bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ancients Versus Medievals
Authors: Hoskin M. A.
Published: July 2007

‘In time no less than in regions there are wastes and deserts.’ So I wrote Francis Bacon with medieval science in mind. And when Whewell two hundred years later spoke of‘the almost complete blank which the history of physical science offers, from the decline of the Roman Empire, for a thousand years’, he was only summing up a view of the Middle Ages generally accepted from the seventeenth century down to our own times.

Historians of science did not need much encouragement before passing rapidly and gratefully over the medieval period. Many of the works had never been printed and existed in manuscript only; and everywhere one was confronted with an unfamiliar terminology and barbarous style. That we now know as much as we do about medieval science is due in the first place to the French physicist Pierre Duhem. He re-examined works that had been untouched for centuries and in his monumental treatises of fifty years ago made some disconcerting claims for medieval physicists, especially for his fellow-countrymen of the fourteenth century. To take just one example, Nicolas Oresme emerged as the inventor of co-ordinate geometry, and even as a precursor of Copernicus, although he discussed the motion of the earth only to reject it. Not surprisingly, many took the view that Duhem had overstated his case, but now the medievals had their champion. Issues had been raised, and evidence must be heard.

Unfortunately, the evidence was not forthcoming, unless one accepted Duhem’s quotations at their face value, and overlooked his tendency to tear them out of context and to offer only his translation even when this meant imposing his own interpretation. And there, by and large, the matter rested for thirty years.
One and Catholic
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The Russian Orthodox lay theologian Komiakov once said that the Pope of Rome was the first Protestant in the world, and this saying is generally taken to mean that, like the Protestants, the Pope proclaims doctrine as truth ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.

Without going so far as this, Dr E. L. Mascall in The Recovery of Unity makes it the thesis of his two final chapters on the Papacy that its claim to universal jurisdiction has resulted in its becoming, in part at least, an excrescence on the life of the Church, impoverishing the function of the episcopate and setting itself, as a preponderantly juridical entity, above and apart from the inner life of grace and truth that it should exist to foster.

Such criticisms as these and others closely connected with them appear fairly constantly in ecumenical writing, and much patient elucidation is needed to meet them and set them in their true perspective. The purpose of this article is to point to certain considerations concerning the phrase ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae in the Vatican Definition which tend to show that it does not separate the Pope from the Church and set him above and apart from its true inner life, but on the contrary, integrates him into the Church’s teaching authority as the final and decisive step in its exercise.

Faith is a gift of God, the beginning in us of eternal life. It is given in baptism and comes to us as an encounter with Christ in his Church. The content of our faith is the saving truth of God,
A Collection for Unity
Authors: Stirnimann Heinrich
Published: July 2007

In January 1957 Professor Oscar Cullmann was invited to lecture in Zurich on the subject, ‘Primitive Christendom and The Ecumenical Problem’. Referring to the collection made by the early Gentile Christians for the Jewish Christians, he proposed that the separated Christians of today make a reciprocal collection at least once a year, as an expression of brotherhood. In a later article, Professor Cullmann defined the significance and the form of this collection more narrowly, and answered objections. We would like to reproduce his thoughts here and to assess their value.

For over fifty years Catholics and non-Catholics have been praying during the same octave every year for unity in faith. This is a promising sign, and we would not be far wrong if we saw here the basic fact and the supreme form of the movement towards re-union. Further, we note as novelty that theological work, which formerly accentuated differences, is now in many respects leading scholars back together along various directions. Thus, for example, for some twenty or thirty years there has been a lively and fruitful exchange in Biblical studies between Catholic and non-Catholic exegetes. Even in the sphere of systematic theology there have been many changes. Without applauding every attempt to seek a rapprochement in content and method, we must not underestimate the value of this tendency, first to reach agreement on several points, and then to make possible a non-polemical, even friendly conversation on the points which still divide. Cullmann is not content with this.
Communist Revival and Christian Opportunity
Authors: Hyde Douglas
Published: July 2007

After several years of decline, the British Communist Party is steadily growing in numbers and influence. The numbers involved are not, as yet, very great but the upward trend has been maintained for a sufficient length of time for it to be of some significance. The form it is taking and, more particularly, what app ars to be its underlying causes, should however cause Christians to stop and think.

