bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Carlo Delcroix in Italy: The Heroism of Suffering
Authors: Gordon George R. E.
Published: July 2007

The political movement which dominates Italy has found in Carlo Delcroix a literary genius whose fame may live with that of Mussolini. Delcroix is not simply a fascista: but his books in their terrible eloquence and beauty are the evangel of that new enthusiasm which gave to Italy an impulse from victorious war that contrasts with the disillusionment that has touched France and made much of England pro-German. Through fascismo Italy found in the war an inspiration, and Delcroix is the prophet of the salvation she has won from ardours and endurances. The People’s War and The Sacrifice of the Word are the titles of his two earlier books, and such words as ‘Holy Sacrifice’ would do as a title for any of them. But the others are Dialogues with the Crowd and Seven Uncanonized Saints.

The theme which Delcroix repeats with variations, and with an increase of mastery and power, is the praise of suffering. In the modern age, and most of all among the admirers of Mrs. Eddy, suffering, against which human nature revolts in any case, has been treated either as cowardice or a delusion. But, as many know, it is not a delusion. To lose one’s hand and one’s eye in one sudden ghastly explosion is, when all is said by Christian Scientists and done by medical Scientists, still a calamity. Faith cannot restore the loss. The agony is acute. That was the discovery of Carlo Delcroix, and the war which brought such a disaster to all the fervours and activities of youth cannot simply be accepted or dismissed.
Savonarola Unfrocked Again
Authors: Bugeja Henry
Published: July 2007

A popular journal, with pretentions to literature and learning, lately held a symposium of well-known novelists. They were set to say whom they considered to be the most tragic figure in history. Says one of the convivials—a lady novelist:

‘Of course, one can hardly say which is the most tragic figure in history ... If one must be named, I would choose Girolamo Savonarola; not because of his terrific downfall and miserable end, but because he was misled and bewildered by his own spiritual impulses; he was the dupe, as it were, of his own inspiration ; he came to feel that God had mocked him, perhaps that there was no God .... He was ugly, unloved, sickly, thwarted in his early passion, sensitive, awkward, self-conscious, uncertain of himself, of an unhappy bilious temperament, melancholy and nervous; never in the history of the world did a poorer vessel contain the fire of genius. Savonarola nearly accomplished a great thing—the reform of the Roman Church that would have prevented the Reformation. He had the audacity to call in the King of France to quell the Pope, the abominable Borgia—but that king was a sickly imbecile, and though the cannon pointed at St. Angelo, Savonarola’s Gallic tool broke in his hand.’

‘He lived to be forsaken, reviled, despised, to find himself shrinking from torture, from death, without courage, without faith, and knowing that he had accomplished nothing. His supreme tragedy lay not in the triumphant ferocity of his enemies, but in his own limitations which had rendered his effort useless. . . . Something of this tragic life I have tried to portray in my novel, The Carnival of Florence.’
Justice and Poverty
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Because the wages of the workman are not sufficient for his personal needs and the needs of his household, the duty is laid by Parliament on the State of meeting the deficiency, as far as it may conveniently be done. Instead of granting the labourer a larger share of the wealth which labour has created, State aid is given. It really seems that the workman is not to be trusted with a living wage lest he spend it unwisely. And no doubt a large number of our social reformers do sincerely believe that it is far better to stop all pocket money for the working class and let the State lay it out, than to trust the working class with the responsibility of spending all the money it has earned.

But these good intentions of the social reformer are not the economic cause of low wages. Capital—i.e., the investor—ever driven to reduce wages to the lowest level of subsistence, seeks native labour in the dark places of the earth because it is cheap labour; and only cheap labour will procure the dividend desired by the investor. Labour—i.e., workmen—struggling to

maintain a standard of comfort, must needs be at strife with capital when the issue is so plainly set. The investor must have dividends. The workman must have what he can get in the way of wages. To bring wages down, capital, through its federations of industry, orders a lock-out. To resist a reduction of wages, or to gain an increase, the workman goes on strike. These manifestations of class struggle recur.
The Church and Art IV.
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

Pre-renaissance art is not, as many solemnly declare, unimportant because verisimilitude (truth to appearance) was not attempted by primitive artists. The gargoyles on the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris are not without beauty because, in so far as they represent anything at all, they represent Devils. Neither the camera nor the text-book of moral theology are the test of Beauty. A work of art is not to be judged beautiful in the degree of its likness to anything, nor in the degree of its likeness to something lovable, nor, supposing we deem a woman to be more lovable than a spider, is a portrait of a woman to be judged to be more beautiful than a portrait of a spider. Conversely ugliness in a work of art is not measured by the degree in which the work departs from natural appearance, nor is a work of art necessarily ugly, because it is like nothing lovable.

