bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Trade Unions in a Changing World
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

During recent decades the power and prestige of the trade union movement have been greatly increased. In the years between the two wars, the trade unions enjoyed full legal recognition, and even a privileged position at law. (They could induce workmen to break their contracts of employment, for example, without being liable to be sued for damages by the employers, and this meant that in no circumstances could the union be prevented from striking, however unreasonably, by any threat to its funds.) The achievement of full employment during and since the war has naturally increased their bargaining power. Many employers now welcome the co-operation of an organized body representing their workmen where previously they had only grudgingly accepted the existence of the trade unions. The consultations between the Government and trade unions on certain matters of economic policy have continued in the post-war period, though it would not be true to say that there has always been real co-operation.
Towards Ecumenical Understanding
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Christian unity is the concern of all these three books, and they are all of some importance; the first two for an understanding of the place of the Catholic Church in the ecumenical scene, and the third for the explanatory light it throws, from the Anglican side, upon the complex and debatable question of the Church of South India.

Mr J. M. Todd sets out to explain the relationship of Catholicism to the Ecumenical Movement. His book, the first of its kind in English and one which supplies a great need, includes a synopsis of the history and scope of this almost universal emergence, in the non-Catholic world during the past fifty years, of thought and action for Christian unity. It is written with a wide knowledge of the whole subject and with a deep conviction of the urgent importance of the ecumenical spirit as an essential element in the apostolate of the Catholic Church in the modern world. The essence of ecumenism is understanding; to seek out what is true in the beliefs, practices and values of those who differ from us and to make that the starting point of work for unity. We do not attempt, nowadays at least, whatever we may have done in the past, to convert the Chinese or the Hindu without the closest and most sympathetic study of what they already believe, and of the ethics and culture from which their beliefs issue and in which they are held and practised. We proclaim the Christian gospel as the true fulfilment of the aspirations which arise from these beliefs, and we take care to present it, as far as possible, in the atmosphere, idiom of thought and the clothing characteristic of the existing culture of those to whom we preach.
The Significance of Lourdes
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

Lourdes has become a household word throughout the Catholic world and a
reality that cannot be disregarded for the world at large. Yet, both in the
one environment and in the other (to quote Bernadette herself), ‘I am afraid
that many people skim over the surface of things.’ Be this as it may, it is
certainly most important that Lourdes, and all that Lourdes stands for,
should be seen not merely as a fact to be reckoned with but also as a sign
to be interpreted. Like the Incarnation itself, in the light of which this
sign must be interpreted, it was initially something unassuming in
appearance, an affair of very simple people for the most part and one that
must have seemed at first to promise little impact on the world at large.
But in the course of a hundred years it has become a sign from heaven that
all who run may read, and must read. The miracles wrought there have
commanded attention; but it is not the miracles of Lourdes that are the most
significant; it is the miracle of Lourdes itself.
Lourdes: A Pilgrimage in Retrospect
Authors: Pryce‐Jones Alan
Published: July 2007

A First impression of Lourdes is never worth recording. The aeroplane
touches down at Tarbes, the little pilgrimage climbs into a coach, the
tarmac unrolls in all the secular splendour of a large main road. Arrival by
train is only a more congested version of arrival by train at any crowded
spa. And from either approach the city of Lourdes at first glance has
nothing particularly striking to offer.

The pilgrim, in fact, must give himself time. Above all, he must draw no
rapid conclusion, whether favourable or not. Lourdes is like a promontory
thrust into the familiar dimensions of time and space and it is fitting to
explore it slowly and with an awe appropriate to the act of
investigation.

In the city itself incongruities abound. The air seems to rain medals,
rosaries, postcards. Shops have unexpectedly nationalistic names, like ‘St
Lawrence O’Toole’. Little notices on the counter announce Ici
on cause wallon and great bazaars, like some reverential
Woolworth’s, overflow with excellent people buying containers in plastic for
Lourdes water, and tiny statuettes brightened with phosphorescent
paint.
Needed: A History of Lourdes
Authors: Martindale C. C.
Published: July 2007

MGR F. Trochu published in 1954 Ste Bernadette
Soubiraus, now translated and ‘adapted’ by Fr J. Joyce,
s.j. (Longmans; 25s.): omission of notes and references has reduced the book
from 585 pages to 400 and it will doubtless be the definitive ‘life’ of St
Bernadette in English. Yet I feel that a History of Lourdes is still
required. Lest I seem over-critical, and at the risk of being over-personal,
may I say that already at school I was spell-bound by ‘Lourdes’—in spite of
books. Lasserre’s book was clearly a ‘literary’ work by an enthusiast, not
an historian: two persons sent me Zola’s Lourdes,
no less clearly rationalist, though I could not then know of its deliberate
mendacity. I went to make a novena at Lourdes and sought for every trace of
Bernadette and Abbé Peyramale. I returned, and remained, ever more beholden
to our Lady of Lourdes, but not till, long afterwards, I read Fr Cros’s
three big volumes, did I feel that my ‘devotion’ had historically
irreproachable foundations. A ‘history’ must not seek, or be afraid, to
‘shock’.