In common with Communist parties all over the West, the British party lost some twenty-five per cent of its members during the months following the Hungarian People’s Rising. Among them was a high proportion of young intellectuals and some of its most promising younger leaders. The membership graph dropped sharply, then flattened out and more or less remained so until a couple of years ago when the Party began to recruit slightly more members than it was losing. Throughout the past year the graph has risen steadily month by month. Between early September and early November 1960, the Party’s membership increased by one thousand. The tempo of recruitment increased too. Before November was through the figure was up to 1,300. This represents, approximately, a five per cent increase in total membership in three months. The numbers recruited may not be spectacular, but the rate of increase is probably just about as much as the Party can effectively absorb at the moment. One must remember that the aim is to teach and train each member to become not just one more Communist but a well-instructed Marxist who is also fitted to be a leader wherever he goes.
Educational Survey
Authors: Wileman M. A.
Published: July 2007

A child who passes his eleven-plus examination can learn Latin free of charge till he is eighteen. A child who does not pass this test can still learn Latin till he is eighteen, if his father will pay for him to go to an independent or direct grant school. If a candidate cannot pass a university entrance examination in Latin, not even the offer of a fee of a thousand pounds a year can secure a university place for him.

When parents make great sacrifices in order that their children shall learn a particular subject, be educated in the religious tradition of the family, whether it be Jewish, Catholic or Quaker, or have the opportunity of being taught in small classes, they are often accused of ‘contracting out’ of their social obligations. There are at least two menacing assumptions behind this question-begging stock phrase which need to be brought into the open. Recently a weekly columnist wrote, ‘Influential people buy their children out of the public system.’ Since each university is autonomous, the question of contract is forced into some curious acrobatics where the payment of students’ fees is concerned. The passing of an examination at eleven entitles a child to a free grammar-school education, whether the parents be rich or poor. The passing of a university entrance examination at present entitles a young man or woman to a free university education only if the parents are relatively poor. The family problems involved in this situation have been faced in the report of the committee on grants to students which met under the chairmanship of Sir Colin Anderson.
Heard and Seen: The Ambassador's Choice
Authors: P.W.
Published: July 2007

The John Hay Whitney Collection of paintings in the possession of the outgoing American ambassador to London has for the last six weeks drawn crowds to the Tate Gallery, attracted perhaps by the legendary worth of a private collection such as could scarcely exist nowadays in England. And it must be admitted that these seventy pictures, mostly acquired in the ten years that followed the end of the war in 1945, have the patina of eminent acceptability. Apart from a stray Blake, two Zoffanys and a group of American paintings, they reflect the definitive arrival of the impressionists and post-impressionists as the artists most appropriate for embassy walls.

But Mr Whitney’s choice is marvellously sound. As Sir John Rothensteiny remarks in his introduction to the catalogue (which is itself worthy of so magnificent an exhibition), the criterion has not been a mere ‘programme’, but rather the inherent quality of the actual painting. Thus Braque is, in the gallery sense, not at all well represented, but the two land- (or rather land-and-sea-) scapes of his fauve period in the collection are wonderful in their own right; one can at once see why they were bought, and how irrelevant it would be to insist that they should be ‘matched’ by his later work. Picasso, indeed, is represented by a splendid cubist Homme Assis as well as by a tender portrait of 1905, but once more it is the autonomous interest of the picture that matters. We feel that the whole collection, however ‘safe’ it may seem, is the vindication of the individual picture’s right to please.
A Theological Chronicle
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It is surely no accident that the two most important books to be discussed here are products of the ecumenical debate; they are important, that is, not merely for professional ‘ecumenicists’ but for theologians generally. The point made by Père Congar many years ago, that Catholic theologians have something to learn from non-Catholic theology, is being verified in particular examples of constructive theological work, in a response to the insights of faithful dissident Christians which takes those insights seriously and positively and seeks critically to assimilate them into a fuller Catholic theology rather than to controvert them merely from what can now be recognized as often too narrow a basis. How intimate the debate has become abroad may be seen from the remarkable collection of studies offered to Otto Karrer on his seventieth birthday, edited by Maximilian Roesle, O.S.B., and Oscar Cullmann. In this large volume of nearly seven hundred pages, Catholic and Protestant writers pair off with each other to study in turn topics which have for centuries been regarded as purely controversial; Catholic writers include Vögtle, Schlier, Geiselmann, Küng, Jedin, Mörsdorf, Fries, Alois Müller, Sartory, and among the Protestants are Asmussen, Stauffer, von Allmen, Stählin, to mention only names known to me. The long study of Peter and the ‘rock’ text by the Protestant Johannes Ringger is particularly striking; it is an extraordinary fact that Catholic theologians, even since the appearance of Cullmann’s Peter (recently published in a revised German edition), have been much more interested in the apologetic case for Peter than in his theological significance, which is not, after all, exhausted in the Vatican decrees which define it.
Sociological Survey
Authors: McClintock F. H.
Published: July 2007

At a time when the upward trend in crime continues steadily and our annual total of indictable offences in 1960 is certain to be the highest ever recorded by the police, it is perhaps not unreasonable that many who are concerned with the day-to-day administration of the criminal law and the treatment of offenders, are doubting whether all this recent activity and expenditure in criminological research can produce results likely to be of practical value in dealing with this phenomenon of lawlessness, now universally regarded as a major social problem of contemporary society.

