bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dr. Kidd on the Counter-Reformation
Authors: Evennett H. Outram
Published: July 2007

Dr. Kidd’s book on the Counter-Reformation is at once a delight and a disappointment. It is a delight because of the skill with which a wealth of knowledge and historical insight, together with a strong sympathy with the Catholic mentality of the sixteenth century, have been compressed and woven into the lucid, scholarly narrative of 262 pages. It is a disappointment because the author's strict following of the conventional treatment of the Counter-Reformation and his attempted adherence to an artificial chronological terminus ad quem, have prevented him from seeing all round his subject and from shedding any really new illumination upon it. Like most of his predecessors he begins with spirituality and ends with politics. At the beginning it is the Oratory of Divine Love, the new Orders, the Exercises, that confront the reader; at the end it is the details of wars, plots, and dynastic policies that hold the attention. The inevitable implication is not wholly justified. Though Dr. Kidd naturally sees that the Counter Reformation was more than a mere reaction of medievalism against Protestantism, he is writing at the end as if the classification of territories lost or won, and by what external agencies, were the whole of his business. On any adequate interpretation of the Counter-Reformation— by which I mean one that recognizes in it a positive and potentially self-sufficient internal development of Catholicism, in touch with all the new forces of the sixteenth century, though undeniably much stimulated and indeed gravely modified by the fight against Protestantism; on any such interpretation, surely, for example, that wonderful and much studied flowering of French Catholicism in the early seventeenth century is as much, if not more, of its essence than the Wars of the League?
The German Catholic in the New State
Authors: Krumbach Josef Hardy
Published: July 2007

The notice of German Catholic Reviews in the last number of Blackfriars gave a clear survey of the problems which confront German Catholicism as a result of the Revolution and the establishment of the new National-Socialist State. It would, indeed, be quite wrong to suppose that the attitude of German Catholics to this new order was chiefly one of irritation at the Gleichschaltung of the Catholic Centre Party, or any such secondary outcome of the Revolution. The Catholic’s outlook obliges him to view things in their essentials and to confront them from the standpoint of what is fundamental in his religion. And it is a striking testimony to the true greatness of our religion that it should, by its emphasis on objective truth, awake in co-religionists in other countries such understanding and regard for the present situation.
Some Thoughts on Maturity
Authors: Meredith Frances
Published: July 2007

Children look towards adult life as to a Golden Age. ‘When I am grown-up I shall do just as I like.’ ‘I shall never be naughty again.’ They believe that truly adult life is reached when their majority is attained. Working-class children grow up sooner and for them the age of independence begins at fourteen when they go out into the world as wage earners.

Before adult years have come the dream has faded to some extent. Adolescents see with a clear eye and realize that their elders are not perfect beings. They notice the hasty tempers, the jealousies, and the lack of truth to which so many grown-ups are prone. They see that ‘naughtiness’ can be found in the adult as well as in the young, though often the children are punished for the faults that their elders excuse or ignore in themselves.

Maturity is not a state to which all adults inevitably attain. It is the possession of the few, and there are many who go through life with the outlook and reactions of children. This childishness must not be confounded with a childlike attitude. It is rather the immaturity of childhood without the charm of that state that is displayed and this is especially true of neurotics.
Divertimento for Harmonium
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The white gate at the end of the privet hedge is half-open, and you go up the path. Under the hanging wire basket of moss and geraniums in the porch, an Aberdeen cocks his head at you, his little legs stiff, his tail going in little jerks. Through the open doors of the garage the back of a car can be seen; an Austin Twelve, you decide, and this year’s model. The dog moves aside, sniffs at your heels, prepared to be friendly. You scratch him behind the ear, ring the bell, and are shown into a room.

You notice a large map of Palestine on the wall, and examine a group over the fireplace, young men in high collars, tight trousers, and faces that make you think of Three Men in a Boat. There are two clergymen in the middle of the front row, an old one with gaiters, a younger one with a moustache holding a splay-legged fox terrier with two heads. A time exposure, presumably, and the dog must have moved. A coloured picture also catches your attention. A figure in a white robe against an Indian background; the face is mild, the hair long and golden. You remember the smells of the bazaar, the fierce eyes, the armoured car nosing its way carefully but authoritatively through the crowd. And what’s this? a photograph of the statue of a Dominican. Yes, so it is, Giordano Bruno. And you smile as you think of the simple Romans who cross themselves reverently as they pass. Like the Holy Year pilgrims, with their rosaries in the temple of Mithras under the church of San Clemente.
Unemployment from Inside
Authors: Howard Edmund
Published: July 2007

The fifth volume of The New Survey of London Life and Labour and The Unemployed Man are two books which deal with opposite aspects of life among the working classes in London to-day. The former describes the employed working man and relates the conditions of his employment, his wages and mode of living. The latter gives an account of the man without a job, the psychological reaction upon him of his position and the effect of the system of Unemployment Insurance in mitigating his pitiful state.