Instinctively I turned to page 40 in the translation: Bernadette on her
way to collect wood passed an old woman who was ‘doing some washing’. I knew
that Bernadette had said des boyaux. I turned to
Trochu: the translation was quite faithful; but the French relegates the
boyaux to a coy footnote. ‘La Pigouno’ ‘did
not hide’ that what she was washing was—would ‘offal’ offend the delicate
ears of England, or even America? Again, when the children returned after
the first Apparition, Toinette says (page 46) that she will go to sell the
bones they had collected, so ‘the mother hurriedly began to tidy Toinette’s
unruly curls’ (recoiffers les boucles folks de
T.).
Poetry and Belief: Some Cases in Point
Authors: Lees F. N.
Published: July 2007

It will have been noticed that the title of my paper is a timid one; even, it may be thought, excessively so. There are two reasons for this; and the first, which would alone, in my opinion, be a sufficient one, is that the questions raised by the phrase ‘Poetry and Belief’ are difficult ones, intimately involved in all discussion of the nature and function of poetry, and ones which have become especially problematic in our century. It is, I think, true enough to say that in the form in which they particularly concern us as Catholics, these questions begin to emerge fully with Matthew Arnold: they at any rate reach explicitness and are given very serious attention in the work of Dr I. A. Richards and Mr T. S. Eliot; without clear agreement being arrived at by those two critics—the most influential and, by and large, the most arresting and convincing critical theorists of our time.

If further reason for my timidity be thought necessary I shall only add that it is warranted by the way in which this paper has come about—and this I offer too as a declaration that what follows makes claim neither to scholarly exhaustiveness nor to formal completeness. I shall, in fact, be putting before you some questions rather than presenting you with any answers.

I have brought together five poems or passages from poems: and these you now have before you. They certainly raise the question of the place, the effect, of Belief (as we must understand it here), and show a significant variety, possibly a sufficient variety, of ways in which it may be raised.
The Portrait of St Dominic
Authors: Knowles David
Published: July 2007

A medievalist rarely has the experience of reading for review a book which impresses him at once as being definitive in its field. Père M.-H. Vicaire’s life of St Dominic gives this impression in the first chapter, and continues to give it till the last page is reached, many days later. No historical work as such is immortal; Thucydides and Gibbon live chiefly as great literature; new material will always be appearing and no two ages will seek for exactly the same answer from their sources. But when these reservations have been made, it may be confidently said that this life, like Vacandard’s Life of St Bernard and that of St Philip Neri by Ponnelle and Bordet, will remain standard for fifty years or more, and will influence all that is written about St Dominic far into the future. It will not put an end to writings on the saint; it will probably lead to their multiplication, for St Dominic is a figure that every generation and every nation will seek to understand and to interpret for themselves, but it will be from these volumes that the ore is extracted, to be moulded into this shape or that.

It is frequently remarked, both by historians and devout Catholics, that little is known of the life and personality of St Dominic. Certainly the lessons in the breviary on his feast day are more than usually successful in confirming such a view. One reason for this is undoubtedly the lack of an adequate contemporary biography. Dominic lived when the monastic centuries, with their tradition of literary education and classical models, had ended.
The Vocation of Philip Howard—I
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

When in 1572 Thomas 4th Duke of Norfolk was attainted and beheaded on the charge of conspiring to marry Mary Queen of Scots and to dethrone Elizabeth, the Howard family lost the title of Duke for the best part of a century. His son however inherited through his mother, Mary Fitzalan, the title of Earl of Arundel, and this became the principal title of the family till the dukedom was restored in 1660. This son was Philip 23rd Earl of Arundel, who was still a minor when his father was executed. His father’s last act was to entrust him to the tender mercies of the great Lord Burghley, so that he was brought up a Protestant. But he married a good Catholic wife in the person of Anne, daughter of Thomas Lord Dacre, and Arundel House their London dwelling became one of the most noted citadels of the faith. Philip himself was converted in 1583 by William Weston, S.J., who was later Robert Nutter’s fellow-prisoner at Wisbech. Realizing that this step was high treason, Philip planned to flee to the Continent, leaving a letter for the Queen to be delivered only after his departure. But his flight was discovered before his ship left Portsmouth and he was arrested on board and lodged in the Tower. Four years later, when the Armada appeared in the Channel he was accused by a timorous priest, also a prisoner there, of procuring from the priest prisoners twenty-four hours non-stop intercession for the success of the Armada.
The Resurrection in the Easter Liturgy
Authors: Crichton J. D.
Published: July 2007