A survey of the results of research by sociologists and others in their efforts to solve delinquency problems which was published only two years ago by Lady Wootton offers little encouragement. In it she seriously questioned the methods used and many of the conclusions reached by workers in this field. In fact, it was pointed out that current theories in criminology are so numerous that they can easily accommodate any facts, however mutually contradictory they may be! In fact, ‘A lament for criminology’ might have been the subtitle of this admirable book. It is true that since then the situation has to some extent improved, and in recent years the Government has strengthened the arm of research by its support and practical tokens of its interest.

But on the basis of past experience, it would, nevertheless, be unwise to expect in the near future any spectacular results from research which could possibly lead to an immediate and substantial diminution in the annual volume of crime.
Regions of Poetry
Authors: Marwood Andrew
Published: July 2007

A small anthology from the region of Cardiff claims to be of Anglo-Welsh verse. How can one tell Anglo-Welsh from Anglo-English verse? The blurb suggests ‘a Celtic sensitivity for the pattern of word and image’, but this seems to me to be taking refuge in the undefinable. This kind of sensitivity, without which a poet is not a poet, is the same the whole world over and what determines it is the extent to which his mind is moulded by the language and past of his people or moved to write by the problems of their present. In the context, as an example of the first, that is of a poet whose imagery and language seem to continue the life of Welsh poetry, I would give Vernon Watkins, who does not appear here and must be outside the terms of reference; and of the second, R. S. Thomas whose verse in the wider technical sense is hardly more Welsh than Edmund Blunden’s but who is concerned deeply with the scene and the soul of Wales. If the meaning I have tried to give to the term is accepted, in this anthology the poems of Glyn Jones fall into the first category, ‘Nonconformist’ by Robin Moffet into the second, but the majority could have been written by Englishmen in England. I sound harsher than I mean to: there are some good Anglo-English poems among them. There are more Anglo-Welsh poems in Mr Conlan’s volume from the same publisher and they are the best ones in it.
Non‐violence and nuclear war
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

Last December a conference of the War Resister’s International was held at Gandhigram in South India, which I was invited to attend. I was only able to go on the last day, but I felt that the meeting was significant both for its timing and for its setting and for the conclusions to which it came. I was glad to find that there were two or three other Catholics present, including a priest sent by his bishop from Belgium. Catholics are not generally supposed to be favourable towards pacifism, but it is obvious that the threat of nuclear war calls for a radical change in our attitude to war, and it seems inevitable that there will be an increasing number who will feel obliged to take up a pacifist position in regard at least to nuclear war. The timing of this meeting was significant because the W.R.I. is an international organization without any religious basis, yet clearly it was felt that the birth of Christ was something which is relevant to the issue which faces all men to-day, and I must say that I was impressed by the spiritual attitude which was shown by the majority of the delegates. The setting also was significant because clearly it was felt that the country of Mahatma Gandhi was the country in the world which could best be expected to offer some guidance on the supreme problem which faces our generation.
Science Survey
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

The Complete Scientist (Oxford University Press; 18s.; paper 12s. 6d.) contains the report of a group of educationists, under the chairmanship of the Rector of Imperial College, to the British Association. Its purpose is to suggest means of overcoming the acknowledged narrowness of general culture of the professional scientists and technologists now being turned out by our universities. Though based on a comparatively small survey of selected schools and universities, the conclusions reached compel attention by their reasonableness, and the firmness with which they are pressed; they ought to be carefully considered by everyone with a concern for higher education in this country.

In broad outline, the conclusions are conservative: there is to be no radical change in the type of education we provide, but the main weaknesses have got to be cured. With one exception, members of the Group wished to maintain the educational system in which specialization begins with the sixth form at school and continues through a three-year university course: the continental and Scottish systems are not recommended. The basic change must be at the school level, though it will reflect itself higher up. In the sixth form, the specialist in science ought to spend twice as much time on non-scientific pursuits as he now does: some twelve periods a week instead of the present average of six, with, of course, consequent reduction in die time given to science. Below the sixth, the present time-table is regarded as satisfactory.
Some Considerations upon Perception
Authors: Walshe Francis M. R.
Published: July 2007

I propose to discuss in general terms some recent neurological and neurophysiological views upon perception—which seem threatened with obscurity by the introduction of epistemological factors into what purport to be physiological accounts of this complex process. One or two writers have chosen, unfortunately, I submit, to resuscitate Locke’s famous doctrine of primary and secondary qualities in perception, which doctrine we owe in the first instance to Galileo.

