bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Keep Left for the Church—I
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

There must always be a tension in Christianity between the demands of the world and the demands of the Kingdom of God. By her very nature the Church must be forever reminding herself that it is part of her vocation to be potentially subversive of any worldly order of things: and she must also be forever reminding the world of this fact too. But the definition of where this tension ought to fie, in the twentieth century, is not easy. We are still mainly influenced in our conception of it by late medieval and Jansenistic ideas. The spirituality of the Imitation of Christ lingers: ‘Fly the tumultuousness of the world as much as thou canst: for the talk of worldly affairs is a great hindrance, although they be discoursed of with sincere intention ... we are quickly defiled and enthralled with vanity’ (I. 10). The trouble is not that this kind of thinking is in itself bad, but that it is no longer taken seriously. The result is, I believe, catastrophic. Just as D. H. Lawrence was right to criticise the modem world - the product of the cold northern spirit of the Reformation and of the narrowing Catholicism of the counter-Reformation - for being obsessed with ‘sex in the head’, so we are right to criticise Catholicism for being preoccupied with a ‘spirituality in the head’ which is equally false. The essence of this parody of proper spirituality is to think of other-worldliness in terms of a future heaven of disembodied souls, instead of thinking of it as a new heaven which is to grow out of a new earth. Corresponding to this false spirituality is a false morality, according to which the main purpose of the sacramental and prayerful life of the Church is to give us help in living according to the moral law. We are to try to live fully in the body of Christ in order to be able to live according to the code.
Double Think and Double Effect
Authors: Windass Stanley
Published: July 2007

In the recent collection of essays entitled ‘Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience’, Elizabeth Anscombe asks how it is that Cathohcs have been able to accommodate themselves with so little strain of conscience to modern war; and the answer, in her own telling phrase, is ‘double think about double effect’. We all know what she means; but perhaps it is not always easy to see just where double effect thinking becomes ‘double think’.

The principle of double effect is in itself by no means so mysterious and subtle a doctrine as it is sometimes thought. It is no more in fact than a rational and systematic explanation of what goes on in our minds when we wonder whether or not to perform a certain action which we see will have both good and bad effects. Thus a man who sells sporting shotguns in a district where there is a danger of violence many wonder whether to carry on with his trade. If he does, he will be carrying on his normal and legitimate occupation, and supporting his family; but at the same time, he will be adding to the danger of human injury. How is he to make his decision? Catholic tradition would suggest four principles (though found with many variations) to help him make his choice. An act with two effects, one good and the other bad, is lawful, according to this tradition, on four conditions. First, the action, viewed in itself, must be good or at least indifferent; secondly, the agent must not intend the evil effect, but only the good; thirdly, the good effect must be produced as immediately as - that is not by means of - the bad; and, fourthly, there must be a sufficiently weighty reason for permitting the evil effect. Now if we apply the principles to the case of the man selling shotguns, they begin to look like ordinary common sense.
From Graded to Comprehensive Schools
Authors: O'Connell P. J.
Published: July 2007

Perhaps no other state can exhibit the variety in organization represented by English educational institutions at the secondary school stage. Within the boundaries of a single local authority may often be discovered public and private schools, direct grant grammar schools financed by the Ministry of Education, and their municipal counterparts governed by local councils, in whose care would also be found secondary modem and technical schools. The religious bodies, particularly the Church of England in the countryside and the Catholic Church in the industrial areas, have their own parallel foundations.

Nevertheless, irrespective of the constitution of the Governing Board or the section of the population served, the majority of them will probably echo in their studies and administration the prevailing educational philosophy. According to this theory there exists in the nation an intellectual elite with inborn mental superiority - although its protagonists differ as to its extent. Professor Cyril Burt estimates five per cent as specially gifted and requiring a separate academic course, while the present Minister of Education considers as many as thirty per cent of the senior pupils ought to be in attendance at grammar schools. All adherents are agreed, however, that one of the chief tasks of the administrator is to discern the elite by an examination at the age of eleven or thirteen years and, thenceforward, to provide them with the best available facilities for an advanced academic course. To such philosophers the examination also reveals those, the hapless majority, with mental ability of a lower order: these they assign to a school where a practical course forms the main staple of the curriculum. At such secondary modem schools there would be a minimum of abstract academic study and no attempt would be made to prepare the scholars for external examinations.
Need Today
Authors: Bernal J. D.
Published: July 2007

We know much better today than before what the needs of mankind are—one of the great developments of modern times is this consciousness of human needs and of our duty to do something to meet them. A little over a hundred years ago needs were in a form that you would think would inevitably appeal to all Christians and humane people, and much close to us than now—in the great famine in Ireland for example —none the less, churchmen, politicians, economists and ordinary decent people considered not only that there was nothing that could be done about the famine, but also that it was wrong to try and do anything about it. It was upsetting the laws of economics, and if economics taught us that half the population of Ireland had to starve, that was just too bad.