One of the effects of the restoration of the Holy Week liturgy and in particular of the Easter Vigil has been to re-direct attention to the Resurrection and its place in the Christian life. It is undoubtedly a new-found emphasis that does not chime very easily with the meditation-on-the-dolorous-passion mentality that has been the tradition since the later Middle Ages. The two are not of course incompatible and the Passion must always have a central place in the life of the Christian in via. But the liturgy does very definitely teach us that the climax of Christ’s redeeming work was not the Cross but the Resurrection and we are now faced with the task of re-incorporating it into our lives. For this at least two things are necessary: one is the rediscovery of what the New Testament has to say about the Resurrection and the other is to live it in and through the liturgy.

A word must be said about the New Testament material if only because it underlies the outlook of the liturgy. It may be divided for our purposes into three strata: the prophecies and accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels, the earliest kerygma or proclamation of the Resurrection in Acts and the teaching of St Paul. We can do no more here than refer to the Gospel passages in which our Lord foretells his Passion and Resurrection, noting meanwhile that the Resurrection is always mentioned, and to the passages in Luke 24, 26, 27 which seem to have become already a ‘theological’ scheme: ‘Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so enter into his glory?’ (and cf. verses 44-46).
Bible and Tradition
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Many who are interested in the growth of an eirenic theology which aims at solving some of the contradictions and oppositions of divided Christendom will welcome a sermon under the above title, printed in the December number of Theology. Implicit in its argument is an intimation that the historico-critical method, though an indispensable instrument in the hands of the theologian to assist him in establishing the true sense of Scripture, has proved itself insufficient as the final and decisive criterion in biblical interpretation. Something further is required and that something would seem to be a deeper understanding of the meaning and function of Tradition.

Very briefly summarized, the argument of the sermon is that the Reformation produced a stalemate between Catholicism and Protestantism, both sides becoming involved in a closed-system theology. Up to the sixteenth century Catholicism had developed harmoniously, but in such a fashion as to interpret the New Testament in ways other than the New Testament itself really allowed. The Reformation broke this development by recourse to the Bible only. But Protestantism, almost at once, began the busy construction of closed doctrinal systems, unconsciously imitating Catholicism in positing a single canon of biblical interpretation; Lutheran justification by faith alone or Calvinist predestination of the elect. From the embattled state produced by these closed systems of theology, in which Catholicism and Protestantism had alike become involved, arose the historical method. In the hope of breaking the deadlock between them this method asked the question: ‘What does the Bible mean when considered in its own right, and without reference to any doctrinal system?’
Is Newman's Theory of Development Catholic?
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

A serious and sympathetic study of Newman’s theory of development has appeared recently from the pen of Mr Owen Chadwick. He concludes a painstaking historical account of theories on doctrinal development with a challenge to Newman’s claim to interpret Catholicism. ‘The question then for those who think Newman’s theology is Catholic, is this: these new doctrines, of which the Church had a feeling or inkling but of which she was not conscious—in what meaningful sense may it be asserted that these doctrines are not “new revelation”?’

That development for Newman was, in a certain sense, from an ‘idea’ held wordlessly and unreflexively to a formulation in words, I agree. But I am sorry that Mr Chadwick has used in this summary a word as un-Newmanic as ‘feeling’. I agree that Newman was a notoriously untechnical writer, and it is true that, in at least one place in his letters, he uses the word ‘feeling’ to represent what he elsewhere calls our partial or unconscious recognition of a truth which we have not yet learnt to formulate. But it is also true that, at other times, Newman explicitly rejects both ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ as words too subjective to represent our relationship to the object of Christian faith or theology. Moreover, it is remarkable that, in his Sermon of 1843, on ‘Development in Religious Doctrine’, he never once uses either of these words. Nor does he, I believe, use them in the Essay on Development.
Ethics and the Play of Intelligence
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It is not usual, in this country at least, for Catholic moral philosophers and theologians to question the metaphysical status of the principles which they employ in their arguments. God and man are taken for granted, and morality is presented as a systematic description of the order which ideally obtains between them and of man’s defection from that order. The importance of such a procedure is hardly to be denied: a programme, a map of life, coherently and consistently recommended, answers immediately to our present perplexities. And yet these perplexities cannot all be satisfactorily resolved in a programmatic way. For our perplexities are not merely first-level perplexities, which may be defined in terms of a restricted number of possible courses of action in a world whose intelligible articulation is something securely achieved, and which may thus be resolved in terms of the recommendation of just one of these courses of action. Our perplexities are also (when they are acknowledged) second-level perplexities, concerned with the articulation itself, throwing into question the very nature of the order obtaining between man and God. Our morality cannot be wholly derived from a metaphysics established without explicit reference to morality. We can no longer merely insert our action into a programme; to attempt to do so, to refuse to admit the existence of second-level perplexity, is to evade a responsibility, the serious acceptance of which could and normally should creatively achieve a fresh, a more interior insight into our relationship to God by deliberately taking the strain of the question in order to offer an answer.
Some Books About Lourdes
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The centenary of the apparitions at Lourdes has inevitably inspired a new literature which ranges from critical editions of the written sources to popular ballads. The variety of emphasis and the levels of taste revealed in these books reflect the universality of Lourdes itself—its capacity to engage the serious attention of the scholar as well as the uncritical affection of the simple believer.