These misunderstandings are variously felt by different persons and different kinds of work suffer in different ways. Thus painting suffers most, music perhaps least. Most people can appreciate a tune for its own sake, or even a symphony, and do not insist that it shall imitate any natural noise. Few people can see painting in the same way and appreciate form and colour as such, but insist upon imitation and ethical standards, forgetting that neither imitation nor the inculcation of morals is the artist’s business. The musician does not write the poem to which he may be asked to make appropriate music.
The Pen of a Scrivener
Authors: Telfer Vera
Published: July 2007

A fountain pen, like silk stockings, is a necessity to the poor and a luxury to the rich, and should form part of the equipment of every citizen, so that he may write to his newspapers, fill up his income tax and perform all the functions of good citizenship. It is as personal as a tooth brush and as indispensable; and, with a tooth brush, forms a barrier to the onslaughts of Communism, and an eternal argument against the persuasions of Communists. A man may be willing to share his pipes and a woman her hats, but neither man nor woman will ever lend tooth brush or fountain pen without emphasizing the loan as a deviation from the standards of Christian conduct.

Nationalisation has given us post office nibs, Communism would give us post office fountain pens, and then God help us!

A fountain pen is, if not a man’s birthright, at least a mark of his manhood or that with which he can make his mark. Millionaires have platinum and diamond studded bands, Chinese lacquer and new blue blood ink, the price of which would keep a suburb in vulcanite for a generation, and with these they make trusts and newspapers and all the horrors of civilisation.

A fountain pen is a blessing to possess and a curse to acquire. We go to buy in some vast hall and are bewildered by shapes, sizes and colours. Sancta Simplicitas chooses a plain black shape, but it needs wisdom and understanding to decide between safety, self-filler, adjustable and all the other devices of maids ingenuity.
Unemployment and the Land
Authors: Editor The
Published: July 2007

Father Vincent McNabb’s The Church and the Land is a book to be read by all who are concerned and anxious about the pressing problem of unemployment. But it would be a pity if our reading of this stirring book produced no effect except a vague feeling that something was wrong and an equally vague conviction that something ought to be done about it. It would be futile to read it as we might read Vergil’s Pastorals—to be thrilled and charmed by the vision of the sower casting his seed, the ploughman turning over his furrow or the harvester swinging his sickle. The flail song in threshing time and the joyous music of the churn when butter is a-making are fine glowing dreams and visions that must not be allowed to evaporate into airy nothings. Every chapter of this book should stimulate into action. Fr. Vincent McNabb describes his work as a bugle-call. Wherefore sound the bugle if there be none to answer the call?

The gist of the book could be given somewhat as follows : There are at the present moment more than a million workers unemployed. They are being paid for being unemployed. At the same time there are millions of acres of good arable land lying untilled; and there are many more acres unworked than there are men out of work.

The practical person will at once say, Yes, but the men who are employed are neither by temperament, training nor inclination the sort of people who would or could till the untilled fields even if it were possible for them to get at them.
A Catholic Daily Paper
Authors: Curd T. W. C.
Published: July 2007

In the April number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor was good enough to print in full a letter in which I advanced the opinion that the time has come for the establishment of a Catholic Daily Paper. The suggestion has, of course, been made before, more than once, but has always been opposed on the ground that Catholics are not sufficiently united to support such a venture. This has always seemed to me to be putting the effect before the cause; surely a Catholic Daily would produce that unity as no other organisation could ever hope to; and so what is put forward by many as being an argument against is, in effect, one of the most powerful arguments in favour.

The question cannot fail to be of interest, not only to Catholics, but to many others, and as the course of events, almost from day to day, only serves to give strength to my conviction, I will state briefly my case for the establishment of a Catholic Daily in the hope that it will at least bring the realisation a stage nearer.

I will deal with it under two headings: (1) Is it desirable? (2) Is it feasible?

(1) Is it desirable?

It is scarcely conceivable that any Catholic should be found to answer ‘No’ to this, but the arguments in favour of its desirability are so powerful that their consideration may lend strength to those who would hesitate on the question of feasibility.

The average man unconsciously forms his outlook on life very largely from the columns of his daily paper.
Far from the Land
Authors: Curd T. W. C.
Published: July 2007

I have just finished reading Father Vincent McNabb’s inspiring book The Church and the Land, aptly described by the author as a ‘bugle-call,’ and in die May number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor asks the question, ‘Wherefore sound the bugle if there be none to answer the call?’

I believe that there are many only too anxious to answer, not only amongst the unemployed, but amongst those also who are ill-employed, working at any sort of a job in the cities because a living must be made somehow for men and wives and children. Since the war, how many men have been forced by sheer want into taking on work of this sort, quite apart from the fact that they, no more than the ‘practical objector’s’ unemployed, are fitted for it neither by temperament, training nor inclination?