The New Survey of London Life and Labour is a modern version of the great survey initiated by Charles Booth in 1886, the results of which fill seventeen volumes under the general title of Life and Labour of the People in London. This grand inquest had revealed the horrible fact that during a period of unrivalled national prosperity as many as thirty per cent, of the inhabitants of London— more than a million men, women and children—were living at or beneath the bare level of subsistence. This discovery and the other revelations which emerged from Charles Booth’s survey had a very pressing influence on subsequent social legislation. And to anyone acquainted with the social work of the last thirty years the importance of such a survey in estimating the necessity and incidence of reform must be too evident to require emphasis. The method of investigation employed by Booth was, for those days, exceptionally scientific, but the technique made use of in compiling the New Survey is of a kind to give more accurate results.
Anti Communism is Not Enough
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

Perils from without assail the Catholic Church openly throughout the centuries. Perils from within threaten more insidiously.

At the close of the Middle Ages the invading armies of Islam threatened continually the faith of Christendom, and the good estate of the Holy See; while within the seeds of disaffection, neglected because unseen, ignored so blandly and when visible so virulently denounced, germinated in every land of Europe north of the Alps and Pyrennees. The Mohammedan hosts were driven back. Rome was sacked by the Lutheran troops of the Catholic emperor, the success of Protestantism accomplished the break-up of the Catholic unity of Christendom.

The peril from without, quite a real peril, failed to overthrow Christendom, and in Europe (though hardly in Asia, and certainly not in Africa) the faith of Islam has steadily diminished. But Protestantism, the peril from within (for the men who made the Protestant Reformation were all Catholic priests or Catholic laymen), survives throughout the world, and is for ever threatening the faith and morals of Christian people.
The Waste of the Practical Reason
Authors: Trevett Reginald F.
Published: July 2007

Those who are familiar with the writings of M. Jacques Maritain will remember his summary of the ancient and mediaeval teaching upon art. The foundation of these doctrines was tha distinction between the speculative and the practical reason. In the first category were placed philosophy and pure science, in the second, action and making. Any man seeking knowledge, directing his actions or making objects, was equipped for his task by a habitus, a virtue which (perfecting and directing his natural gifts) could be perfected itself by correct training and right use.

The maker, artist, or artisan, working in matter, gave it a shape or form already conceived in his mind. The genesis and perfection of this spiritual form depended upon the end in view, the degree of habitus in the artist and his sincerity in the use of his gift. The form once achieved, the difficult work of individualising it in matter demanded skill, discipline, technique. The end and principle of the whole operation, however, was the intellectual form without which no art was possible. The genesis of the form requiring a true intellectual habitus, a right appreciation of the end in view; the shaping of the matter demanding a just estimate of its possibilities and an adequate ordering of the means to the end, it is clear the basis of the classical theory of making is the reason. Reason being the distinctive mark of man, we may qualify this doctrine as essentially human.
Painting and the Public
Authors: Gill Eric
Published: July 2007

My immortal fellow guest once said that it was ‘funnier to have a nose than to have a Roman nose.’ There are many things like that. For example: it is funnier to be a Catholic than a Roman Catholic—that is to say it is funnier that a man should have any religion than that he should have the true one. Again it is much funnier to wear trousers than to wear Bond Street trousers, and when I sit eating my lunch in a Lyons teashop it becomes abundantly clear that it is much funnier to eat anything at all than it is to eat even the Lyons’ portion.

But, thinking of this meeting, perhaps the funniest thing of all funny things is the thing called art. It is funnier that there should be art than that there should be any particular kind of art, however fantastic.

And this is specially true in these days. The word Art of course means first of all simply skill—human skill. Thus we have the art of the dentist and that of the pickpocket and thus we have the word ‘artful,’ which is much the same as ‘crafty.’ But there is a special sense of the word art which we are concerned with here and in this sense art is not mere skill, though it involves skill (for nothing can be done or made without at least a little skill).
Ludovico Necchi and Italian Catholic Action
Authors: Hughes Henry Louis
Published: July 2007

In 1886 the recognised leader of the Catholic laity in Italy, Giuseppe Toniolo, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Pisa, wrote as follows:

‘True civilisation, which should not be confused with mere material progress, flowed out of the wounded side of the dying Christ when he inaugurated on Mount Calvary a new era of self-denial and charity. Only an imperfect preparation for civilisation existed in the world before the Cross. Outside the shadow of the Cross can only be found either the complete negation, or the gradual decomposition of civilisation. In union with the Cross the history of the advance of civilisation is synonymous with that of the progress of Catholicity.’
Spain's Catholic Awakening
Authors: Parker Alexander
Published: July 2007