Most important of the centenary publications is Lourdes: Dossier des Documents Authentiques, edited by Abbé Laurentin (Lethielleux). Four volumes are projected, of which two have already appeared (Vol. I: Au temps des seize premieres apparitions; 1,200 francs; Vol. II: Dix-Septième Apparition, Epidémie des Visionnaires, Gnoses et Faux Miracles, La Bataille Administrative, Fermeture de la Grotte: 1,500 francs). It is a matter for gratitude that a theologian such as M. Laurentin should undertake the necessary task of inspecting the sources of Lourdes. As he explains in his introduction, the apparitions at Lourdes are not a major subject for theological study, but they have an important place in the life of the Church, ‘if only because of the number of people they affect, and because of the fruits they produce as well as the dangers they present’. For that reason ‘God’s designs in this matter should be exactly established and stripped of exaggerations’.

The need, therefore, was to establish the authenticity of the record on which the story of Lourdes depends. M. Laurentin describes his task as comparable to a detective story, and indeed many of the relevant documents are in fact police reports made at the time of the apparitions. In the course of a century a mass of documents had accumulated in archives of all sorts (and, as M. Laurentin remarks drily, ‘France is a country where everything is kept’).
Morals and the Novel
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

Dante, in the fifth canto of the Inferno, wandering among the souls of those damned for incontinence, meets the lovers, Paolo and Francesca. He is told that they fell from chastity after reading a book, the story of Lancelot. ‘Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. . . .’

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

‘The book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther.’ And as the commentators tell us, for ‘Galeotto’ we may read ‘pandar’. Here we have what is, I think, a locus classicus for the problem under discussion: the meeting-place of behaviour and literature and morals; and an occasion for apprehension for both the moralist and the writer, though for very different reasons.

In discussing the particular question of ‘Morals and the Novel’, rather than the relations between morality and literature in general, the problem becomes both more defined and more acute. If we are talking about poetry, or painting or music, it is possible to argue that the artist’s basic concern is with his medium, with words or paint or sounds, and that his aim is to make an aesthetic structure in which the relation of parts to the whole will be consonant and harmonious. This kind of ‘formalist’ aesthetic will be familiar to readers of Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, where the author asserts the virtual independence of art and morals by claiming that the former is ‘a virtue of the practical intellect in the field of making’ while morals—or ‘prudence’—is a ‘virtue of the practical intellect in the field of action’.
Myth, History and Revelation
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

In this essay no attempt is made to discuss Bultmann’s important contribution to Formgeschichte, which is, perhaps, the work for which he will be remembered. The purpose of the essay is rather to examine some of the assumptions that enter into Bultmann’s thought; assumptions that serve to shape, at the very least, his approach to Scriptural, and other problems.

This can be best understood if one of Bultmann’s typical preoccupations is considered. In his essay ‘New Testament and Mythology’ he attempts to explain in what sense he regards the New Testament as an historical document, in view of the amount of figurative language it contains. His explanation raises, among other problems, the question of what is meant by history, and this question in its turn, for Bultmann, forces the discussion into the realm of philosophy.

