bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Soul as Image
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

Unless the spiritual life is based on a sound psychology it will never be secure from illusion and misspent energy. Those for example who fancy the soul to be some strange spark burning within the massy flesh, which threatens to extinguish the fire by the melting of excessive fat, will plunge into mortification of the flesh with the ardour and the malpractice of a manichee. Those who think the soul is exclusively mind will turn to education and culture as to infallible ways of salvation. The concentration of interest upon the soul alone leads to the unbalanced self-consciousness which we have already considered. Hilton's skilful balance between the subjective and the objective, the self-knowing and the God-knowing in the spiritual life guarantees that the foundation of his scale is perfectly sound; and if we look more closely into his subjective doctrine we shall find how happily he holds the balance.
Hermits
Authors: Magrath Oswin
Published: August 2024

The absence of hermits as a recognised and esteemed element in the life of the Church for the last century or two is an extraordinary phenomenon, for in other ages hermits have always been numerous and accepted. This is not merely that eremitical vocations are lacking, they possibly exist in numbers; but is in part at least to be attributed to the general attitude of suspicion with which the eremitical life is viewed. In the West there is no legal provision made for hermits in canon law, and the difficulties of a religious or priest embracing the eremitical life ar practically insuperable. Spiritual writers rarely treat of eremiticism as a means or state of perfection, and it tends to be regarded as a thing of the past which has no place in the Church today.

There are, however, not lacking signs that this state of affairs may be passing away. The example of Charles de Foucauld and the spiritual personality of St Thérèse of the child Jesus are turning minds to the possibilities of the life of an anchoret, and many writings on the subject are beginning to appear.
The Cloud on the Tabernacle
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: August 2024

Of all the events of the Old Testament there is none which is of an importance comparable to the Exodus. It was the mighty Act of God, in the light of the whole history of Israel was given its meaning. By this act Israel had been delivered from bondage and formed into a people, it had been given a Law and made the subject of a Convenant; it had been guided through the desert and brought into the Promised Land. This was the pattern in which the Prophets saw the history of Israel. They looked back on it as the ‘time of her espousals', when Israel had been ‘holy to the Lord'. (Jer. 2, 2.) As time went on it was regarded more and more as the Golden Age, the period when God had been manifested to his people and they had walked in his light. But at the same time it was seen also as the ideal of the future.
Mysticism and the Sacraments in the Early Eastern Church
Authors: Keller Herman
Published: August 2024

Recent discussion has led to a recognition Christian mysticism differs fundamentally from that of the non-christian religions. It was necessary, first of all, in face of the historical positivists to show where this difference lies. The answers so far proposed indicate at least that this is to be sought in the trinitarian structure of our theism. It is remarkable how little this has been taken into account by the theologians of the last centuries, and how little influence it has had on Christian life. In theory the West has never lost sight of the unique nature of christian, i.e. trinitarian, theism, but in practice the Christian and non-Christian mystic differ less markedly. We do not account for this difference simply by saying that the revelation of the Trinity and the substitution of trinitarian forms for mono-theistic characterise Christian mysticism, for this would be to beg the question which is precisely how this reference to the Trinity makes Christian mysticism so unique a thing.
The Holy Spirit in the Church
Authors: Farmer Hugh
Published: August 2024

Although the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul is perhaps more widely appreciated than formerly, it may be doubted Whether the same can be said of that of the Holy Spirit lying and operating in the Church as a whole. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with human failings in the Church's members that we tend to forget the intimate presence in the Church of the Divine Guest whose gifts show her to be an opus plane divinum, as Pope Leo XIII called her. We tend to forget that the Church is a theophany, that the ‘Trinity in which Unity is apparent in the unity of the Church—the Father, as the principle to which we are united, the Son as the milieu in which we are united, the Holy Spirit as the tie by which we are united: and all is one'. (Bossuet: Lettre sur l'Unité de l'Eglise.)

Although the early Church was by no means exclusively composed of holy and perfect members, there was in those days, one may think, a more widespread realisation of God's presence in the Church, specially attributed to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.
Liturgy and the Incarnation
Authors: Blenkinsopp Joseph
Published: August 2024

In the West the word ‘liturgy’ is used to cover a considerable number of acts addressed ideally to God, but the very multiplicity of forms which it subsumes tends to obscure what might seem a fact too obvious to comment on. Sometimes the question is put in a rather naive way: Who is the object of our worship as Christians: God or Jesus Christ? (distinction of persons); Has Jesus Christ, in whom is certainly the fulness of the godhead, ‘taken over’ from the God of the Old Testament as the centre of our liturgy? Before dismissing such a naive formulation too hastily we might remember that exegetes are not always unanimous on who the kyrios, addressed here and there in the prayer of early Christians as recorded in the Acts, really is—whether Yahweh (as in the Septuagint translation) or Jesus raised to the right hand of the Father.
The Modern Vice
Authors: de la Bedoyere Michael
Published: August 2024

Corruptio Optimi Pessima—yes, but few of us can rise to the best, and consequently few of us descend to the depths. Corruptio melioris pejor Would be a maxim more suited to us, and we could translate rt: The corruption of the rather better produces the rather worse. That is the habitual danger which most Christians and especially most Catholics run. It is that ‘rather worse’ which interests me, and another way of putting it would be that Catholics run their own particular danger of being vulgar.