By the term ‘perception,’ I refer to sensory perception in all its modes, not limiting myself to visual perception, since some confusion has arisen in the past by such restriction.

Before I proceed, I should define my operative term, ‘perception.’ Except in the case of infants, lights and colours and sounds do not enter consciousness without some significance and without some measure of interpretation. For example, auditory reception pure and simple is rare. Sounds come into the focus of attention as spatialized, and identified as to their source and significance. This perception has physiological and psychological elements and affective accompaniments, and is in effect a product of experience, as Rheinhold has recently reminded us. The same holds true for other sensory modalities. Simple sense reception is what Whitehead calls ‘sense awareness.’ When this is enriched by these accompaniments, when in fact it involves thought and feeling, it is better spoken of as ‘sense perception.’ Simple sense awareness or reception is the fleeting endowment of the infant, rarely to be repeated in later life, save in circumstances unprecedented for the individual.
Dogmatism Without Authority
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

This is the study of an anomaly, an inquiry into a paradox. It is an examination of how and why the apparently unexceptionable tenets and standards of one very distinguished literary critic can so often lead him to the most erroneous conclusions.

Yvor Winters is an American, a man who has had a formative influence on a number of young poets in the United States but who, until very recently, was almost unknown in this country save for a few of his stylish and fastidious poems which had appeared in anthologies of American verse. He is a great teacher, a teacher who has been honoured in a fine poem by Thom Gunn who has studied with him; he is also a self-appointed arbiter of taste who is spoken of by his devotees with an almost hushed reverence and awe.

Let us first examine Winters’s credentials, his beliefs. In one very real sense, he is a Schoolman, a scholastic who rates human reason higher than every other faculty or function; but he is a Schoolman who pays homage to no Church, a man who gives allegiance to no established system but who creates his own fearlessly and sometimes defiandy. Winters is not afraid to be either didactic or dogmatic. Indeed, what first strikes the reader of his essays is, above all, the enormous assurance of the writer; there is no timidity, no demurring. The judgments are never tentative, the appraisals never ambiguous. And Winters is as confident and precise in his generalities as when he applies those generalities to particular poems or poets.
Ecumenical Survey
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

Last year’s Conference for the discussion of Ecumenical Questions was held at Gazzada near Milan from September 19 to 23. Over seventy representatives were present, among them many names well known in ecumenical work, including two English priests, a Dominican and a Jesuit. The general theme of the Conference was ‘differences compatible with Catholic unity.’ It met under the presidency of Cardinal Bea, and Mgr J. G. Willibrandts was in the chair. The discussions and conclusions of this Conference are not at present for publication, but it may be said that there was much scope at it for the frank expression of opinion, and the chief point that emerged was that under the unity of the Church’s de fide teaching there is room for differing points of view and complementary traditions in both theological thinking and liturgical practice, not only as between East and West but also within the Latin rite itself. Cardinal Montini, Archbishop of Milan, visited the Conference, and Cardinal Alpink was also present at it.

Following up our promise, given in the Ecumenical Survey in the January number, we print here a communication from an Anglo-Catholic deeply interested in work for unity between her own members within the Church of England; and especially between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals.

A letter addressed to Abbé Couturier of Lyons, and printed by his executor, makes clear that the resolve of one Anglican religious community to engage in conversations with their evangelical brethren was a by-product of his eirenic visit to that community in 1937.
Christianity and Sex: Orientations
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

‘It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and refreshing’.

This eminently quotable and much quoted passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover allows us to indicate the purpose and scope of the reflections which follow. It is certainly an exploration of consciousness (and conscience) that we propose to make, but neither as novelist nor as saint, concerned to illuminate and purify the secret springs of life, so far as these are accessible to the intelligence of feeling and sympathy; it is rather from the viewpoint of the Christian theologian that an attempt will be made here to explore consciousness and conscience, to analyse its ingredients, to take stock: an exercise of intelligence sensitive enough, it is hoped, to avoid the crudities of brute imperatives, but none the less conceptual and discursively rational, while at the same time resorting to those privileged sources of insight available to the Catholic in divine revelation.
A Survey of Old Testament Studies
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

Contemporary study of the Old Testament appears to be dominated by three trends, associated with three broad groups of scholars. For practical purposes these groups may legitimately be described as ‘schools’, but only in a sense broad enough to allow for the intellectual independence of each individual scholar. The designation ‘school’ is often resented and repudiated nowadays.