It is, perhaps, useful at this point to summarize Bultmann’s position about history, as set out in his History and Eschatology. History only begins when man frees himself from participation in a world that is full of gods; a world that he pictures, rather than analyses, in story forms that reflect both the regularity or rhythm of nature, and the irruption of awesome event. It is only when a human group becomes conscious of the processes that shape its experience that history, as self-conscious reflection on human relationships within a group, can be said to emerge. Both chronicle, with its selective character, and narrative, with its patterning of events, emerge from a reflection on, and an evaluation of, the causes and the interconnection of events regarded as significant in the experience of a people.
The Labour Party and Education
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

The education policy of the Labour Party is without any doubt of considerable importance and far more attention ought to be paid to the draft policy document, Learning to Live, than has been given in the popular press which concentrated on comprehensive schools and the fate of the public schools. When this document is considered at the October Party conference there may be some opposition that will lead to changes in detail, but it is unlikely that the conference will do other than endorse the document as a whole. The important thing to recognize is that a favourable vote at the conference will not stop the discussion on education, for of all topics this is about the most popular with Labour Party members. Furthermore, there cannot be another party with as many educational ‘experts’ as the Labour Party has—even if many of them are self-elected.

To discuss the development of an educational policy inside the Labour Party is not possible without recognizing that several schools of thought exist and that there are two other documents besides the official party policy document. One is the Victory for Socialism publication, Equality in Education, while the other, Education and Socialism, comes from the influential Socialist Union group.
The Part of the Laity in the History of the Church
Authors: de Riedmatten Henri
Published: July 2007

The coming of age of the layman in the present-day Church can be looked at, as a result of the general upheaval in modern society, from two inter-related points of view. In the first place, present circumstances have reminded us that the Church, even where she seems most settled and at peace, remains essentially ‘militant’: her children, while ‘in’ the world, are never ‘of’ the world. Constant conflict within and without is inescapable for all the baptized. Consequently the Church, impelled by the demands of her missionary task, is ever anxiously urging the layman to become the apostle and the Gospel-bearer that is at once his vocation and his birthright; while the layman himself, now finding himself up against unfavourable surroundings, whether antagonistic or indifferent, is more fully alive to the claims made upon him. For the most part he has not shrunk from this challenge, but rather shown his resolve to turn to greater account the immense riches of the Faith and the Church found in the Sacraments, the liturgy, the Bible, the great spiritual traditions and theology.

In the second place, there can be detected a tendency which would claim for the layman a more specific status in the mission of Christendom. According to this, the layman should assume as his peculiar right and duty those tasks of the temporal order which do not of their very nature belong to the spiritual society which is the Church; he should even willingly take over, within the Church itself, certain functions and responsibilities of which the clergy, to their own advantage, could be freed.
New Work on St John's Gospel
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Two groups of Christian scholars have met recently—one at Oxford, the other at Louvain—to consider the Gospel of St John; and the papers read at both meetings are now published. The English group was mostly Anglican, the Continental one (French, Belgian and Dutch, but using the French language) was Catholic; but this difference only appears obviously in two or three of the contributions to the English volume. Together these books are a striking witness to contemporary interest in the most sublime of Christian documents. This interest is particularly keen just now for several reasons including, besides a general stimulus coming from the Qumrân discoveries, the recent publication of an important new manuscript of the fourth Gospel and, in the field of Johannine theology, Dr C. H. Dodd’s great work, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953). It is in this theological field that the books we are reviewing make their chief contribution. The Catholic volume in particular offers some really distinguished pieces of biblical theology; indeed it is only fair to say, and one may say this without any parti pris, that of these two books the one that carries an imprimatur is by far the more important. The English work is relatively slight in scope and quality.
Genesis, Church and Colour
Authors: Potter Roland
Published: July 2007

Events at Nottingham and Notting Hill may well be symptoms of a more
deep-seated and widespread evil in our midst. It is true that bullying
Teddy-boys have been suitably punished, but it is also true, at the time of
writing, that our popular press has printed letters which betray
considerable race-feeling and racial prejudice. And anyway there is
apparently conclusive evidence that the population of Britain falls into
three broad groups of roughly equal size: one third is tolerant of coloured
people, one third is mildly prejudiced, and one third is very prejudiced.
These are saddening figures; and, alas, all the ugly incidents and ugly
attitudes at Nottingham and Notting Hill do but confirm the accuracy of the
estimate.

This is what obtains in twentieth-century Britain. In striking contrast,
antiquity did not know of racial prejudice. The true Greek saw the world as
something divided between Hellenes and Barbarians; another division would
give the categories of citizen and slave. You were born, or became, a Roman
citizen, without the slightest reference or advertence to skin pigmentation.
Jews in the time of St Paul, whatever their exclusiveness and strong
feedings about ‘gentiles’ or uncircumcised non-Jews, were quite unconscious
of colour differences. We read in the Acts of the Apostles of an Ethiopian,
a minister of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, who had gone to Jerusalem to
worship (Acts viii, 27). He was no doubt a devout proselyte, and accepted
like all others . . . ‘from every nation under heaven, Parthian, Medes,
Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia .
. .’ (Acts ii, 8-10).
Authority and the Anglican Mind
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The purpose and scope of this paper may be conveniently formulated in the following two questions: what are the obstacles which prevent our fellow countrymen, who are Christian believers, and men and women of good will, from recognizing the Catholic Church for what it is, the visible society in the world, which alone is Christ’s Mystical Body and which alone speaks his word with the fullness of his authority; and, how far are these obstacles in the minds of the non-Catholics in question, and how far are they to be looked for in our presentation to them of the Gospel?

