bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Encyclical and Niebuhr's ‘Impossible Possibility’
Authors: Ellis Ieuan
Published: August 2007

The debate over Humanae Vitae reminds one strongly of the controversy—now much less pronounced than it was—over the nature of the ethic of Jesus. I want to suggest how an answer which emerged in that controversy may have a bearing on the present discussion among Catholics.

The Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted in three main ways—as an utterly transcendental ethic, as an interim-ethic, and as an ethic realizable in terms of this present world. Broadly speaking, the first and third of these alternatives received most support and they have their counterparts in the present debate. The transcendental view commanded great respect; the ethic of Jesus was absolute, it promulgated a new sort of law demanding a superhuman obedience. The opposite view argued that the ethic could not be attained, and we had much better wrest significance from such principles of justice, fair play, equality, etc., as we had and attempt a progressive improvement of humanity with these. In practice, this often corresponded with the third view about the nature of Christ’s teaching: Christian morality was about a human ideal, a vision of a better world after which we must all strive.

The most lucid critic of these positions was Reinhold Niebuhr, in a long line of books, notably Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in 1936. Niebuhr holds that the great mistake of most of the usual interpretations of the ethic of Jesus is their failure to realize the ‘true dialectic of the spiritual life’.
Science of God and Sciences of Man
Authors: Duke Michael Hare
Published: August 2007

Theology and the Social Sciences need to have a close relationship for they are both concerned to say things about the nature of man and the values which govern his decisions. But what kind of exchange is possible—will it be a happy marriage, a shot-gun wedding or a straight take-over bid ? The purpose of this article is to suggest that both sides can be enriched by attending to what the other is saying. Since it is the work of one whose first training is in the theological field, it rather stresses the gains which are achieved by bringing human warmth of the behavioural sciences to the sometimes arid tracts of traditional dogmatics! It is vitally important that the connections should be made because it is the task of theologians always to seek to communicate the truths they hold within the context of the contemporary perceptions of truth. Not that they will always accept these uncritically. Sometimes upon examination the theologian will want to say, ‘This way of describing things so conflicts with all that I hold true that I cannot accept it.’ At other times he will be bound to say, ‘My reason tells me that your findings are valid, therefore they must modify my theological assertions’, or perhaps, I now see that what this theological assertion meant is different from the way in which I previously understood it.’ Such a process of re-thinking and testing-out is bound to produce a considerable amount of anxiety w'hile the period of ferment lasts.
Christian Materialism
Authors: Hibbert Giles
Published: August 2007

This paper could well have been called Christianity and Materialism, but since it is concerned with arguing, from the Christian side, for a more materialistic interpretation of Christianity than is usual, the present title seems more appropriate. It is addressed, however, not merely to Christians but to all those who are interested in bringing together the values inherent in Communism and in Christianity, without detriment to either and to the enrichment of both.

Two things are to concern us. Firstly, how far it is possible (or indeed necessary) for a Christian to be a genuine materialist—even in some sense an atheist—without departing from traditional Christian belief in God; and secondly, how far it would be possible for a Marxist to believe in God, even to be a member of a Christian Church, without betraying his materialist philosophy and the political humanism to which he is committed. These questions could probably be dealt with more easily amongst either Christians or Marxists alone, but whilst much valuable progress is to be made in that way, it is also important that both sides should be able to discuss this matter together. To facilitate and further such dialogue is precisely the purpose of this contribution.

What I want to be able to show to Christians is how necessary it is for them, if they are to be true to Christ, to appreciate and absorb the value of an atheistic materialism such as that of Marx; and in doing this, to show to Marxists that Christians,
Letter and Spirit: St Paul
Authors: Murphy‐O'Connor Jerome
Published: August 2007

One of the paradoxical side-effects of the shift of interest in New Testament studies from historicity to tradition-history (Redaktions- geschichte) has been an increased awareness of the historical character of revelation. In the process of distinguishing sources and noting literary techniques we become very conscious of the personality of the writers. We discover human minds grappling with the problems of their communities, minds operating within the problematic imposed upon them by their culture and interests, minds limited by their resources. This discovery has destroyed the concept of the New Testament as an ageless monument. In its place we have a library whose volumes reflect the varied personalities of their authors. The inspired character of their insights guarantees that they cannot be ignored, but recognition of the fact that they have been conditioned historically means that they cannot be accepted without critical examination.

