bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
C.F.S. Movement in Holland
Authors: Lefeber T. W.
Published: July 2007

Catholics in the Netherlands have always taken a great interest in the film problem. Very soon after the first cinemas appeared (about 1912) there arose among Catholics a movement for the erection of so-called ‘White Cinemas,’ where only those films would be shown which had been properly censored in accordance with the dictates of moral theology. This movement failed, however, owing to lack of experience and of the necessary funds. Meanwhile, at the instance of the Catholic National Purity League, there was set up a board of film-censors operating mainly at Amsterdam. This committee, however, lacked the authority of an official body, and did not sufficiently meet the just claims of the people outside the big cities.

In 1926 The ‘Cinema Act’ was passed in Parliament. Among other things it lays down the principle that, in the Netherlands, onlv those films may be shown publicly which have been passed by the National Board of Public Censors. It also empowers the Board to suppress certain films as being contrarv to good morals and public order. The Committee, moreover, reserves to itself the right to forbid the attendance at certain films by young persons under the age of 14 or 18. With the co-operation of the Catholic politicians a clause was added to the law enabling those institutes and societies which have been set up for the prevention or destruction of social and moral dangers in connection with the film industry, to exercise a further censorship on films already passed by the National Board of Film Censors. These institutes and societies may obtain an official authorization for this purpose from the Home Minister.
Doctrine in the Church of England
Authors: St. John Henry
Published: July 2007

Twelve months have now passed since the publication of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine. The varied comments with which it has been received, both within the Church of England and outside it, have revealed much divergence of opinion as to the significance of its content and in consequence as to its value as an indication of the direction in which the Church of England is moving. Among Catholics, the tendency has been to judge it in the light of its obvious divergences from Catholic standards, particularly in regard to its apparent surrender, as necessary dogmas, of the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the bodily Resurrection of our Lord, and to write it down as proof positive of the final victory of modernism over orthodoxy in the Church of England. The Memorandum, published this month with the authority of the Council of the Church Union, is an illuminating commentary both upon the Report itself and also upon many of the judgements which have been made upon it. Indeed, it would not be untrue to say that for the outsider a real understanding of the Report is very difficult without its help. A judgement which assesses the Report merely in the light of its divergences from Catholic standards is shown to be superficial; a fruitful judgement must penetrate to the root of the problem and undertake two closely connected tasks The Report must be seen in its setting as the product of the Church of England as it is to-day, and the Church of England as it is to-day must be understood in relation to its past history if an estimate is to be made of the direction whither in the future it may move. The first of these tasks is admirably performed by the Memorandum; to the second, we shall return later.
C.F.S. Movement in Holland
Authors: Lefeber T. W.
Published: July 2007

Under the direction of the local committees of the K.F.A. film circles have been started. Very soon meetings were held in which authorised speakers explained the meaning of the film problem, and demonstrated that a film circle must be a nucleus of local activity in the sphere of Catholic Film Action. The members of such a circle form a bodyguard of workers in the great action for good films. They contribute energetically and in various ways to the realisation of the aim of Vigilanti Cura, and this not only by study and practical film labour, but also by participation in the propaganda of K.F.A. They are the people on whom K.F.A. can rely in the most difficult hours.

The film circle in Bois-le-Duc has already achieved much that is important. It has become active in the three most important parts of our task: study, propagation, and practical film work. Soon after its commencement this Film Circle held meetings, at which the problem of good films was treated in conformance with the Encyclical and short films were shown and discussed. It showed to the outside world very clearly its propagational character, when the local department of K.F.A. began its offensive at the beginning of June, 1937.

After the faithful had heard en masse of the inauguration of the world-film-action through a film-Sunday, about seven parochial meetings were held. At these meetings the film The Eternal Dream was shown, and at the same time the assembly heard an explanation of the essence and aim of the K.F.A.

The principal members of the Film Circle appeared as speakers and arrested the attention of the masses to the work of the K.F.A., through innumerable articles in the local Press, by home-visiting and other stimulating activities. In the domain of practical film labour also the film circle of Bois-le-Duc has turned to action.
The Colour Bar
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

The progress of Catholicism in Africa is so amazing that only the divine character of the Church can explain it. Yet we realize how much remains to be done when we recall the millions of coloured people still untouched by Christianity. And the need is urgent not only amongst indigenous negroes, but also amongst those of such a country as the United States, where live many millions of negroes crying out for the religion of God made Man. In the centre of New York is Harlem, the negro quarter, a town in itself well-nigh cut off from the neighbouring boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx, whilst in the southern States live many millions of negroes in far worse poverty and distress than in the days of slavery. These people want religion, for their simple nature is a religious one. But they are unwilling to accept the Christian religion as they see it practised, or rather distorted and falsified, by the whites. They want rather the riches and power that go with modem materialism and irreligion.