You will observe that I am prescinding altogether from any discussion of the mystery of the bestowal or non-bestowal of the gift of faith, which, however else we differ about it, we all agree to be a sheerly gratuitous gift of God, given by him when and to whom he wills. I am treating faith, in the context of this discussion, as divine faith in the authority of the Catholic and Roman Church, which seems to me to be very often an extension of faith in those who already possess it on a narrower, but at the same time very real, field. I am proposing to deal only with obstacles in the mind, obstacles, that is, in the non-Catholic mind which, we must presume, make it incapable of having this gift of faith bestowed; or obstacles in our own minds, which lead to the presentation by us of that faith in a form which is in fact incapable, psychologically speaking, of penetrating the non-Catholic receiving mind, and preparing it for the bestowal of the gift.
Women of Tomorrow
Authors: Stafford Ann
Published: July 2007

August, 1957: the great horse-shoe amphitheatre of the Sala Santitham, Bangkok—the last word in international conference halls—looked like a herbaceous border, so brilliant were the silks and saris of the women from fifteen Asian nations who had come to attend the Seminar organized by U.N.O. on the Civic Responsibilities and Increased Participation of Asian Women in Public Life.

Burma, Cambodia, China (or rather, Formosa), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaya, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sarawak, Singapore and Thailand had all sent participants, for in all these countries women now have the vote, and politics and the professions are open to them. Fifteen nongovernmental organizations sent observers; they included the Associated Countrywomen of the World, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the World Association of Girl Guides, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Union of Business and Professional Women, and four Catholic bodies: Pax Romana, the World Federation of Catholic Young Women and Girls, the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations, and the Catholic International Union for Social Service at whose behest I was there. And I think I was the only European present.

When I looked over my programme, I realized that U.N.O. had indeed gathered together some of the most able women in the East. India had sent a member of Parliament and of the Constituent Assembly, a quick-witted person, never at a loss for a word; Cambodia, a Professor of Primary Education, distinguished by the quiet chic of her national costume and her sound commonsense.
The Autonomy of the University
Authors: Fogarty Michael P.
Published: July 2007

A word or two first to explain the title of this paper. My subject is ‘The autonomy of the university’. Actually, of course, the essential question is about the autonomy of the individual university teacher and research worker, not so much of the university as an institution, and I propose to treat the matter from that angle. Also, ‘autonomy’ is not the best word to express the question we are discussing. I would prefer to put it thus: ‘What is the responsibility of the university to the rest of the community, and how is this responsibility to be enforced?’

I shall try to answer this question, not from special principles applicable to the university alone, but from the general rules that govern the rights and duties of all workers. I know that many people dislike the idea that the university teacher or researcher is just one more kind of worker. In this country (Austria) we have recently heard the eloquent protest of Josef Pieper on this point. But opinions will not change facts. Work is work, whether it is done by the driver of a bus, the typist at her desk, or the professor in a university chair, and the rules governing the rights and duties of workers are the same for all. Everyone who works has the right to use his special skill and ability to the full—to enjoy, if you like, full employment—for two ends. The first is the development of his own personality, for achievement in work is necessary to the growth of a mature personality. The second is service to the community.
Affirming God: An Informal Reflection
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

The Bible starts with a deed and a wonder: ‘In the beginning God created . . .’. The reader is at once, without preliminaries, told of a power so great that it handles the sum of things, ‘heaven and earth’, and produces what it handles. Prior to whatever else is going to happen, things, we learn, only- are because of ‘God’. The statement is familiar—too familiar; but what it says is wonderful, in the sense that it means that the accepted order of things, the world around us, need not be. All wonder, all surprise, implies a norm, an accepted order of ‘ordinary’ reality from which the surprising fact or act seems to deviate as an exception. But here it is the whole ordinarily accepted norm itself, not man’s world only but all nature too, that is suddenly presented as an ‘exception’: it need not have been. The accepted norm is swept aside and another, infinitely more real, appears—God. As for the universe, we know now what it is made of—nothing!

I shall not attempt here to prove this doctrine as a thesis, restating familiar arguments, but only to draw out its meaning a little and then touch on one or two difficulties we may find in holding it firmly.

