upon the extent to which the new American Government can subordinate the sentimental anti-imperialism which is part of the stock-intrade of American politics to the solidarity of the alliance and long-range strategic requirements. In the Far East, no solution (if solution there be) can be found for the deadlock in Korea except through the leadership of the United States, which has shouldered the main responsibility for the war against the Communists and has suffered nine-tenths of the United Nations’ casualties.
The Philosophical Background of Marx and Engels
Authors: Hawkins D. J. B.
Published: July 2007

Although the writer on Chinese philosophy who looked up first ‘China’ and then ‘philosophy’ in the encyclopaedia and proceeded to combine the information thus obtained can hardly be said to have followed an adequate method, there is something to be said, when one is investigating dialectical materialism and its antecedents, for considering materialism and dialectics separately and then seeing what happened when they came together. Materialism is a recurrent mood of human thinking on the pre-philosophical as well as on the philosophcal level. When our existentialist contemporaries point out that a denial of God is more than a failure to work out a metaphysical syllogism, they are uttering what is in one sense a truism but in another may be grossly misleading. For the atheist or agnostic is blind precisely to the necessity by which any instance of being entails as its ultimate source the fullness of being} and this is a metaphysical inference, although it can be made inarticulately and needs in any case to be lived at the instinctive, as well as elaborated at the logical, level.

The mind which is, for whatever reason, thus metaphysically defective is confined in its search for explanation to factual correlations and temporal sequences within the world of experience. Instead of the world as a whole being seen as an overflow of infinite fullness, it becomes merely a pattern of material fragments building themselves up into such systems as we call organisms and collapsing again on the wheel of time. The spirit of materialism is essentially a contentment with proximate and partial explanations which leave the whole finally unexplained. The materialist cannot ask or answer the question why things should exist at all.
Communism: Later Philosophical Developments
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

Fruitful discussion between persons who accept different philosophic systems postulates a point of contact, an area of agreement in terms of which one system can translate the terms of another system. This is so because any highly developed system has its own terminology.

So far as Marxism goes, we are like the spectators of a strange and complicated game, whose players speak a foreign language. For the Marxist philosophy is not a contemplative activity, it is not a system in the sense that Hegelianism is a system; it is simply the deduction of positive knowledge from the world through our minds. Any philosophic statement is simply the best approximate account of a given situation which is valid relative to this or that point in the historical process. The situation is constituted by matter and its laws translated into the human head. This is not an ‘insight into’, but a mirroring of, environmental conditionment.

The difficulty is that words like ‘peace’, ‘justice’, and so on, have the same sound for Marxists and ourselves but mean quite different things. For the Marxist there is no meaning about the word ‘justice’ save as it receives definition in relation to one or other stage in the historical process. Indeed, only statements formulated in terms of matter in motion can be true. Hence the philosophic opinions of others are interpreted by him in relation to their exponents’ social conditionment and only affect him as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’.

For Lenin, all ‘abstractions must be taken back into the concrete, for they are only true in so far as they reject the history of developing production’. He saw his philosophic task as that of a guardian of the Marx-Engels theory in its purity.
Economic Aspects of Communism
Authors: Brech Ronald
Published: July 2007

Any discussion on the economic aspects of Communism has to refer to Russian experience since Russia was the first (and for some time the only) example of the application of Marxist economic philosophy. And it is perhaps only poetic justice that Russia should have contradicted Marx in almost every aspect of his economic teaching. Russia according to Marxist doctrine should never have become Communist—at least not when it did—for it had not experienced the full development of capitalist society. Russia also found it necessary, contrary to Marxist tenets, to operate a normal pricing mechanism and to pay money wages, not according to need, but according to the type of output that the state wished to foster. In other words, the Soviet planners discovered that the acquisitive motive— and original sin—still existed in a Communist state.