This conclusion has implications for both dogmatic and moral theology. Attention has centred in the area of dogma, as is only natural given the traditional understanding of the relationship between the two, but unfortunately lack of adequate investigation into the relation of language to religious thought has rendered the discussion less fruitful than one might have hoped. This difficulty does not arise with regard to morals because here there certainly can be no question of simply modifying the verbal expression. The problem posed by moral precepts is not one of understanding but of relevance: to what extent are concrete specific directives given to first-century communities binding today?
Resolution and Community
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: August 2007

The point about being a Christian (other versions of this are no doubt possible!) is that one lives, loves, works, feels and thinks in the light of the disclosure/discovery of a sense of end (finis, telos), and hence of a possibility of happiness (beatitudo, eudaimonia), which in turn points to a whole style of being-with-others, a particular form of community (amicitia, koinonia). In principle this is both nuclear and global. As well as the smaller projects, such as the guerrilla bases, proleptic utopias, regenerating sanctuaries and the like which our local church-communities should be, there must be permanent transformation of the structures of interdependence, ongoing liberation of mankind as a whole, active sponsoring of the righteousness of God which happens as the righting of relationships within society. Salvation occurs as community: that is unmistakably the Christian emphasis. In other words, then, politics cannot be divorced from ethics. It is in the ethical, precisely, that the relation between the personal and the social-political is negotiated. And if that is a commonplace in the tradition represented by St Thomas Aquinas, as it is, however uncharacteristic it may be of many Catholics ‘in public life’, it is also a principle which is central in the literary- critical tradition developed and sustained by Scrutiny.

The plan of this paper, then, is first to outline how the Scrutiny tradition forms an essential part of the long revolution against the society which inhibits and falsifies all reference to an ultimate source of meaning and an ultimate ground of being,
Violence and Misery
Authors: Camara Dom Helder
Published: August 2007

I. Speaking to Willing Ears

First of all, let me speak on behalf of the Third World, and thank those of you who represent the Haslemere Group for the Declaration which you are transforming into a programme of thought and action. I assure you, in my capacity as a man of the underdeveloped world, that your vision could not be clearer nor your attitude more courageous. This is what I have already said in Manchester, at the Manchester Student Congress, organized by the Student Christian Movement.

I have come here to co-operate with you; to urge you on in your effort in spite of the obstacles before you. I have come here to testify to the truth of the theme of this Conference.

I will try to show you quickly how the underdeveloped world is being crushed by a triple violence.

II. The Triple Violence against the Underdeveloped World

1. Internal colonialism, which means established violence

Taking Latin America as an example, when people ask me if I think our Continent is threatened by violence I feel that the question is looking ahead to the possible, eventual violence of those who are now oppressed, whereas it does not take into account the already existing violence of the oppressors—a small privileged group whose wealth is maintained at the expense of the misery of million of their countrymen.

Those who are unfamiliar with Latin America may think I am exaggerating; they may think I am being demagogic, or deliberately provocative.
The Psychological Roots of Authority
Authors: Dominian J.
Published: August 2007

Every Catholic knows that the Church is faced with a crisis and the name of that crisis is authority. Similarly in our society, the majority is aware that there is a challenge to authority as witnessed repeatedly on television which brings to millions of homes scenes of strife involving students, demonstrations, marches and clashes between employers, trade unions and workers. The majority of men and women sit and watch, leaving the few to march, sit down on the streets, barricade themselves in and from time to time explode in violence. At this point fingers are raised, critical editorials are written and sermons are preached about law and order. Indeed the desire for law and order is so great that human beings have to reach a very high degree of desperation before they threaten seriously the conditions which stabilize any society. Ideally everyone in authority should have as a primary concern the anticipation of legitimate needs. But this is an ideal and the enormous amount of human strife is a witness that this highly desirable objective is rarely achieved. Because of the known temptations likely to afflict those in authority who exercise power on behalf of others, the principles of democracy have been evolved to safeguard both the ruler and the ruled.
Culture and Revolution
Authors: Cameron J. M.
Published: August 2007