The story of the negro in U.S.A. is a sad one. Every year waves of horror and anger shake the whole of the negro population as fresh lynchings occur with a brutality that is unsurpassed by any other age in the history of this world. The Chinese torture of a thousand slices cannot be more cruel than the white southerner’s use of a blowlamp on a negro suspected of crime.

Are Catholics in the United States, or in the Union of South Africa, caring for these people, influencing them, as they ought? In the days of the Roman Empire there existed slavery, and that slavery was ended by the Catholic doctrine that by nature and birth all men are equal before God.
The Lesson of Standardisation
Authors: Durkan John
Published: July 2007

The same clothes, the same swing music, the same technological thinking, the same standardised responses, the same dances, the same transport communications: in other words, the same standardisation all the world over. ‘This uniformity is quite another thing than a structure of civilisation properly speaking, it is of an order not specifically human.’ The Manichee, in his contradictory thinking, desired to attain to a univocal perfection, to be swallowed up in the principle of good like a Buddhist in his Nirvana, to negate his own body to the point of race-suicide, a Pharisee concerning matter and profoundly anti-social. Modern man is an inverted Manichee: again desiring a univocal perfection, in a dialectic not of spirit but of matter, regarding the spirit as nothing or hating it as evil, enslaving mind and responsibility to the evolution of technique, exalting his own blood in the interests of race purity, exploiting and commercialising intelligence, and profoundly anti-personal. How true that Marx is the obverse of Hegel. The outcome of such mass-education is anarchy of thinking and feeling, against which we childishly protect ourselves by the sameness of our clothes.

Let us isolate one noteworthy aspect of this situation. To much modern thinking, the intelligence is a dangerous faculty, an anti-vital machine that skims the cream off things, that divides person from person and class from class, like the cathode rays that disintegrate alpha particles: it is the very principle of disintegration. The sub-human Utopia of the Communists, on the other hand, is the achievement of a material integration, it may be a leisure state to which technological progress will tend or an economic collectivity of the masses achieved in a strictly political field.
The Sanction of War
Authors: Farrell Ambrose
Published: July 2007

There can be no lasting peace in international affairs until the nations of the world learn to worship God. Worship is the chief act of religion, which is not confined to church or reserved for certain occasions, but is a life-long task and a whole-time endeavour characterized by swift readiness to obey. The universe cannot escape from the laws which hold it fast to God’s throne. Governments cannot hope for order and peace unless they follow nature’s rules. For obedience to law is the pledge of justice, the foundation of peace. There is no medium between law as a dictate of reason and lawlessness with violence for its sanction. When violence is the rule in national life anarchy is its fruit, and when this is carried beyond the borders of the nation the world is plunged in war. Man was not made for servitude, since he is freeborn, and when his freedom is placed in jeopardy by the lawless domination of force, the primary law of his nature urges him to fight for his existence as a free man. As it is with men and families, so it is with nations. The law of men and of states, unless it is to be a pure tyranny, is one of liberty making for full co-operation and a protection against the bondage of servitude. The dignity of human destiny requires the liberty to serve in obedience to authority under the reign of law. The law of nature is by origin divine, since God is the author of nature.
Patriotism and the Life of the State
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

There must be many to-day whose minds are troubled because they find it impossible to accept without reservation the opinions and the policy which have been generally adopted with regard to the war, and because, in consequence, their patriotism—their love of their patria and desire to serve it—cannot find, at least without much self-searching, the outlet which the majority have accepted. Are they to resign themselves to the idea that this mental tension is inevitable; to the idea that they must seem, and be, less patriotic than those who can accept the situation without any misgivings or detachment of mind?

The question, if it is considered adequately, reveals itself as a very large and very deep one; for it involves far more than the particular problem of war, and leads back to the ultimate principles of human society. Before attempting such a general consideration, however, we may note two particular preliminary points, since they seem to show that the presence even of the complete non-participant is not without its value to a nation in days such as these.
On the Divine Comedy
Authors: Kehoe Richard
Published: July 2007