But before the significance of this contradiction can be discussed, its existence must be proved. Marx did not study economic problems as an end in themselves but merely because in his day current political controversy had an economic content. To him economics was nothing more than a means of discovering the laws of social development. He argued that the social productive relationships entered into by man formed the anatomy of a society. They enabled a society not only to make the fullest use of its productive powers but also to increase them, and through this increase the productive powers were brought into conflict with the social relationships. In more concrete terms, Marx claimed that the basic contradiction in capitalism is the increasingly social co-operative nature of production, because the means of production are individually owned, and it shows itself in the development of two classes which are inevitably antagonistic since their interests are incompatible.
The Dignity of Conscience
Authors: Deman Thomas
Published: July 2007

Conscience’ is a word of which we ought to be I proud. It proclaims that the criterion of good and evil lies within the individual man. Whatever orders he may be called upon to obey, in the last resort a man relies on the interior judgment which says ‘Yes, I ought to act in this way’, or ‘No, it would be sinful to do that.’ Through his conscience, a man is finally accountable to himself alone; or rather, he is freed from that merely human authority under which so many people find themselves.

It was the moralists such as Cic'ero and Seneca who first gave conscience a prominent place, at least in so far as the examination of past actions is concerned. St Paul, who introduced the notion into the Christian tradition, extended it to the control of future actions as well. Here it has no easy part to play, and gives rise to many problems. The scholastic theologians who discussed the extent to which its judgments should be followed, held that it may sometimes be mistaken, for it may consider that something is good which in reality is evil, and vice versa. But it was St Thomas above all who insisted on the authority of conscience, declaring that its ruling must be followed even if it is mistaken, though he added that a man who acts in this way is not necessarily free from blame. The man must obey his erroneous conscience, but in doing so he sins if he could have corrected it; the only solution for him is to alter his conscience by bringing it into agreement with the truth.

The importance given to conscience in St Thomas’s teaching is perhaps most clearly seen in his examination of the conflict that may occur between a subject and his superior.
Superior Orders
Authors: Wortley B. A.
Published: July 2007

We are bound to obey the legitimate orders of our legitimate superiors in any society we claim to be part of.

The defendants at Nuremberg admitted themselves to be members of the Nazi State; both the defendants and the prosecutors admitted that Nazi Germany was a state in the international sense of that term, and in that state orders could be legitimately conveyed down the appropriate chain of military or civil command.

Because authority was legitimately vested in the state, it could be presumed to be properly exercised by those tn whom commands were addressed. This presumption was not irrebuttable to the ordinary European mind; but the Nazis strove to make it irrebuttable. The Nazis sought to make the state the sole society to which a Nazi could belong, and to make the head of that state the sole source of legal and moral obligation; this monolithic conception, intended to be the strength of the Nazi state, in fact became its greatest weakness. When the Fuhrer destroyed himself, he also carried the Nazi state to destruction: as he intended.

A strong society is one which allows the free growth of legitimate aspirations expressed in different forms of societies and corporations. The closed, or totalitarian, form of society looks strong from outside, it looks neat and streamlined, but internally its life tends to be cramped and to lack spontaneity when not kept young by regular blood transfusions from those who direct it and who themselves remain relatively free.

It is fashionable nowadays for some critics of the Church to compare the Church with a totalitarian state. Clearly there are resemblances between any well-organised hierarchical societies when viewed from outside: but such a comparison overlooks the essential difference in spirit between the Church and the secular state.
Dafydd AP Gwilym
Authors: Lewis Saunders
Published: July 2007

Until recent years Dafydd ap Gwilym was the only Welsh poet with a high reputation outside Wales. This was not so strange. He fitted into the conventional picture of medieval poetry. He shared themes and modes with Guido Cavalcanti and with Thibaut de Champagne. He stretched a hand to Rutebeuf and another to the early Chaucer. Sir Idris Bell tackled English translations; Stern treated him as a Welsh minnesänger; a Dutch scholar, Theodor Chotzen, killed later in a Nazi prison, had in 1927 published his Recherches sur la poésie de Dafydd ap Gwilym, a large volume which remains still a most valuable survey of much of the poetry of Northern Europe in the fourteenth century. Now Professor Parry, of the University College of Bangor, gives us the long-awaited edition which is based on a study of all the manuscript sources. One must not speak of a final edition, for the simple reason that oral tradition admits of very little finality} but here are the text and critical apparatus that will be the starting point of study for the rest of this century. What I propose to attempt now is to give English readers a glimpse of Dafydd ap Gwilym from the point of view of the Welsh literary tradition.