This collection of essays discusses the issues that are important for Catholics and others who find in neo-Marxism, at least in some of its varieties, something that speaks to their condition. The situation is slightly complicated in that some of the writers, notably Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams, are also affected by a densely and peculiarly English background, that of the tradition constructed (if a tradition can be said to be constructed) by Raymond Williams and his circle out of their reading, in both senses of the word, of Cobbett, Arnold, George Eliot, Tawney, Lawrence, Leavis. I am not sure that I have ever wholly understood the theses advanced by these writers. In part this is because I find their style opaque. Certain terms seem to be terms of art, but one is left to pick up the sense as one goes along. ‘Totalization’ is one that is coming in; ‘structure’, of course, both as a substantive and a verb, but this is perhaps the influence of American sociological writing; losing and making connexions between ‘cultural meanings’ seem to be important but elusive processes; we have ‘praxis’, and so on.

One would wish to press for examples. One of the great lessons of Wittgenstein’s later writings is the need to measure formulations against examples. At any rate, we are given by Mr Williams himself and by Mr Eagleton one of the theses over the interpretation of which I remain confused. Summarily it is that if we want to have or to bring about or to realize more fully a common culture in England—and it is always taken for granted that there is a moral imperative to work for this end—then we must strive for revolution or socialism or both as the only way of bringing this end about.
The Question of Priesthood
Authors: Milner Paulinus
Published: August 2007

The large number of conferences, books and articles that now centre on the nature of the priesthood seem proof of a general disquiet on the part of both priests and laymen. From the Netherlands comes the edition of the papers on this subject given at a congress in Lucerne in 1967 (News Bulletin of the Institute for Inter-European Sacerdotal Exchange at Maastricht, April, 1968, Vol. 2, Nos. 1/2); the March number of Concilium, also emanating from Holland, is devoted to the subject. It has even been suggested in certain quarters that a campaign of agitation is being organized by a small group of rebellious priests and theologians operating from the Netherlands, which is responsible for the open letter signed by 260 French priests last November and for the resignation en bloc of the twelve executive councillors and regional representatives of the Mission de France in March this year. Both events are concerned with the same problem and reflect ideas aired at the Lucerne Conference. The 260 priests state that they have come to believe that the clerical status imposed upon priests with the style of life and human relationships which it implies is one of the biggest obstacles to the revelation of Christ in the modern world. The worker-priests, for their part, have resigned because of the failure of the French bishops to recognize that the role of the Mission de France implies a third form of pastoral ministry different both from that of the religious orders and that of the secular ministry.
Calepin
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: August 2007

Since the last of these chronicles (New Blackfriars June 1967), I should no doubt have been spending my time dutifully reading the Goncourt prize entries, or the latest offering of the nouveau roman, I have in fact been doing nothing of the kind. If I were to look for the two most interesting novels recently written in French I would plump unhesitatingly for two quite different books, both by established writers, one experimental in style, the other rigorously traditional. The first is a fascinating exercise in science-fiction by Robert Merle, Un animal doué de raison (Gallimard, 1967), the second is Marguerite Yourcenar’s L’Oeuvre au noir (Gallimard, 1968).

I haven’t, either, been doing much in the reading of the fifty-odd books which have appeared on ‘the events of May’, having a suspicion that more of the ideologies, at any rate, were represented in the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, where plaintive practicalities (‘Baby-sitters wanted’) mingled with political exhortations and various kinds of contempt for the past (‘Dire qu’il y a toujours des chrétiens!’).

This is not because I feel there’s a good deal of I told you so’ about the student revolt in Paris and elsewhere, but rather because I believe there is a much more profound revolt going on in the comparatively unnoticed depths of society in the French provinces. The latter-day chouans of Brittany are no doubt the most spectacular of these rebels against a hyper-metropolitan government which knows little about their problems and cares less; but there have been manifestations of an aggressive provincial counter-attack in other quarters too, and two books by Robert Lafont give an interesting analysis of this: ‘Paris versus the provinces’ struggle in terms of colonialism.
Authority and Obedience in the Church Today—I
Authors: Torbet Ronald
Published: August 2007

It is a truism—and one repeated so often that it is starting to become tedious—that the issue of Humanae Vitae has precipitated a crisis of authority and obedience in the Church. Indeed the Roman authorities have been talking in these terms for several years now.