M. Masseron finds a very effective way of concluding his book on Dante by recalling the centenary celebrations that took place at Ravenna in 1921. It was only in the course of the preceding century that the body of the poet had been recovered from an ignominious hiding-place and restored to its rightful tomb. The homage which he now received was like the setting of a seal on his fame and status, like the raising of a definitive monument. Or it was like an act of canonisation, performed in the name of the whole civilised community of Europe. The ‘Empire’ and the Church acted for the occasion in such perfect harmony as to make a sort of pageant representing what had been the highest earthly vision of the poet. Not that he could be deceived by any pageant. It was accordingly left to the Church to preside and to pronounce the solemn benediction. Pope Benedict XV despatched a cardinal legate and composed an Encyclical Letter. And M. Masseron is surely right in suggesting that this document deserves to be treated as still important: deserves at least to be read, Papal Encyclicals are not lightly composed, for the momentary purpose of mere long-distance speech making. To return on the metaphor used above, one may say that the ‘In Praeclara Summorum’ has something of the character of a brief of canonisation. (Among the papal documents for that year it is to be found placed precisely between two other Encyclicals composed in honour of St. Francis and St. Dominic.)
The Town that was Murdered
Authors: Harari M.
Published: July 2007

Whatever his political bias, the reader will not be left unmoved by a true tale of human struggle and suffering and of a tragic failure of society for a hundred years. In the present struggle of civilization we must disengage that which we have set out to defend from our share in the guilt of the common disaster. Miss Wilkinson’s book must impress us anew with the evils of a capitalist society, which she traces back through one example to their beginnings in the Industrial Revolution. These evils, for which she advocates a mainly political remedy, come from as brazenfaced a rejection of Christian and human values as any that have been made. Habit and some faith in human progress and in the professions of governments have partly blinded us. But now comes the day of reckoning, when past crimes and their consequences must be paid for, even to the possible collapse of civilization and the merciless persecution of our Christianity which we have allowed to be so denied.

The history of ‘the town that was murdered’ suggests more than the interplay of economic and political forces. It raises the issue of human responsibility in the face of poverty and riches, the destiny of the individual caught in the stranglehold of the ‘World.’ The figure of the political, commercial and financial magnate haunting the pages of the book and the streets of Jarrow is not so much that of the individual capitalist; it is that of Dives, the victim not of system and fate, but of freedom and sin, and, finally, of God’s avenging mercy to the poor.
Man Grows Up
Authors: Walsh R.P.
Published: July 2007

Group action is the keynote to our modern society. No longer are men working as individuals, be it in business, in politics, or in religion. This group action is largely instinctive, but there is a desire for it and a realisation that through it something can be achieved, though unfortunately the ‘something’ is rather uncertain.

This desire for group action, this longing to be with and work with others, can be found in many spheres: Hitler and his mass regimentation, Mussolini’s fascist spirit, our own youth movements, in big business, and among Catholics.

Never before in the story of the Church has there been such interest in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. In all parts of the Church theologians and other thinkers are writing about and discussing the doctrine and working out its implications.
The Layfolk's Patron Saint
Authors: Delany Bernard
Published: July 2007

The Catholic layman should glory in the name of Catholic. It is no accident that, of the four marks of the true Church, Catholicity is the character that has prevailed. We are called Catholics, because the note of Catholicity in a sense contains and implies the others. Catholicity means unity diffused, spread abroad—unity everywhere. Unity absolutely demands a Hierarchy, oneness with the Apostolic tradition. Holiness means unity of belief and practice; the integral, personal unity of one who has perfectly harmonized faith and morals, whose life is the expression of his convictions of the one and only truth. Catholicity, therefore, means unity, vital and organized, unity magnificent, unity transcendent. Catholicity is the stupendous, resplendent unity of past and present, of all ages stretching out into the eternal years. The Catholic is one with Christ and one with all with whom Christ is one. The Catholic is the totalitarian Christian.

This totalitarian mark is conspicuous in the lives of the Church’s martyrs whose eminent charity led them to the last limit of self-sacrifice: their heroic constancy makes them one with the King of martyrs with Whom they are identified even to the shedding of their blood.
Portrait of a Liberal
Authors: Lunn Arnold
Published: July 2007

Few words are more ambiguous than ‘liberalism.’ Liberals of the Manchester school invoked liberalism in their efforts to liberate economic activity from state control, whereas modern liberals are even more anxious than Socialists to extend the sphere of the state’s activities. When Lord Shaftesbury, the Conservative, introduced the Factory Acts to liberate small children from the tyranny of the machines, John Bright and Cobden protested in the name of liberalism against any attempt to fetter the economic activities of the factory owners. Towards the end of the century, Mr. Lloyd George, in the name of Liberalism, imposed compulsory insurance on the nation.

