bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gill Sans….
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

Writing of Eric Gill some years ago Graham Greene remarked that ‘Catholicism in England instead of producing revolutionaries, produces only eccentrics, and that Gill was a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics . . . That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anticlerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful.’ And we have seen quite a lot of those silly weary smiles yet again in the reception of Mr Speaight’s biography of Gill. Rarely can such a beautifully produced and expensive book have received such accolades for the biographer’s skill and such a confident dismissal of the subject. One sees the book being read with a nostalgic regret for the sunny days of such delightful chesterbelloc buffoonery with all the home-grunnit food, tunics and sandals, and placed on the shelf with a sad shrug, ‘Poor Gill’.

I do not want to be misunderstood, Gill was certainly eccentric in many respects, his views on monarchy and the indecency of husband and wife kneeling together in church, for example, and Mr Speaight has valuably stressed Gill’s Victorian formation which plays an important part in all this. He has also filled in many of the gaps in the Autobiography, particularly the incidents leading up to the removal from Ditchling, his documentation is wide and admirably integrated. Gill’s biography is perhaps an unenviable and delicate task, but I think the reception of the book and the confirmation of Gill’s place among the wayward cranks of English Catholicism owes something to the biographer’s interpretation of his subject, or rather the interpretation he fails to make.
German Christians and Germany's Boundaries
Authors: Boxer Charles
Published: July 2007

It was rather as one had supposed. The massive show of solidarity with the CDU in the last election presented by German Catholicism in all its shapes and forms was the last outing before being trundled into the Church History Museum. Much has happened between the General Election last October and the local North-Rhine Westphalian elections in July. Rumour had it that an anonymous article which appeared in the March number of Wort und Wahrheit was written by none other than Bernard Hanssler. Wort und Wahrheit is a periodical that tends to reflect episcopal opinion; Bernard Hanssler is the priest in charge of the Central Committee of German Catholicism; the article was entitled ‘The end of political Catholicism’.

Dr Günther Schreiber has recently suggested that catholic authorities have recognised that some basic re-thinking of the official political attitudes of German Catholicism was necessary. His analysis of the situation raises considerable doubts about the motives behind this reappraisal. It has been much more a defensive reaction to the inevitable break-up of the Adenauer ideology than a genuine attempt to think out for instance, the implications of the Second Vatican Council; much more a withdrawal from a position that was distasteful to democratic opinion, than a realisation of what the church’s presence in a modern society might mean. The North-Rhine Westphalian elections were heralded by a pastoral letter stressing the neutrality of the church towards the political parties.
New Left Catholics
Authors: Williams Raymond
Published: July 2007

Some three years ago I was asked to write an introduction to a new journal of radical catholic opinion. I sent along, to what proved to be Slant, what seemed to me at the time a slightly rash note of welcome, and was much impressed, when the first number appeared, to find that I had been understood as cautious, suspicious, and even vaguely minatory. Such ambivalences will doubtless recur. The Slant position, if we are to believe Catholics and the Left, is now well established. It has already been honoured by an attack in the Spectator, and I suppose it is just another mark of its success that it must now face the rigour of its friends.

The Slant manifesto, which is what Catholics and the Left amounts to, is very uneven: not so much in quality as in level. Its first part, Christians against Capitalism, by Adrian Cunningham and Terry Eagleton,is a vigorous piece of pamphleteering, of a properly manifest kind. I hope I do not wrong it when I say that it seems to me the best short statement that I have read of the general position of the New Left. Its Christian interpretation of community, which is inevitably its starting point, is unforced and organic, and it gains in specificity by being able to talk frankly (as in other traditions is not always possible) about loving relationships as the heart of community. At the same time it is powerful in negative criticism: the chapter on Liberalism is especially astringent and wholly convincing.
Religious Freedom and International Law
Authors: Draper G. I. A. D.
Published: July 2007

The gradual abandonment of the purely theological basis for religious persecution in favour of a secular posture, based on social and political stability, inevitably led to the emergence of the basic modern premise of freedom of religious worship. The outcome of this long and painful interlude in the history of man becomes apparent when we look at certain recent developments in international law. The unfolding of the modern conception of human rights owes much to the philosophy of such men as Locke. The natural law rights of states produced their distinct natural law echo in the fundamental rights of man. Such ideas played a large part in American and French revolutionary thinking. The right to believe and worship as one likes is now based on natural law conceptions derived from a purely fictitious state of nature and reason. We are prone to say with Sir Henry Maine that natural law theories gave us international law. It is a legitimate extension to go on and say that 18th century natural law theories gave us the idea of fundamental human rights. Among these came, ultimately, freedom in the exercise of religion. It is this parentage that accounts for the provision in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution of 1776: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. A like idea translated into law appears in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 in providing for freedom from harassment on account of one’s religious opinions.
The Pastoral Care of The Clergy
Authors: Kennedy Christopher
Published: July 2007