What, of course, is tedious about the phrase is the indiscriminate way in which it is employed. It may be helpful just to look at what the term ‘crisis’ basically means. It means, of course, simply ‘judgment’, ‘testing’, ‘questioning’. So, if we talk about a crisis of authority and obedience, we mean that authority and obedience are under question. But many jump immediately to the conclusion that this means that an attempt is being made to overthrow all authority and obedience in the Church. This seems to me a peculiarly obtuse misreading of the situation. There is undoubtedly a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction within the Church at the current theory and practice of ecclesiastical authority, but this is something quite different from wishing to throw overboard all authority in the Church, lock, stock and barrel. I do not see why this dissatisfaction in the Church should not be as much a ‘sign of the times’ for the Church as was the dissatisfaction with, say, the Church’s attitude to other Churches, or with the sclerosed ecclesiology that dominated in post-Tridentine times till our own days. These dissatisfactions had a fruitful result: the spirit and theology behind Vatican II. Why should we weep and be fearful regarding the dissatisfaction about authority?
Father Tyrrell and the Catholic Crisis
Authors: Goetz Joseph
Published: August 2007

The title of this paper expresses a certain wilful, or at least studied, ambiguity. What Catholic crisis? you may ask; or, more realistically, which Catholic crisis? Upon the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July last year, there was a single point of agreement between those Catholics who welcomed the papal letter as a major contribution, in Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s memorable phrase, for stemming ‘the Gadarene slide into American morality’, and those other Catholics who recognized it at once as yet another offering for that ever-growing catena of documentary embarrassment which the Holy See, in a kind of reverse Peter’s Pence, has generously provided in the course of the last 150 years. The nearly unanimous response—one of the notable exceptions being the author himself, if we are to believe some observers—was that we were now on the threshold of a new crisis, of faith, of authority, what you will, which would reduce the dimensions of the Modernist crisis, 1894-1910, to something resembling a parochial squabble between the vicar and the mothers’ union.

There are others, on both the ecclesiastical right and left, who would hold that the present crisis in the Church is simply chapter two, or the logical outcome of that earlier one, that the problems at the heart of the modernist controversy have re-appeared, sometimes in rather new garb, and that we must once again face them and come to terms with them.
Bones of Contention
Authors: Squire Aelred
Published: August 2007

A brief report of a congress on the pastoral relationships of priests, held at Louvain, and published in France in 1968, shows encouraging signs of a serious wish on the part of a team of both reputable clergy and of qualified psychiatrists to assess the psychological implications of the priestly role in the contemporary world. That its conclusions should be tentative is only to be expected, for there is so much new ground to cover, and an English translation is probably not to be looked for. It is, in any case, doubtful if, as it stands, it is an eminently exportable product outside a French-speaking milieu. But in raising, as it does, some of the more profound sexual implications for the figure of the priest and being bold enough to make articulate the latent ramifications of his relationship to money, it blazes a trail along which others are bound eventually to follow. The truth of the most universal of its observations can scarcely be disputed, namely that to the conscious reaction to the very notion of the priest there is ‘not sometimes, but invariably’ a normally, unconscious affect which is exactly its contrary. ‘On the image which arouses a conscious aggressiveness, another image imposes itself in the unconscious which arouses a feeling for its antithesis. Indeed this phenomenon is translated into noteworthy sociological terms in our contemporary society. Consciously anti-clerical, it nevertheless throws up a mass of books, films, etc., dealing with the person of the priest. A fact which shows well enough that it is not indifferent to him.’
Two Readings of St Augustine
Authors: O'Brien Denis
Published: August 2007

In the literature that survives from the ancient world Augustine is unrivalled, except perhaps by Cicero, for the range and intimacy of his writings. The lovely folio pages of the edition published in Paris by the Benedictines of St Maur from 1679-1700, still the most recent more or less complete edition of the extant works, contain by far the greater part of the titles catalogued after Augustine’s death by his disciple Possidius. Certainly enough has survived for us to see the personality and ideas of Augustine unfold over more than forty years, from the first flush of conversion at Cassiciacum, expressed in the almost adolescent idealism of the Soliloquia and the De beata vita, until his death at Hippo in 430, with the last chapters of the De civitate Dei completed some years before, and the Retractationes cut short, as scrupulosities should be.