Amongst these city workers in uncongenial jobs in factories and offices, there are many who suffer acutely from the pangs of land-hunger, men and women who have the love of the earth in their very blood, whose ancestors—in many cases not more than two or three generations back—were farmers, and whose keenest desire is to get back to the soil and toil to which they feel themselves called almost as powerfully as a priest to his vocation—for surely, save that of the priest, there can be no labour nearer to God than that of the land worker.

By reason of these, then, the bugle does not sound to deaf ears, but to hearts to whom it comes as the call of hope and life itself.
The French Hierarchy and the Franc
Authors: Gwynn Denis
Published: July 2007

Not the least embarrassment of the French bishops, in the present political crisis of France, has been to decide whether Catholics should be called upon to forget the constant annoyance and petty persecution to which they are still subjected—even since the fall of M. Herriot’s deliberately anti-Catholic Government—and to respond generously to all appeals made by the Government, as though the union sacrée which M. Herriot brought to an end were still really in existence. It is true that, since M. Herriot’s downfall, the open challenge to the Church on the question of the Vatican’ Embassy has not been officially renewed. The threats to the religious communities which have settled in France in defiance of the laws proscribing them, have not been carried out; though the inquisition into their numbers and their status throughout the country, which was set up by M. Herriot’s Government and methodically organised, has placed full information in the Government’s hands, which may at any time be made use of by an anti-clerical Government. And the attempt to compel Alsace and Lorraine to accept the same educational system as the rest of France has also been suspended.

But all over the country minor incidents have continued to provoke violent resentment. The Ministry for the Interior, which controls the whole local government of the country, and through the distribution of patronage arid by more direct means ‘makes’ the elections in a manner calculated to ensure the permanent success of the Left, has always been jealously kept in the hands of anti-clerical Ministers even during the war; and the Prefects nominated by them have been using their powers to prohibit religious processions, and to interfere in various other ways with such liberties as the Catholics still possess.
Two Mystery Plays in Dublin
Authors: Dease Charlotte
Published: July 2007

When in 1925 the sudden and deeply regretted death of its promoter brought the Dalkey Nativity Play to a close it was thought that an end, at least for the time being, had come to representations of Mysteries in Ireland. The strange fatality so often over-shadowing Irish efforts had, it seemed, struck again at the root, and all that had helped to produce the drama disintegrated. Kindled for a moment by Lady O’Connell the latent artistry of Irish children would be left to smoulder out without a chance of expression. The ‘thing of beauty’ she had built up during four Christmas Seasons and that in its continuance would have inspired other pioneers to work in the same field too quickly ceased to be. No sign appeared of another hand to carry on the torch and to help to establish a tradition. Like a comet, the Dalkey Nativity Play had flashed upon us for a moment and was gone, and only its memory as an artistic creation remained. Then suddenly in the early days of May this year it was announced in connection with the prospective centennial of Blessed Imelda Lambertini that on Whit Monday, May 23rd, two Mystery Dramas were to be produced at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. The Plays, Imelda and Tarsicius, were from the pen of the Rev. H. M. Gaffney, O.P. The first was to be presented by the girls of the Dominican College, Eccles Street, and the second by the boys of SS. Thomas and Tarsicius Altar Sodality, St. Saviour’s, Dominic Street. A choir of the choristers from Corpus Christi Church, Drumcondra, were to render the Plain Chant, and the Orchestra was to be that of the Loretto College girls.
The Friars-Preachers in Russia II
Authors: Bennigsen George
Published: July 2007

II

The two centuries of Tartar domination brought on radical changes in Russia. Whilst the South or Ukraine, temporarily occupied by Lithuania and Poland, remained open to Western influence, a new Power was gradually and steadily growing and strengthening in the densely wooded territories of Central Russia. In the early fourteenth century the thrifty and hardy rulers of Moscow, an insignificant and poor principality, began slowly and laboriously to extend their domain at the expense of other impoverished principalities, to ‘gather the lands,’ according to old Russian chronicles, until towards the middle of the fifteenth century, Muscovy became an important State under Ivan III, who shook off the last vestige of the Tartar yoke. For centuries cut off from Western influence, Moscow was strongly conservative in every way, and considered herself the natural heir of By-zance, a belief which Ivan Ill’s marriage with Sophia Paleologue, descendant of the last Emperors, only strengthened. Moscow claimed to be the ‘Third Rome,’ and the depository of the sole true faith. Her attitude towards Catholicism and everything coming from Rome was uncompromisingly hostile. The Union of Florence was rejected by Vassili II, Ivan’s father, and the Metropolitan Issidore, who was charged by the Pope with the mission of obtaining Russia’s adherence, was imprisoned, but eventually succeeded in escaping and leaving Russia. This anti-Catholic hostility was actively fostered by the Greek clergy. Despite such a seemingly hopeless outlook the Popes repeatedly tried to enter into cordial relations with the Great Princes and Tsars of Muscovy, though all their efforts remained fruitless.
The Pagan Press
Authors: Curd T. W. C.
Published: July 2007

For my sins I am condemned to read several papers every day. During the strike my normal supply of reading was cut off, and the only news beyond the usual crop of rumours was that sent out by the British Broadcasting Company and the strike items contained in the various news sheets.