Now we don’t think that any more, and I believe this is a great advance. But apart from what we think, the facts are different. The facts are that we are now in a position where—in respect of material needs, in respect of what might be called the simple Gospel needs of feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked and so forth—the means to relieve these needs for every human being are not only to hand now, but have been to hand for at least thirty or forty years. Nevertheless the hungry are still there, and very little effectively is being done to feed them. It’s not because the food isn’t there or that it couldn’t be brought very easily to those who need it.
Theology in the University: Downside 1963
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

Downside symposia are high-powered affairs. The papers (later to be published as a book) are closely related to a single theme. They are listened to by the rest of the speakers and a few more invited experts: after other Catholic conferences there is a welcome absence of lunatic fringe. We took the seventeen talks at the rate of three a day, each followed by close discussion; the BBC were busy with their tapes (a Home Service programme goes out on August 18th). Yet this, we began to see, was what a retreat might be like: listening and thinking and talking about a serious topic, and each mid-day celebrating mass together in die room where we had worked.

This year we were discussing the problem of Catholic entry into university theological faculties for study and teaching. Up to now in England theology has been done outside the context of university cultural life, and without the help of the special contribution which lay-people alone can give. Clearly it would be a great gain if we could work in the open universities, instead of behind seminary doors, and if our teaching could be directed as much to the formation of theologically literate laymen as to that of clerics. Above all so much would be gained if we could work in collaboration with Anglicans and Free Churchmen; those of them present made it clear that we would be welcome, that we had something to offer as well as to receive. America has Catholic universities, even Europe separates theology faculties by denomination; for the first time in the ecumencial age England, we realised, could give the world a lead.
Michelangelo's Failure
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

‘It was the pattern of Michelangelo’s life’, writes Mr Michael Ayrton, introducing a translation of the great artist’s sonnets, ‘that in painting, an activity of which he thought little, his greatest designs were completed . . . whereas in sculpture, which he considered his proper profession, all his greatest projects failed to materialise or remained in some compromise form to mock him’. A story, then, of disappointment by distraction: an artist of outstanding genius in several media, but profoundly drawn to one in particular, finds himself repeatedly diverted, by circumstances and his patrons, from the work he most wanted to do; the result being the Sistine ceiling and the Last Judgment on the one hand, and on the other the unfinished tombs for Julius II and the Medici. And while those paintings are superb, they are unmistakably, almost pathetically, the work of a man whose deepest impulse was to carve in stone. ‘Say a good word, John’, wrote Michelangelo in the bizarre sonnet-letter to a friend about the discomforts of painting the Sistine vault lying on his back, ‘for these dead paintings of mine... for this place is no good and I’m no painter’. And many years later, in a letter to Benedetto Varchi, he tries to define what he felt about the two arts. It is a hesitant, halting letter because the old man was genuinely puzzled. Varchi, writing ‘philosophically’, had declared painting and sculpture to be really ‘the same thing’, and though Michelangelo knew by experience that they weren’t, he was too humble to contradict. He had always assumed, he replied, that painting was good ‘the closer it approached relief and relief was bad the nearer it got to painting, so that I’ve always thought of sculpture as the guiding-light (la lantema) of painting and that the two differ as the sun and the moon’. Now however he has changed his mind, yielding to Varchi’s metaphysics, agreeing that these arts ‘are one and the same’.
The Church and the World
Authors: Bishop Jordan
Published: July 2007

The Church exists among men, men of flesh and blood who are, for the most part, in what we shall call ‘the world’. It is not a simple thing. While men are free to change the world they live in, this same world exercises, now as in the past, a great influence on men, including those who make up the community of believers that is the Church. It is true that the Gospel must be numbered among the forces at work in the world, since the men who respond to the Gospel are also in the world. There is an interplay, a complex relation between the world and the Gospel, a relation that varies from time to time, and which cannot be solved by a simple affirmation of a common divine origin of both societies. St Paul, having commented rather sharply on aspects of the world in his time, says later on: ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God’.