The doctrine tempts the imagination (witness my first paragraph), but it baffles it too, of course. Our images are always of limited things or activities, and if we try to represent ‘creative’ activity we have to make shift with such human doings as seem most original—the production of a symphony or poem, of a scientific or philosophical theory: all human things, presupposing at least the man who produces them and some sort of working material.
The State as Guardian of Morals?
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The publication of the Wolfenden Report has re-opened an old debate. How far should human legislation enter the field of morals and condemn behaviour reprobated by the Christian tradition? The difference between crime and sin is pretty generally recognized at the extremes; thus a man will admit to a technical breach of the rules and regulations without concluding thereby that it is matter for the Sacrament of Penance. The difficulty is to know where to draw the line between what should be legislated against and what should be left well alone, even though it may be objectionable to many on grounds of ethics, religion, or culture. Let us attempt to mark the frontier, or rather to narrow the marches between the temporal” and spiritual powers in the culpability country.

Among Catholics the guarded approval which greeted the Report was presently followed by dissent. Perhaps their attitude will harden when the proposals come before Parliament, but for the moment it remains unsettled. The ambiguity reflects an oscillation between two opposite charges in the widespread suspicions entertained about our social mentality. Grumbles at one moment about clerical fussiness and intrusion into private affairs are followed at the next by mutters about condoning human frailties which do not interfere with ecclesiastical privileges. We are told of priests with blackthorns scouring the hedgerows for courting couples of a summer evening, of petulant sacristans shooing lightly-clad tourists away from the churches, of orders from the pulpit telling us how to vote: behind all this lurks an archetypal Mrs Grundy—crowned with a biretta.
A Dominican Nobel Prize Winner
Authors: Torbet Ronald
Published: July 2007

The Pasternak affair of last autumn tended to throw into obscurity the awards of the other Nobel Prizes for 1958. Normally, it is ‘peace’ rather than ‘literature’ which attracts the notice of the press and the other organs of publicity. But this time the roles were reversed, and it was ‘literature’ which offered a rich store of acceptable copy by providing a significant chapter in the development of something that really interests us more than peace, namely the ‘cold war’. After all, one could hardly grudge the journalists their excitement that at long last the U.S.S.R. had dropped practically its first point in the ‘world propaganda’ competition with the West, even if maturer reflection could not but see this as only adding a deeper shade to the personal tragedy of Dr Zhivago’s creator.

That Boris Pasternak, then, should eclipse Père Pire in the press as a whole is understandable enough. What is surprising is that the award of such a widely prized honour to a priest should have raised so little attention in our Catholic press. After all, even bears—or so the apocryphal story runs—can hit the headlines simply by eating nuns on the way to Mass. Yet, at the time of writing, only the briefest notice has been taken of this award, only the baldest details of Père Pire’s life and work given.

To give an explanation of this silence would be easy enough. It would have to be in terms of ignorance; an ignorance, I hasten to add since my present intention is far from being a criticism of the Catholic press, which is shared by all of us, Père Pire’s own Dominican brethren in England not excluded.
Abraham in the Koran
Authors: Daniel Norman
Published: July 2007

This impressive book marks very clearly the revolution that is taking place in Christian thinking about Islam, and at the same time it illustrates an important new trend in scholarly treatment of the Qur’an. In the past, theological hatred of Islam has often been stronger among Oriental Christians than among Latins; the prejudice shared by both has been intensified by the frustrations of subordination in the political and social order. Now this important book comes from a Maronite author, that is, from the Church traditionally most anti-Muslim. It enjoys the blessing of that truly remarkable prelate, H. B. Mgr Meouchi, the Patriarch, who, however, is far from being at one with his church. The book is a little dour; it has all the severity of the thesis form. Even when it was turned into a book, the solid meat was served without sauce. This criticism, which militates against its readability, is the only criticism I can wish to make of a book which greatly promotes understanding of Islam, and clears new paths for scholarship.

It reverses the traditional attitude of Christians and of scholars, in a very simple revolution, which consists in treating the Qur’an as a religious book; in treating it consistently as consistently a religious book; in assuming that religious ideas inspired and informed it and guided the Prophet. From the earliest days of Christian criticism, Islam was supposed to have been contrived out of Christian, Jewish and pagan elements, by a false prophet; hypocritically, it was thought in the old days, and more or less sincerely, or innocently, in a more modern view.
Catholics, Crime and the Community
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The spectacular increase in recent years of serious crime, especially among young men, has created an inevitable reaction of disquiet, indeed of anger. The need, it is suggested (and not only by reactionary opinion), is for severe punishment, exemplary in its unpleasantness, which will dissuade the gangster and the man with the gun. And even lesser crimes of violence must be sharply punished: the restoration of the birch and the cat, it is argued, will achieve far more than the assumptions of a remedial penalty—whether it be probation or Borstal training.