As the strike and its effects constituted the one important topic of news, to the exclusion of the doings of the various notorious personages of no interest, it is probable that the strike news sheets came nearer than Fleet Street would care to admit to fulfilling the true function of a newspaper. When read in conjunction with the official ‘correctives’ and a due allowance for what could be found between the lines, a very fair estimate of the day’s news was available.

On the Tuesday after the settlement, one of my papers joyfully announced that it was able to supply ‘all the world’s news again’ ; on Wednesday another paper reflected that the strike had provided a lesson in ‘what can be done without at a pinch,’ and, remembering that for the period of the strike we had been without any of the usual scandal, crime, divorce, film-star vagaries, fashionable news and eccentricities of the dull people who seek publicity on the back pages, many people will agree.

Now that the newspapers block the letter-box and litter the mat once again, we are expected to rejoice that the indispensable daily printed sheet is once more with us, yet it is difficult to conjure up enthusiasm when the average daily is subject to analysis.
Thomas Hood
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

Thomas Hood, ‘true poet and true humorist,’ was born in The Poultry, London, in the tail-end of the eighteenth century. He died at Devonshire Lodge, Finchley Road, in the middle of the nineteenth. He lived, to be precise, from May 23rd, 1799, to May 3rd, 1845. I was a shortish, sickly life, and had to be beaten out, as it were, very thin to last for forty-six years.

On Hood’s birthday George III, aged sixty-one, and for the time being in his sober senses, rested after the levee of the day before. Queen Charlotte held a Drawing-room. News came that our noble allies, the Russians and Austrians, under Marshall Suwarrow and General Hohenzollern, had taken the best part of the Milanese from the French; that General Buonaparte had met with a check near Acre in consequence of which the Sultan had ordered a solemn thanksgiving in the seraglio; and that the Success frigate had fallen in with the French fleet passing the rock of Lisbon, and an engagement was hourly expected. On Hood’s birthday the second reading of a bill to restrict slavery was fiercely opposed by the Liverpool merchants in the Commons. Mr. Castlereagh and Mr. Ponsonby fought a duel near Dublin. Carriages waited at the Bull, Bishopsgate, to take the friends of Mr. J. Frere to the Norwich election to vote on the whole policy or impolicy of the war. A highwayman with crape on his face, mounted on a bay mare, stopped a post-chaise on Uxbridge Common.
The Friars-Preachers in Russia III
Authors: Bennigsen George
Published: July 2007

III

During the reign of Alexander I the position of the Catholic Church in Russia was a peculiar one. Not only did the Government consider itself called to rule the Church, but also to safeguard the purity of her faith from any alien influence, including the Pope’s. Thus, in 1822, the Emperor decreed the expulsion from Russia of Fr. Lindl, Rector of the Church in Odessa, for ‘preaching a creed which was not in accordance with the dogmas of the Latin faith,’ but at the same time the Russian Ambassador Italinsky was admonished for accepting from the Vatican a confidential note, demanding Lindl’s expulsion.

The Russian Dominicans figured in another example of this solicitude of the Government for the Catholic Church. As we have seen previously, the Monastic Orders were compelled to participate in the cost of primary and higher education and other useful institutions, having, however, little to do with religious life. A Conference of representatives of the Catholic Church was convened by Chatzky, visitor of the schools of Volhynia, Podolia and Kiev, in Luck, on October 20th, 1803, at which the expenses of maintaining the schools in these provinces were divided amongst the Orders. The Dominicans had to support (a) one district school in Staro-Constantinov; (b) twenty primary schools; (c) three scholarships in the Vilna University for preparing teachers; (d) pay 1,000 zloty for the maintenance of the botanical garden; (e) maintain two metereological stations; (f) hand over to the Ministry of Public Education the foundation for the education of pupils in Rome; (g) print in their printing office in Luck a hundred books for the Volhynia secondary school, also give to the same school four copies of every book which had been published there.
St. Francis of Assisi
Authors: Gordon George R. E.
Published: July 2007