The word ‘vulgar’ is interesting because it carries within itself, as it were, the story of its own corruption. Its true meaning is something to do with the common people, that is, those least in danger of being vulgar in the modern sense, for the common people largely bound in mind and behaviour by God-made conditions of life are in least danger of falling from the rather better to the rather worse.
The Study of Mystical Theology
Authors: Corson John
Published: August 2024

With the publication in America of the translation of Father Arintero's great work on Mystical Development in the life of the Church and of Dr Greenstock's work on Christian perfection (both from the Herder Book Company of St Louis) a very important and decisive stage in the journey towards the more realistic attitude to the study of mystical theology has been reached. Father Arintero died, a very holy man, in 1928 in Madrid; yet it is, perhaps, only at this point in the development of the study of mystical theology that his full significance can really be understood. It is therefore fortunate that through the devoted labours of Father Jordan Aumann, O.P., this very useful and accurate English translation of Father Arintero's major work has appeared.
Come Lord Jesus!
Authors: Roland Potter
Published: August 2024

Come, Lord Jesus!’ is the earnest prayer in the closing words of the last book of our Holy Scriptures. This, the only prophetic book of the New Testament, tells of a Kingdom founded by the Lamb that was slain, withal a Kingdom still looking to and yearning for a greater perfectioning. We are the fortunate children of that Kingdom, privileged with the blessing of seeing the things that we see, and able in faith to cast our minds over the unfolding of God's plan through the ages, and so enabled to grasp something of the wonder of the Word-made-flesh and his dwelling amongst us. The Incarnation is the first and necessary step in God's redemptive plan. It Prepared for and is a presage of a Second Coming which will mean a completion of God's plans and which will bring the world of men as well as the universality of creatures to the term which God has prepared for them.
Head and Heart in Common Catholic Prayer
Authors: Davis H. F.
Published: August 2024

I Think good Catholics want the common Christian life of prayer as much as ever. They know that Christians should love one another, and live and pray as a body, but they do not know how to set about it. Other Christians would want it, and thereby become better Christians, if they saw before them an example of the Christian common life of prayer.

From one point of view the big difficulty seems to be that our Christianity is heart without head; from another it seems to be head without heart.

It is heart without head in so far as in this twentieth century of Christianity, hundreds of Catholics seem to be insufficiently instructed in what it means. It is head without heart in so far as Christianity has become for many people a mere matter of creed and catechism without sufficient of the practical common action which bring creed and catechism to life. Religion is worship, common religion and common worship; and it can never be a mere creed.
The Nuptial Mass
Authors: Sire Dominic J.
Published: August 2024

Tradition has always surrounded marriage with ceremony and feasting even among the most primitive races and countries. Being the climax of human love it is not surprising to find this very natural instinct expressing itself thus. This tradition has almost inevitably found its way into the Christian mode of life and the liturgical spirit of the Church.

Mere love of pageantry is not a sufficient explanation of the full ceremonial of Christian marriage. The Nuptial Mass, which should always form part of any full Christian marriage, has a much deeper significance and reason, especially for the parties concerned. It is not just a kind of luxury, something added to fill out and prolong the festivities, still less should it ever be the privilege of the rich. It is more than an adornment or a frill, for it is deeply concerned with the very essence of marriage.
Ways to Interior Silence
Authors: Stein Edith
Published: August 2024

In a lecture attempting to draw a picture of woman's soul as it should be in accordance with her eternal vocatio11 the following attributes were used: wide, silent, empv of self, warm, clear. The question arose of how these qualities are to be obtained.
The Christian and the Trinity
Authors: Hibbert Giles
Published: August 2024

To be a Christian is to believe in Christ; and this in its fullness is to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnate Word of God: to accept Christ as God made man, who through his Passion takes away the sins of men, and through his Resurrection restores to them a life of communion with the godhead. This life of communion with God—in which lies the possibility and reality of man's perfection—is in and with and through Christ, through faith in him. And the proper place of this life is visibly in the Church on earth, which he founded, with her sacraments through which her members meet with him whose body she is, together with and in just relation to her ministers and saints, who play their necessary and leading rôles within her life. All this, and one's relation to it in faith, is relevant to one's life as a Christian. If those who Profess Christ are wrong about these points, they are at least endangering the solidarity of their life in Christ. The more firmly the Christian believes these things, and the more he appreciates their significance, the deeper is the possibility of his spiritual life in Christ.
An Ordinary Christian's Reflections after hearing Arguments on War and Peace
Authors: Dawson Clare
Published: August 2024

Dear Lord, I turn to you after hearing many arguments about war, peace, nuclear weapons, non-violence, pacifism, and the duty of Christian persons to take an active interest in governmental policy, or drift, or incapacity to resist events.