This is no longer too difficult. The first volume of The Growth of “Literature by H. M. and N. K. Chadwick—a great and noble work despite necessary lacunae and some errors—has revealed to English students the tradition of heroic panegyric that is the main stream of Welsh poetry from the sixth century onwards. The Welsh poets themselves used to call it the tradition of Taliesin, from the sixth-century poet of that name.
The Aims of Catholic Ecumenism
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

In a previous Blackfriars article the development of the attitude of the Holy See to the Ecumenical Movement, during thirty years, was traced in outline. This development has followed marked changes in the nature and aims of the movement itself, and these have enabled the Holy See, while still remaining aloof from ecumenical organisation, to encourage the Catholic episcopate in fostering its own ‘reunion’ work on ecumenical lines, in close touch with the movement. The principles of a Catholic ecumenism, with necessary safeguards against the dangers to be met with in their application, are embodied in the Instruction to local ordinaries on the Ecumenical Movement, issued in December 1949 by the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. This document is a charter and guide for Catholics in the work of promoting the unity of Christendom among our own countrymen.

The purpose of the present article is to discuss, tentatively and by way of suggestion, the lines of action by which Catholic ecumenical work could be applied to the religious situation in England today. Between Catholics and their non-Catholic countrymen who are professing Christians, there lies a formidable psychological barrier; a barrier which keeps in being distorted ideas of the doctrines that divide Christendom, and hinders the realisation by non-Catholics of the direction in which true Christian unity lies. The aim of Catholic ecumenism is to work, from our side, for the removal of this psychological barrier by the same methods and in the same spirit with which the non-Catholic ecumenists are working from theirs. The non-Catholic ecumenist may object that this is not, and cannot be, true ecumenical work, but is rather the proselytising spirit of Catholicism in borrowed clothes. True ecumenism, he would say, renounces convert-making and aims only at promoting corporate growth towards truth, in each separate tradition, until the day when all achieve a common unity in Christ.
The Enigma of Simone Weil
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

Why was it that Simone Weil, with her intense desire for the truth at all costs, with her love of God, of Christ crucified and of the Mass, was yet kept outside the Church and died without receiving baptism? The answer to this question is to be found partly in the letters which she wrote to Father Perrin, the Dominican, and which were published in an earlier book, Waiting on God, and more definitely in the Letter to a Priest, which she wrote from New York a year before her death. It is not merely a personal question, because Simone Weil, though more intense in the ardour of her desire for truth and more uncompromising in its pursuit than anyone, perhaps, in our time, was yet typical of a whole generation of those who are apparently estranged from the Church or from any form of organised Christianity. She expresses the position both of herself and of many others in the opening words of the letter: ‘When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth. When I read the New Testament, the mystics, the liturgy, when I watch the celebration of Mass, I feel with a sort of conviction that this faith is mine. . . .’ She then goes on to enumerate all the reasons which keep her from the Church, about which, she says, ‘I have been thinking . . . for years with all the intensity of love and attention of which I am capable’.
On Commending Authority
Authors: Roberts
Published: July 2007

The excitement with which the conferring of the Red Hat on Cardinal Gracias was greeted in Bombay had a special quality. It was not just that it came to the first Indian Cardinal; it was rather like the enthusiasm of Preston or Bolton on receiving the Cup. The Cup, clearly, is won. So in a real sense was the Hat, and that is the difference between East and West.

There had been no attempt to disguise the disappointment felt when about a month earlier all twenty-four hats had gone to the West. Indian Catholics had seen overwhelming reason to hope for at least one more Asian Cardinal in the seventy; in general what the Westerner says about the decision of a superior, the best Eastern Christian likes to say to a superior; in that he is already much nearer to apostolic Christianity. But if there was an Indian Archbishop in Bombay at all to receive the Hat, that was a situation which had been earned also. This is not the place to dilate on the subject. Immense as the joy in India has been in the first Indian Cardinal, I think that there may be more joy in Heaven on what the East can give back to the West.
The Sacring of the Queen
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

The coronation service is not a picturesque anachronism, of purely secular interest. It is an historical drama of great antiquity. The central feature is the hallowing of the Queen effected by the anointing, as expressive of her own self-dedication to the service of God and of her people. At the crowning of the Emperor the whole ritual was called ordo ad benedicendum imperatorem, quando coronatur. Regal coronation therefore takes the form of a blessing imparted with great solemnity, with the Mass as its natural setting and culminating point. In origin it is a sacramental conjoined to a sacrament.