The first group, led by the German scholars, A. Alt, M. Noth and G. von Rad, is usually called the ‘History of Tradition’ school. The second, consisting primarily of Scandinavian scholars with S. Mowinckel and J. Pedersen at their head, is sometimes described as the ‘Comparative Religion’ school. For reasons which will appear later I personally prefer to call it the ‘Palaeo-anthropological’ school. The third general trend is that of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. It is characteristic of the new awakening of Catholic Old Testament scholarship, especially in France, and here the leader is unquestionably R. de Vaux. The approach of certain American scholars such as W. Albright, G. E. Wright and J. Bright is markedly similar to that of the French, and it would not be wholly inaccurate to classify these too under the same general heading of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. Let us very briefly consider the distinctive approaches of each of these schools as exemplified in their most important and most representative works.

The characteristic approach of the German school may be described by means of a double simile. The enormously complicated amalgam of tradition which we call the Old Testament is regarded as a sort of snowball. The nucleus of the snowball is constituted by the Grundlage, the central ‘pan-Israelite’ traditions recording the events of the exodus, Sinai and the entry into the promised land.
Toleration and Conscience
Authors: John Henry St
Published: July 2007

At the meeting of the World Council of Churches at Evanston in 1954 it was reported in the newspapers that a movement, within its organization, was pressing for a motion against the Roman Catholic Church condemnatory of its alleged persecuting activities against Protestants in such countries as Spain and Colombia. The motion was successfully shelved by the skilled and tactful chairmanship of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Fisher. It is very generally admitted, and often publicly stated, by leaders of the Ecumenical movement, that any thought or action on its part which definitely excluded the Roman Catholic Church because of the difficulties involved, would damage its Ecumenical character and tend to render it pan-Protestant and anti-Roman. Nevertheless, even within the movement, there are Protestant pressure-groups which are anti-Catholic, especially because of the charges of persecuting intolerance made against the Church, and these would like to see it ousted from consideration in the work of the World Council for Christian Unity.

But even where alleged persecuting intolerance is not seen as a reason for the complete exclusion of Roman Catholicism from the ultimate concept of Christian unity, this charge undoubtedly causes concern even amongst those non-Catholic leaders who are otherwise well disposed towards the Church; there is always the lurking suspicion that if and when Rome gets the power it will of its very nature turn persecutor. This suspicion is strengthened by a prevalent belief that the only orthodox doctrine of religious freedom permissible to Catholics is that based upon the distinction between thesis and hypothesis.
The Moral Basis of Punishment
Authors: Gaskell Austin
Published: July 2007

Example alone is the end of all public punishments and rewards. Laws never inflict disgrace in resentment, nor confer honour from gratitude. ‘For it is very hard, my lord’, said a convicted felon at the bar to the late excellent judge Burnet, ‘to hang a poor man for stealing a horse’. ‘You are not to be hanged, sir, answered my ever-honoured and beloved friend, for stealing a horse, but you are to be hanged that horses may not be stolen.

A Voyage to Lisbon, 1754.

Henry Fielding too, was honoured in his time as a just and humane magistrate, but few of us today would feel able to endorse the judge’s action as he does. Even the severity of the sentence scarcely repels us so much as the callousness with which the judge scores a debating point at the expense of the condemned man. And is his point even valid? Put like this, the theory of pure deterrence appears crudely utilitarian, and difficult to justify morally, because it treats a human being as only an instrument of deterrence. Can we truly say that the man is not being hanged for stealing a horse? Would he have been hanged if he had not stolen the horse? Surely not. And in that case, can we say that penal justice is concerned only with the future effects of punishment, and that we need not consider what punishment the criminal has deserved?

In talking about punishment, there is a danger of a false antithesis arising through over-simplification. Retribution, deterrence and reformation are sometimes presented as if they were mutually exclusive— as if the adoption of one theory automatically excluded the other two.
The Approach to Unity through the Scriptures
Authors: St. John Henry
Published: July 2007

In a television interview on the religious position of the Church of England recently given, the new Archbishop of York, Dr Coggan, said that he was an Evangelical, but with a high doctrine of the Church. This is as if his predecessor, Dr Ramsey, now Primate of all England at Canterbury, had said in a similar interview, as he might well have done, that he was an Anglo-Catholic but with a marked infusion of Evangelicalism.

The very real fact that two such statements, actual or hypothetical, represent is of profound ecumenical significance. The Church of England, and indeed world-wide Anglicanism as a whole, is a microcosm of the Ecumenical movement, for it contains in an organism which is highly cohesive in outlook and spirit most of the widely differing elements which exist within the World Council of Churches. It follows that the process of evolution going on within Anglicanism is likely to be reproduced, and is in fact now being reproduced, within the wider context of the main allegiances of World Protestantism.