Of course it concerns me deeply whether your creation, human and non-human, is destroyed or not; and though to die might be swift as the rending of a curtain that hangs between here and hereafter, I don't want to die with most of the world, my world at any rate, making a funeral pyre.

I can accept it if it is part of your plan, something you mean to allow because out of it you can bring greater good. Must I accept also the ghastly possibility of living while others die, m a barren world, the Material expression of spiritual bankruptcy? Yes. I am sure your answer is ‘Yes'.
Prayer for England
Authors: G.A.
Published: August 2024

Blessed Virgin, Saint Mary, our Blessed Lady, the Mother of God, who with all the saints dost not cease to pray unto Almighty God in general I for succour in all distresses of the whole Catholic ‘Church, I beseech thee most humbly that as it hath both pleased thee of special favour to take upon thee the special protection of this realm of England thy Dower, so thou wilt vouchsafe by thy special prayers to thy sweet Son our Lord Jesus Christ, to prefer the same continually, and at this present, most instantly to deliver it from schism and heresy, and to restore it again to the unity of the holy Catholic Church, that all English people, above all other nations, may worthily from henceforth call thee blessed, and honour thy lame for ever, saying thus:

Blessed Virgin, praise to thee, England thy Dowry Was lost, is turned by thee again from schism and heresy. Dos tua Virgo pia Per te est conversa, Maria.
Sanctity in Marriage
Authors: Nicholl Donald
Published: August 2024

One might suspect a distrust towards marriage in the words of a recent statement in a publisher's blurb advertising a book upon saints who were I married. The blurb declares it the purpose of the book to show that ‘marriage is compatible with sanctity'. The force of the ‘compatible’ needs exact appreciation, and may be more easily gauged if one reads it as ‘a sacrament instituted by God (e.g., marriage, ordination, etc.) is compatible with sanctity'.

Yet the misconception lurking in the sentence does not so much arise from a false view of marriage as from a false view of sanctity; clearly it is referring to canonised sanctity and not to being a saint; one hopes that there are more saints than the canonised. And, indeed, the many attempts which have been made in the last few years to rescue the married from the limbo of half-hearted Christianity nearly all labour under the same misconception. In the many Continental reviews which have dealt with the subject one hears an appeal for the canonisation of more married saints.
The Life of Grace: III
Authors: Riedmatten Henri de
Published: August 2024

St Bonaventure, who sees so clearly that theology has an object of its own—'the things we have to believe, when considered as such, pass into the class of things that can be grasped by the mind, and this because we now look at them from a second point of view’ (I Sent. I proem, q. 1.)—does not for all that think it anything but an instrument or stage in the movement towards Love. He states its aim like this: ‘Revelation turns us towards the affections', (loc. cit. q. 3, a. 1.) Albert the Great holds the same opinion: ‘Knowledge of truth is not sought through the intellect alone but through the affections and substance; hence it is not intellective but effective, for the intellect is directed towards the affections as towards it end'. (I Sent. d. 1, a. 4, ad 2m.)

This text lays bare the heart of the matter: the intellect is subordinate to the affectus. Cognitive activity, especially at the supernatural level, does not represent something autonomous, something with value in itself. To use Aristotelian terms, we have in theology not a speculative science but a practical one.
The Wisdom of Saint Dominic
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: August 2024

The work of the Church is a work of reconciliation, of restoring men to God, by whom they were made and to whom they must return. It is the work of Christ, ‘for he is our peace, who hath made both one … breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh’ (Eph. 2, 14). He came into the world that he might redeem it; he died for the world that it might live for God.

And through the centuries the Church, which is the Body of Christ, continues his work of healing: bringing back the alien to the household of God, forgiving his sins, feeding his soul, teaching him the truth that alone can set him free, and at last preparing him for the destiny of heaven. And of all the evils which pervert that work of healing, heresy, the choice of a lie instead of the redemptive truth of Christ, is the deepest and most dangerous. For it is at last the choice of slavery, the return to the desert of alienation: and its fruits we know.
The Divorce of Mysticism from Theology
Authors: Vandenbroucke F.
Published: August 2024

Father H. Urs von Balthasar wrote recently in Dieu Vivant (No. 12, 1948): ‘From the dogmatic point of view we no longer take the modern saints seriously because they themselves no longer have to be dogmatic…. They leave dogma to the prosaic work of “the schools” and become lyricists.’ Such a statement is not an isolated one among spiritual writers today. And we need hardly add that as a rule it is made with a view to deploring this separation of ‘sanctity’ from theology.