Undue importance is perhaps given to the present antiCatholic campaign in Spain by those English Catholics who are ignorant of the nation’s history and unaware that the present measures are for the most part a repetition of the events of the last century. The problem tends to lose its alarming proportions and is narrowed down when seen in its true historical perspective. The problem, however, still remains, and in view of the present state of our world civilisation we may be justified in concluding that it has reached or will reach a decisive stage in Spain’s history. The problem of how such a Catholic nation could so unexpectedly become the home of persecution and hatred of religion is found to be deeper when it is realised that Mexico is also a Spanish country, and that anti-clericalism and violent opposition to the Church are rampant in all the Republics of Spanish America and have always formed an integral part of their stormy politics. We should also keep in mind the sufferings of the Church in Portugal and her daughter country, Brazil.
The Challenge of Communism
Authors: Clayton Joseph
Published: July 2007

By this time we are all aware of the Communist ‘peril’ and ‘menace.’ But is it so clear who is imperilled? what is menaced? The fearsomeness of the unknown attends the very words ‘peril’ and ‘menace we feel that danger lurks unseen, that a hidden hand has sinister designs upon our pockets. Or alternately, the hidden hand is disbursing large sums of money sent from Moscow, much in the same manner as ‘the man in the moon,’ or a similar mysterious agent appeared at parliamentary elections to corrupt the enlightened but very limited electorate in the good old days of Eatanswill.

If we do not lie awake at nights pondering how the ‘peril’ can be averted and the ‘menace’ overthrown, it is from no lack of honest endeavour. We must be scared, it seems, if we are to realise what the Communists are after. We are to be scared fix:and after that told precisely where the danger lies. ‘wants to make your flesh creep,’ said the Fat Boy to old Mrs. Wardle in the arbour before he indicated the enormities of Miss Rachel. So we are to be thoroughly frightened by suggestions of secret conspiracy and dark plot, and then we shall be ready to go any lengths in the suppression of Communist propaganda and the imprisonment of Communists. The feeling that a plot exists is sufficient to create the vision of plotters, busy and all around us waiting the signal to commence their foul and bloody work. (Catholics of all people know what it means to be the victims of panic. In the atmosphere of fog and suspicion, how many of our Catholic martyrs were done to death!)
Colour in the Liturgy
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Catholics to-day are left in no doubt of the importance which the Church attaches to the kind of music she considers suitable for use in her liturgy. Since the year 1903, when Pius X issued his Motu Proprio, the principles governing legislation in this art have been made accessible to all. But in that encyclical a reference is made to other arts besides music and it is stated, ‘The Church has always recognized and favoured the progress of the arts, admitting to the service of worship everything good and beautiful discovered by genius in the course of ages—always, however, with due regard to the liturgical laws.’ Among these things ‘good and beautiful’ the Church has made use of the Art of Colour at all times, and has, moreover, in various places explained her principles and reasons for so doing. References to these principles are scattered among the canonical books, and occur in the decrees of the Congregation of Sacred Rites. They may be difficult to find when they are wanted, but the general principle of using colour as part of the splendour of the liturgy is too well known and accepted to need emphasis. It has always taken its part in the ceremonial, as one instrument in an orchestra, and the gap in the general harmony would be obvious, if it were omitted. Cardinal Schuster, the present Archbishop ofi Milan, dwells on this accumulated harmony when describing the Introit for Whit-Sunday.
Notes on the Month
Authors: Jacobin
Published: July 2007

Immediate action. The state of affairs twenty years hence is difficult to conjecture. Those who foresee the break-up of Industrialism are preparing quite logically to go back to the land. Under the circumstances it is beside the point to criticise the smallness of their beginnings or to ask how townsmen can possibly be turned into successful farmers. But a general crash is far from being the only possibility. The centre of gravity is shifting from the congested industrial town, but whether it will move into the country or stop in the outer suburb is another matter. After all, there are various schemes which claim to be able to save our present system of production, although they would completely overhaul the financial system. For this reason, Mr. Foster’s suggestion in the present number of Blackfriars for Catholic housing associations deserves the most serious consideration.