A few years ago, it would have sounded unthinkably liberal to say that a priest should not let a week go by without spending an evening socially with laymen. To many maybe it still does. But the point is obvious enough; there is no better way for a priest to cut through platitudes and pat answers and learn to address himself directly to realities than through candid and honest conversation with lay friends, on a level of social parity and about matters of common human interest, and not merely those of a professional, ecclesiastical nature. Such exchanges would benefit particularly the young priest and help him overcome the brash and insensitive enthusiasm which is so often the product of much education and little experience. This would appear to be what Vatican II’s Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests means in its statement that ‘the Word of God ought not to be explained in a general and abstract way, but rather by applying the lasting truth of the Gospel to the particular circumstances of life.’ In its first chapter this decree states that, although priests are taken from among men and ordained for men, they are nevertheless to ‘live on earth with other men as brothers,’ and in a manner which is marked by such human virtues as affability and sincerity. ‘They are not to be separated from the people of God or from any other person.’ The reason for this is quite clear: ‘They cannot be of service to men if they remain strangers to the life and conditions of men.’
What is Wrong with God?
Authors: Steeman Th. M.
Published: July 2007

Come to think of it, Nietzsche’s famous phrase: God is dead, has a peculiar ring to it. It is not an unqualified statement of atheism, a simple denial of the existence of God; it is rather the announcement that someone who was alive at some time has died. God existed, he exists no more. A straight atheism would have tried to prove that God is not, does not exist, cannot exist. Not so Nietzsche: for him God has died. The one who is acclaimed by a long tradition as the Immortal, has disappeared from the scene, his time is over. God is dead.

It would be too easy an answer if we decided that, in any case, Nietzsche is dead. We can perhaps qualify Nietzsche’s statement and say that in view of the faith of ever so many theists, God is not really dead yet. But, somehow, we have to agree that something is wrong with God. It would be accurate to say, resuming Nietzsche’s imagery, that if God is not really dead, he is at any rate sick. If he has not disappeared yet, it is at least clear that his appearance is not quite what it should be. And it seems timely to ask: what is the matter with God? Or, again more closely to Nietzsche’s language: what has become of God ?

I think we can dispense with arguing the actuality of the problem. Ever since the Bishop of Woolwich wrote his Honest to God, it has been clear that God has become a problem generally, also within the fold of the Christian churches. Bonhoeffer’s program of a life in a world come of age ‘as if God did not exist’ also finds a rather amazing following.
Typology and a Poet
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

It is rare that aPh. D. thesis gets turned into a book so readable and so wide-ranging as this one. That it should be well-written is already remarkable in a work of this kind, but even more so is its width of range and scope. Dr Charity, who now lectures on English at York, was bred as a Methodist, so that I suppose he has the bible in his bones, and in due course he made the contact with Dante’s poetry which led to the rather unconventional line of research that bears fruit here. A certain courage, perhaps, was entailed in his virtually staking an academic reputation on a first book addressed to scholars on two quite different fronts, to biblical theologians and to Dantists: the former may be more provoked than disarmed by the author’s warning them that he is ‘a theologian of a sort only . . . and pro tern’, while Dante scholars — even such as can spare time for a little theology – are mostly no better disposed than other specialists to the ‘amateur’. But the result shows that the risk was very well worth taking. This is a remarkable work in many ways – scholarly, perceptive and intelligent, nearly always closely argued, and, so far as I can judge, original.

Its general subject is typology, and this has to do, of course, with symbolic or figurative meanings, particularly in the Bible; and in the Bible considered precisely as an historical narrative.
London—A City in Dissolution
Authors: Pearsall Ronald
Published: July 2007

‘It is evident’, wrote Thomas Carlyle a century ago, ‘that an old order of things is breaking up into fragments; and men watch it, as they watch all wrecks, fearfully’. Nothing could be more apt than this when applied to London today. For we see a city in dissolution, a city that has got out of hand.

The problem is so vast. The idea that the problem is solely one of traffic does not bear a minute’s examination; traffic congestion is a convenient scapegoat, an excuse for not doing anything, a reason for doing the barest minimum (the odd traffic roundabout here, the odd fly-over there). These muted attempts to solve traffic congestion savour of a sop to the conscience, just as the cornflake packets posing as architecture are acts of tardy defiance against a chaos that was predicted by Ruskin and Carlyle with ineffable accuracy.