Some readers then begin to wonder whether sanctity in the Church has actually become a kind of lyricism or poetic enthusiasm. Is it a matter of ‘mystical’ intuition, rather exaggerated, a special ‘grace'» Moreover the mentality of many of our contemporaries, sincere Catholics though they may be, echoes these questions. For them the point of view of the ‘mystic’ which they identify with that of the ‘saint', the ‘irrationality’ of his conception of Christian life, of prayer and penance, are all things that should not be discussed. They are accepted or rejected; but in any case such a view of Christian life is not final.
Secular Institutes: I—In the World
Authors: Melia Teresa
Published: August 2024

You live in an age that is twisted out of its true pattern and among such people, you shine out, beacons to the world, upholding the message of life.’ (Phil, ii, 15.) These words of St Paul to the Philippians might be addressed to members of Secular Institutes at the present time. It would be difficult to find in the world a nation, a city, a family, living its life according to the true pattern, the pattern of Christ. He is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life', yet how small is the number, even amongst Christians, of those who follow him. The message of life is unheeded, unrecognized even, jammed as it is by powerful propa ganda, lies, secularization, false values and materialism—the message of death. The profound meaning of the Incarnation’ the ‘sanctification of the profane', the divinization of humanity, this has become obscured and mankind throughout the world searches gropingly and often unwittingly for the realization of Christ's message: ‘I have come that they may have life and may have it more abundantly'.
The First-Born Of Many Brethren: I—He came down from heaven
Authors: Brockdehurst Mark
Published: August 2024

The death of Pope Pius XII made the Catholic Church and the Papacy a headline news item for several days. Through the newspapers, the radio and the television we Had a glimpse of the Church's world-wide embrace, and of its ancient origins. For instance, the vast body of people in the two- mile long procession from Castel Gandolfo and lining the route, were only a symbol of the millions all over the world who look to the Pope as their spiritual father and acknowledge his authority as the successor of St Peter. And one was reminded how the pope himself during the years of his pontificate received many of these millions there in Rome, and spoke to many of them in their own language.
The Play Of Grace
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: August 2024

Varro, a naval officer and the most learned of the Romans, refers to three kinds of theology, mythological, physical, and political—mythicon, physkum, and civile: St Augustine discusses the division in the De Civitate Dei. The first ranges from fable to myth and includes symbolic and poetic theogonies, the genealogies of heaven and earth; the approach is not scientific, yet Jungians are not alone in agreeing with Plato that the results may be educationally valuable. The last is concerned with public worship largely as a factor of social cohesion, and is accordingly dominated by the requirements of administrators and lawyers in both or either Church and State. Neither represents the theology of St Thomas.
The Spiritual Life: An Historical Approach—II
Authors: Buixough Sebastian
Published: August 2024

In the first of these articles it was explained that the series is being written with the conviction that an historical approach to Christian teaching on the spiritual life, an enquiry into the thought of successive masters on the subjects of prayer and perfection, will be a powerful aid to the deepening of our own understanding of what the knowledge, love and service God means to each one of us today.

The roots of Christian thinking on prayer and the spiritual life are to be found with the Greek Fathers of the East, whose teaching sprang in the early centuries from the Gospel itself, forming a great heritage from which grew the medieval development in Western Christian thought (while the East has preserved, and continues to preserve, the treasures of the patristic heritage), and in the West at the close of the middle ages the systems of the devotio moderna in turn grew out of the medieval developments.
St Augustine's ‘Intense Suffering'
Authors: Boos Thomas
Published: August 2024

Parallel with the liturgical movement, though less widespread and effective, there has been obvious among Catholics during the last decades a growing concern for the unity of Christians, an anguish that the divisions among Christians present a stumbling block to many who are seeking the truth, a longing that Christ's fervent prayer that ‘all may be one, as thou, Father, in me, and I in thee’ be realized so that the world may believe in Christ's mission. In France and in Germany this anguish has taken hold of the faithful in a for greater measure than in this country; here there are but a few self-effacing individuals, encouraged by the memory of such men as the Abbé Paul Couturier and Dr Max Josef Metzger, working quietly that Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, become more conscious of the tragic divisions. This annual number off The Life of the Spirit is one fruit of that work.
Religious Sisters
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand
Published: August 2024

This book is an important contribution to the literature of the spiritual and religious life; how important we shall discuss presently. The Foreword tells us that it is a translation of papers read at the Journées d'Etudes by a number of priests, secular and regular, which were later arranged by the Editor of La Vie Spirituelle for the benefit of French religious sisters and published in two volumes under the titles Directoire des Superieures and Les Adaptations de la Vie Religieuse. The former was intended for superiors and the latter for religious women in general. The translation is presented in one volume, with certain modifications of the original which are indicated in the text, and the addition of a very helpful chapter by an English doctor, R. E. Havard, M.D.