A Man who seven hundred years ago lived from the age of twenty-five to that of forty-five a life of extreme self-discipline, and who yet preached of love and joy with a Doric simplicity, has captured the imagination of the modern world, as he did that of his contemporaries, and been found so faultless and so fascinating that both those who are scholars and those who are not keep on bringing out new books, as we see once more. His joy and his love of nature, which made him hail the water and the moon and death as his sisters, and the sun and the wind and fire as his brothers, call even to the present age with a sweet secret voice, and there is in holiness itself a romance which stirs the heart of the most earthly of us. But otherwise it would be hard to explain the popularity of St. Francis of Assisi, or to tell why so many people share enthusiasm with the Catholic pilgrims who are now crowding the Umbrian town which, seen from Perugia, looks like a pale patch upon a purple hill, why, in every country, many ordinary people are thinking of that scene of 1226 when the worn-out body, poor ill-treated Brother Ass, refused to go any further, and marked strangely in hands and feet and side, as though a copy of the Crucified, it grew finally still in the twilight of an October evening in a thatched cell on the plain beneath the little town, while, according to St. Bonaventura, innumerable larks, with full throats, alighted on the thatch, singing the songs of dawn at nightfall.
Empire and Papacy—A Modern Problem
Authors: Isham Gyles
Published: July 2007

Sir John Marriott has suggested that to cut out of of an English history book all the pages that concerned the relation of Church and State would leave but a few pages in the book. That the problem is no dead one is testified by the present conflict in Mexico. In its widest, most universal form, the problem arises in the relations of the Empire and the Papacy—a problem which, I think, can be shown to continue long after the break up of the mediaeval system, and, recently, to have received a fresh emphasis.

In a side group from the Lateran Mosaic (appropriately reproduced by the Temple Edition of Dante’s Latin Works) are shown Peter and Constantine receiving the symbols of their authority from Christ, while Peter alone gives these symbols to Leo and Charlemagne—an apt summary of European history from the start of the Christian era to the Reformation. But it represents even more than that. Napoleon was content to refer to ‘Charlemagne, my august predecessor, Emperor of the French’! This statement (however false historically) was used as a bludgeon against the Pope.

Always has there been a conflict between Caesar and Peter. And yet, always, Caesar has been forced to confess his indebtedness to Peter. Charlemagne was crowned at Rome by the Pope : Charles V as near Rome as possible, at Bologna: and Napoleon— though he brought the Pope to Paris, kept him waiting in the Church, and snatched the crown from his hands—was unable to bend him to do his will. Even Bismarck had to go half-way to Canossa.
Hymns
Authors: O'Connor. John
Published: July 2007

The young are not expected to be wise: there is something uncanny about old heads on young shoulders; but there is so much foolishness uttered about hymns, even by those old enough to know better, that one wonders why the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Undergraduates did not interfere to stop this essay, and the fact that the subject was set for a prize essay is sufficient proof that wisdom in hymnology does not necessarily come with age. You have a form of composition in which the greatest fail, and the second best quail, to wit, the Hymn, the religious hymn, and the next class in order, the academic arbiters, toss it for a bone of contention to the unblooded. What boots it them? What reck they? They are sped.

Doubtless the subject was set to provoke thought and discussion, and thereafter experiment, effort, and practical results. This prize essay scarcely carries out the intention, and incontinent one asks, What were the others like?

In the first place it excludes, with the aid of Sir Oliver Lodge, the central fact of all religions that have ever been. You must not mention Blood. One immediately says, Hell. And sure enough the essayist not only rails at the Dies Irae, but even bridles (on page eleven) at Bernard of Morlaix and his translator, Neale. Note well the objection to the famous lines,

Hora novissima, temfora pessima sunt,

VIGILEMUS.

The world is very evil,

The times are waxing late,

Be sober, and keep vigil.
Saints and Sickness
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

In one of his Studies in Arcady, entitled ‘Christianity and Language,’ R. L. Gales asks himself whether ‘as regards the mass of the (English) people the result of the Reformation may not be summed up in one sentence, “They have taken away my Lord”’ ? The thought has probably occurred to many Catholics that certainly the Reformation took away from us Our Lord’s chosen courtiers and friends, the saints. Before that date in England the names of the Saints were in all men’s mouths, and their images graced many a wayside shrine instead of the modern statute of a parliamentarian or philanthropist. How rich are the Irish, Bretons, Tuscans, and Spaniards in their beautiful saint-lore. Just as any ordinary man loves a powerful friend at court, so do these Catholic peoples love the friends who they know are helping them at the only Court that matters. Accordingly, they still do what our own fathers did—rely on the saints for help in every need. Faith directs the steps of Catholics in their choice of helpers. Our Lady in all things is our chief resource, because she is our mother, and the saints, our brethren, can always be relied on. All sorts of reasons led to the choice of particular patron saints, many of these choices being whimsical enough, but full of affectionate reverence. Countries and towns, arts and crafts, states of life, all have their own distinct protector, but help in sickness has from all time been sought from all God’s saints, though even here circumstances have guided choice of particular patrons, and some saints have by the faith of the people been granted a monopoly of curing certain ills the flesh is heir to.
Some Hampshire Relics: A Grandison Ivory
Authors: O'Mahony. D.
Published: July 2007

A few months ago a Southampton lady, a recent convert to the Catholic Faith, showed us an ivory triptych, about nine inches high, which appears to have been in the possession of her family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and proves to be a fourteenth century ivory with the arms of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter (1327-1369). In the centre piece (slightly damaged) are carved the Crucifixion in the upper compartment, and in the lower the Madonna and Child. The wing on the left has standing figures of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist; and that on the right corresponding figures of St. Paul and St. Thomas Becket. The authorities of the British Museum have arranged to secure this ivory for their collection of mediaeval antiquities.