Had there been no war, had the population remained static, then London might have tottered on for a century more or so, with its prisons disguised as Gothic castles and its abatoirs as Venetian palaces, and its churches built for little more than £4,000 (including fittings and furnishings). However, such was not to be. As Matthew Arnold wrote in another context, ‘For what wears out the life of mortal men? ‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;’
William of Saint Thierry VI: Faith and Heresy
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

In an age when people ask whether God is better visualised as ‘up there’ or ‘in here’, it could be relevant to recall the medieval and Augustinian approach, which claimed that the best way to think of God was necessarily as that on which the intellectual structure of man is modelled – mens, notitia, amor or even memoria, intellectus, voluntas. In other words, the Trinity. For if a Christian holds in the first place that man is made in the image and likeness of his creator, then one can speculate about the original on the basis of the copy. ‘For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.’

The traditional formula still had validity in the period of William of Saint Thierry because man was even then conceived as being sympathetically in accord with the universe around him, and with God. A divine quaternity related him to the four elements, the four humours, and so on, and divine trinity, in the same way, related him to the nature and the persons of God. It was apparently not difficult for twelfth century people to see themselves as part of the landscape, in an almost Chinese sense, nor was it difficult for them to see themselves as involved in the matter of God, ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin’.

We have already considered William’s treatment of the vindication, as he calls it, of the three faculties of man by the three persons of the Trinity, memory, reason and will, each being taken as his own by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively.
The Crisis in the Missions
Authors: Yendell Agnes
Published: July 2007

‘The Church in Mission’ is a collection of papers by various authors, mostly translated from the French, which have been published in recent years. There are eleven; and nine would have been enough. After an excellent introduction from Information Catholique we are given two papers on missionary theology which make weary reading. Presumably it is a prudent convention, before launching into any subject, to survey what has already been done, but in the field of theology this can be tedious, and the reader begins to wonder whether the Church is well served by writings which wrap up a few simple ideas in many yards of abstractions. In these sixty two pages we learn that whereas at one time the primary aim of the missions was said to be to plant the Church in pagan lands, which took precedence over the aim to save souls, -more recent thought has reached the conclusion that the first cannot be done without the second. There is an interior as well as an exterior Church, a res of which the visible Church is the sacrament. That the theologian is not redundant when dealing with living issues can be appreciated in the articles by P. A. Liégé, who writes realistically and economically on ‘The Theology of the Church and the Mission Pastoral’ ‘Religious Liberty’ and ‘Before the Catechuminate’. His third paper contains this important paragraph:
Black Power and the Liberal Conscience
Authors: McCabe Lucy
Published: July 2007

Norman Mailer has been travelling the lecture circuit with Stokely Carmichael this winter. At dinner one evening, a friend of mine tells me, Mailer said he had begun the tour expecting to support ‘Black Power’ in a general way, but introducing a few cautionary phrases. After the first question period, he realised that he was ‘way to the left of Stokely.’ Many white liberals react like this, criticizing Black Power for its betrayal of the radical ideals they have associated with the civil rights movement. Non-violence is one of these vicarious ideals: very few white Americans are non-violent for themselves, their right to defend themselves or their families has never been called into question. But they had admired Martin Luther King for loving his enemies and turning the other cheek. Now they were hearing Stokely Carmichael’s voice, growing testy at constant requests for reassurance saying ‘I have never rejected violence’. He has two tones of voice, one for white living rooms and one for black crowds and the same words have different overtones. He has a standard response to a question about violence. It goes something like this. ‘If you don’t mess with me, I’ll leave you alone’. Pause. ‘But if you move to strike me, I’ll break your arm.’ Then, on a rising tone, ‘and I might break the other one too.’ When this is greeted by wild cheers, whites come away pretty shaken.

The fact is that the white liberal does not live way to the left of Stokely, he just feels that way.
Rhodesia Infelix: Fact and Fiction
Authors: Townsend H. G.
Published: July 2007

Rhodesia today is an unhappy country. It is unhappy in its divisions, its rulers and the direction they have taken; unhappy in the international ostracism its white citizens have brought upon it and in the kind of friends they are making abroad; unhappy too in that its human and moral problem has been made a bone of political contention in Britain; unhappy especially because its Christian citizens by and large differ so little from the rest in their social attitudes and aims that Christianity seems irrelevant to the solution of the basic problem.