Nevertheless, history has seen a considerable assimilation of elements from the world within the structures of the Christian community, even before Constantine. In the Eastern Churches, the conciliar procedure followed that of the Roman senate, and the division of ecclesiastical dioceses followed that of the civil dioceses. Byzantium was a place of little importance in the Church until Constantine established his capital there. Even in the realm of faith, the influence of Hellenism is undeniable. Contact with the Greek intellectual world raised questions, while at the same time it provided tools, for a theological reflection which is a permanent part of our Christian heritage. To admit a certain assimilation of elements from the world, a certain ‘conforming’ to structures which do not have their origin in the Gospel is not to say that these elements are always corrupting influences.
Dante and the Aesthetes
Authors: Charity Alan
Published: July 2007

The Commedia is not just an aesthetic, but an existential, work. As such, it demands an interpretation which relates it not merely to art and art-history but to our own human concerns, to our situation and existence in life, to life and life-history. That is the note which I wish to strike in this essay, and with this emphasis: the Comedy demands such interpretations; its demand is an integral part of its art.

Of course, though the point is often ignored or forgotten, it is not strictly an original one. Already in the Letter to Can Grande the note is struck, either by Dante or on his behalf, when, having affirmed that the poem has to do with ethics, the Letter goes on to say that its aim is not merely instruction but inculcation. In the previous paragraph it is struck more forcibly still: the work is intended to be nothing less than a means of grace, to produce nothing less than ‘conversion’: ‘Finis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis’ (§ 15). The words are ambitious indeed, and it is hard, at first, to take them more seriously than we are generally wont to take the high-minded professions of moral purpose which conventionally preface a great part of the Renaissance’s literary output. But we should, I think, make the attempt, and test them, to see if, at least in a part—since the whole cannot be studied in an article—the Comedy will substantiate them. We shall try to see how, in spite of the fact that its narrative is compounded of events and phenomena which are miraculous, or fantastic, the Commedia is a communication paradoxically spoken from and to ‘existence’ much as we know it, by an art which, at times, comes close to defining itself as something perhaps quite unique: the art of converting through art, ‘de statu miserie ... ad statum felicitatis.’
Marginal Benefits: Films at Venice
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

This year the Venice Film Festival was once again under new management; but there was from the start no shadow of doubt that Professor Luigi Chiarini, the new Director, was exercising effective control. A rigorous limitation of participating nations and in addition a severe system of pre-selection virtually excluded the type of film all too often encountered at festivals—lasting for three hours plus and employing most of the cliches long since outgrown by adult cineasts. The result was a festival in which almost every picture was worth seeing for one reason or another; a festival, in short, of much more consistent level with fewer peaks, perhaps, but certainly fewer shocking depths.

Moreover, the entries from the eleven countries competing were divided into two sections: 1st XI and Colts, as it were, for the established directors showed their films with ceremony at the evening performances and many of the afternoons were reserved for opere prime, first works by promising newcomers to the festival world. Inevitably, I suppose, there was a strong preponderance of Italian pictures in this section and, exuberant though the Italian industry is, it could hardly produce enough films of real quality. Even so, it was an impressive contribution.

Two of these opere prime were set in Venice itself, which was fun for the local audience and even gave us transients a pleasant feeling of deja-vu. One of them, In Capo al Mondo, was made by a director with the improbable name of Tinto Brass; a charming, desultory story about a boy with a couple of hours to kill before he learns whether he has a job or not. The industrial psychologist has set him thinking, and he goes sauntering through time and space for satisfactory answers. The camera work made the best of the incomparable sunny background and the young man who played Bonifacio had such an endearing face that one liked him from the start.
Black Judgment
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

It was an uneasy summer. Yet all seemed usual enough on the crowded freeways, the trailers loaded with the burdens that Americans bear for their annual love affair with what they imagine to be the past: guns and fishing rods, plaid shirts and folksong records, bags of charcoal nuggets for the forest cook-outs, stickers on the rear window of Yoshe-mite, Virginia City and Gettysburg. But the papers they read as they sat at the teakwood tables in Oregon camping grounds or lay by the motel pools in Florida always told the same story: a single theme whose only variations were Bull Connor’s police dogs savaging the Negro boys or the high-pressure hoses mowing a black mob down, or, as summer ended, the exploded bomb in Birmingham, Alabama, and the broken bodies of children in the street. And there had been the Washington march and a quarter-of-a-million witnesses to all this huge iniquity.