There can be little doubt that a book of this kind, which faces many present-day problems with wisdom and courage, is long overdue.
His Will is Our Peace
Authors: Frederick B. M.
Published: August 2024

The Benedictine maxim Pax inter spinas—Peace among thorns—is applicable to everyone who is trying to live the life of the spirit, but whereas the peace is supernatural and due to the indwelling of God in our souls, the thorns chafe the unspiritual parts of us, and because they are painful or irritating we are often more conscious of pricks than of peace. Our Lord warned us that following him entails many things which are hard to nature, but he also said that if we took up his yoke we would find rest to our souls, and the over-all pattern of the spiritual life as depicted in the New Testament is undoubtedly one of eager service and of joy. It could not well be otherwise, for the following of Christ is nothing less than the doing of God's will, and all our true happiness is grounded in union with him.
Obedience
Authors: Albert S. M.
Published: August 2024

The human body formed by the Holy Ghost in the chaste womb of the Virgin Mother, and the mystical body which she brought forth by her travail on Calvary are both alike the body of the Incarnate Word. Indeed, one may say in a sense that the human body was assumed for the sake of the mystical body so that the mystical body could also be formed; just as, according to St Thomas, the first effect of the Sacrament of the holy Eucharist, of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ on the altar, is the unity of the mystical body. Therefore the members of the mystical body are likened to the members of Christ's physical body, his hands and feet, etc. and therefore they must serve his purposes, be used in his work in the same way, and, if completely united to him, to the same extent as were his other members.
Inspired Symbolism
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: August 2024

The proper sphere of a Catholic craftsman who is responsive to the appeal of the liturgical movement is to translate its doctrine into terms of form and colour, and so help in presenting it to his fellow men through the medium of the senses. Let us be quite clear about this. His work is not that of a teacher, but of a translator of others’ teaching. His normal function is to get on with the job without explaining what he is doing or why he is doing it. He may well consider the job important enough in itself, if he accepts the definition of Catholic philosophy that all truth has to pass through the senses before reaching the understanding. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu. And of these senses he may well recognise the eye as affording a more direct avenue than the ear, if he agrees with Horace:

A thing when heard, remember, strikes less keenOn the spectator's mind than when ‘tis seen.
The Art of Letting Go
Authors: Herring A. G.
Published: August 2024

Every now and then the Church is handed a bouquet, over the fence as it were, by someone outside her fold. Professor Jung has done this and surely we can take it. He tells us that he finds ‘frequency of complexes … highest among the Jews, Protestants come second and Catholics only third’. But what is even more interesting is the reason for this state of things. This is not found specially in the psychological value of confession but rather in the way in which Catholic belief helps a man through the natural psychological crises of ordinary human life. Indeed the professor seems to show that as Christian morals help to keep people out of prisons, so Christian dogma is of value in keeping them out of asylums. For the life of man is normally a progress beginning as a child under the care of its parents passing through various stages till he attains to maturity and becomes himself a parent.
Lourdes: A Journal
Authors: Braybhooke Neville
Published: August 2024

Tuesday: Seven o'clock; it has been a hot, sweltering day and down through the dusty vineyards of Bordeaux the train, like a caterpillar, has made its way on the last lap of the journey. A courier has said that we will be in Lourdes in twenty minutes and already in other carriages other pilgrims are singing the Ave; in our own compartment, in a formal English way, we remain mute. One of the priests begins to say the rosary to himself and we all follow suit. For the last few minutes we have been winding with the Gave as it runs its twisting course, never having lost sight of it for more than a few seconds.
The Cleansing of Man's Soul
Authors: Kirchberger Clare
Published: August 2024

Beautifully written MS. of the end of fourteenth century, MS. Douce 114, takes for its the phrase used by its anonymous author in a general description of its subject. The author, probably a Benedictine, writing for a ‘religious sister’ also in Benedictine convent, finding that the community” knowledge of the doctrine of penance was both insufficient and confused, and considering the complexities of the available Latin ‘penitentials’, proposes to reduce into a vernacular compilation of three parts all the necessary instruction on contrition, confession and satisfaction. He writes: ‘Also seldom have they little comfort of their confessors to teach them that speedft” … and needful were of the sacrament of penance … at their’ request and because ye have none other understanding of other manner of Scripture than of such as is written in your mother tongue, I will etc’ The three parts are divided into seven chapters each, and though long it is a simple straightforward and useful piece of work, full of homely illustrations, and must have been a great comfort to the nuns and their superiors.
The Symbol of the Mountain
Authors: Mould D. D. C. Pochin
Published: August 2024

The collect for the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, having recalled the legend of the saint's body carried to Mount Sinai by angels, asks that we, by her intercession, may come to the mountain which is Christ. It is a symbol presented with the suddenness of mist clearing from a rocky summit, a dramatic image that brings one back to a consideration of the immense richness of mountain symbolism in liturgy and scripture.