It was inevitable, but unfortunate, that Rhodesia should become the centre of a controversy that is assuming international proportions. Its problem is very much a problem of our time: a problem of acceptance of and adjustment to new social patterns and unities which conflict with habits of mind and living acquired in the past and the expectations they have engendered. To those who have enjoyed a dignified and stable existence with a comfortable standard of living, far-reaching social change, however inescapable in the long run, appears as a threat to their own and their children’s security and, if this security has been won by their own enterprise and effort, as an unjust undoing of their achievement. When the required change is one of the integration of two groups of people so different in cultural background, experience and present attainment as are the two major racial groups in Rhodesia – the Africans and the Europeans
Just for a Riband to stick in his Coat?
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Mr Roe’s book comes as something of a surprise; not because of its contents or its presentation, but simply because it has not been done before. Of all the comparative literature theses of the ‘Jones in France’/‘Dupont in England’ variety, it is natural to expect that someone would have examined the role of Lamennais in this country. From any point of view, he is one of the greatest names in the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. He lived in England for awhile (a crucial while: it led to his much controverted decision to take orders), and had many English connections and admirers. No matter: Mr Roe has done the job very well indeed, though, as he is careful to warn us himself, he has been more concerned with the effect of Lamennais upon England, as exemplar, than with the influence of English ideas upon Lamennais.

By the development of current religious and political ideas in his own person, Lamennais offered to English observers the essence of certain key notions in religion and politics which were otherwise diffused throughout the pages of books and periodicals and the actions of very different groups of men. He was one of the most articulate exponents of the renascent Bourbon legitimism with de Bonald and Chateaubriand in the days of the Drapeau blanc and the Conservateur.
The Diseases of Man and the Death of God
Authors: Swanson Hamish
Published: July 2007

Fr Fergus Kerr (Slant g, June-July, 1966) presents as self-evident the proposition that ‘theology is primarily a way of talking about man', and supports this with the historicist description that ‘every major breakthrough in our understanding of God issues from an equivalent breakthrough in our understanding of man’. Our anthropology has undergone a revolution, so it is plain that our theology must, if it is to survive, undergo an equivalent revolution. It might at first appear that Professor William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School is the man to work the revolution. After the New Reformation and the New Morality, the New Essence of Christianity? He is certainly aware that ‘all our theology, even our essences of Christianity, must be done afresh in every generation’, and makes a brave attempt at this doing afresh. I want to say something here of how brave the attempt is and why I think that it ultimately fails to engineer the revolution. The kind of thing that Fr Kerr and Professor Hamilton presume about revelation and theology is perhaps easiest conveyed by suggesting that the case of the prophet Hosea has become our paradigm. Hosea’s understanding of his own condition, of his continuing love for the unfaithful Gomer, led him to understand the continuing love of Yahweh for the unfaithful Israel. Hosea’s longing for the return of his wife was not a longing for this or that aspect of her character but a longing for the woman herself, for Gomer. So Hosea thinks of Yahweh’s redemptive hope for Israel as a promise for the whole people. In this his theology differs radically from that of Amos and Isaiah whose experience led them to speak in terms of a remnant of the people having a share in the kingdom. Hosea has first of all made an effort to understand his own situation and has then been able to understand something of God. He has made his experience into a sign for the whole society of Israel. As Kerr says: ‘God reveals himself in a new light to people who have gained some new insight into what they are’.
Reflections on the February Editorial
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

For an order of Preachers the written word is as essential a means of communication as the spoken word. The monthly editorial comment in New Blackfriars is one of a considerable variety of styles of literary communication practised by the English Dominican Province, and one which is closer to oral preaching than other styles since it must make its impact on the immediacies of a rapidly changing historical life. If such contemporary comment is to be effective, it must try to stimulate and provoke consciences, and so to inform them in a personal life of faith. A monthly comment which merely pronounced ‘timeless truths’ would be irrelevant. It is plain that a concern for the significance of the present moment is exposed to dangers very similar to those of pulpit preaching; audacity may slide into rashness. An editor must have a discriminating awareness of his audience, for the Comment is part of a two-way communication taking place over a period of time with an audience free to enter into discussion with the editor or to abandon it. It would be surprising if remarks made within a context of discussion built up in this way were not to appear eccentric or outrageous when presented in selective quotation with sensational headlining to a quite different audience; and it would be improper to assess these remarks in isolation from a total context which includes not merely a single month’s comment but a whole continuing debate conducted over months and years in the pages of a monthly periodical.
The Case for Mao
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Anything written about China, other than for the daily press, risks being out of date long before it gets into print. By the time this is being read, the differences between Chairman Mao and the administrative set-up in Peking may have been finally resolved, or shelved; there may even have been an intervention — though it is difficult to conceive of the Americans being foolish enough to back it — from Chiang Kai Shek. In theory, he has been awaiting just such a time of internecine strife to send an expeditionary force across to the mainland. That is, of course, if the strife is really as violent as we have been led to believe. English visitors recently (January 1967) in Canton suggest that although a few months ago there was a serious likelihood of the army under Mao moving from Shanghai against an army raised from Peking by Liu Shao Chi, this clash has been averted, and rumours of violent deaths by the hundreds in cities like Nanking seem to lack foundation.