James Baldwin’s book had headed the best-seller list in the NewYork Times all summer long. And The Fire Next Time, enraged and apocalyptic, matched the new mood. Somehow the old arguments had become as irrelevant as war-time rationing. And even the high-minded, faithful over the years to the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (and how suddenly archaic that had come to sound!), seemed still to be speaking of another time, another place and certainly another people. The religious leaders, with various degrees of caution, sounded trumpets—mostly of tin, it must be admitted. And Catholic Bishops spoke afresh, or at least again, of the Natural Law.
Letters to a White Liberal
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

How is Christianity involved in the Negro struggle? Dr Martin Luther King has appealed to stricty Christian motives. He has based his nonviolence on his belief that love can unite men, even enemies, in truth. That is to say that he has clearly spelled out the struggle for freedom not as a struggle for the Negro alone, but also for the white man. From the start, the non-violent element in the Negro struggle is oriented toward ‘healing’ the sin of racism and toward unity in reconciliation. An absolutely necessary element in this reconciliation is that the white man should allow himself to learn the mute lesson which is addressed to him in the suffering, the non-violent protest, the loving acceptance of punishment for the violation of unjust laws, which the Negro freely and willingly brings down upon himself in the white man’s presence, in the hope that the oppressor may come to see his own injustice.

The purpose of this suffering, freely sought and accepted in the spirit of Christ, is the liberation of the Negro and the redemption of the white man, blinded by his endemic sin of racial injustice. In other words, the struggle for liberty is not merely regarded by this most significant sector of the Negro population, as a fight for political rights. It is this, and it is also much more. It is what Gandhi called Satyagraha—a struggle first of all for the truth, outside and independent of specific political contingencies.
Two Revolutions
Authors: Masvidal Boza
Published: July 2007

In our issue of February 1964 we published an article by Leslie Dewart, the underlying implication of which (also worked out explicitly in his book ‘Christianity and Revolution: the lesson of Cuba’) was that the Cuban Church had made a too simple identification of the Christian cause with anti-Communism and of anti-Communism with pro-Americanism. In the course of the article (p. 56) Mr Dewart referred to the voluntary exodus of more than four hundred priests after the failure of the Pig’s Bay expedition. In this connection we have received the following document from Mgr Eduardo Boza Masvidal. Mgr Boza was appointed auxiliary bishop and vicar-general of Havana in February 1960 and was forced into exile by the Cuban Government in September 1961, as a result of the worsening in relations between the Cuban Church and the Government following the Pig’s Bay invasion. His expulsion and that of the 132 priests who were expelled at the same time is clearly to be distinguished from the earlier withdrawals of mainly non-Cuban priests, and his enforced exile and that of other Cuban priests is plainly an act of grave injustice on the part of the Cuban Government in which he deserves our deepest sympathy. The document sent us by Mgr Boza is a copy of his reply to the Cuban Ambassador to the Holy See. The Ambassador had protested against the inclusion of Cuba in an Exhibition of the Persecuted Church. The Bishop’s reply is given under three main headings.

1. The Ambassador points out that diplomatic relations still exist between Cuba and the Vatican.

This in no way signifies there is no persecution of the Church in Cuba. As is well known, the Holy See has no other object in view, in maintaining such relations, than the good of souls; it is not concerned to withdraw from any country so long as it is not obliged to do so, notwithstanding all the injustices to which the Church may be subjected.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

As presented to us in Europe at the moment, the American film is in a rum state of disproportion. Hurtling around in circuit like so many giant satellites go the blockbusters—El Cid and Ben Hur and West Side Story—and not yet generally released are the near three hours of The Cardinal, the three hours plus of Cleopatra, looming like Easter Island figures in the West End or on the boulevards of Paris.

And yet, in contrast to films of such enormous magnification, spatial and temporal, financial and technical, we have now been able to see a handful of American films which would almost appear to have been made by directors looking through the wrong end of the telescope, so deliberately small-scale are they.

The first of these was, I suppose, the memorable Shadows, made by John Cassavetes to please himself in a kind of sophisticated near-improvisation, which ran for months at the Academy Cinema, with the longest queues of the most enthusiastic young audiences that London had seen since foreign films reached us again after the war. This study of race relations in New York, made in a minor key but with major intelligence, was most absorbing, apart from its sheer cinematic interest, for the insight it gave one into the lives of real people, as distinct from film stereotypes, as prolific in the American cinema as in the British, but less easily detectible by the stranger. And now that one has read James Baldwin’s Another Country, Shadows seems even more impressive in retrospect. Then came Shirley Clarke’s The Connection—I do not think one can include The Savage Eye in this category, for it was essentially a documentary—which was a wonderfully entertaining piece of work. It dealt, you will recall, with the existence of junkies whilst they await the appearance of Cowboy—sinister black boy in white dungarees—who will bring them their dope, without which they cannot survive.
Religionless Christianity
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

You would be surprised and perhaps disturbed if you knew how my ideas on theology are taking shape . . . The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and indeed what is Christ, for us today? ... We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all; men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more . . . Our whole nineteen-hundred-years old Christian preaching and theology rests upon the ‘religious premise’ of man . . . But if one day it becomes apparent that this a priori premise simply does not exist, but was a historical and temporary form of human self-expression, i.c. if we reach the stage of being radically without religion . . . what does that mean for Christianity . . . ? How can Christ become the Lord even of those without religion; If religion is no more than the garment of Christianity—and even that garment has had very different aspects at different periods—then what is religionless Christianity?