It may well be that the mountain is the easiest of the great symbols of the Church for us to understand today, easier than water or fire, for instance. The townsman is too used to think of water in terms of turning on the tap, of heat and light in terms of pressing switches, but with the hills, he returns to reality; in increasing numbers more and more people are discovering the fascination of mountaineering.
Breath And Prayer In Ancient And Modern Times
Authors: Selo Agnes M. F.
Published: August 2024

And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul’ (Gen. 2, 7). Since that moment of creation when God raised Adam above all mere animal life by the communication of his own divine life, breath has helped to build a bridge between two worlds, the seen and the unseen, the world within and the world without. Breath—ruach, animus, spiritus— the life-giving medium, creates unity between body and soul, matter and spirit. It is that breath of God which moves and inspires, man: Spiritus est qui vivificat. The opening chapters of Genesis are perfectly paralleled and reach perfect fulfilment in the closing chapters of St John's Gospel.
Friars in Black
Authors: Meath Gerard
Published: August 2024

The religion of thy father Dominic is a delightful garden, I broad, joyous and fragrant.’ Admirers of the spirit and A children of Saint Dominic would appreciate our Lord's word ‘broad’ when he spoke to Saint Catherine, for it is said that no two Dominicans are aHke. Whatever that means, something good or something dangerous, it is but one half of a story that is on the surface paradoxical. That St Dominic's spirit and sympathies were indeed broad can never be in doubt if we look at the characters of his first companions, a set of men at once entirely diverse and bending all their diverse talents to one purpose. For seven hundred years that spirit has grown stronger by the very diversity of its followers. Perhaps there has grown with it also a romantic aura that again is half good and hah0 dangerous. In the first flush of youth a young man may set out to follow St Dominic for motives that on the surface are indeed romantic.
Mystical Prayer
Authors: C.K.
Published: August 2024

When a soul beginneth to feel grace work in him, he waxeth then sorry for his sin, and remembreth his great unkindness done against God and in what peril his soul is in; he weepeth and waileth his offence and with great sorrow and lamentation crieth and calleth to God for mercy. Then thus continuing he getteth him to religion, or at leastwise to confession, there purging himself clean from all rust of sin by contrition and penance doing. Anon he feeleth him clean in body and soul and delivered from gnawing of conscience, which is the greatest pain on earth. Then continently he feeleth great sweetness both in reading and prayer and sermons hearing, thinking that this doth all worldly solace exceed, and great comfort he feeleth in that which not long before was full tedious and painful to him.
The Soul of Christ
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

Gardeners sometimes say that a certain degree of drought strengthens the roots of plants. The grass of a newly growing lawn finding no moisture above the ground in the light and heat of the sun thrusts its roots deeper and deeper into the soil in search of life-giving refreshment. Similarly the soul which is left by God in a dry and waste land abandons the hope of refreshment in the external life of experience and the senses and begins to sink more completely into the reality of God, but in the darkness of the lower soil, in the darkness of faith as opposed to the distinctness of emotional experience.
The Faith and Man's Mind
Authors: Barker Austin
Published: August 2024

The first and most pressing application of the principles at issue described in the preceding section, must be concerned with that assent of the human mind which is claimed for the truths revealed. The Catholic Church has always been explicit in affirming that the truths of Christ were dogmas to be accepted by faith. She has consistently corrected those of her members who have ventured to maintain that these dogmas lay within reach of unaided reason. They are to be received by faith, and faith was to be defined as an assent of the mind, not based upon the intrinsic evidence of the truth accepted, but based upon the word of an authority revealing. It was said to Nicodemus: ‘I Say to thee that we speak what we know, and we testify what we nave seen, and you receive not our testimony. If I have spoken to you earthly things and you believe not, how will you believe, if I shall speak to you heavenly things?’ (John 3, 11-2).
New Biblical Versions
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: August 2024

The desire to have Holy Writ put into modern terminology and so made easy of apprehension seems reasonable enough, especially since the past century has brought about such a remarkable revolution in manners of life and thought, a change chiefly notable for its departure from the immemorial customs of our fathers. Consequently we no longer find it easy to Understand either the manners or the speech of the past. Add to this the apparent paradox that the easier communication becomes between one people and another, between one part of the world and another, the more narrow-minded and insular we seem to become.
The Morality of War
Authors: White Victor
Published: August 2024

When your chaplain asked me whether I should like to talk to you on the morality of war, I had to tell him that there was nothing I should like to talk about less. I can think of no less cosy subject for a Sunday morning chat in this year of grace 1949.