The Queen herself, in her broadcast last Christmas, asked for the prayers of her people, no matter what religion they belonged to, that she might be blessed by God, and be made faithful to the promises she would make before the altar of Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation. Catholics will not be slow in responding to the deeply religious appeal publicly made by her Majesty.

In remote times the crowning and investiture of the Emperor was without religious character. When Leo II was crowned (473) we find the Patriarch reciting a prayer, and at length it became the duty of the Patriarch of Constantinople to set the diadem on the head of the Emperor. With the crowning in church of Phocas (602), the ceremonial assumed a formal and religious character.
The Beginnings of ‘Blackfriars’
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

The editor asked me to write something about how Blackfriars came into being. It was over thirty-three years ago and I am now six thousand miles away. So at this distance in time and place my task has its difficulties. I have little more than my memory to rely upon, and I feel like old Kaspar in Southey’s poem sitting in the sun indulging in reminiscences, perhaps as remote to many people as the Battle of Blenheim must have seemed to little Wilhelmine and her brother Peterkin.

It was Father Bede Jarrett who decided to start the review and it must have been among the many schemes that filled his thoughts when he became Provincial at the end of the year 1916. The idea of such a review was by no means new. The Hawkesyard Review, which had been in existence for about twenty years, was an occasional review edited by the students at Hawkesyard and a kind of depository for their written efforts, literary, philosophical and theological. It began as a collection of manuscripts later it appeared in typescript and finally blossomed out in the full glory of print three times a year. During Father Vincent McNabb’s priorship the students were actually printing it themselves on a hand press, and printing it well enough to win the praise of experts. The Review provided a training ground for aspiring writers whose contributions naturally varied in style and quality: it was just a family affair and strictly for private circulation only. There was another collection of manuscripts of a different kind, produced annually by the Hawkesyard students, called The Mince Pie.
The Impact of Eastern Wisdom on the West
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Of the impact of Western science and technology on the East little needs to be said. But there is a reverse process which is less manifest, more subtle, but which may perhaps prove hardly less effective in shaping the future of mankind. ‘Let us look towards the East’, the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung has bidden us. ‘Let us look towards the East. . . . European cannons have burst open the gates of Asia; European science and technique, European worldly-mindedness and cupidity. . . . We have conquered the East politically. . . . But do you know what happened when Rome overthrew the Near East politically? The Spirit of the East entered Rome . . . and out of the most unlikely corners of Asia Minor came a new, spiritual Rome. Would it be unthinkable that the same thing might happen today? ... I know that our [Western] unconscious is full of Eastern symbolism. ... The spirit of the East penetrates through all our pores, and reaches the most vulnerable places of Europe.’

Perhaps that sounds extravagant. But I am not so sure. It was just about the time when the French revolutionaries were enthroning the goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame that some Upanishads were first translated into a European language. It was a rather dubious translation into French by way of the Persian, and, for some time after that, European renderings of the great spiritual classics of the East were rare enough. But we know how the discovery of Buddhist thought influenced Schopenhauer; and however much he may have misinterpreted it, European thinkers have never since been unaware of the challenge to their own ways of thinking of an immense power of age-old wisdom in the Far East.
Latin American
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The generalities of geography, or a shape on the map, do little to prepare you for a new land. After the timeless, torpid days of sea and sun, the gradual bulk of a strange continent seems a heroic gesture against the empty world of water. And the introduction to South America is a warning that you must forget what you expected to see. For the islands of Fernando de Noronha, two hundred miles still from the Brazilian coast, a penal settlement for political prisoners, stand hostile and apart, with their toppling peaks and deserted bays. This is what land can be like; first a geology, and then the fantastic thing within that man can make of it.