In this passage, written from prison twenty years ago (30 April, 1944), Dietrich Bonhoeffcr raised an issue to which wide currency has now been given by the Bishop of Woolwich in the chapter of Honest to God entitled Worldly Holiness. Not that the question is confined to that chapter alone. Indeed I believe it to be the central issue of the Bishop’s whole book, more central in some way than the question of what image of God we are to have. For, if I am not mistaken, we have here the central anxiety which made Dr Robinson write his book.
Sartre as a Critic of Camus
Authors: Thomas Charles
Published: July 2007

Jean-Paul Sartre as a critic has been harshly judged in Western Europe, indeed he is one of the more notable victims of cold war mental attitudes. This is well illustrated by the quarrel with Albert Camus brought into the open by Jeanson’s harsh review of ‘L’Homme Revoke’ in ‘Les Temps Modernes’, a quarrel in which a very large number of western readers have taken Camus’ side. Camus is seen as the upholder of human dignity and values, over against Sartre, the system builder, infatuated with the marxist myth of history. This attitude very much undervalues Sartre’s contribution—he points out clearly the essential weakness in Camus’ position. Moreover the whole debate is an excellent illustration of the difficulty involved in building any coherent, materialist system of ethics.

This difficulty is rooted in their common ground; both start from the atheism of Nietzsche and its consequence the absolute freedom of man. Yet both belong to the long line of French moralists and are passionately concerned with what a man ought to do, granted this double premiss. However they begin to differ even in the ways they accept this atheism. Sartre is very matter of fact, for him the death of God is so self-evident that there is no point in talking about it. Towards the end of ‘Le Sursis’ Mathieu receives a letter from Daniel in which the latter very interestingly explains his half-conversion to Catholicism. Mathieu reads part of the letter, loses patience with its to him utter irrelevance, and throws it into the waste paper basket. This contrasts sharply with Camus’ interest in the way the individual accepts atheism.
The ‘Summa’ in the Sixties
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

St Thomas is one of those people who, like Queen Victoria, have become a myth : I use the word in a Jungian sense and by no means in depreciation. She became one during her lifetime, and on that count made an earlier start; still he was already five centuries ahead, and his image has been more variously encrusted with the tastes of different periods and regions, so much so as almost to have grown into several myths.

To discover what the real person was like, the prosopon of Patristic theology, you cannot do better than go by the biographical documents edited by Father Kenelm Foster, which record the witness of those who were as near to him as we are to the characters of the 1914 war. Yet it is with the prosopon in its earlier histrionic and later juridical sense, the personage standing for a cause, the legal person and sometimes, it must be confessed, the legal fiction, that the historian of philosophy and theology is occupied, for such is the public figure that engages the gears and sets into motion the vehicles that carry the ideas of groups.
Christian Unity and Institutionalism
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

In a notable speech at the Vatican Council on November 20 last, the Archbishop of Westminster undertook, in the name of the hierarchy of England and Wales, to promote a fuller and more frequent dialogue with all Christians in this country of whatever denomination. The occasion was the opening debate on the Constitution de Oecumenismo. The Archbishop said that the hierarchy, for whom he spoke, gives its ready approval to this document and receives it with joy. It gives us the guidance of the Church’s supreme authority, which we have been awaiting, and clearly shows us its mind. Without this our ecumenical work could not make progress.

Soon after the publication of this speech it was announced from Lambeth Palace that the Archbishop of Canterbury had set up a Commission on Roman Catholic Relations, to be composed of experts from strategic areas throughout the whole of the country. They will be responsible, from the Anglican side, for the arrangement of dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. It can hardly be doubted that there has been a causal connection between the Vatican speech and the Lambeth announcement, and we may hope therefore for the setting up, on our side, of a similar body to co-operate in organising this work.