My father’s Liberalism was derived not from Manchester, but from Nazareth. He was one of the last survivors of those Victorians who were Christian Liberals as opposed to secular Liberals. The Liberalism of the convinced Christian must always be qualified by the conclusions which he draws from the great premise that man is made in the image of God, and therefore has rights which no dictator and no democratic majority can over-ride. Secular Liberalism, on the other hand, with its deification of the ‘General Will,’ inevitably leads to the servile state. If man is nothing more than first cousin to the chimpanzee there is no reason why a dictator or a dictatorial majority should not put him behind bars. It is only man’s supernatural estate which alone guarantees his personal dignity and his inalienable rights.
The Greatest of These …
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J.
Published: July 2007

‘Men may be evil in many ways, but good in one alone.’ So wrote wisely the unknown poet whom Aristotle quotes in the Ethics, and he wrote with deeper significance than he could have known. To be ‘good’ is, properly understood, to be on the way to the attainment of that essential perfecting which human nature of itself craves and must seek, and even mere reason can show that this perfection is to be found only in the attainment of the Universal Good, which can be none other than God, for God Who is the First Cause must needs be therefore the Final End. This much may be known by reason; but from a source of knowledge infinitely surpassing reason in profundity and certainty comes the revelation of a human destiny which a finite mind could not otherwise know nor finite power hope to attain to. The First Cause and Universal Good has revealed Himself as the Father and Friend of man. He has revealed man’s elevation from the natural order to the supernatural wherein it is possible for him to become the friend of God and to attain to a perfection such as ‘eye hath not seen nor ear heard.’ Once raised to this supernatural possibility, man can find no peace, no happiness until he attains to that perfection. ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart rests not until it rests in Thee.’
The Philosophical Categories
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

To supply the lack of a detailed treatise on the categories in English, Dom Augustine Osgniach has written this substantial book, supplementing his exposition of scholastic doctrine with critical studies of the historical fate of the ideas of substance, quantity, quality, relation. The method is well chosen, since the historico-critical studies bring into play the relevance to the fundamental problems of human thought of the scholastic doctrines in question; whereas a bald exposition modelled upon such Latin text-books as, e.g., Gredt (Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae), may indeed lay before readers what St. Thomas and his commentators taught, but will hardly gain access for that teaching into their minds without the support of an oral pedagogy. Not only does the method followed in this book secure the relevance of scholastic principles, but it enables the author to give them accurate development to a point which would perhaps weary’ the most hardy reader if reference to the later developments of philosophy were less constant and less close.

Perhaps the chief source of modern distrust of the categories is the fear, not by any means without foundation in the later developments of scholasticism, that the logical order is usurping the order of reality and imposing upon the real a system and framework of divisions and dependences which properly belong to the mode of our mind’s knowing and not to the mode of existence of things.
Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

It can hardly be necessary at this date to summarize the contents of a book which, one notes with thankfulness, has been so widely described and discussed. It will be recalled that Mr. Eliot’s purpose in writing it was to offer a ‘contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come’; and the most fitting way in which to salute his work would therefore seem to be to confine oneself to suggesting the main points at which further elucidation appears desirable. The urgency of such continued discussion should also need no stressing; the background against which these lectures are to be read is the realization, in September 1938, of a ‘general plight,’ the conscious ‘doubt of the validity of a civilization and that doubt is not assuaged but intensified, the urgent need of following as best we may the lead here given us is not diminished but increased, by the constant iteration, from press and platform, that the conflict in which we are now engaged is quite simply one between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, between Satan and Christianity.’ The last thing we should like to do would be to examine that “Christianity” which, in such contexts as this, we say we keep.’ We can make much emotional capital out of the use of labels that have lost all definite meaning; but the facts are quite plain.
The Civilization of the United States
Authors: Foster P. Urban
Published: July 2007

At Belshazzar’s feast ‘there came forth fingers as of a man's hand, writing . . .’ The last volume of Charles and Mary’ Beard’s enormous work is scarcely as epigrammatic as the ‘Mane, Thecel, Phares’ of the Book of Daniel; indeed, each of the three volumes contains more than eight hundred pages; but the writing on the wall can clearly be discerned in the vast accumulation of the authors’ erudition.

With patience, unending research, fine organization of material, real eloquence, detachment, culture and an occasional pleasant acerbity, the two authors have traced the cultural history of the United States from before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers until the day before yesterday. Their first volume covers the whole period from Elizabethan days until the eve of the Civil War; the second from 1860 until the Harding Administration; the third extends to the winter of 1938. Somewhat mysteriously entitled ‘America in Midpassage,’ this last volume was published in the Autumn of 1939, near the beginning of this latest war.
The Catholic Problem of Evacuation
Authors: Klimeck Esmond
Published: July 2007

I am not attempting to discuss here the wider problems of evacuation taken in its most general sense. The general scheme and its results have come in for much adverse criticism both in the secular press and in our catholic papers. It seems only fair, then, that one should give some of the good effects where one has found them. Of course it is only in the normal order of things that first things come first with Catholics. So we make no apology for the fact that in the case of children evacuated from our catholic schools it is with their religious welfare that we are primarily concerned. Not that we think the material welfare of the child to be unimportant. It is merely considered in its proper place. For convenience I shall, however, take this less important aspect first.