The Confessions were written in the earlier part of this period. In book seven Augustine tells us that he finally rid his mind of the lees of Manichaeism by his reading ‘certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin’ (vii 13: I have cited throughout the paragraph divisions of the Maurist edition, without the chapter divisions of the editio princeps). In book eight Augustine is converted to Christianity by reading St Paul. But the conversion has still a Platonic element, for Augustine describes his experience in the garden at Cassiciacum partly in language that Plotinus had used to describe the soul’s ascent to the beautiful.
Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages—II
Authors: Parmisano Fabian
Published: August 2007

As John Noonan reads him, Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in everything except his sexology, in which he reverts to the rigours of the traditional Augustinianism. For the Angelic Doctor as for Augustine the marriage act is not a product of love and is not to be motivated by a desire for pleasure; it is justified only in its purpose of multiplying mankind. Noonan concedes (briefly, and reluctantly: ‘A case can be made . . he says) that late medieval theologians, Thomas included, were ‘somewhat in advance of their society in their declarations on the ideal of married love’, but, he adds and emphasizes, they failed ‘to incorporate love into the purposes of marital intercourse’. (Contraception, Mentor ed., pp. 299-311.) The purpose of this article is to summarize St Thomas’s doctrine on marriage; to show that he did indeed teach that love and marriage go together, and did also teach that love—human, passionate, pleasurable love—not only entered into the purposes of the marriage act but was also the root and source of the act’s ultimate beneficial value for the spouses.

St Thomas’s reflections on love and marriage are found scattered here and there through his vast opera, but his teaching appears in full and concentrated form in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book IV, dists. xxvi-xlii. This early teaching of St Thomas was, in the middle of the fourteenth century, incorporated into a Supplement to the Summa Theologiae by an unknown Dominican friar in an attempt to complete the Saint’s master work. Accordingly, it is these two loci that have served as the present paper’s principal sources.
Winter Rose
Authors: Cameron-Brown Aldhelm
Published: August 2007

There is a story about two monks who lived long ago and who had taken a vow never to touch a woman. One day they were walking together through the forest, when they came to a clearing. Through the middle of the clearing ran a stream, rather wide and deep, and at this season rather turbulent. By the banks of the stream stood a pretty girl, obviously in some distress because she wanted to cross the stream but was afraid to. Hardly pausing in his stride, the elder and taller of the two monks picked her up in his arms, waded through the water, set her down safely on the further side, and walked on without waiting for her thanks. The younger monk was astounded. He crossed the stream—with some difficulty, because he was smaller—and then bounced along behind his companion, seething with suppressed criticism. At last he could stand it no longer. Catching up with the other, he said, in a voice that showed how deeply scandalized he was, ‘Brother—your vow!’ The elder monk looked round at him in surprise, and then said, rather sharply, ‘What! Are you still carrying that girl?’

Of our Lady above all people it can be said that her spirituality consisted in eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.
Character and Liberalism—II
Authors: Bergonzi Bernard
Published: August 2007

A similar concept of character to John Bayley’s was presented by Iris Murdoch, in an influential essay called ‘Against Dryness’, published in Encounter in 1961. Her approach is more overtly philosophical: she argues that in the face of the failure of traditional liberal philosophy to develop an adequate concept of man, the novel can give us a full sense of the uniqueness and mysteriousness of human personality. She finds these qualities exemplified in the great novelists of the nineteenth century, particularly the Russians, and contrasts their kind of novel with the typical fictional modes of the twentieth century: the ‘journalistic’ novel of accumulated fact and information, a degenerate descendant of literary naturalism, which is often a formless, inflated daydream; and the ‘crystalline’ novel of dry aesthetic concentration, which is more concerned with an ideal of form than with conveying the variousness of reality. A normative note emerges at the end of Miss Murdoch’s essay:

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for the imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency of course may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always present a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.

There is a clear consonance between Iris Murdoch’s ideas and John Bayley’s, and, again, the contrast between these ideas and the characteristic utterance of the Continental or American avant-garde is striking.
Corporate Personality in the Bible: Adam and Christ—a biblical use of the concept of personality
Authors: Wansbrough Henry
Published: August 2007