Brazil is the fourth largest country in the world. More than two thousand miles from north to south, as many from east to west, and with a coastline of four thousand five hundred, it sprawls, huge and unmanageable in mind. Absurd to begin to write of it in terms of ports of call: the half-day visit and the scheduled sights. Yet there is something to be seen, and much to imagine. Here, more than in any other Latin American land, the layers of history are immediately revealed. First the immense fact of it, prodigal and strange: vast enough and rich enough to absorb the succeeding waves of Portuguese conquerors, African slaves, immigrants from Germany, Italy, Japan. Today a population of fifty-three million can suggest a false record of the facts, for three-quarters of the people are crowded within a hundred miles of the coast, mainly in the south-east. Here are the colossal cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, skyscrapered and growing every hour.
Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

The ‘muddled marriage’ is only one among a great number of cases needing very special pastoral sympathy and care and guidance, in these days especially. The grim fact has to be faced that problems connected with the sexual life, often caused by a clash between the individual Catholic’s instinct or indeed conviction on the one hand and the Church’s teaching as it is so often presented or understood on the other, are responsible not only for great unhappiness in the lives of innumerable Catholics, but also for the fact that an appalling number are led, by their inability to ‘conform’, to leave the Church altogether. The equally grim fact has also to be faced that within the Church the growing conviction among lay people that the clergy either cannot or will not understand or sympathise with their very real difficulties is leading to a wider and wider cleavage between the two.

The case of preventive birth-control is a notorious example. There are married people who for one reason or another just cannot, at least temporarily, have more children: what an insult to tell them, sans façons, that in that case they must just ‘abstain from indulgence in sexual intercourse’. (Ecclesiastical jargon often indicates a lack of real theological thinking.) The whole point is that this is not a question of ‘indulgence’: it is of the very essence of their married, their Catholic married, life. From the layman’s point of view what too often happens is that first they are told how wonderfully God has blessed the mystery of human love and sex and marriage, and then in the next breath they are told to go off and do without it.
Unity and Authority
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

All Christendom, Catholic and Protestant, believes that God has spoken to men, and that his Word thus spoken is the Word of Life, the good news of salvation. All Christendom too, though not without reservations, believes that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain that Word written. Beyond this Christians begin to part company along a hundred different roads. The cause of their divergence is the variety of different answers given to the question how God’s Word written is to be understood. Is it self-authenticating j does it yield its meaning to each man’s conscience by the inner light of the Spirit, or are we to approach it by the aid of sound learning, relying only, for the conviction of faith, on the ordinary means of knowledge with which reason has endowed us? What part does the concept of the Church play in mediating God’s message to men’s minds, in terms which they can depend upon with certainty? Does God, in his written Word, stand in judgment over and reform the verdicts of the Church, or does Christ our Lord, living in it by the power of the Holy Spirit, guide its understanding of the written word and himself speak with its voice? If the Church is integrally necessary to the proclamation of the gospel, what is its nature and how can its voice be recognised and its verdicts guaranteed? The fundamental disunities of Christendom lie in the answers given to these questions. To the finding of a way which will lead from such diversity into a unity willed by God the world-wide ecumenical movement has addressed itself for over thirty years with a sincerity and depth of desire which must surely be the work of the Holy Spirit.
Sunflowers and Giants
Authors: Sewell Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Riddles are out of fashion. They have sunk to an idle fourth form exercise. The classics, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ or ‘When is a door not a door?’ hardly kindle enthusiasm. Even the more promising ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ with its answer ‘The higher the fewer’ cannot take one far. The Mad Hatter and Mr Salteena had one or two up their sleeve, but they were both in their own way rather questionable company, and nowadays riddles do not figure in polite society. Still less does one meet them in poetry. Yet this is strange, for they once flourished in our literature, rhyming riddles whose remnants survive in nursery jingles—‘Long legs, crooked thighs, Little head and no eyes.’ Every mind with a bent towards poetry has in it something that engenders riddles, and the recognition of these and the attempt to solve them are among a writer’s most important tasks. The Sphinx in the mind propounds her dark saying and waits in her cave for the answer,

‘. . . that Theban Monster that propos’d Her riddle, and him, who solv’d it not, devour’d’, showing that inability to answer may have serious consequences.