It will not be out of place then to consider, on as wide a basis as possible and in a spirit of experiment, not only what are the most suitable topics, at the theological level, to embark on in dialogue, but, and this is more important, what are the presuppositions on either side with which eirenic discussion of these topics will inevitably be approached.
Socialism and the Encyclicals
Authors: Purnell Gerard
Published: July 2007

From Pius IX to John XXIII, Popes have stated that a person, to be consistent, cannot, at the same time, be a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist. To many, this attitude seems to evince sheer clerical cussedness towards positive measures intended to right economic injustices, and to dismiss the great improvements in social conditions won through the efforts of Socialists: an examination of what is meant by ‘Socialism’ in the encyclicals may accordingly dispel some misunderstandings. It should be remembered that the Church’s teaching is not an attack on all the demands of Socialists or their criticisms of Capitalism, that the meaning of the term ‘Socialist’ varies in the encyclicals depending on the circumstances of the time and that the personal attitudes of the Popes towards Socialism are reflected in the encyclicals and the timing of their publication.
The Council and the Bomb–Casuistry or Witness
Authors: Stein Walter
Published: July 2007

-‘Would you press the button you know is going to annihilate millions of people ?’

-‘If the circumstances demanded it, I would.’

This reply, under oath, by Air Commodore Magill to Pat Pottle at the British Official Secrets Trial of February 1962, distils the essence of nuclear deterrence. In the light of common sense, and especially with reference to just-war principles, it also defines its essential immorality.

As a prosecution witness, the Air Commodore was being cross-examined by one of the accused who had invaded a nuclear base in protest and who was later sentenced to imprisonment for this offence. The Air Commodore’s reply is of course in no sense surprising; everybody knows that the backbone of nuclear strategy remains the threatened icineration of enemy cities. (Even is so-called tactical nuclear combat and in so-called strategic counterforce strategies it is precisely the ultimate threat against enemy cities which seeks to enforce the proposed restraints.) What is notable about Air Commodore Magill’s colloquy with his objector is simply that it spells out, with a clarity we cannot evade, the moral cost of nuclear defence.

This cost lies not merely in the risking of future enormities; it involves gravely immoral intentions here and now. These declared intentions to execute city-hostages ‘if the circumstances demanded it’ are no less immediately and categorically genocidal for relating to a future hypothetical condition. No doubt there is a difference between murder accomplished and murder in one’s heart, but it is not a difference between murderousness and non-murderousness.
The Quest for Gravity
Authors: Stewart James
Published: July 2007

The Quest for Love published a year ago, is the best of the dozen books – of poetry, of criticism, of short stories, of works on teaching and of anthologies for teachers – that Mr David Holbrook has put out in the last five years. Something of his programme, and of a distinctive overtone that accompanies it, can be seen if we go back to his dispute with a Times Literary Supplement critic in 1962. Writing in reply to a fairly stinging review of Llareggub Revisited, his book on Dylan Thomas, Mr Holbrook affirmed (and that seems the right word for it): ‘It is true that I feel strongly that literature is of little value unless it brings us deeper perceptions and insights into our own nature, and the nature of our living conditions, in time and mortality. For this reason I seek to write with gravity .. .’

What he intended, he suggested, was ‘a quest for gravity, in the art of writing, and in personal living’. Yet there is a kind of quest for gravity, and a kind of quest for love, which makes us pause. To care so much is a great thing, to declare oneself openly is an honest act which we see too seldom, but aren’t the references to time and mortality uncomfortably over-large, embarrassingly imprecise? A quality of Puritanism, as Hooker knew, is to think too little of the multiple lesser needs and laws that govern our lives, to concede a kind of hypertrophy to the greatest and (at worst) to dismiss with rancour those who cultivate the less.
Priesthood and Paternalism
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.
Objections to Roman Catholicism
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

When I was young a book with this sort of title and written by Catholics would have been intended as an answer; the Church would have been defended. One can plausibly imagine some of the contributors: Belloc and Chesterton, not yet, respectively, too old or dead; Fathers Martindale and McNabb; Mr Waugh speaking for youth and perhaps Eric Gill (a bit uneasy with some of the company) for art. Count de la Bedoyère's team are of a different kidney. All but two of them seem far more concerned to raise than to answer objections, and if the formula of our imaginary book might have been ‘Yes, but . . . ‘, that of the present one is rather ‘Yes, and...', followed by a strong recommendation that it is high time something was done about it. The common mood, in short, is one of protest, the common aim is reform. Hence it isn't surprising, given the Church's established structure, that the general tone may fairly, if loosely, be described as anticlerical. And it is perhaps here, rather than in the particular views and arguments put forward, that this book's chief interest and significance lies, – not, of course, simply in its being slanted towards anticlericalism, but in its being so in a new, contemporary way.