No doubt a movement with the youthful intensity of the Red Guards will not fade back into obscurity without some violence somewhere — you can’t summon up this massive support from a nation’s youth (their ages seem to range from 10 to 18) and then deprive it of an active outlet. But before we jump to hasty conclusions we should be very wary of press reports, particularly from correspondents who, though they may have been inside China for a week or so (it doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to get in) can’t converse with the Chinese without an interpreter,
The Limits of Liberalism
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.

To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.
The Reputation of Ford Madox Ford
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: July 2007

If Ford Madox Ford is more widely read and discussed today than he was a few years ago, then most of the credit must go to the Americans. In the late thirties, Ford’s reputation was at an absolute nadir in England, only twenty years after he had been at the centre of the metropolitan literary scene. The English Review, which Ford edited between 1908 and 1910, was one of the most distinguished publications ever to appear in the English-speaking world: the contributors to the first issue included Hardy, James, Conrad, Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Tolstoy, and Wells, while later numbers included the first published work of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. Ford may, indeed, have been half-remembered as a great editor, but his own creative achievement as a novelist was resolutely disregarded. Thus, Mr Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938, contains a useful chronological list of key works of modern literature published between 1900 and 1932.If we look up the entry for the year 1915, we see titles by Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, and Somerset Maugham, but no word of Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Again, Mr Connolly gives a very comprehensive list of books for the years 1924 to 1928, but says nothing of Some Do Not and the other sections of Ford’s long novel about Christopher Tietjens, now known collectively as Parade's End. And Parade's End is certainly regarded in America as one of the major achievements of modern English fiction.
Benedictine Aggiornamento
Authors: Stacpoole Alberic
Published: July 2007

The modern urge to dig up one’s roots to inspect their state of health has not escaped the Benedictines, and the spirited winds of the Vatican Council no less than of the September 1966 Rome Council of Abbots have given the urge an added impetus. The issues are broad and ontological, ranging from liturgical adaptation to the question ‘what is a monk?’. But no issue exercises theorists and practitioners alike so vehemently as that of the tension, as old as the ages of man, between Mary and Martha, between the contemplative and the active vocation. Both schools of thought agree that nihil opere Dei praeponatur (RB XLIII); but where the contemplative school believes that laborare et orare embraces the essential Benedictine life, the active school insists on the wider formula orare et laborare et praedicare. The latter believes as a corollory that something of orare which the contemplatives allot to lectio divina (essentially a preparation for prayer, if not an indirect mode of prayer itself), should be allotted in part to the necessary preparation praedicare – i.e. that prayer and apostolic work feed on one another and are mutually supporting in the monk’s proper pursuit of the unum necessarium.

Both schools are returning to the fontes of monasticism, to Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, the Regula Magistri, the Regula Benedicti, S. Gregory’s Dialogues, in order to test and substantiate their case for the form of monastic life they favour.
Public Worship and Human Society
Authors: Crichton J. D.
Published: July 2007

If we were to take a look at human society of some four and a half centuries ago, say, about the year 1500, we should see there a world that was still largely sacral. The whole of life was bound up with religion, the Church, the Sacerdotium, penetrating into every department of human life, and in the civil order the Imperium itself was regarded as sacred. The Sacerdotium may have been corrupt and the Imperium tottering but men still thought of the whole of society as sacred. Even the very processes of nature by which millions of men and women gained a painful livelihood were nearer to magic in their minds than we usually like to think they were. Nature was largely unpredictable, afflicted with mysterious calamities and marred from time to time by what were called ‘Acts of God’.