It is convenient to collect Milton, and Thebes, here, for they are part of my riddle (which I set, not officiously for you, but for myself). It was set me two years ago, one gusty Sunday afternoon in September on a farm in the Hudson Valley. I had been invited to spend the day there, whiling away the brief uneasy week before the opening of an academic year.
‘A Pillar in the Temple’
Authors: Squire Aelred
Published: July 2007

If the diffusion of his works and the range of his influence is to be taken as any guide, St Bernard was beyond question the most outstanding figure in the Europe of his day. Certainly among the schoolmen, no teacher ever had so many devoted disciples, no single preacher so fired the imagination of thousands, there was no one whose moral drive was so potent a fact in the lives of men of every degree. There were saints of the towns and saints of the country, saints of the court and the schoolroom: Bernard spoke to the world. Even to this day, when all allowance has been made for the misfortunes of time, of fire and casual destruction, a tangible witness to his power could be assembled in sackloads of manuscripts from the greater libraries, and those who have merely a nodding acquaintance with the available materials will know why Mabillon, that indefatigable scholar, doubted if any single individual were capable of coping with the task of collation. Available in print by 1475, although we still await anything like that critical edition which the great Maurist was content to leave for another generation, St Bernard’s works have never ceased to be re-edited and translated right up to 1953, the eighth centenary of his death. Among the many volumes and essays devoted to Bernard in the present year, the Rev. Bruno Scott James has given us an English translation of the letters and the familiar biography by Dr Watkin Williams has been reprinted.
Hilaire Belloc: A Nursery View
Authors: Haynes Renée
Published: July 2007

From what a man is, springs all that he does. The being Hilaire Belloc, a person of very much larger than life size, a natural portent, vivid, roaring, and exciting as a thunderstorm, was present to me long before I knew anything about his work, even the Moral Alphabet and the Bad Child's Book of Beasts which were kept in the back drawing-room and later filled us with a fearful joy as intense as that inspired by their creator. He had always been there: a grown man who liked children, and who could be observed with delicious awe to behave very badly, according to the standards of Nanny. We did not then know he had created an entirely apocryphal legend that there hung in our quiet rationalist nursery a card bearing the words, illuminated like a text, ‘No Rot About God’; but we were acutely conscious that he did many other agreeably outrageous things. He shouted with laughter whenever he felt like it; he sometimes sang in the street as he walked along; he went into pubs; and once there was talk of his being tried in a court of justice for something he had put in a paper, talk which led me to visualise him as chained by the leg in a dark stone cell in the Tower of London, with a jailer looking in once a day to bring him a stale loaf and a jug (the large white enamelled sort used in bathrooms) of tap-water. This must have been at the time of the Marconi case libel action.

He had always been there; yet the natural self-centredness of childhood made him seem real only when he flashed through our humdrum ambience like a shooting star. To go to King’s Land where he lived under the downs was for the first time to perceive him as a giant with a house, a family, a way of living quite independent of our own, continuing when we were not there to see.
The Church of the Diaspora in Germany
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

It is welcome news that the United States has agreed to consider the possibility of allowing East German refugees to enter America as immigrants, and that the Canadian Government has given an assurance that it will assist in giving East German farmers in particular new homes and places of work. For the problem of the twelve million refugees, swollen every month by thousands of fresh arrivals from the Russian Zone, is still one of the most important of all European questions. The plight of the D.P.s is perhaps even worse, for there are still between 150,000 and 200,000 of the old, weak, infirm and unemployables in D.P. camps in Germany.

The unprecedented migration that followed the Potsdam agreement—when in the winter of 1945-6 fifteen million people were moved out of Eastern Germany and neighbouring territories to make way for Poles and Russians—has provided an unprecedented responsibility for the Church in Germany. Only twelve million finally arrived in Western Germany—three million died or were directed eastward— but nearly half of them were Catholic, coming from the almost completely Catholic areas of Upper Silesia and the Sudeten territory, as well as from Tower Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania. Up to the last war the Catholic and Protestant majorities in Germany could be delimited almost exactly by the boundaries set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1,648 on the principle ‘cujus regio ejus religio.
Blasphemous Poets
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Early in May this year the proctors of Cambridge University took action against The Granta in view of complaints that a poem published in that magazine was blasphemous. The affair made a stir in Cambridge and even got into the London papers j and if I take it here chiefly as an occasion for some remarks on the blasphemies of certain long-dead poets, this is not because I consider the Granta poem negligible. It was not. The remarks that follow are merely one observer’s modest attempt to get the whole subject into focus.