The evacuees came from the danger areas, namely the large industrial cities with their congested conditions of life, and from crowded seaports. Such places are unhealthy not only in war time, and for fear of German bombers. When one thinks, then, of the money that is spent in an ever-increasing amount, year by year, in peace time, in bringing children from the worst of such areas into the healthy surroundings of seaside or countryside; and that the evacuation scheme did this very thing on a wholesale scale—for all children, and not merely for a week or two, but indefinitely—it seems evident from this, the point of view of national health and fitness, that the scheme deserved more support from the public generally.
Co‐Operation in Native South Africa
Authors: Walsh R.P.
Published: July 2007

‘It is a well-known fact that the spiritual welfare cannot be separated from the material welfare. There is a constant interaction between both. By arousing in the destitute a longing to raise and better himself economically and socially we awaken in him a desire to make the best possible use of all moral and physical forces.’ That was said many years ago by a Protestant in Germany, and though we could quote similar statements from important Catholic sources, we prefer to quote this from the works of Frederick Raiffeisen because it has a direct connection with the subject of this article.

Raiffeisen started among the German peasants people’s banks, or credit unions. To-day, throughout the world, credit unions on the Raiffesen system number well over 250,000 and have some 28,000,000 members. The line we are tracing from Raiffeisen to the natives of South Africa runs through Dr. Heim, the founder of the Bavarian Catholic Farmers’ Union, and Fr. Tom Finlay, S.J., the great Irish co-operator, who died recently, to Fr. Bernard Huss, a Marianhi'll missionary in South Africa. Though this line starts with a Protestant it can be ultimately traced back to the formation by the Franciscans in fifteenth century Italy of the Montes Pie tat is, welfare associations to alleviate the economic distress of the people. Then the great burden of the people was heavy taxation, and to meet this they had to borrow and the heavy rates of interest that they had to pay kept them permanently tied to the money lender.
Ave Maria
Authors: Carpenter Hilary J
Published: July 2007

In the introductory words to two special articles on Mary the Mother which he was invited to contribute to The Catholic Times, ‘the present writer felt it imperative to point out that’ it would be a grave and lamentable loss if a Catholic’s appreciation of our Blessed Lady was no more than the largely sentimental emotion it often appears to be, or even no more than a solid but unpenetrating admiration for her spotless purity of soul and an awed wonder of her virginal Motherhood of God. These are not without their place and value; but it is yet more important to realise that both her immaculate purity and her divine motherhood play an essential part not only in the historic fact of the Incarnation whereby the world was redeemed, but also in the application of the fruits of that Redemption to all men throughout the world and throughout the ages. We need the wisdom of understanding if the full vision of the Motherhood of Mary is not to escape us............ We cannot properly appreciate the Mother except as inseparably linked with her Son; and there is a sense in which it is true to say that we cannot properly appreciate the Son apart from His Mother. There is no absolute necessity in this; but there is the necessity of God’s love, Who chose this way and no other for restoring humankind to His friendship..........so that only by finding the Child with His Mother can a man find also the wisdom of God which leads to everlasting love. For it is no mere physical necessity which linked these two ....
St. Augustine on Peace and War
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

‘If good people feel disgust at a nation which—simply with a view to extending its dominion—spontaneously provokes a war with neighbouring States which are at peace with it and have done them no harm—then I can only say that I applaud their praiseworthy feelings.’—De Civitate Dei, IV, xiv.

Remarkably little seems to have been written on this subject. Yet Augustine is quite justly described as the Father of the Philosophy of History,’ and even if he had not treated of the subject almost ‘ex professo ‘—as we hope to show—no remarks of his on the part war has played in the history of the world could fail to be of interest. So far the only discussion on his attitude to the problems are a Paper by Fr. Vincent Scully, C.R.L., in the Clergy Review for Feb., 1932, and also Ypres de la Brière, La Conception de la Paix et de la Guerre chez S. Augustin, Revue de la Philosophic, 1916. See too R. Regout, S.J., La doctrine de la guerre juste de S. Augustin ii nos jours d'apres les théologiens et les canonistes catholiques, 1935, though the author is more concerned with Franciscus de Victoria who has, he thinks, broken with scholastic teaching on the requisites for a just war.