On the other hand, there was an immense surge of new life throughout Europe. Men had rediscovered the ancient literature of Greece and Rome and were luxuriating in it. For more than a hundred years Italy had flowered with a new art in paint and stone, whose products we still admire. Great new buildings were going up, but above all, men felt that they were new beings. They were throwing off’ the restrictions of the old sacral order and were finding themselves, discovering new powers to which they could see no limit. Nature itself was being freed from the bondage of magic and within a hundred years Galileo would demolish the old picture of the cosmos and take the music out of the spheres.
Rome Converted and Paris Preserved
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

‘Has Rome been converted?’ is the question put by the title of Henri Fesquet’s book on Vatican II and its aftermath (Rome s’est-elle convertie? Paris, Grasset, 1966, 12.00 Frs.). Better placed than most to sound the reactions of the French bishops to events in Rome, Fesquet is Le Monde‘s correspondent on religious matters, and a very well-informed one he is. This makes the only slightly muted optimism of his book all the more surprising. He is convinced that the question must be answered in the affirmative, and he selects a number of themes to illustrate this — the new concept of the priest, the concern with the ecumenical spirit, with world poverty, with public opinion, and with the role of women in the Church.

‘Thanks to Vatican II,’ he writes in the preface, ‘Catholicism is giving the impression of taking the Gospel more seriously. The Council’s most essential task . . . was for the Church to look at herself in the light of the New Testament. What does the Gospel tell us, if not that all progress passes through death ? The Church will only renew herself by accepting immolation in the image of her Founder.’ Immolation of the old, to direct the development of the new. A renewed Christian eschatology, for example, which will present itself to twentieth century man as the accomplishment and metamorphosis of humanity. And a way has been shown of reducing the tragic opposition between Marxism and Christianity, which only developed in the first place because Christians had forgotten their most urgent duty.
The Reluctant Protagonist: The Dichotomy of Cardinal Pole
Authors: Gwatkin Jean Bowes
Published: July 2007

When men stand out from great events they come of necessity under the glass of scrutiny, to be viewed from many angles. On some, a general judgment stands the test of time, on others it is later reversed or modified while others again elude a consensus of opinion and remain subjects of controversy. The great epoch of the reformation forced into the public view men who otherwise might have led lives of relative obscurity or be remembered today for quite different reasons. Because of the reformation, Thomas More and Martin Luther have, to the generality of succeeding generations, become identified with dramatic and irrevocable choice. Reginald Pole, on the other hand, is by no means so universally remembered. Historians have viewed him variously — as subtle and wily, as unworldly and indecisive, as upright and courageous. It can be fairly stated that his temperament bore an affinity with that of Erasmus, that he shared with Colet a clear-sighted desire for ecclesiastical reform and that at one time he came close to Luther’s thoughts on justification. In common with Erasmus, his considered theological opinions were regarded in some quarters with a suspicion which hardened into menace. Like More and Luther, Pole was presented with dilemmas and, not without agony, he came to decisions. His decisions were not followed by consequences of comparable drama. He did not divert the course of history and he died in his bed of a common fever. His writings are not often recalled, his career presents contradictions, his personality eludes.
What is Corruption?
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

Father Herbert McCabe was penalised, or disciplined, for having written that the Church is corrupt, and the censor who passed the statement for publication has been removed from office. I have very little doubt that it was the use of this word, ‘corrupt’, which brought down such indignation on their heads; and, indeed, I can readily understand how his statement, tom from its context, provoked feelings of anger and shock. Taken out of context, the statement appeared to bring against the Church the gravest possible charge, and to do so on a flimsy basis of four complaints about particular actions, only one of which (Cardinal Spellman’s militaristic speech) was obviously substantial. Of course, most people who have followed the affair know by now how misleading this appearance was. First, the general drift of the editorial was a rebuttal of Father Davis’s accusations against the Church, in explanation of his own withdrawal from it, so that the statement so widely quoted had the force of a concession to Father Davis of what Father McCabe found true in his charges, although he nevertheless found the general assessment incorrect. Secondly, the role of Father McCabe’s examples was not (as it appeared out of context) as proof of the corruption of the Church: rather, the proof was that we took such things as expected behaviour on the part of bishops and the like, instead of as shocking aberrations. It was, no doubt, foolish of Father McCabe to write a sentence so liable to be quoted out of context, and so misleading when thus quoted; but far less foolish than the behaviour of the authorities who dealt with the rcsulting situation by first silencing thc one man who could havc explained cxactly what he meant, and thus correctcd thc misinterpretation.
Jerusalem 1966
Authors: Vallquist Gunnel
Published: July 2007

To come here for three days seemed rather meaningless beforehand. But since the itinerary included this visit, I did not want to miss it. It would at least be a preparation for the real journey one is always hoping for, with unbounded time at one’s disposal. Then there were other reserves: it’s no good hoping to penetrate the religious reality which lies below, behind, especially in so short a time; everything that obscures and blocks this — the tourists, the petty commerce, the local colour of the East, the apparatus of rival devotions — all this asserts itself in a much more clamant way.