Much of the propaganda for such measures is intelligible enough as a reflection of public indignation. But it is often irresponsibly expressed, as in a petition for the return to corporal punishment which was displayed in many Glasgow shops recently and immediately received hundreds of enthusiastic signatures. The case for such a grave step was not stated; no argument was offered but that of instinctive aggression. The Home Secretary has on several occasions resisted such proposals, and has pointed out that, even at the statistical level, there is no evidence that offences previously allowing for a sentence of corporal punishment have in fact increased since such punishment was abolished.

The Home Secretary, instead of giving way to the storm (which, it must be admitted, is by no means as spontaneous as some newspapers make it seem to be), has urged the need for much greater research into the causes of crime, and to that end the Cambridge Institute of Criminal Science is to have more substantial help for its work.
Truth and Verification in Theology
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

I must begin by saying how much I appreciate the honour of being asked to address a group of scientists on this subject; and my only hope is that what I have to say will not prove entirely irrelevant to the concerns of those who practise experimental science in one form or another, though I suspect that the kind of relevance which I shall suggest is rather a peculiar one.

While the experimental sciences—what is usually meant by ‘science’—have become highly diversified today, so much so that divisions of the sciences such as ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’, ‘botany’ and so on, are so general as to be pretty well unusable, one feature in particular distinguishes theology from all of them and indeed from any other intellectual pursuit whatsoever: the fact that theology itself belongs to the supernatural order. By ‘theology’ I shall always mean ‘sacred theology’ and not ‘natural theology’, which is properly a special way of practising metaphysics. To say that theology in this sense belongs to the supernatural order is not merely to say that its object, what it studies, is something supernatural, the Revealed. It is also to say that it is itself, in its intrinsic movement and apprehension of truth, something supernatural. It is not merely the application of procedures already practised in other fields to a special field, a special set of data, though it certainly is that too, as we shall see: but its very intellectual activity shares the specific character of the special field which it investigates.
Wandering Stars and Flying Arrows
Authors: Hoskin Michael
Published: July 2007

That the earth is a sphere was already known to the Greeks by the time of Plato; and most of them were agreed that the sky too is spherical, as suggested by the daily wheeling motion systematically shared by all but seven of the stars. So far so good, but with the seven exceptions, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the attempt to understand the structure of the universe ran into difficulties. These seven circled the earth every day just like the ‘fixed’ stars, but in addition they moved against the background of the fixed stars without, it seemed, rhyme or reason. However, as the lunar month and the seasonal years showed, the apparently random movements of the ‘wanderers’ or ‘planets’ concealed regularities that were not always evident at first sight, and this raised the question of ‘saving the appearances’ of the planets, of explaining their movements by displaying the geometrical patterns underlying them.

This was the problem that dominated astronomy in the two thousand years that separated Plato from Kepler: a highly technical challenge, of such complexity that in the thirteenth century, Alphonso X of Castile, exasperated by the difficulties of preparing the Alphonsine planetary tables, said he wished God had consulted him when creating the world. Yet, despite its technicality, the problem of the wandering stars is one of the most significant issues in the whole history of science; for when in the sixteenth century Copernicus proposed a solution according to which the earth was itself merely one of several planets which circle round the sun, his specialist monograph sparked off one of the most profound revolutions ever to occur in human thought.
Two Difficulties About Evolution
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

One sometimes hears it said that ‘the Church’ has changed its mind about evolution; Catholics are now allowed to believe in it, whereas formerly they were not. This is a thoroughly confused remark. Evolution is a biological theory, and biological evidence tells us whether it is true or false. It would he very odd to speak of a theory concerned with neither faith nor morals being officially accepted or rejected as part of the Catholic faith. But because the theory has implications which touch on the faith, Catholics looked for guidance from authority about the attitude they should take towards it where those matters were in question: guidance now given them in the encyclical Humani Generis, which encouraged theologians to investigate those points where the theory bore on truths of faith. The present article is not concerned with the biological evidence, which I accept, nor with an extended theological investigation, but merely with difficulties which Catholics still seem to have about the theory, and which are really philosophical in kind.

The first difficulty lies in the conflict which people still find between the theory of evolution and divine providence. How can we say that God directs the whole course of history if rigid scientific laws determine the way in which living things developed from inorganic matter, and finally evolved man? The problem is really that of understanding how causes in the natural world are related to the causality of God. People tend to think that if natural causes are not independent of God, their dependence must imply his constant interference with them to bring about what he wills.