The above passage—so peculiarly apropos to the events of to-day—shows us what the Bishop of Hippo’s reactions to the present crisis would have been. Yet to gentle, peace- loving Augustine, ever absorbed in the needs spiritual as well as temporal of his flock, war was-—as indeed it must be to every thinking man—-something unspeakably horrible.
Pius XII and ‘The Flight from the Land’
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

‘All over the world . . . our troubles have one bitter root . . . the ignoring of God’s majesty, the complete neglect of His heavenly commandments or, at best, a woeful inconsistency that can do nothing but hesitate between right and wrong.

’ It is this that gives rise to our blind excess of self-love— to our thirst for pleasure . . . the Flight from the Land (.Agrorum desertio), to levity in contracting marriage (in matrimoniis contrahendis ludificatio).’ Encyclical Letter, Sertum Laetitiae, to the United States Hierarchy on the 150th anniversary of their establishment.

We have set down this authoritative statement on a fundamental principle because only through authoritative statements and not through individual opinions can a sick world be led back to health. Individuals, and perhaps especially the young when endowed with a sensitive nature, are often capable of sensing social ailments. Yet their power to descry and describe social disease does not empower them to prescribe the remedy for the disease. Zeal to staunch the wounds of the world is amongst youth's most engaging qualities. But those of us who once were young —’ and that was long ago ‘—know that the best words an individual in the Church can now say to a world in extremis must only be words of commentary on what the Church’s authority has already said.

(2). Two anecdotes will serve to prepare the readers of this commentary to see what the commentator sees.
The Church in England and the Social Question
Authors: Benvenisti Vincent J. L.
Published: July 2007

Has the Catholic Church in England any message save to the individual soul? Has she a real and constructive contribution to make to .the social problem of this country? It is no doubt a dreadful thing that I should even ask such a question, but it is high time that the question were asked.

That the Church has solicitude for the material needs for her children is an article of Faith, but whether that solicitude moves the hearts of the Faithful in this country to such a degree that it will be of any practical effect is another matter. Yet if it goes no further than pious aspiration and is not likely to go further, if it does no more than proclaim ends on the majority of which all men are to-day in agreement and fails wholly to regard the problem of means, it -would be better for us to confess failure and retire into the desert to pray. To proclaim that we have a body of social teaching and then declare ourselves bankrupt when it comes to seeking ways of applying it or even of showing how it might be applied is to court ridicule. The multitude is hungry. We have no right to give them generalities instead of food. I say in all seriousness that if we cannot do better than that, it would be far better to do nothing at all.

True, we have consolidated certain defensive positions. We have asserted the priority of the family over the State, the natural authority of parents over children, the right of free association and the dignity of human personality.
Our Lady in Medieval Verse
Authors: Cholmeley K.
Published: July 2007

In that England which was Mary’s dowry, men were eager to offer their gift of poetry to her. The thirteenth and two succeeding centuries are gemmed with lyrics praising and compassionating her. These poems are, on the whole, naive in form; they have the terseness and singlemindedness of a short story. They are arrows winged direct from the heart. Simile is seldom used; praise is given direct. There are two or three poems like the magnificent ‘Song to the Queen of Heaven’ whose lines pulse with a passion of wonder, but, for the most part, the lyrics have the simplicity and pathos of folksong music. They are prayers in verse. The unknown authors were not thinking of fame; their hymns are wrought for their Mother’s glory:

Levedy, I thank theeWith heart so mild,The good that thou hast done meWith thy sweet child.

Love fashions it, and dictates the language. It has the clean fragrance of a bunch of cowslips gathered in a sunlit meadow. The medieval poet has the direct and candid speech of the child; he possesses a like wisdom and sincerity. The themes of his sons are simple. He loves his Mother’s beauty; he cries to her to aid his helplessness; he pleads to be delivered from sin, and from Hell; he echoes, though less perfectly, that poignant cry of yearning which concludes the Salve Regina.

In care and counsel thou art best

felix fecundata,

To all weary thou art rest

mater honorata

Beseech thou him with mildest mood

That for us shed his blood

in cruce

That we might come to him

in luce.

Such lines sing themselves into men’s minds, and are not easily forgotten.
Obedience and Freedom
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.

The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of freedom, in particular, which is in the New Testament has been sounded again and again by the Church throughout its history; so that, as Pope Leo XIII declared, whenever men ‘have attacked the liberty of man, the Church has defended it and protected this noble possession from destruction.’ ‘The powerful influence of the Church,’ he said again, ‘has ever been manifested in the custody and protection of the civil and political liberty of the people.’
Freedom and Spontaneity
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

I stood on the river-bank near Bablockhythe and watched a snake swim straight across the water. He was quite a small snake and made little stir, so that at first I saw only his head moving. It seemed odd in a fish to swim with its head out of the water. Every now and then he stopped dead, curved in the sun quite still; then was off again on his way to the opposite bank. In that silent and remote place the little live thing held all my attention. The form and movement were lovely of course, but they were not the cause of the fascination. They were only signals. What was fascinating was the appearance of Purpose, the way the silence and the swift, steady movement gave me the sense of something being done, a secret intention being followed with the entire body and soul of the creature.