An economic staff. The Army has specialist officers whose function is to adjust fighting power to the economic situation. The Church, too, has its specialists; but, very naturally, they are mostly concerned with principles and diagnosis of conditions. There is room for a more immediate and utilitarian effort. Local government affects our lives more than Parliament does, and although priests are often closely in touch with local developments, there seems to be a place for a council which would inform and advise diocesan authorities on such things as future town planning, the movement of industry, the possibility of a Catholic housing scheme at some strategic point. This is work for laymen, a form of Catholic action which did things, instead of debating social theory. For the times are too urgent to wait for many theoretical conclusions; the centre of Catholic life is a church, and what is a church unless the Catholics are grouped around it?
Technocracy and Poverty
Authors: Charles-Edwards T.
Published: July 2007

The word is dead, but the thing is alive and growing. According to an American observer, Technocracy has made an impression; it went straight down through the layers of society to the very bottom. It may be dead at the top, but at the bottom it will live on. The organisation named Technocracy has been discredited, almost entirely on a question of personalities and and errors in incidental statistics. The popular press has turned to other stunts. Nevertheless there is a growing tendency among intelligent people to enquire if the consequence of plenty is really starvation, to what extent the present ‘economic crisis’ is natural and how much of it arises from stupidity. As the rising tide of bankruptcies reaches the professional classes, so an increased interest in economics is aroused in a section of society which has long been remarkable in England for ‘this gift of moving in a region other than that of logic.’ The broadcast emotion of a Prime Minister specially elected to put things right, is ceasing to reassure or even to interest a nation, which for a year and a half was instructed to save what it had not got and is now being urged to spend the proceeds of this thrift. In sheer desperation the nation is beginning to think for perhaps the first time since the Reform Bill.
Two Who are Dead
Authors: Carter Barbara Barclay
Published: July 2007

On March and Francesco Luigi Ferrari, editor of the international review, Res Publica, official leader of the Popular Party abroad and its representative at all the international gatherings of Christian Democratic parties, died in exile in Paris at the age of 4a. He had been badly gassed in the war; in 1920 he had received internal injuries from a Communist attack—remote causes, as far as it appears, of the abscess on the lungs that, an aftermath of neglected influenza, ended a life of useful achievement and still greater promise. Eighteen months earlier he had followed the funeral of Giuseppe Donati, his friend and colleague, the brilliant ex-editor of the militant Popolo of Rome, and who died of consumption accelerated by the privations of exile.

The deaths of both, in Catholic serenity and exaltation, were in harmony with their lives. They had spent themselves in the Catholic Social cause, in defence of the principles of Rerum Novarum in the political and economic field, and therefore it is well that they should be remembered.
Death of Judas
Authors: Claudel Pual
Published: July 2007

It cannot be truly said that my case has been what people call a flash in the pan. No boyish enthusiasm was it that carried me away, no feeling that I should hardly scruple to qualify as ‘sentimental.’ It was something absolutely serious, an absorbing interest. I wanted to ease my mind, I wanted to know where He was going. For His part, when He called me, I am fairly compelled to suppose that He distinctly knew what He was about. To follow Him without hesitation, I sacrificed my family, my friends, my fortune, my position. There has always been in me a kind of scientific or psychological curiosity, call it what you will, at the same time with a relish for adventure and speculation. All those stories of the pearl of price, of mysterious estates no one knows where, yielding fruit an hundred fold, I must confess them all calculated to fire a young man’s heart with the noblest ambitions. I swallowed the hook. Besides, I was not the only one to get caught. There were all those worthy fish-scrapers. But on the other hand, I saw well-to-do and well-thought-of persons like Lazarus, women of the world, masters in Israel like Joseph and Nico-demus, falling at His feet. You never know. After all, since the Romans came, a man may say he has seen all sorts. I wanted to know just all there was to know, and follow the thing from start to finish.
Some Recent Mediaeval Studies
Authors: Callus Daniel M.
Published: July 2007

We are glad to begin these notes with the work of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies established at Ottawa. The two volumes under review are the real primitiae of a new series and, with the exception of one contribution, deal with doctrinal and literary problems of the thirteenth century. As one may expect in such a publication, not all the essays have the same value and importance; but all of them deserve praise for their accuracy and rigorous historical method, which prove the efficiency and activity of the Institute.

The eminent mediaevalist, Père Chenu, O.P , director of the Institute, opens these studies by publishing from a MS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris most interesting and valuable information on some of the leading professors at the University of Paris about the year 1240. The MS., in a very difficult script, is a reportatio, or as we should say, a note-book, of a diligent student of the University of Paris who, day by day following the classes of several professors, carefully reported their lectures. By the aid of this MS. we may reconstruct the intellectual life of the great University in the years immediately preceding the period of St. Albert the Great, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Several Baccalaurei and Magistri not elsewhere mentioned are here rediscovered. Thus we have the introitus, or inaugural lecture, of four baccalaurei sententiarii, Peter the Archbishop, Stephen de Poliniaco, John Pagus, and Odon Rigaud. They reappear in the following year, with the exception of Odon, whose place is taken by a certain Adam. The lectura on the Sentences or on the Bible follows in the MS. according as the professor was Bachelor or Master. Père Chenu has succeeded in his historical notes in gathering from scattered elements data which enable us to settle more than one historical problem, as, for instance, the chronology of the Dominican Albert the Great and of the Franciscan Odon Rigaud.
The Joy of Chastity
Authors: Kelly Bernard
Published: July 2007