There now exist but comparatively few English ivories of the later Middle Ages; doubtless their rarity is due to the Reformers’ fanatical zeal for the wholesale destruction of sacred images. In the British Museum have been for some time two ivories with the arms of Bishop Grandison : one of them is a triptych somewhat similar to the one mentioned above, and the other a panel of a diptych of which the other leaf is in the Louvre at Paris. There also is a mediaeval English diptych in ivory in the Salting Bequest at South Kensington. Such ivories now have a market value of nearly ;£ 1,000 each.

St. Thomas Aquinas in Art.

Perhaps not many are aware that there is in the Manor House, Mottisfont, a curious antique painting, which represents two events in the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, and is said to have belonged to the ancient Priory of Mottisfont.
Brokenborough
Authors: Gray John
Published: July 2007

What of this or that, as you move through a county or two, which has appeared to modify the face of the land for the good of those who live upon it; the new bridge, as perhaps at Witney, with curves and gradient indicated by all laws, or nearly all, and not unworthy balustraded parapets; a new expression of stateliness in what should now be called motor-gates, abolished railings and screens, treeless drives and cunning choice of building site; house-shortage houses; long-legged concrete water-tanks; circus-like pump colonies; or what time has consecrated : the built mass, intricate in unity, upon its green plinth, the close such service ennobles; structures, age on age agglomerate, heterogeneous, like the glorious tangle of Winchester; an agricultural tessellation, if you wish the fields by thousands, seen from the precipitous foreground of Lord Hereford’s Knob, lying north and south between Radnor Forest and the dim heights of Brecon; man’s motive in changing his natural surrounding by adaptation and addition, that is the question ever present to the meditative, seldom answered conclusively.

Or the mind rests willingly from irritated criticism, as of a man’s own house, be it ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ or neither; or that in which he gives thanks to God. Its consecrated purpose is assumed to release any usual building from the thraldom of time; that it exists and is for the present indispensable answers sufficiently all but impertinent questions. It need be neither cowardice nor languor which admits that the church is pleasing in which indeed there is nothing to please.
St. Francis in Recent Journalism
Authors: Bonnar Alphonsus
Published: July 2007

I approach this subject much in the spirit in which Tertullian wrote against the heretics of his day. We might adapt the words of the powerful, if acrimonious, apologist. ‘We must first see to whom the Saints belong lest they be claimed by those who have no right to them.’ As the gnostics of Tertullian’s day claimed a right to the Scriptures, so the agnostics and other misguided folks of our day claim St. Francis. As the self-constituted teachers of those days interpreted Scripture according to their own fancy, and suppressed such parts of it as did not please them, so modern non-Catholics admire their own views in St. Francis and shut their eyes to those aspects of his personality—often fundamental aspects—which do not fit in with their views. I wish to summarise in a rough way the recent non-Catholic appreciations of the Poverello. Furthermore, I would like to make Catholics grasp that St. Francis is theirs: that he is a product of the supernatural vitality of Christ’s Church : and that if non-Catholics admire him, they must do so from afar, preferably in sackcloth and ashes. You can only really imitate St. Francis in loving the birds and flowers, if you have fasted with him on Mount Alverna, and approached Confession and Communion at his side. Let Mr. Sidney Dark close this paragraph for me:

’ Finally, do not be deluded into the belief that St. Francis preached and taught despite the authorities of the Church. There was no difficulty in persuading Pope Innocent III that St. Francis was a saint. The Holy Father realised that great fact the first time that he saw him, and he encouraged him, and guided him with amazing wisdom.’
St. Francis and St. Dominic
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: July 2007

The contrast between the two saints is as obvious as the likeness; indeed, such likeness as there was sprang more from their background, environment, and common century than from personal resemblance in story or work or ideals. Besides the common century there was, of course, the common faith; but apart from these things that are the settings and not the gems, the gems themselves, though equally precious, were singularly unlike. The two succeeded to the long winter of the Dark Ages and the illumination of the twelfth century, and they were caught up in the creative movement of the thirteenth; there was, therefore, a certain community of spirit which their age naturally begot in them. They both started orders of Friars.

But remove the age and look at the men. What a perfect contrast! Dominic is of noble Spanish origin, born in bleak and desolate lands, growing up in a feudal tower; his early years are years of study, in the house of a priest, at the University, and as one of a community of Canons. Quietness throws its veil over him, and his companion is learning, and wisdom is his star.