It is always so with animals. They go so entirely to their ends. They are utterly absorbed in doing something. Hence their gravity, their sincerity, their entire lack of both humour and vulgarity. They may play but they do not joke, they may strut about before their females, but they are never self-conscious. They are wonderfully at ease. And how their actions interweave! A million actions and movements converged on that snake to make him swim the river at that precise moment, and he, displacing the water, was moving the whole Thames.
Love and Law
Authors: Thomas Ivo
Published: July 2007

Every one is present to God. They have been brought from non-existence to existence at the appointed time by His eternal, unchanging knowledge. They are kept in existence through every change and adventure of their lives by that same knowledge. Their very freedom is given by it; every deed and venture of our journey to God is caused by it.

God is present to every one; but not to all in the same way. He has planned creation with each as a part, but not all know it, and of those who know, some will not accept. And of those who accept, some do so grudgingly, while others intently gather themselves to God, loving Him with all their heart and with all their mind and with all their soul and with all their strength. Nor do these last forget the second commandment of the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
St. Augustine on Death
Authors: Pope Hugh
Published: July 2007

Throughout the country there are people mourning their loved ones, parents, sons and daughters killed fighting or helping behind the scenes; even babes in arms, children on the high seas, sent away for safety, have met a cruel death. In the streets, once so familiar, are unsightly ruins, houses crumbling, churches, convents, public buildings, the houses of the very poorest, all overwhelmed by the common wanton destruction wrought by an unseen hand. How trite and unconvincing seem our condolences with the afflicted! We hardly know what to say, our tongues stammer and falter, as indeed must always be the case when speaking of the mysteries of faith. For death is a mystery, though an inevitable fact: ‘Who is the man that shall not see death, that shall deliver his soul from the underworld?’ (Ps. lxxxviii, 49). The Saints of God made themselves familiar with the thought of death and the next world, and we may well turn for guidance to one who had lived with such thoughts always before him, to one who had seen Death with his scythe mowing down men, women and children, now by the sword, now by pestilence, now by the creeping onslaught of old age, to one who himself died amid the destruction of all he had loved, the overthrow of all he had so laboriously built up, to St. Augustine of Hippo.
The Night Cometh
Authors: Thomas Ivo
Published: July 2007

Jesus told us that the night cometh when no man can work. He, the dayspring from on high who came to give light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, who was proclaimed as the light come to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of his people, told us—what?—that the night cometh. Others had told us before of this night. Nox est perpetua una dormienda, ‘ there is one everlasting night in which we must sleep,’ but it was not the same message. Catullus knew not the dayspring from on high, nor of the world where there is no sun, for the Lamb is the light thereof. He knew only of the earthly day with its changeable sun in a cloudy heaven. In his soul there was only the pale light of reason amid the clouds of passion. All that he saw would be swallowed up in that one everlasting night of death, where there would be no loneliness and no fellowship, for there would be nothing. Our last night will not be like that; it will be followed by a day and ‘the Lamb is the light thereof.’ It will not be a night of annihilation, an end of all things, but a night of refreshment, of preparation, of vigil, a night, though, most certainly, dark and when no man can worrk. It will, too, be a night of suffering.
Citizenship With the Saints
Authors: Meath Gerard
Published: July 2007

The Communion of Saints is an article of faith recalled daily in the Creed, and its acceptance is implied in most common acts of religion, prayers to the saints in Heaven, prayers for the souls in Purgatory, prayers for one another. These practical and frequent applications of this article of faith, however, seldom seem to rouse curiosity as to the implication of the belief itself. Yet its importance in the ordinary things of Christian life gives meaning, for instance, to the feast of All Saints. The latter is more than a makeweight feast for all the saints who cannot otherwise be fitted into the calendar. It is, in a sense, our own feast; it is a reminder of the capabilities for grace which we all possess; it is a counsel to see more profound possibilities in the familiar sides of our daily life.