That misconception which interpreted the moderative virtues as habitual repressions only, seems to be vanishing in many signihcant quarters from the modern mind; and it will now be perhaps very largely conceded that chastity and temperance may possess other vital elements than an automatic negation ot corporal pleasures. It is in proportion as these vital elements are understood that Gerard Hopkins will be appreciated, tor they are the integrating factors of his great sensitive and poetic powers.

Castitas dupliciter sumitur: . ... et metaphorice . . . . pro moderatione delectationis quae oritur ex conjunctione mentis ad objectum. Moderation, here, as always, is the operative word, and it is significant of the times we live in that it should at once suggest, not conformity to order and right reason, a vital use informed by the intelligence, but a less than full use. But rightly a use conformable to reason is a full use par excellence, not only on the part of the intelligence which vindicates its proper activity, but also on the part of the thing used, be that the erotic faculty or the poetic sensibility, which, by direction towards its proper end, gains power and does not lose it, gains joy also and does not lose it; because the intelligence alone can use it according to the true nature of its being. It is arguable that a man unchaste and disbelieving in the principles by which chastity is a true virtue may be wider and more vehement in his pleasures than a chaste man, but he is denied the joy of the chaste man, to which pleasure is but fuel, because he has set his senses to war against the real nature both of his mind and of the pleasures involved.
Passage to Beauty
Authors: Brocklehurst Mark
Published: July 2007

Poetic Experience surely provides what Mr. Herbert Read was looking for. And in a more conclusive and final way than the hints and suggestions he found in the works of M. Bergson. The sub-title is An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetic. The claim is amply justified in the argument by its close and constant use of the principles of St. Thomas.

The scope of the book is wide. It deals with poetic experience in general, and seeks to chart its position in the Thomist system. This it does by insisting on a particular aspect and a special relation of familiar Thomist principles. Atmosphere is given by the appearance of such names as Billuart, Cajetan and Durandus, until one is almost led to expect some familiar quotation from Zigliara.

We have become so accustomed, at least in English works on aesthetics, to arguments in a strange and unintelligible idiom. Unrecognizable principles and intangible conclusions are all too familiar. Since Mr. Clive Bell wrote Art a sort of superficial idiom has been established. Prospectuses issued by educational authorities now speak in terms of ‘significant form.’ But there is no generally accepted meaning of these terms. The importance and the great value of this book lies in the fact that its conclusions are related to familiar landmarks. They cannot be dismissed as ‘somewhere in Ruritania.’

In brief, the argument is this. Knowledge in its perfection is union with a concrete thing. In its normal life the reason only partially achieves this end.
Charles Peguy
Authors: L'Estrange J. K.
Published: July 2007

It is well that he died when he did: it were too painful to picture him still living in these days of betrayal of the victory for which he gave his life so joyously. He deserved to die in battle for France and Christendom, for his death was thus of a piece with his life. As he died, so had he lived—in action; fighting, as he expresses it, on the frontiers of every province of human activity.

During life, the instrument of his action had been the pen. Yet, in a sense, he was a writer only accidentally. Essentially, he was the citizen, and later the patriot and the Christian, who recognizes a duty and claims the right to influence his contemporaries. The authority he wielded was moral rather than intellectual, less doctrinal than educational: heart predominates over head, but since it was a good heart, which had been set true from the beginning, it was able to pilot him, gropingly but safely, through those early years of his public life when his range of action was foreshortened by an overclouding of his intellectual horizon. The return from agnosticism to the Faith, and from utopian socialism to France and Christendom, is scarcely perceptible in his writings: at least, in the earlier Péguy, the later is always clearly discernible. His ‘conversion’ was rather a rediscovery of the supernatural, conditioned perhaps by the realization that true love of neighbour exists, and is possible, only as a function of love of God.
The Layman and Society
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E.
Published: July 2007

It is exactly thirty years ago that the first of the now famous Semaines Sociales de France was held in Lyons. Since then sessions—annual, except during the War—have been held of this perambulating Catholic University in all the regions of France: the twenty-sixth session was held this year in Nice (July 23 to 29). In 1932, at Lille, the theme treated was economic; last year, at Rheims, political; this year the official title of the subject was Social Order and Education. The title puzzled not a few, myself included: and it is only now that in retrospect I seem to grasp its full meaning. At Lille and Rheims the principles of economic and political science, as embodied in Catholic doctrine, had been admirably stated—principles, which have only to be applied, to end the economic and political anarchy of our age. But the anarchy continues; the principles are not applied. Why? Because our age does not know them; because an education is needed. It is only through education that we can move towards an ordered Society: Par I’éducation vers I’ordre social chrétien was in fact the title of the President’s inaugural address at Nice.