One aspect of this process, and a fundamental one, is the increasing unity of outlook which marks the approach of many sections of divided Christendom to the Scriptures. In this we Catholics have both a share and a deep interest. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century Liberalism in the non-Catholic world took a lead in the scientific criticism of the Scriptural documents.
The Sacrament of Marriage
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

I want to begin with a picture I do not accept, and I will try to explain why I do not accept it and what I want to put in its place. It goes like this—‘Sex is first of all a matter of fulfilment... it is an appetite which must be satisfied one way or another; sexual desire is something implanted in us by nature and nature’s purpose is the maintenance of the race. But nature with her usual lavish hand has given us far more sexual desire than is really necessary, just as she makes far more cod’s eggs than are really necessary to keep up the population of cod. Because our sexual desires are stronger and more frequent than is really necessary we are led into various kinds of competition and violence, disorder and war. In order to regulate this stimulation man has invented the institution of marriage. Marriage is rather like the institution of private property to which indeed it is closely related. Men have an appetite for possessions greater than is really necessary and to regulate this appetite we grow hedges round bits of land and say to a man “Go in there and own away to your heart’s content but don’t come over the hedge into my bit of land”. Private property means that a man may perhaps have less than he would like, but what he has is secure’. Marriage according to this picture is a fence around the sexual appetite just as the hedge is a fence around the appetite for possessions. Marriage is a limit set on sexual activity for the sake of other people.
German and Austrian Opinion
Authors: Steiner W. A.
Published: July 2007

The Second Council of the Vatican remains the most important single issue in what may be called religious public opinion in the German-speaking countries. Little of the unbounded optimism that followed the Pope's first announcement remains, but there is a great deal of sober interpretation of such information as is available, and numerous articles have been written on topics likely to be discussed by the Council.

The Herder-Korrespondenz, vol. 15, No. 7 (April 1961), pp. 312-323, contains statistics of the personnel concerned with the preparatory work for the Council, and an analysis of the statistics. The tables are detailed, showing such matters as position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, nationality, membership of religious orders, membership of the Roman Congregations, special expertise, etc. It is deduced that the following matters are likely to be treated: the Episcopal Office, (it will be remembered that this was on the agenda for the first Vatican Council, but the item was not reached), the shortage of priests, the difficulties, particularly those of recruitment, of the religious orders, the reforms needed to adjust the orders of women to the present age, the administration of the Sacraments of Matrimony and Penance, the liturgy, the position of the laity. It is noted that the officials of the Curia form a high proportion of those concerned with the preparations, but it is pointed out that this is, for administrative reasons, inevitable. It is hoped that the Council will not get bogged down in details, but will deal with essentials, and there is a plea for more publicity and information.
Morals and nuclear war
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

Morality is not immediately concerned with what happens but with what people do. The characteristic moral judgment is not ‘It would be better to have this happen than that’ but ‘It would be good to do this, better to do this other, and definitely bad to do that’.

It is important to restate this platitude because nearly all muddle in questions of morality comes from forgetting it. Take for example, the business of the population explosion and contraceptives: you can have an interesting discussion about whether the world would be a better place with a large population or a small one, whether a large population means too many mouths to feed or more hands to work, and so on. Such a discussion can be very interesting but is attended by a curious difficulty—apart from dogma and prejudice it is exceedingly difficult to rest the discussion on any firm basis at all. You get difficult exchanges like ‘If you do such and such, the human race will not survive’. ‘Why should the human race survive?’ ‘Well I just want it to’. Mr Evelyn Waugh’s famous and characteristic remark that he saw no objection to the destruction of the human race, especially if, as seems likely, it should happen accidentally, was taken as some kind of joke. But it is perfectly serious. Mr Evelyn Waugh sees no objection, if you are surprised it is up to you to think of an objection. One of the most interesting things about a discussion of this kind is that it brings you up against these curious puzzles.
Love and ‘Fin Amors’
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Love is a word we use for widely different activities: sexual desire, friendship, turning to God; we even ‘love’ books or games. The differences can be marked by adjectives (love is ‘carnal’ or ‘spiritual’), but the recurrence of the same noun implies, one supposes, that something remains the same, or similar, in every case. But it is not easy to define this common factor or similarity, and we are more likely to be irritated by the ambiguity of ‘love’ than to try to see how it arises—to take, I mean, this ambiguity as a clue for exploring our own nature. On reflection, however, we might agree that the imprecision of the term comes from its meaning, if anything, too much, not too little; from its referring to something at the centre of existence and involved, inextricably, with all that we do. We might, of course, try to limit the meaning of the word to one particular context, to sexual relations; but although ‘love’ in modern English does chiefly refer to sex, such a limitation would he somewhat artificial. The idea behind the wider, inclusive use of thi term arises quite naturally, and it is an integral part of our culture, as a glance at any Latin dictionary will show. Already in classical Latin amor had a wide, trans-sexual sense; which Christian theology and meditation was quick to appropriate in its turn, and then enormously to extend—enough to recall a single great phrase from St Augustine, pondus meum, amor meus: ‘my weight is my love; thereby I am borne, whithersoever I am borne’.
A Theological Chronicle: Sin
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings; Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains: But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove;

Yet few there are that sound them—Sinne and Love.