The trouble, of course, is not just that it is such a complex moral issue in the abstract, but rather because war is so real, so imminent, so possible, so probable.
The Obediential Capacity
Authors: Barker Austin
Published: August 2024

From the wider and more general considerations we may now presume to formulate in clearer and more precise terms what is here meant by the words Nature and Grace. In the modern vernacular they no longer at once offer to the mind the clear-cut idea they once represented when Catholic doctrine was more familar and more closely ingrained in the English mind. In the developing and perhaps changing philosophy of any given people, particular terms or words endure in current use; but gradually they are emptied of the significance that once charged them, and they are apt to become uncertain coin of exchange, particularly within the generation which marks the dissolution of a preceding era and the opening out upon new and uncertain adventures of the human spirit.
Prayer Without Ceasing
Authors: Baily Dom Theodore
Published: August 2024

Sine intermissione orate (I Thess, v, 17)

The following notes have been suggested to the writer by the reading of Récita sincères d’un pélerin à son père spirituel, a French translation of a MS. found on Mount Athos and published at Kazan in 1882. They are set down here as they may be not without interest to others. Of this book Professor Arseniev writes (Mysticism and the Eastern Church): The experience of the old Oriental Fathers, those guides to the ascetic mystical life, as they are collected in the Philokalia, spring into fresh life in that remarkable monument of Russian folk mysticism of the middle of the nineteenth century… The Candid Narrative of a Pilgrim to his Confessor… is by a man of great capacity for intense inward prayer. This pilgrim is possessed by the sweetness of inward prayer and thereby his life is transfigured.
'As One's Self'
Authors: Riviehe Madame Isabelle
Published: August 2024

All human misery comes from avarice: corporal misery from the refusal to give one's belongings; spiritual misery from the refusal to give one's time and one's heart.

All the sufferings, acute or dull, all the bitterness, the humiliations, all the grievances, the hatred and despair of this world, are an unsatisfied hunger. Hunger for bread, hunger for help, hunger for love.

From the little lad who heaves great sobs because his mother slaps him for no other reason than that her nerves are on edge, to the too old grandfather whom his grandchildren now always forget to kiss; from the plain young woman left alone in her corner, to the wife upon whom her husband no longer deigns to cast his eyes, to the abandoned woman who throws herself into the Seine; from the friend whose companion fails on purpose to keep his appointment to the twenty-year-old boy who dies alone at night in his hospital bed whilst the infirmarian is drinking coffee in the kitchen; from the small poor-law child to the man who is going to be executed, all have suffered from a penury, from a stinginess of love.
Benoite Rencurel of Le Laus
Authors: Gillett H. M.
Published: August 2024

September 29th of this year marks the third centenary of the birth of a notable mystic, Benoite Eencurel, a Dominican tertiary whose memory is still fresh in the French Alpine valleys where she lived until 1718. Her immense influence in counteracting the local, withering effects of Waldensianism and Jansenism may still be felt by those who visit the sanctuaries which she there founded and which give title to the devotion to Notre-Dame de Laus.

About seven miles from Gap, in the Departement of Hautes Alpes, and across the range of low mountains which lie between the little cathedral city and the Durance Valley, is the charming and picturesque little valley of the Laus, wherein nestles a group of hamlets of which St-Etienne d'Avançon and St-Etienne du Laus are chief.
The Analyst and the Confessor
Authors: White Victor
Published: August 2024

We are often assured by those who should know best that sacramental confession and psychological analysis are very much the same thing. On this point at least there would seem to be a considerable measure of agreement between many Catholic spokesmen and many psychologists: if they differ it is only in the assertion of the superiority of their own respective wares. While the psychologists will tell us that sacramental confession is a sort of naïve and undeveloped, pre-scientitic forerunner of a psychological analysis, it has become almost a commonplace among many Catholic apologists that analysis is a secularised anil truncated form of sacramental confession.
David
Authors: Humphries Silvester
Published: August 2024

David was a man after God's own heart. The saying is founded on certain qualities in the psalmist, prophet, king, conqueror, which mark him out as distinct from all the other saints and heroes of either Testament. Among these qualities was this: that he was, if not an ‘ordinary’ man, a norm among men. He was extraordinary only by not being in the striking mode of most holy men, extraordinary. He worked no miracle like Moses, suffered no crushing humiliation like Job, saw no vision like Isaias, had not to hope against hope like Abranam. He was, to ordinary men, an ordinary man, and his greatness lies therein. He had strong human desires and enjoyments, but did not permit anything human to interfere with his service to his God; and that he sometimes lapsed, and once lapsed gravely, adds to his normality and even, in the long run, to his sanctity. He was intensely alive and intensely human in his desires, his ambitions, and his affections, yet free from base self-love and the sophistication which corrupts the purity of a man's character.
God Spoke Through the Prophets
Authors: Potter Roland
Published: August 2024

At every creed in the Mass we profess belief in God who spoke through the prophets. This in itself should spur us to reflection on the totality of the prophets' teachings, reflection too, in a spirit of great faith—fides quaerens intellectum— on the phenomenon of prophecy in general, and the mysterious facts relating to God's action in the world, the penetration of the divine and eternal into the world of sense and time. But our theology of prophecy must not be arbitrarily a priori; not need we be tempted to think that it is so in St Thomas's systematic treatises De Prophetia (de Veritate, 12; II-II, 171-174: Qdlbt 7, 14 ad 5. and 16). St Thomas was profoundly grounded in the Scriptures and more especially in the one thing necessary in Scriptural vestigation, that grasp of the doctrinal content of every book as of every word. We should strive to grasp a living, objective, reality: the utterance of God through the prophets, at a point in the history of the world, in and through contingent realities of flesh and blood.
The King and the Kingdom
Authors: Potter Roland
Published: August 2024