In the twenties and thirties there were currents of anticlerical feeling in English Catholicism, but they were small and scattered, and, more important, they neither claimed nor expected much support from theology.
Heard and Seen: Critic in the Cinema
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

Today the conflict in critical opinion over controversial films often seems more pronounced when it comes to the kind of film that is most likely to engage the interest of Catholics. Never has it been more important that the intelligent Catholic should make up his own mind over a difficult picture than in the present state of the cinema; and by and large there is not, in this country, a great deal that will help him enlarge his cinematic critical apparatus. In France, Belgium or Italy the highbrow Catholic is not ashamed to admit to enthusiasm for the cinema: in England one only too often finds him saying that he cannot be bothered with films. This puts us at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to international gatherings concerned with any form of mass media and, worse still, at a visible loss when it comes to discussion with alert non-Catholic cinema-goers in this country about any particular film on which we should certainly have clear views one way or another.

The eighth London Film Festival held last autumn provided a pertinent case in point. Owing to the massive rebuilding that is still taking place on the South Bank, the films this year were shown in the West End; in consequence a much larger proportion of the general public (as opposed to members of the British Film Institute) came to the performances. Three of the films shown were OCIC (Office Catholique Internationale du Cin?ma) prize winners – one of them the Grand Prix for 1964 – and several others were of lively interest to Catholic audiences.
Music in Vernacular Liturgy
Authors: Milner Anthony
Published: July 2007

what generates the plan itself in the first instance is liturgical requirement.

Then don’t let him engage a decorative artist of the second, third or any subsequent rank to apply fiddling little bits of art to a structure which will probably at least have the humble merit of plainness. Again and again as one turns these pages one is struck by the pity of it ‣ messy ceramic plaques, vacuous mural reliefs, busy semi-abstract stained glass windows of overblown cosmological significance, facile streamlined statues of sacred personages appliqué to fine blank walls with about as much relevance as if one were to stick a Valentine card on a Mondriaan abstract … if only they’d refrained! So unless you can afford the prices payable to the Chagalls, Rouaults or Légers of this world, let the architecture do the talking: it has a far better chance of avoiding the arbitrary, the personal, and therefore the distracting.
On Clericalism
Authors: Blenkinsopp Joseph
Published: July 2007

There is one side to the transformation of the Church going on today which might seem to have a purely liturgical bearing but which in fact goes wider and deeper – the general abandonment of the Latin language. This doesn't just imply the return to an intelligible and genuinely public liturgy but the abandonment of the lingua franca of what has been for centuries a clerical world and the moving out into the open and as yet largely unchartered waters of a lay and secular church – a church of the people, fully in the world.

Anti-clericalism is a lot easier to recognize than clericalism and therefore a lot easier to deprecate. Rather than merely deprecating it, however, with its long and ugly history especially in some Latin countries, we would be better employed in finding out to what extent it was justified and in fact at times made necessary by circumstances. It might, for instance, be considered rather significant that the part of Italy where communism and anti-clericalism is strongest, where there are still people who ‘baptize’ their children in wine out of contempt for the Church's sacraments, is precisely that part which formed the Papal states.

Clericalism is a historical phenomenon and has to be studied historically. It is, of course, a pejorative term and does not refer to the existence in the Church of a section of people called clerics, those who, in the definition of canon 108 of the Code, are ‘tied to divine service, having received at least first tonsure'.
Man is a Gorilla with a Gun: Reflections on an American best seller
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

'Extrapolation', says the dictionaries, ‘is the method of finding by calculation, based on the known terms of a series, other terms, whether preceding or following.’ The method is proper to mathematics and works efficiently when dealing with number and quantity. When it is transferred to the realm of quality and of organic life, more still to that of history and of culture, it tends to lose its precisely exact scientific quality and becomes a venture in creativity, or, at any rate, a work of fantasy. Imagination now takes the place of calculation. There can be no doubt that the scientist who seeks to learn the origin of man from a fossilized remnant of a skull that might have belonged to a man or to a baboon, must be blessed with a creative imagination as well as with a scientifically exact intelligence. I suppose that when Robert Ardrey, a playwright rather than a professional scientist, sub-titles his book ‘A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man’ he is serving notice that he intends to extrapolate with unrestrained imaginative abandon. At any rate, this is what he does !.