‘Christianity has been tried two thousand years and has failed,’ say our neo-pagans. No, we retort, it has never failed, whenever it has been tried: the trouble is, that it has so rarely been tried. Individually, yes, it has been and is being tried: but socially?
The Economics of Sanctity
Authors: Valentine Ferdinand
Published: July 2007

In our present state of spiritual emergency must some form of economic reconstruction precede spiritual revival? This issue is dividing Catholic opinion. On the one hand Mr. Eric Gill writes: ‘Instead of doing anything about economics the moralists fulminate against the unborn child .... As someone said: “The drains are smelling—let's have a day of intercession!”’ And again: ‘The clergy are barking up the wrong tree when from the altar steps they talk about sin to people who have been deprived of the possibility of living according to common natural morals.’ Then Father Drinkwater: ‘The economic problem fills the whole sky, nothing, nothing, nothing, can be done until that problem has been dealt with.’

On the other hand, M. Maritain supports Péguy, and holds that if the social revolution is to come at all it must also be moral. He would go even further: ‘One is condemned to a work primarily destructive, if one wished to change the face of the earth without first changing one’s own heart, and this no man can do by himself. It may well be that if an almighty love really changed our hearts, the external task would already be half accomplished.’

In supporting the latter opinion, I submit, therefore, that it is just as bad an error to over-emphasize the importance of economics as to under-rate it. Prevailing conditions of life can help or hinder, as both the moralist and psychiatrist never tire of reminding us—but how far?
Enlisting Revolution
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

In short, what we want is Catholic Revolution—a revolution transcending the revolt of petty anarchists but not ashamed of harnessing their energy and harmonizing their discordant outcry. Anyone acquainted with conditions in the U.S.S.R. will agree with me that with one fundamental obstruction removed no state could be easier and worthier of adoption. That is why we have spoken with some eagerness on the ‘unsponsored Bolshevism’ detached from administrative protection, and scandalized by the Capitalist-Communist symbiosis favoured by Stalin and Litvinoff. That one obstruction, I need hardly add, is the purely political value placed on the human economy. Nevertheless the transition from the political to the Metapolitic required for entente with Catholicism is not impossible. Long before the publication of M. Berdyaev’s works in England, contact with Bolshevism had convinced us of the subjectively religious nature of Russian Revolution—of the mock-metapolitic set before the Russian people, and the possibility of its substitution by Catholicism.

Are we warned by Austria? Less than a year ago we heard an Austrian Catholic declare that the prosperity of his country depended on an entente between moderate Radicalism and Catholicism in the temporal order, and co-operation in the national economy. For the Linz programme of the Socialists has much in common with the encyclicals of Pope Pius; both advocate a discreet State interference with unprincipled capitalism, both condemn huge profits. And Pfliegler, a left-wing Catholic, in condemning the incontinent greed and anarchical competition of modern Capitalism, in deploring the class war that these have made inevitable, does no more than endorse the Pastoral Letter of the Austrian Hierarchy.
Cajetan
Authors: Mathew Gervase
Published: July 2007

Giacomo Tommaso Del Vio named Caietanus from his birthplace, Gaieta, died in the autumn of 1534. He had been a Cardinal for the last seventeen years, had been chosen as the Dominican Master General when he was only thirty-nine, and had been employed as Papal legate in Hungary and at the Imperial Diet. His influence upon church policy had been exercised through four pontificates; he had been the councillor of Julius II, the intimate of Leo X, had helped to achieve the election of Adrian VI and had been the minister of Clement VII in the last years of his reign. Much of his public life had been marked by the conventional felicity of that of a high curial official in Medicean Rome; a Neapolitan by birth, barely noble and quite without inherited influence he would seem to have been first marked for preferment by the favour of Duke Ludovico Sforza; he had come to the Roman court as a familiar of the Caraffa, had owed his Cardinalate to the almost personal friendship of Leo X and then slowly earning the confidence of Charles V he had gained the sometimes hesitant support of the Imperialist grouping in the sacred college.