One may start with St Thomas’s preliminary definition of blasphemy: ‘the term seems to denote the disparagement of some high degree of goodness, and especially of the divine goodness’. In the context certain things are presupposed 5 in particular that there is such a thing as goodness, that it has degrees, and that there is a maximum goodness called God. ‘Blasphemy’ is related chiefly to God, as it always has been since the New Testament writers stressed the religious reference of blasphemia (in general, scurrilous or abusive language), though this reference was not lacking in classical Greek, just as the wider or secular sense of the term still appears in the New Testament itself. Both Francis Bacon and St Thomas’s master St Albert speak of ‘blasphemy’ against learning or knowledge; others have spoken of blasphemy against nature, friendship, and so on. But these are extensions of a term already appropriated by Christianity to mean disparaging speech about God, or about things and persons closely associated with him.
Burgundian Pilgrimage
Authors: Squire Aelred
Published: July 2007

Beggars can’t be choosers, and when it was evident that the French strikes would make transport indefinitely doubtful, we decided to renounce the tidy shape of our original plans and let chance offers on the road take us where they might. Perhaps even in the limited time at our disposal—three days only—we should see something of St Bernard’s country and the places where he had been. So we set out, the two of us, hopefully.

The first offer, taking us beyond Auxerre, came after no more than five minutes walking and we were soon moving through the forest of Fontainebleau in the morning sunshine. The rain which had broken the oppressive heat of the previous two days had left the leaves clean and shining, and beyond the wood the blue sky opened that was above us all the way; a route through Moret with its narrow gates and an old house in a world of moving waters, past Sens, and gradually into downland till you are on a ridge of hills. The trees along the road change from poplar to unclipped chestnut and then to generous plane and, now in the Côte d’Or, the Yonne lies below on the right, a broad and pleasant river in a singularly favoured land. To have read in one’s history books of the power of the medieval Dukes of Burgundy is to have learned the hard way. Here one has only to look to understand. A country of such resources, so royally self-sufficient and assured, could scarcely be less than a kingdom. The light has a quality all its own, the very air moving among the leaves in the orchards seems blended according to secret ingredients. And white and honey-coloured in this light, bathed in this air, on the crown of a steep hill stands the abbey of Vézelay.
Monks and the World
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

It was only to be expected that in the great effort which has been made in recent times in France to go back to the sources of Christian tradition and to recover its principles, an attempt should have been made to reconsider the nature of the monastic life and its place in the life of the Church. Of these attempts the most remarkable is the work of the Oratorian Père Bouyer on Le Sens de la Vie Monastique. It may be a matter of surprise that this should be the work of one who is not himself a monk. But the reason for this becomes clear when it is seen that for Père Bouyer the monastic life is simply the life of Christian perfection. ‘To be a monk’, as he says, ‘is simply to be an integral Christian.’ Viewed in this light, the first chapters of his book form one of the most memorable studies of the ideal of Christian perfection in modern times. They are distinguished from the work of Père Garrigou-Lagrange on the same subject in that they are based not on the teaching of St Thomas and the Carmelite mystics, but on the doctrine of the Fathers, and especially the Greek Fathers. This gives his view a richness and depth which is lacking in the work of Garrigou-Lagrange, but it also brings with it certain dangers. This becomes evident in the second part, where he turns from the theory to the practice of the monastic life; for he bases himself here largely on the teaching of the Fathers of the Desert. Now this teaching has, of course, immense value, and the fundamental principles of prayer and asceticism and spiritual perfection were laid down at this period for all time. But there were also defects and excesses in their outlook which make them often dangerous guides, and one does not feel that Père Bouyer has altogether escaped the dangers. As Father Aelred Sillem pointed out in a review in The Life of the Spirit, the fact that the Fathers of the Desert went out into the desert ‘to fight with demons’ is not really of much relevance to the vocation of a monk today.