Both sociologists and philosophers are becoming more and more aware that a man’s personality is formed by the interplay between himself and his society. If he is transplanted into a different society or different culture at a sufficiently formative period of his life, then that culture will determine the directions which he takes in many fields of thought and activity; if, on the other hand, such a transplantation takes place when he is too rigidly (or firmly) fixed in the ways of a different society, he may be unable to communicate with or relate to the members of his new society, and remain a frustrated member of his old group, from which he is now separated. Examples of both these situations are easy to find among European immigrants to the United States. In more primitive societies where there are less universal conventions and systems of protection, the involvement of the individual within his group, and his dependence on it, are even more obvious. Today the Coca-Cola and Kleenex culture is worldwide; the traveller’s cheque and the passport will provide a fair measure of financial and legal protection the world over. Group loyalties and so group particularism, strong as they may be, need to be less extreme than in primitive times. The psychologists will tell us that a sense of belonging is a crucial factor for psychological stability, but in Hebrew times real belonging to a group was a condition of survival. This was one element which generated the way of thinking which was first characterized by H. Wheeler Robinson as that of the ‘corporate personality’.
The Transcendental or the Political Kingdom?—I: Reflexions on a theological dispute
Authors: Mann Peter
Published: August 2007

It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.
The Perils of Translation
Authors: Evans‐Pritchard E. E.
Published: August 2007

It is well known what confusions and misunderstandings have arisen in the history of Christianity by translations from one language into another. They can be worse when attempts are made to translate religious literature from a European language into languages of peoples with cultures very different from ours, such as the peoples of Africa. I have recently come across an illustration of this in a C.M.S. hymn book in Zande (Buku Aimina, The Religious Tract Society, London, n.d.). I shall present a few specimens of translations into this Central African language of familiar verses as examples. Before doing so I should say that Zande is a tonal language and that the translations are made to conform to English metre and to be sung to the English tunes. This in itself is enough to render the hymns more or less meaningless. I am not trying to make fun of the missionaries, for whom I had great respect, but I must say that I am astonished at their attempts not only to translate hymns to be sung to a foreign system of notation but also to translate them, where possible, literally. Thus:

Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear,

It is not night if thou be near:

O may no earth-born cloud arise To hide thee from thy servant’s eyes.

Yesu, Uru mbisimore,

Ka Mo du no, yuru o te;

Ka paiye nga ka oka Ro Ti bangili vururo ya.

This would have sounded quite remarkable to an ordinary Zande (one who was not an instructed Christian convert).
The Founding of ‘Blackfriars’
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: August 2007

It must have been early in 1919, the time when Father Bede resumed his weekly walk with me, that he spoke of his desire for a monthly review; of the need for a new Catholic review in England; a periodical, fearless, outspoken, zealous for truth; not primarily theological; a review that would present, in intelligible fashion, Catholic teaching on social justice, comment on passing events, give adequate space to literature, strike the human note. A Dominican review—acceptable to the unlearned—and, perhaps this was harder, a review the learned would not disdain. The articles must not be heavy, nor yet be too abstruse for the plain man. Scientific technicalities were to be avoided, humour not discouraged. A Dominican review that would appeal to the laity and, no doubt, might be read by the clergy. In all its criticism of books and political activities, and in the inevitable controversies that would be provoked, the review, while not allowing truth to be obscured by feelings of charity must not let the plea of truth excuse want of charity. All cocksureness, arrogance, identification of personal opinions with eternal verities—in short, all pontificating by lay-writers on matters by no means de fide was to be deprecated, as far as possible excluded.

So, in many talks, Father Bede discussed the review he projected, the kind of review he wanted, that he believed there was room for; a review that would find its public. Of course he knew quite well that Catholics in England are not addicted to the habit of reading, preferring in their newspapers startling headlines rather than sober statement or reasoned argument. Aware of this disadvantage, equally aware that a large body of Anglicans read Catholic literature, Father Bede reached a definite decision—a monthly Dominican review should be established.
The Apostolate of the Press in the Dominican Order
Authors: Callus Daniel A.
Published: August 2007

A religious Order, Père Lacordaire said, is an expression of the ideal of man as raised and inspired by God. Greater or lesser loyalty to this ideal is the measure of the success or failure of a religious Order. The motto Veritas, Truth, is the mark of the Dominican Order, the symbol of its ideal. To uphold, to spread and to defend the Truth was the high ideal of St. Dominic in establishing the Order of Friars Preachers. But if the quest for truth is a noble aspiration, it is none the less an arduous pursuit. To maintain the truth without counting the costs, to become its apostle by preaching it in season and out of season, to vindicate it without flinching when challenged, is an achievement which entails much labour and strenuous self-sacrifice. An apostle is not sent to preach his own fancies and theories, but to teach and defend the truth of God and His Church in whose name he speaks, so that if he, as the Church’s representative, indulges his own fancies and speculations, he forfeits his rights in the apostolate of truth, and is likely to become a traitor to the Word of God and His Christ, according to St. Paul’s strong words.
Blessed Henry Suso
Authors: Graef H.C.
Published: August 2007

’ You must not thitik that you shall take leave from love. Behold, they who said they loved you could not love. And if your heart were as full of love as the bottomless sea, it would all be drunk in by the love of the Beautiful Lover.'—Henry Suso.