(Herbert, The Agonie)

I cannot remember ever having seen an article in blackfriars on sin—not sin and Mauriac or Graham Greene, or sin and homosexuality or sin and Jung: just sin. This may very well be due to my own pre-occupations; it is easy enough simply not to notice an article which doesn’t seem to offer anything to one’s immediate structure of interests. But even then, it may be, this inadvertence would not I feel be untypical. If the Catholic intelligentsia today is very conscious of having moved, and having to move still further, from a Catholicism almost wholly turned in on itself, psychologically and sociologically, almost wholly ‘interior’, it is hardly surprising that the Catholic themes which excite and hold attention are ‘exterior’ ones: liturgy, the lay apostolate, ‘the Bible’ (the Bible as proclaiming a message, kerygmatic, and not as ‘devotional’). Again, it isn’t easy to write about sin or to think about it, to make it an object of serious contemplation, to hold it before the mind’s eye. One’s own crude and violent experience of sin interferes with the peaceful contemplation;
The Pan‐Orthodox Meeting at Rhodes
Authors: Minihan Joseph
Published: July 2007

Eight hundred electric lights brilliantly outlined the facade and cupola of the new market that looks out on the Mediterranean quayside. On the top of the building, angled eastwards, was a large illuminated X P (Chi Rho) symbol, surmounting the words, Pan-Orthodox Meeting ofRhodes 24.9 - 1.10.1961.

Rhodes gave a warm official welcome to the congress. Ecclesiastics and civic dignitaries spoke. There were dinners, concerts, trips. Perhaps the visiting naval vessels of the United States and Britain did introduce what someone described as ‘unfortunate over-tones’ to the atmosphere in which religious matters are best discussed. But, on the whole, everything was calm, apart from puzzled speculation among journalists and observers; the extra hundred or so attracted by the congress were easily absorbed among the sun-worshipping late season holidaymakers; taxis did a roaring trade; excitement seemed to be well contained within the closed church where the delegates met generally in private.

Religious inscrutability is intensified when ecclesiastics are bearded. Of the nine or ten Catholic priests on the island that week, four wore beards, but only Father Dumont, with the added advantage of his white Dominican habit, looked in place. The impression was forced on one that here was a man fully aware of the issues involved at Rhodes, who understood what the dignified prelates and their theologians were about: so far, an Orthodox might say, as a Latin can understand us.
The Laity and the Council
Authors: Baum Gregory
Published: July 2007

In this article I wish to show first, how the laity is involved in the Council and secondly, how the entire life of the Church is marked by what is called her ‘collegiality’, the co-operation of all in the acts of a few.

In preparation for the Second Vatican Council a great number of theologians and other specialists are examining the problems of the Church’s life in the areas of doctrine and discipline. This work is not confined to the relatively few bishops and priests who have been appointed to the preparatory commissions at Rome. Theologians in general, in many parts of the world, are concentrating on matters dealing with the council and studying the problems that are likely to be discussed during the sessions.

This work is of utmost importance. It must not be forgotten, however, that the ecumenical council itself is the business of the apostolic hierarchy. Theologians may propose themes and elaborate plans for a council, but during the actual sessions responsibility lies entirely with the bishops acting as judges of faith and rulers of the Church.
Appeal for Amnesty
Authors: Benenson Peter
Published: July 2007

It has been said that the ‘political prisoner’ is the symbol of this second half of the twentieth century. In a sense this is correct, but it is probably truer to say that political imprisonment is the most important social evil which civilization has as yet failed to tackle. In the thirties the predominant social evil was that of unemployment, in the forties it was hunger and in the fifties the immense problem of the homeless refugee. In each case public opinion coalesced to oblige governments to work together for a solution. It is now a recognized part of the obligations of a government to provide employment for its citizens. Through the United Nations and other inter-governmental agencies the world has assumed the obligation to provide food for the hungry. More recently, through the organization of World Refugee Year, a great effort was made to find homes for the human jetsam left over from the last war. Although the problem of the refugee remains, it has now become generally accepted that each country should feel it a moral obligation to provide shelter and work for those without any country of their own.
North American
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The figures of course are formidable. And the European enquirer can be mesmerized by the catalogue of Catholic achievement in the United States: a population now of forty-five million, with 55,000 priests, 170,000 religious sisters (of whom nearly 100,000 teach in schools), 267 universities and colleges with more than 300,000 students, 10,000 elementary schools with over four million pupils, 850 hospitals of every sort in which more than fourteen million patients were treated in 1960. In the same year nearly 132,000 converts were received into the Church.