Francis comes of the trading stock of Assisi, a city of commerce, but also of rich colouring and crowded wealth, and ripens to manhood in the service of his father’s trade. In the little city, amongst his young companions, he is the leader, gay, joyous, light of heart, a singer of songs with his fingers nimble on the viol and his feet beating time in the dance.
Saint Francis, Apostle of the Blessed Eucharist
Authors: Devas Dominic
Published: July 2007

Saint Francis studying Holy Scripture : no, it must be confessed, few people ever picture him bent over a book or, with pen in hand, busy over his writing, pausing awhile to pray and ponder, and then taking up his work once more. I should like to see an artist produce a picture of Francis writing, for it would serve to remind us that, though his writings may be all gathered together into the compass of a single slender volume, they contain, nevertheless, passages of unsurpassed beauty. And this was the result not merely of prayer, but of study. Intrinsic evidence makes this plain, even if we had no further proof; but, as a matter of fact, we have the express testimony of Saint Bonaventure, who tells us that, though, prior to the foundation of the Order, he had never devoted much time to study—his early education was slightly above the average, since he knew French, and was well read in romance literature— afterwards he made considerable progress in learning, not merely by prayer, but by study, non solum orando sed etiam legendo.

Now, in these writings of Saint Francis, there is a certain subject to which is given an unmistakable prominence. It is not poverty, not the abstract love of God, not preaching, but devotion to the Person of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and as a consequence great reverence for priests and churches. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate this point and, as a preliminary, it is well to bear in mind that this attitude of Francis was a conscious protest against a widespread neglect of and irreverence towards the Blessed Sacrament,
Assisi Speaks
Authors: Chadwick M. G.
Published: July 2007

The luminous hills of Umbria, the absolute sun, the grey climbing town, the rows of thick green cypresses—who has not heard of these and of the little sanctuary that is Assisi? Some, too, perhaps, have come to guess at a whole world made up of prayer and of a real Presence enshrined in no less a sanctuary than man’s soul; to guess, to wonder, even to realize so far as the wayfaring man may. But are there many who have given thought to the mind of modern Assisi, to consider how the townsfolk of St. Francis speak and think to-day of their greatest citizen? How many of the thronging pilgrims were able to read the Italian placards, the ‘affisioni,’ that were everywhere, half-covering the walls of the little sunny town?

Now, in Italy, the powers that be speak to their subjects through the placard : upon any morning you may find lavish messages on all the walls. Does a Queen go to death or a Minister escape it, a calamity befall, a festa loom in the coming week, instantly proclamations from the Mayor, the committee, the parish Church or what not are set where he who runs may read. The newspaper catches a few thousand eyes and possibly a few hundred intelligences, but the prolific, eloquent walls catch us all. Almost might history be written by means of placards alone. Let, then, the walls of Assisi speak:-

‘The Commune and people of Assisi,’ we read, ‘are custodians of a good, destined to be shared by the whole world, for their town is like a heart sending its life-blood beyond the limits of space and time.
Anarchy and Age
Authors: Jarret Bde
Published: July 2007

The younger generation is having an immense amount of attention paid it by the novelists of today. School stories abound, foot the jolly old-fashioned school stories, with their idealist friendships, their thrilling game contests, and their appeal to the boy reader, but problem school stories, full of desperate purpose, critical, ‘contributions to the literature of the subject,’ as the commercial jacket grimly records. They afford psychological material for Freud, Jung, and their more unpleasant followers. They are not books for boys, but about boys written for the purpose of improving the education of youth.

Then there are the young-man books, not the old-fashioned type even of Father Benson—who died in 1914, and whose characters are, therefore, pre-war and out of fashion—but the newer type, full of complexes and inhibitions with enormous elaboration of unnecessary detail, due to a pelmanistic capacity for observation, searching out and remembering the irrelevant. We notice in them the sex-impulse as a substitute for careful writing, the decay of life thus providing a rather more effortless way of book-making than painting ‘a true and perfect image of life indeed.’ The young-women problem books are, of course, even nastier. That is to be expected. A good young woman is apparently a most uninteresting subject, more uninteresting than a good young man—and that in the view of the novelists is saying a very great deal.

It is not quite that our authors wish us to believe the world is worse than it was, but only that now it doesn’t mind anyone knowing how bad it is.
Gilbert Linklater
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

In an ancient south country city with a great past behind it, and nothing whatever in front of it, there exist cheek by jowl a vast Norman cathedral and a small Catholic church. The church, oddly enough, is of the eighteenth century, and it is not known how the St. Lull Catholics of that era found the means to build it, still less what spirit of effrontery prompted them to rear it so close to their lost cathedral. There it is, off a bye-street of Georgian hou'ses and spiked garden-walls, its whereabouts indicated by a furtive notice at the incidence of an alley. Pursue this alley in the spirit of faith, and you come abruptly up to a dwarfish stucco building submerged in the morning shadow of the cathedral, its graveyard, planted with classical trees of the family of the willow in a mourning ring, terminated by the west transept of the fane itself.