The fourteenth century may justly be called the classic period of German mysticism, for it gave birth to the great triad of Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and John Tauler, all of them Dominicans.

The conditions in which they lived were, indeed, almost ideal for the development of a Christian mysticism of the highest order. Their time was a time of widespread and intense suffering for Church and people alike. The Church, in the person of the Popes, was persecuted by the Emperors; epidemics were rife in town and country, and frequent interdicts deprived the faithful of the consolations of Religion often for years at a time. Thus, in the desolation of a life whose insecurity and transitoriness were only too apparent, souls sought and found stability in a personal relationship with God which the vicissitudes of earthly existence could not affect and death itself would but transform and fulfil. This close intercourse between God and the soul was cultivated, especially among the nuns and lay communities of women whose direction was entrusted almost exclusively to the Dominicans. This contact between the highly strung spirituality of the nuns and the theological austerity of the disciples of St. Dominic produced a wonderfully enriched mystic life. Securely rooted in Thomistic doctrine, the flower of Dominican mysticism drew from the Angelic Doctor all his learning, sanity, and balance, developing his own mystic elements in the less restrained atmosphere of feminine tenderness and devotion.
A Tertiary of St. Dominic
Authors: Bury Diana
Published: August 2007

Anyone assisting at Mass in the Chapel of the Fathers of the Assumption in Paris on a May morning in the year 1865 might have observed the frail, slightly mis-shapen figure of a woman, bowed in prayer. On enquiry he would have learnt that her name was Antoinette Fage, the directress of an orphanage run by some charitable ladies, a Tertiary of St. Dominic, and a recent penitent of the Assumptionist Père Pernet. He would have required unusual prescience to have discerned in this small delicate woman, already in her forty-second year, the Foundress of a Congregation that would spread to two Continents before the end of the century.

Left a virtual orphan at the age of thirteen by the death of her mother, her spine permanently injured in an accident during her childhood, Antoinette grew tip in an atmosphere of sorrow and suffering. Thus early she learnt her first lessons in resignation to the Divine Will. ‘It was His Holy Will that I should suffer anguish of mind, sadness of heart and extreme bodily pain so that I might the more easily enter into the sufferings of others and minister to them,’ she said in later years.

Antoinette was cared for by kind friends until site was old enough to earn her living with her needle. In 1850 she joined a dressmaking establishment, and it was about that time that she first became acquainted with the Dominican Fathers. Of a naturally religious nature, gifted by God with remarkable qualities of heart and mind, yet with a highly-strung temperament and a want of confidence in her own powers, she needed the direction of a master of the spiritual life. For the next fourteen years she was to find in Père Faucillon, O.P., such a director.
THE SPIRITUAL MAN1
Authors: Thomas. John of St. , McCann Dom Justin
Published: August 2007

The Spirit breatheth where He will, and thou hearest His voec; but thou knowest not whence He cometh or whither He goeth. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit.
Look Back in Ambiguity
Authors: Egner G.
Published: August 2007

The most significant thing about Cardinal Heenan’s autobiography is its preface. He cannot write the whole truth, he tells us, because ministers of Christ must keep confidences without limit of time; and he has written his own life-story because that was less trouble than the granting of frequent interviews to a prospective biographer. In other words, he regards the history of a man’s life as total recall tempered with discretion. How well does this dubious conception serve him ?