The statistics matter, if only because they are the staring facts that declare the vitality of the Church in the only way it can be externally measured. They indicate something too, of the astounding generosity of American Catholics, who, with no help from public funds, have built up a system of churches and schools unparalleled in the Church’s history. But the Church is not merely a corporation to be surveyed in terms of its efficiency or of the successful image it presents to the world. It is easy for the visitor from an older and more casual society to wonder a little at the signs of a high-powered organization—the discreet hum of the electric typewriters in the carpeted rooms of the chancery offices, the multitude of monsignori bearing their hide brief-cases, the jet black Chryslers—and to see in it all the ecclesiastical equivalent of the sort of business set-up commended by Fortune magazine.
Delinquency—A Sub‐cultural Hypothesis
Authors: Halloran J. D.
Published: July 2007

There are many approaches to the problem of juvenile delinquency and its causation, but in a rough and ready fashion it is possible to divide these approaches into two main groups. On the one hand are those who see delinquency as stemming from personality disturbances or emotional conflicts, and on the other are those who view delinquency as coming from relatively normal personalities which have been exposed to an ‘abnormal’ environment such as a deviant sub-culture in which the individual learns to be a non-conformist as others learn to be conformists.

If one is to judge from recent writings in criminology, the conflict between these two approaches is still quite intense. This is unfortunate, for apart from vested interests and professional pride there is no real reason why the two approaches should not be regarded as complementary. That I have taken sub-cultures as my theme in this article does not mean that I consider this approach to be more fundamental or more fruitful than others, still less does it mean that I consider it to be the only one. It does mean, however, that I think that it is necessary to stress the wider social factors, the part played by society as a whole, in the delinquency equation and to draw attention to the fallacies of attributing all delinquent responses to inadequate socialization and of viewing deviant behaviour as typically coming from biological impulses breaking through the restraints imposed by culture.
Fribourg : A Catholic University
Authors: Wansbrough J. H.
Published: July 2007

The University of Fribourg is a characteristically Swiss institution. It is not merely that it is situated in the capital of a proudly independent canton where two traditions in Switzerland, represented by the French and German languages, meet. The very notion of a University where nearly half of both students and professional staff are foreigners is true to the national tradition of world service. Although the world service consisted for many centuries in supplying mercenaries for the armies of Europe, it is now best represented by the Red Cross and the various organizations concerned with world co-operation. To understand the spirit of the University and appreciate its worth one must understand something of its setting.

Clarity is one of the most striking features of the country: perhaps it is the clarity of the air which produces clarity in other respects. The cleanliness of the trains and the hygiene of the hospitals are well-known. One might ascribe this merely to a passion for neatness, an impatience with lack of order. But I think this would be unjust, in spite of some features which suggest this interpretation. The steely fingers of bureaucracy extend over the land, cutting across even the treasured individualism of the cantons, to an extent which even the obedient Englishman would find difficult to stomach.
A Survey of New Testament Studies
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

From the early Church back to Jesus! If one were to sum up in one phrase the scope and purpose of modern New Testament study, this one, of Joachim Jeremias, could hardly be improved upon. One starts with the primitive Christian community; for by the time the earliest of the New Testament writings was composed, numerous groups had emerged of those who believed the gospel and were already striving to live their new faith. The New Testament enshrines the traditions by which they lived. It was written in response to their needs, among them and for them. In that important sense the New Testament is their book, the ‘prayer-book of the primitive Church’. These early Christian communities, springing up first at Jerusalem, then at Antioch, and then throughout the Roman empire, were striving to respond to a single historical event. What Jesus was, what he did and what he taught, these first Christians had received from ‘eye-witnesses and ministers of the word ‘(Lk. i, 2). And we receive it from them. Under the Holy Ghost we depend upon them utterly for our knowledge of our Saviour. It can be said then that the reality with which the New Testament faces and challenges our world is a body of believers swiftly growing and spreading throughout the empire of Claudius, Nero, Vespasian and Titus, each single member of which has his gaze steadfastly fixed upon a human figure at a point slightly further back in history, a point not directly visible to us. The community as a whole is responding with all its life-force to what it sees of ‘the Man on the other side of Easter Sunday morning’.