No contact with the religious reality — that was a foregone conclusion. But man proposes, God disposes. I could hardly imagine a more brutal contact with this reality. I passed those three days in solitude, with the Gospels and Jerusalem. I had little idea that so charged a current would pass between these two poles.

Nevertheless, with every year that passes I am more and more seized by fear as I listen to the lamentations of Holy Week. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God.’ And I know that Jerusalem, which once meant the people ofjuda, the synagogue, now means the Church, Christianity, divided, heir not only of the promise but of the betrayal.
The Future of Belief
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Leslie Dewart’s book, just published in England, is the most far-reaching philosophical reappraisal of Catholic belief that has appeared in this country in recent years. It is symptomatic of a shift of emphasis that has begun to appear in Catholic thinking generally — away from ‘progressive’ preoccupations with the modernisation of the church, the liturgy, the parish, the ‘community’ and towards a new way of thinking and feeling about God. The modernisation programme – at least in terms of books — is wearing thin. Its slogans no longer seem much more relevant than the ones they replaced. They do not offer a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What the hell does it all mean?’ As Sebastian Moore rightly says, in his new book God is a New Language (which is another symptom of the same shift in emphasis), ‘what is within the circle (i.e. of progressive theologians) a revolution appears to the wider world to be a purely domestic battle, offering no more than the journalistic interest of a palace revolution’. Whereas — the implication is — what is needed is a real revolution. Dewart’s work is largely subversive: helping to prepare for that revolution and suggesting the outlines of a strategy.

I have some reservations about Dewart’s thesis. In one sense I think he goes too far, and almost loses touch with the church as a community at all — and thus what is being hinted at is liable to become only an intellectual revolution, not one that overturns the world.
Final Solutions?
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

The German occupation brought to French Jews a fresh realization of the profound anguish of the Jewish condition — and also to those Jews in North Africa who had been emancipated by the presence of France, and who had adopted French as their literary language. Albert Memmi is the most articulate of these writing today, and his new book, La Libération du Juif (Paris, Gallimard, 1966, 15 Fs, the second volume of his Portrait du Juif) proposes what is for him the only possible solution to that condition. M. Memmi himself is a very interesting phenomenon, a Tunisian Jew who has described the life of the North African ghetto in Statue de Sel and has since analysed the psychology of colonialism in Portrait du Colonisateur. The fact that he was a member of an oppressed minority within an oppressed majority under French colonial rule made his situation rather special. The French language liberated him from the ghetto, but separated him from the Arab majority who, at the same time, were trying to free themselves from the French. The young Memmi obviously sympathized with their aspirations, whilst realizing that once they were achieved his own people would be far worse off than they had been under the French. And this in fact is precisely what has happened: the life of the North African Jewish communities has been made intolerable by the new independent Arab governments, whether monarchical or democratic-socialist, and another exodus has begun from what were once flourishing communities.
Fresh and New
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

I should like to make a comment on Father Van Straelen’s book The Catholic Encounter with World Religions, reviewed by Agnes Yendell in your February number.

Reading it myself I was greatly surprised to discover in various places my own sentences (at times slightly twisted), simply stolen by the author without any acknowledgement. In all he has lifted a good sixty lines from my article ‘Missionary Thinking in the Context of Today’, New Blackfriars, August 1965. The references are as follows:

V.S. p. 26, 15 lines from N.B., pp. 630 and 631.

V.S. p. 65, 12 lines from N.B., p. 636.

V.S. p. 71, 21 lines from N.B., pp. 631 and 632.

V.S. p. 145, 12 lines from N.B., p. 639.

My name appears nowhere in his book.

The dust cover tells us that the fifth chapter on ‘The Council and the Missions’ “was written specially for this book”. How curious when reading twenty-two pages of this chapter to find that no less than eight of them have again been lifted bodily from a writing of Father de Tourigny, W.F. There is, of course, no mention of Fr de Tourigny anywhere.

As we are rightly told on the cover Fr Van Straelen, who is a Ph.D. of Cambridge, a Professor of Philosophy, etc., ‘always produces something fresh and new’.

How odd too that the book, which includes some long quotations from Cardinal Heenan, was nominated by the Cardinal in the Catholic Herald as his ‘Book of the Year’ for 1965.
Authority in the Church
Authors: Nowell Robert
Published: July 2007

Any discussion of authority in the Church today must start from the fact that authority in the political sense has become a dirty word. To adapt a saying originally coined by Sir William Harcourt in 1889 and given wider currency by the future King Edward VII in 1895, we are all anarchists now. There was a time when authority was given the benefit of the doubt: unless there was glaring evidence to the contrary, it was assumed that those in authority knew what they were doing and thus commanded our obedience; and even if the matter was analysed further and it was admitted that authority could make mistakes, it was thought better that the wrong decision should be made and applied immediately than that any decision should be deferred until it might be too late. Today our assumptions tend to work the other way. We assume that those in authority will lurch from blunder to blunder, and we no longer see any great virtue in muddling through: it is apt to be a messy and expensive business.