Best, obviously enough, in narratives of a circumscribed and picturesquely memorable kind. Days in the infants’ class; a schoolboy’s escapade; anecdotes of life at Rome or in a parish; episodes in a journey to Russia. Some of the anecdotes are entertaining; of some (especially those of an edifying character), the best to be said is that c'est la guerre, mais ce n'est pas magnifique. However, it is good to have the criminally bad diet at Ushaw set down for posterity by a cardinal, while his account of The Day World War II Broke Out should find a place in any anthology of such narratives. The book proceeds in this style from schooldays to Rome and from Rome to ordination in 1930 and parish work. Before and during the war the author became involved, not only in local affairs, but in public speaking and writing. There follows the resurrection of the Catholic Missionary Society in 1947, retreat work for Clergy (of which the unfortunate The People's Priest was the precipitate) and the author’s appointment in 1951 to the See of Leeds. We are promised a second volume. What kind of man emerges from the first?
Workers' Control
Authors: Fleet Ken
Published: August 2007

‘In the past workmen have thought that if they could secure higher wages and better conditions they would be content. Employers have thought that if they granted these things the workers ought to be contented. Wages and conditions have improved, but the discontent and unrest have not disappeared. Many good people have come to the conclusion that working people are so unreasonable that it is useless to try to satisfy them. The fact is that the unrest is deeper than pounds, shillings and pence, necessary as they are. The root of the matter is the straining of the spirit of man to be free.’— William Straker (Northumberland miner), in evidence before the Sankey Commission, 1919.

Workers’ Control is about the struggle for a genuine system of industrial democracy. It is based on the premise, and contradiction, that while we live in a political democracy, however weak and limited that democracy may be, we certainly do not have any real economic democracy. And, furthermore, that without a swift development of democracy in industry we are not very likely to maintain much of our existing political democracy, which has already been seriously undermined by the rapid growth of huge economic empires accountable to no-one. On the other hand if we can create genuine democratic institutions in the industrial sphere we shall have a substantial base from which to attack the weaknesses of the present political framework and to make it much more responsive to human needs and aspirations.
The Case of the Abbé Barreau
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: August 2007

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his great-grandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.
Collusion Course
Authors: Rice Denis
Published: August 2007

The recent coadjutor appointment in Nottingham diocese met with some criticism. I could sympathize with the critics—and with the chosen candidate. However, the situation was more than an example of non-consultation about episcopal selection. Clouds of debate and confusion around the freshly-embroidered mitre obscured something deeper, farther back in time.

For some years, the Ordinary of the diocese has been a target of comment for allegedly rigid views and activities. In particular, his stance on Humanae Vitae (H. V.) was strict in its expectations of what priests should teach about the encyclical. Five priests were suspended on the issue. In 1968 and 1969, widely-reported arguments and public meetings were held in the diocese about H. V. and its aftermath.

I chaired one of these meetings in March 1969. It was attended by four hundred people. Many of them were for liberal interpretations of H. V. and against the Bishop’s sanctions on priests who did not accept his line. Some in the audience were supporters of the growing Renewal Movement. Many more people were concerned about the need for an articulate but critical lay voice in the Church. I directed part of my summing up at the meeting to these groups. I suggested that, perhaps, enough had been said and done locally about H. V.; that attention should be turned to more important, if less exciting, issues. The example I offered was the manner of appointment of Bishops. I said that, in Nottingham, discussions or protests about this would be too late after a retiral or death. As far as I am aware, nothing was done from that time in 1969. Yet when Mgr McGuinness was appointed in 1972, the protest was strident.
Remaining in the Calling in Which You were Called
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: August 2007

One of the Christian notions that has been offered a new lease of life as a result of the twentieth-century renewal of ecclesiology has been that of vocation. It no longer ought to be possible to write an article entitled ‘vocation’ in a Catholic encyclopedia and go on to deal exclusively with the call to the priesthood or the religious life. Even when an author has the intention of dealing with these topics, he should nowadays feel obliged to begin with remarks to the effect that all Christians—and, indeed, all men—share in the same vocation to the kingdom of God. It is the sacrament of baptism that is the seal of a vocation before ever there is a question of an ordination or a religious profession. Just as the notion of the ‘Church’, once confiscated by the clergy, has had to be handed back to the baptized, who all begin and mostly remain as lay people, so has the notion of ‘vocation’. A vocation from God is something which every Christian must learn to detect and act upon, whether or not he remains a layman all his life. One hopes that children in Catholic schools run by religious orders are no longer led to believe that there are just two major possibilities in their lives: either that of having a vocation or, if they do not have this, of getting married. (Not that I am going to spend time in this article in setting up marriage as an alternative vocation; rather the reverse, as we shall see.)