The principle of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints is enunciated in the Catechism of the Council of Trent: ‘Every pious and holy action done by one belongs and is profitable to all through charity which seeketh not her own.’
On Imagination
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Even in war-time men cannot think only of what they are doing here and now. Their desire goes beyond the immediate job; and when their outer world falls to bits they turn to God, if they believe in Him and seek Him, or to the Future that is always going to be so much better than the past, or to their own souls. Belief that the human soul is somehow, vaguely, ‘divine’ is intensified by the horrors that surround it and to which it seems a stranger even while it directs them. The sense of the strangeness of man’s soul in this world, of its unconformity to the outer madness, causes wonder; and wonder has traditionally found expression, in England, in the individual voice of poets. Yet as a citizen and in public the poet is expected not merely to draw poetry from the situation, but to relate it back to the situation. He must be practical, he must provide propaganda or, in the -widest sense of the word, amusement. If Shakespeare is ever played nowadays, he is expected, officially at least, either to help people to forget the War completely or to make them remember it all the more intensely. Teach us to forget ourselves for a night. Teach us to remember ourselves to-night so that to-morrow we may fight like Englishmen.
Art
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

Art is not an aesthetic but a rhetorical activity.

(Ananda Coomaraswamy)

The Incarnation may be said to have for Its object the drawing of men from misery to happiness. Being the act of God It is the greatest of all rhetorical acts and therefore the greatest of all works of art. And as from the fatherhood of God all paternity is named in heaven and earth, so from His creative power all art is named. In the Incarnation we do not only know a fact of history or a truth of religion; we behold a work of art, a thing made. As a fact of history It is the most interesting and illuminating of all historical happenings. As a truth of religion It is of primary and fundamental importance. But It is as a work of art that It has a saving power, power to persuade, power to heal, power to rescue, power to redeem.

But the word ‘art,’ in spite of the obsequious worship which the modern world gives to the works of painters and sculptors and musicians, is not a holy word in these days. Art, the word, which primarily means skill and thus human skill and thus human skill in doing and making, has, in literary circles and among the upper classes, come to mean only the fine arts, and the fine arts have ceased to be rhetorical and are now exclusively aesthetic; they aim only to give pleasure.
The Incarnation and the Human Order
Authors: Ward Barbara
Published: July 2007

If there is one temptation more strong than any other in this time of falling bombs and unbelievable cruelties it is to despair of man. As in the time of Tacitus we have entered upon ‘a time rich in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions and savage in its very hour of peace.’ Purges within the states, wars between the states, cities flaming to heaven, women and children buried beneath the ruins, death raining from the sky, a new and brutal generation of scientific killers riding down fleeing refugees in their tanks or spraying machine-gun bullets on defenceless streets, on children at play—the list is endless. And this is human society. These are men. What can we hope from such corruption? Even if we survive the war, what can be built upon a generation whose nerves have been shattered by constant bombing and whose characters are maimed by the orgy of killing in which they have grown up? Even where bodies are intact, what can be hoped from these twisted souls? It is an obvious reaction to abandon all interest in the future of human society, to concentrate on the otherness of the spirit, the transcendance of God, the nothingness of creation, to adopt an apocalyptic attitude towards the present struggle.
Christ in History
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

History in a general sense is concerned with past human events. But it does not consider them simply as bare facts succeeding each other in the unrolling of time; it gathers them together as vital parts of a variegated and complex unity and deals not merely with the subject matter of these events, but with their cause and effect, by which they are welded into a whole. The historian, who is both scientist and artist, must gather the seemingly chaotic and accidental succession of events into a synthesis. Knowledge must always ultimately unite; and it is in this process of unification that the Catholic historian is bound to differ from any other kind of historian.

The past events with which the historian is dealing are human events, not the eruptions and radiations of the mineral world, not the burgeonings and seeding of the vegetable world, not the fights and amours of the animal kingdom, but the successive actions of MAN. Man is the subject of this science and so it is in man that we may find the guiding principles of historical unity. Certainly we are not here concerned immediately with the nature of man. That is the field of psychology which considers man according to his constitution with his intellect and his will. Nevertheless, the historian depends essentially upon rational psychology to describe to him the nature of man, as well as upon revelation itself to give a concrete view of that nature. The silversmith must understand the nature of the metal he proposes to work.
New Religion For Old
Authors: Benenson M.
Published: July 2007

It needed a choir of angels to explain to some Jewish shepherds that the Babe in yonder manger was Christ the Lord: it needed a special star to show three Gentile sages the swaddling clothes of Holy Wisdom. Without such startling messengers men might not have noticed Salvation as it lay at their feet.

It has needed a world war and the destruction, enslavement, maiming of countless millions to make men conscious of a religion which has not for one moment been kept a secret. ‘Mein Kampf’ has been translated into almost every language of the world: and the deeds and words of Hitler are its faithful confirmation. Do we now understand the ‘why’ which conjured up the Nazi djinn, the ‘why’ which gives it more than human power, the ‘why’ which gives us the key to its destruction? Do we now understand that Nazism is simply the conscious parody of Christianity?