This cannot be put down simply to a widespread cynicism alleged to exist as part of a supposed far-reaching malaise affecting the whole of our national life today. Indeed, there is some justification, if not for cynicism, at least for scepticism: our governments since the war seem to have been singularly unable to avoid leading us into one economic crisis after another, and when we are encouraged to swallow yet another dose of deflationary medicine we cannot help wondering if this cannot do more than alleviate the immediate symptoms of our economic ill-health.
The Significant Life of a Dominican House of Studies
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It has not been easy to decide on a suitable title for this address. The phrase ‘significant life’ has been chosen in preference to ‘role’, ‘function’, or even—wilder flights, these—‘inner life’ or ‘soul’. The point has been to indicate a perspective (rather than to frame a policy) for our common life of study at Blackfriars, and to propose it for inspection and reflection (not for instant discussion). I am conscious that many of my hearers this evening have had to listen to me before, sometimes for many years, and it is hardly likely that they will hear anything new from me today; and yet there would seem to be some value in publicly rehearsing, with some ceremoniousness, views which are intended to elicit positive attitudes of assent or dissent, to contribute to a common if differentiated consciousness. With this in mind, I have upon careful consideration determined to speak with as much honesty as I am capable of; the time has really passed, if it ever existed, for triumphalism of any form, conservative or progressive. What is offered is a ‘Here I stand’, like Luther’s; but it is not necessarily, not yet, anyway, an I can do no other’, provided someone shows me how. Those of my hearers who are not Dominicans have at least done us the honour of sharing our erratic pilgrimage, and I must suppose that they too will not be without concern for an attempt to sketch out its horizons, if hardly to plot its future course.
Expo ‘67 and the Mersey Funnel
Authors: Nuttgens Patrick
Published: July 2007

The coincidence of the opening of a gargantuan international exposition at Montreal and of a new cathedral at Liverpool is provocative of questions about the relationship of architecture to society and of the sacred to the secular. In some ways an international exhibition like Expo ‘67 is to our century what the building of a cathedral was to an earlier one—lots of people and fun and a tempting opportunity for architectural gymnastics on a universal scale.

That, in terms of cost at least, is what such an exhibition is; and ever since Paxton’s Crystal Palace patrons and designers have seized their chance. But Expo ‘67 has another dimension. By the manmade islands, near the tense and justified hilarity of rival national displays, is the building of Habitat, permanent housing of an aggressively experimental kind. The units are piled up with a cubist exploitation of spaces between and through and over them. They are homes. They are extravagant; they cost per home about ten times what we would spend on local authority housing. Yet it all seems reasonable.

It seems reasonable because an exhibition is a chance to make innovations and experiments unhindered by a realistic budget. And that is one of the few ways in which experiments on a big scale can be made. (Otherwise the costs escalate, as in aircraft development.) In this case the designer can try out a social experiment: exploring ways of additively building up a group of homes individually expressed, the reverse of the tall slabs of storage for people with which we have become familiar.
The Sacred and The Whole
Authors: Buckley Vincent
Published: July 2007

Brian Wicker’s new book is important not only because of the analysis which he gives of our historical present and of the potencies within it but also because of the sources on which he calls to establish his analysis and the terms in which he calls on them. They are terms particularly congenial to the literary imagination, for one reason because they suggest a renewed life for poetry. Briefly, Mr Wicker argues that it would be a mistake to see our historical moment as one in which a conception of the sacred is fighting unequally against the secular actuality, or in which secularism must be accepted by Christians as a providential subversion of myths no longer acceptable to reason. On the contrary, he says, the most rational account of our condition, both existential and essential, is one in which a conception of the sacred will be not only preserved, not only renewed either, but remade. His account of this may bring unease both to those who think there is only one way to talk about the sacred and to those who think it retrograde to talk about the sacred at all.

In speaking in such terms he is of course speaking from within a cultural dilemma whose nature he recognizes; our society in so far as it is opting for ‘secularism’ is opting to sit on one horn of the dilemma; for its refusal of the sacred is not only a refusal of a ‘meaning’ in and for life but an inability to participate fully in the world of meaningful presences and activities.