Throughout he had possessed that recognition as a genius so valuable to a Renaissance statesman, for he had shared in precisely those qualities that the men of the Renaissance valued; a subtle sense of words, a fluent scholarship, distinction as a diplomatist due to a careful recognition of the realities of each situation, and a plastic memory, that favourite prodigy of the 16th century.
Karl Marx and Capitalism
Authors: Somerville H.
Published: July 2007

The propaganda of intellectual Marxism in England is the chief concern of this article. All Marxism is intellectual in the sense of being strictly doctrinal, not sentimental, though it may exploit sentiment; and not merely ‘practical’ in the sense of valuing immediate ameliorations regardless of their relation to a general scheme and a final goal. The Communist Party of Great Britain, recruited though its membership is mainly from very unintellectual unemployed, is extraordinarily doctrinaire in its attitude to the matters on which it has to frame practical policies. This is as evident from the Daily Worker written for the crowd, as from the Labour Monthly, which aims to be philosophical. These two publications officially represent the C.P.G.B. and the Third International, and their Marxian orthodoxy must be taken to be indisputable. The National Council of Labour Colleges is also professedly Marxist, its educational reach is probably wider than that of the official Communist organizations, and if we consider it, as we justly may, as a continuation of the defunct Central Labour College, founded before the War, it is older than the C.P.G.B. and the Third International. It would be absurd for an outsider to attempt to adjudicate on disputed questions of Marxian orthodoxy, yet it can be said that the National Council of Labour Colleges, related as it is to the Labour Party and the trade unions, is not so exclusively Marxist as those bodies that frankly accept the leadership of Moscow.
A Primer of Patmoreana
Authors: Hallack Cecily
Published: July 2007

Twelve or thirteen years ago, Alice Meynell introduced me to Mr. Frederick Page in her drawing-room at Granville Place, and we talked about Patmore. He sent me Patmore’s Courage in Politics afterwards, as a memento of that talk. In those days one met fewer devout students of this English and Catholic philosopher and poet. I, ever since, have been waiting for the book on Patmore which Mr. Page was already planning.

It has at last been published: Patmore : a Study in Poetry. (Oxford University Press).

The nervous and just prose in which it is written strikes one as being, in itself, homage to Mrs. Meynell, from one who, for more than three dozen years, has known her standards of accuracy and lucidity. But in the Acknowledgments there is a compliment superb, austere and delicate enough to become her. ‘Through Patmore,’ he writes, ‘I became a pupil of Alice Meynell, and our love for him brought me her friendship. That in the following pages I mention her name almost always only to differ from her slightly, is to be ascribed to that vigilance, that care for justice, which, more than from anyone else, and almost more than anything else, I learned from her. If I have said anything to which she would not consent, then I have said what is not true.’

I should like to think, as I handle this lean and well-considered book, that it is only a first slice of the contribution Mr. Page is ready to make to Patmoreana.
Tracking Down the Baron Corvo
Authors: Hael Ifor
Published: July 2007

The essential interest of the ‘Experiment in Biography’ by means of which Mr. A. J. A. Symons tells us’ what his ingenious patience has pieced together about Frederic William Rolfe, the ‘spoilt priest’ who has definitely taken his place in Victorian letters, depends on the fact—presented by Mr. Symons with a mass of accumulated evidence—that he was a congenital Invert. Once this has been realized the course of his wasted life is comprehensible. Without this clue we might well ask ourselves what all the fuss was about.

Born in Victorian London, and received into the Catholic Church at twenty—six years of age, Rolfe presents all the ear—marks of his kind. ‘Bright, attractive, a natural Catholic . . . interested in drawing, music, and the arts, not over given to sport,’ as Mr. Symons says, he might have sublimated his Inversion under the spur and curb of Catholic asceticism to become a useful priest. Yet ‘somehow’ he met ‘squalls’ at Oscott, ‘somehow’ he was expelled from the Scots College, ‘somehow’ he lapsed into vicissitudes at Christchurch and Aberdeen, ‘somehow’ he failed to convince either Franciscans or Jesuits, until ‘somehow’ he became the man of’ many queer friendships ‘who never made a friend, and finished up by purchasing the favours of venal youths in the back alleys of Venice. The ‘somehow’ is not difficult to deduce.
Schools of Holiness III
Authors: Steuart R.H.J.
Published: July 2007