‘Grace and peace … from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first-born of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of earth. To him who loves us and has loosed us from our sins in his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests to God and his Father—to him be the glory and the might for ever and ever: amen!’ (Apoc. i, 4-6.) This text from the last book of the Scriptures serves to recall a large and important aspect of the apostolic witness to the doctrine of the King and his Kingdom. The Apocalypse is full of the Kingdom in all its phases: as it now is, even now triumphant, and yet to be perfected, consummated in a hereafter. It is a sustained vision of Jesus Christ gloried fied as also of the Bride of Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem glorified.
Distractions
Authors: Sire Dominic J.
Published: August 2024

The unequivocal command to continual prayer so clearly expressed by Christ in the Gospels is by no means so clearly understood by the average christian of today. That everybody should pray the sincere Christian will readily admit, but it is the element of eternity that is either glossed over or assumed to refer only to those who have received a special call to a life of contemplation in the cloister. The fact plainly is that it is a call to all who Pretend to follow Christ, and we are bound to pray always. There is no doubt an unconscious prejudice based on a misconception of the meaning of prayer. The reasons for this Prejudice may be said to be two which are very closely allied, one being in a sense the cause of the other.
The Motherhood of God
Authors: Albert S. M.
Published: August 2024

The Fatherhood of God is an idea that is far from exhaustive of God's nature. Alone it would isolate God from a vast part of our own nature.’ So wrote Dom Vonier, O.S.B. (in The Divine Motherhood, p. 90), and what he does not go on to say in so many words, though the idea is implicit in his book, is voiced by Fr Victor White, O.P., in his article on ‘The Scandal of the Assumption’ (Life of the Spirit, Nov.-Dec. 1950), when he says: ‘Perhaps it [the definition of the Assumption] will lead the Church to closer consideration and ultimate formulation of the deep mystery of the “Motherhood of God”. For by the Assumption Mary returns to her own eternal Source, and not she but God himself is the ultimate and eternal type of Motherhood, Womanhood, and even materiality.’ In what follows there Will be suggested, with much diffidence, one possible line of approach to a deeper understanding of this mystery.
The Sacrament of Prayer
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

Catholic teaching on prayer and methods of prayer seems sometimes to neglect the sacramental system of the Church. Great emphasis is necessarily laid on the personal activities of the Catholic who sets out to lead a life based on communion with God; still greater emphasis is rightly laid on the part played by God directly on the soul in this communion, as the soul grows passive under the divine influence; but little is said of the divine activity through the sacraments in relation to this life of prayer, which after all is the final purpose of every influx of grace. These divinely given means of receiving grace work ex opere operato and do not depend merely on the subjective use made of them by the recipient. Therefore as means of prayer they should contribute to a new power, independent in some manner of the personal spiritual exercises of the individual. If a man desires to pray he adopts a method in addition to the ordinary daily exercises of morning and night prayers.
Blessed Nicolaus von der Flue
Authors: Campbell D. M.
Published: August 2024

Blessed Nicolaus was a hermit, respected and beloved not only by his contemporaries, but to this day in his native land of Switzerland, in his great shrine in Sachsen, and in several chapels as well as his own memorial chapel at Ranft.

The Swiss believe that it was owing to his prayers and protection that their country was immune in the 1914-18 war and in this one; and the gratitude of the nation has shown itself in a large fresco painted in his memorial church at Ranft, showing Switzerland as a sort of island, upheld by Blessed Nicolaus, amidst the general welter of slaughter and suffering of the rest of Europe. He is considered one of the nation’s heroes, indeed, had it not been for his prophetic vision and wisdom Switzerland might never have become a country at all.

Nicolaus had many visions, but in the first great vision he suffered pains; for God, in one moment, freed his body from the bands of necessities such as other men are heir to; the piercing light raised him from the ground, and taught him he was to seek all in God.
The Way Of The Cross
Authors: White Victor
Published: August 2024

It is three o'clock, Good Friday afternoon. Coaches and cars, cyclists and hikers, pour from the cities into the countryside; it is the first day of the holidays. Within the cities it is a nondescript sort of day; the shops, theatres, cinemas are closed, but (such at least are the mores of the British), there are crowds at the football grounds and the ‘dogs'.

There are unusually large crowds in the Catholic churches too. one wonders what has brought them. This is no day of ‘obligation’ ; absence from this service will bring no reproach and incur no guilt. Yet, besides the regular congregation, there are rows of unfamiliar faces; faces one seldom or never sees at Sunday Mass.