The stucco interior is anything but architecturally impressive, and so damp that flourishing outcrops of fungus uproot the tiles in untrodden parts of the floor. But there is a clear fairway to the altar, and a frequented one. You seldom find Our Lord without one or two kneeling adorers if you look in at any time between sunrise and” sunset, and I have looked in myself at all hours of the day. I have a liking for the church, apart from my ardour for its Lord; and my liking extends to the quiet graveyard in its rear.

I was winding up a summer holiday in St. Lull: staying on at my rooms there, after my children had gone back to their convents, to meet an American friend before returning to my husband in Italy. It was the first week in October, and the friend, a greyhaired priest on leave for literary work, had come down to visit the cathedral and me.
Catholic England in 1837
Authors: Curd T. W. C.
Published: July 2007

There are some Catholics who claim that the Church is not making the progress that it should in this country; they point to the scarcity of churches in some places, the shortage of schools in others, the slow growth of our numbers, the lack of Catholic influence in matters of public importance, and other signs from which they draw doleful conclusions.

Whilst our progress is never so rapid as we should wish, and while there still exist disabilities and other circumstances which we may deplore, a rapid survey of some of the changes that have come over Catholic England since the year Queen Victoria came to the throne will show what truly remarkable progress we have made in a period which may seem a long time but which is actually within the lifetime of many still living.

In 1837 there were several counties in England and Wales with no Catholic church or chapel of any kind, and eleven with only one chapel for the spiritual needs of a parish which sometimes extended far beyond the county boundary. In Scotland, of course, the position was far worse; eleven chapels had to serve the needs of twenty-four counties, thirteen being entirely devoid of any place wherein Mass could be said. Think what this means, you who have only to step across the road to a fine church in which you can hear two or three Masses every day of the week if you are so inclined.

In London there were twenty-five ‘chapels’ ; churches, and, of course, cathedrals, were unknown. In the whole of England there were 433 chapels; Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Middlesex accounting for nearly half.
The Ministrel and the Don
Authors: Reeves Jhon Baptist
Published: July 2007

Friendship, according to the philosophers, is founded on resemblance. The more two persons have in common, the easier for them to be friends.

‘Pares cum paribus facillime congregantur.’ In the absence of books and a reliable memory I venture to think that this is Cicero expounding the foundation of friendship with Laelius for mouthpiece.

St. Thomas I am happily able to quote. He is emphatic and explicit.

‘Is likeness a cause of love? It seems not. Potters, says Aristotle, quarrel with one another. A man, says Augustine, loves in another what he would not be himself : he loves an actor, but would not himself be one. Sick men love health and poor men riches. We all love those who give us money and health; and those who continue friends of their dead. So likeness cannot, it seems, be a cause of love.

‘On the other hand, however, it is written in tEccle-siasticus : Every beast loveth his like.

’ My own answer is that likeness, properly speaking, is a cause of love. But there are two kinds of likeness. Actual presence of the same quality in two things make them alike. Thus two white things are alike. But presence and absence of the same quality in two things can also make them alike, when the thing that lacks the quality tends to it. Thus a body at rest and a body in motion are alike in respect of rest and motion, which are the same fundamentally, since related as act to potency.

‘The first kind of likeness begets the love of friendship ; the second, the love of concupiscence, or friendship based on usefulness or pleasure.
The Fiddler
Authors: Richings R.
Published: July 2007

We were on Isola Pescatore. The heat of the day had iessened. It was six o’clock. Odours of garlic, fish and unwashed drains, drifted after us as we made our way through crazy alleys. Houses lolled towards each other; steps rose to join erratic arches, or give access to crooked balconies. The cobbled way played tricks with one’s step.

We reached the limit of the island and were about to turn back, when we discovered a wooden stall, set out with peasant’s ware.

There were mementoes displayed of every kind: little vases of Venetian glass; pots made of local marble; boxes of olive wood, and trays garnished with coloured inlaid designs; bronzes and beads. From the cross-bar supporting the white canvas awning hung rosaries of nuts gathered in the woods and dried in the sun.

Everything was attractive, though much would look tawdry enough away from its setting. I admired a number of trinkets, but saw no gift that would please my friends.

I was moving on, when I heard music and saw the Fiddler. He stood on a rough block of wood, the large black, worn-out boot on his right foot nosing round to the left. His trousers, coarse and biscuit-brown, creased voluminously about his legs, and were secured round his waist by a thin scarlet belt. His coat, blue, a little shrunken, a little faded, was unbuttoned, and revealed his white shirt, open at the neck; his cuffs were rolled back from bis brown wrists.