There is of course a good basis of scientific evidence in African Genesis. The most recent discoveries of paleontology made in Africa, especially the most notable, those of Dr L. S. B. Leakey at Olduvai in Tanganyika, give very convincing indications that the origin of man was in Africa not in Asia.
Father Daniel Callus, 1888–1965
Authors: Knowles David
Published: July 2007

The Order of Preachers, which has such a clear individuality in the Church, has nevertheless among its gifted sons many different shades of character and fields of achievement. To the outside world it is the order of the great theologians, the order of strict orthodoxy, the order of St Thomas, of Cajetan, of Bariez, of John of St Thomas, and in our own time of P?re Gardei! and P?re Garrigou-Lagrange. The historian thinks also of the great inquisitors, of Jacob Sprenger and his Malleus Ma/eficarum, of Torquemada and the formidable Melchior Cano. By contrast with these there has always been a strain of the revolutionary, of the liberal and of the avant-garde, Savonarola, Las Casas, Lacordaire Vincent McNabb and Yves Congar. And finally, there is the recurrent type of the dedicated scholar, William of Moerbeke, Heinrich Denifle, Pierre Mandonnet and P?re Vicaire. And where shall we fit in Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso ? Into which of these groups shall we place Fr Daniel ?

His curriculum vitae is a varied one. Angelo Callus was born in 1888 in Malta, of Maltese parents but ultimately of Greek ancestry, and I am told the first Callus in the island was Greek physician to the Grand Master De La Vallette, the hero of the first siege of the island. He became a friar sixty years ago at the age of seventeen, and studied at Florence and Rome with a brilliant record, becoming Master of Sacred Theology at the unusually early age of thirty-six in 1924.
Missionary Thinking in the Context of Today
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

An approach to this theme must be very tentative. Enormous shifts in emphasis and sense of direction are taking place in the Church today and it is not easy to see the effect they can have in fields of thought and action which have of late been less explored. It is strange that one of these should be the missionary field, but it seems true. The Council's preoccupations hitherto have been elsewhere. The outright rejection of the schema on the Missions in the third session was evidence not only of its own inadequacy but also of a possible general consciousness among the Fathers that this crucial subject had not yet been considered by them with requisite seriousness. The great project on The Church in the Modern World’ will obviously also be of the deepest significance for missionary thinking. To attempt any sort of a rounded statement on the subject at the moment would seem then to be out of the question. All one can do is to present some of the intellectual problems behind mission work today and also to gather together what new insights into the meaning and strategy of our work already published conciliar decrees and current theology can offer us.

Certainly mission thinking today must undergo a thorough renewal; our work cannot continue to be carried on with the attitudes and methods that have prevailed with relatively slight changes over the last century. Doubtless the need for this renovation has not been recognized as yet sufficiently or at a deep enough level by those engaged in the work.
How Progressive is German Catholicism?
Authors: Boxer Charles
Published: July 2007

That the question should protrude out of English Catholicism and start prodding about in German Catholicism seems like irreverence, biting the hand that fed, or just plain scandalmongery. The revival of theological interest amongst English Catholics owes, after all, much to the activity of German-speaking theologians like Rahner and Kung. Here, we have said, is a Catholicism that takes theology seriously. The German bishops brought this activity in their train to the Council in the form of theological advisers. They were very well advised theologically. The Council was for German Catholicism something like a Trade Fair; its stands were stocked with the latest models of German theology, and the bishops quite overreached themselves in attempting to express it.

Meanwhile back in Germany there was considerable surprise in many quarters that the German episcopate should be, as Simplicissimus put it in a front page cartoon, marching like a mitred army on Rome behind its two cardinals. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel rummaged through its considerable files and produced a number on Cardinal Frings setting out dialectically his record as a conservative churchman in Cologne, and his activity as leader of the progressives at the Council. How were the two conflicting images to be reconciled? Certainly the German Church can never be the same again. Things have been said by its leaders in Rome which will have to be said in Germany.
The Private Conscience and Legitimate Authority
Authors: Zahn Gordon
Published: July 2007

Let me begin with a joke, a rather grim joke attributed to a popular Bavarian folk comedian named Weiss Ferdl. It seems that he would innocently inform his Munich audiences that the Nazi regime had just opened a new camp at nearby Dachau, and he would proceed to describe the elaborate security measures taken there – the armed guards, the dogs, the encircling rings of barbed and electrified wire. And then, when he felt the moment was right, he would deliver the punch-line: ‘But no matter what they do, they can’t keep me out if I really make up my mind to get in’.

It takes nothing away from the thousands who did ‘get in’ to Dachau or from the millions who ultimately peopled the other camps like Dachau to state the obvious fact that the great majority of individuals in Nazi Germany did not ‘make up their minds to get in’ but, quite the contrary, did what they were told to do so that they might be sure of staying out.

This obvious fact led many to embrace the doctrine of ‘collective guilt’ that was so popular as World War II drew to its close with the total collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’. This was the time when the question of the form of peace would take was already engaging the attention of the political and intellectual leaders of the Allied World. The prevailing tone was one of stern vindictiveness. The enthusiasts of the so-called Morgenthau Plan in America had their counterparts in the followers of Vansittart in England.