Star differeth from star in glory, says St. Paul, and we are well accustomed to variations, amounting sometimes almost to contradictions, in style and type and expression of holiness as exhibited by the lives of those whom the Church has officially pronounced to be saints, to be persons, that is, who are proved to have practised the Christian virtues— not on occasional impulse, but with such regularity as fairly deserves to be called habitual — in a heroic degree: in a degree (that means) which is conspicuously above what is recognized as constituting a normally good life. But even with this preparation one is scarcely ready to accept Bernadette of Lourdes as a saint, for at first sight (and perhaps increasingly with further acquaintance) her life presents itself to us as so remarkably devoid of the features demonstrably common to all the other saints known to us, that it is a real difficulty to associate her with them. A well-known authority on this subject, whose judgment and critical ability meet with respect in all quarters, has given it as his considered opinion that ‘in all the annals of sanctity it would be hard to find the counterpart of the history of Bernadette Soubirous for, he continues,’ she did nothing Out of the common, she said nothing memorable, she gathered no followers around her, she had in the ordinary sense no revelations, she did not prophesy or read men’s secret thoughts, she was remarkable for no great austerities or striking renunciations or marvellous observance of rule or conspicuous zeal for souls . . . and yet she is to be proclaimed a saint . . . and for all future time, as long as this earth shall last, the Holy Sacrifice will be offered in her honour, and petitions will be addressed to her to intercede with God, the common Father of us all, to bless the creatures who are the work of His hands.’
The Liturgical Drama
Authors: Pepler Hilary
Published: July 2007

Awareness of the enemy’s method usually tempts one to imitate him, to meet tanks with larger tanks and poison gas with a gas even more poisonous. It is not a process which I commend. It would seem wiser to develop one’s own genius than to copy another’s, especially when that other is an enemy. The Church can hardly be interested in a Five Year Plan, nor enthusiastic about shock troops, while she has eternity to play in. Unless the Communist gets quick results he knows he will have none; he knows, in his heart, that all mankind is but waiting to relapse into its old bad ways.

The Catholic stage has powers hardly dreamt of by the Soviet, and were it elevated to an arm of Catholic Action, it would quickly achieve the same position in propaganda as it held when the people of Chester, York and other cities of England turned out

‘At Pentecost

‘When all our pageants of delight were played,’

to celebrate the descent of the Holy Ghost in a summer holy day. Historians sometimes lift a corner of the veil which hides these scenes from us, but only as a reminder that they are no more. Playwright, actor and audience of to-day are silent when our forefathers rejoiced, they seem to be unaware that the power to make and the sense to enjoy such pageants is within themselves, rusty only for want of use. The example of Soviet and Cinema may send us into our own dramatic storehouse—not to imitate these methods, but to practise those peculiar to our Faith and Religion.
Bequests for Masses and the Law
Authors: Winder W. H. D.
Published: July 2007

A case decided in the High Court in November, 1933, can be reckoned another and final stage in the gradual process of freeing bequests for the saying of masses from legal restrictions imposed on account of their purpose. In spite of the passing of the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, gifts made for a Catholic purpose have been strictly controlled by the law and it is only by several steps culminating in the case of In re Caus (Times Law Reports, 1933; Vol. 50, 80) that they are now almost entirely free of legal fetters. In the following account of the law on this topic an attempt is made to trace the various stages in its somewhat complicated develoment.

The law, thought for so long to have been settled by the ruling case of West v. Shuttleworth in 1835 (2 My. and K. 684), was based on the Chantries Act, 1547. Mass, and gifts for the purpose of having it said, were of course recognized by the common law as part of the religion of the country before the Reformation. The Chantries Act, however, contained a severe condemnation of the doctrines of purgatory and the mass, directing that property disposed of within five years before the passing of the Act, for the purpose of enabling mass to be said, should be forfeited to the Crown. But the Act did not prohibit such gifts for the future. The idea, nevertheless, that gifts in support of priests, and for having masses said for the soul of a deceased person, were made illegal by this enactment spread among lawyers.
Religious Fixity and Reformation
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Just as a particular life, though largely conditioned by material needs, is on occasion given a new direction by unpredictable forces of religion, culture, election and whim, so general history is determined by the stresses set up by forces that economics cannot measure, by the opposition of spiritual ideas, the incalculable action of personalities, the tendencies of the acquired prejudices, conventions and enthusiasms of a period. The econoinic interpretation of history, indispensable as it is, must appear singularly partial when applied to the sixteenth century. It is the merit of a recent book of Reformation studies — The Reformation and the Contemplative Life—to relate a wide and learned selection of facts to a significant aspect of the time, and to watch them in the medium of biographical religious psychology.
A Catholic Plea for Re-Union
Authors: St. John Henry
Published: July 2007

The first impression of many priests on reading A Catholic Plea for Reunion ‘ is likely to be: Why! here is a man saying a number of things which I have often said myself or heard others say; and putting them on paper with a lack of qualification that usually characterizes the convivial talk of common-rooms and recreations, but without the air of levity which makes things said in such circumstances very pardonable. There is a good deal here about the centralisation of the Church’s government, about the autocratic ways of our superiors, about the hair-splitting niceties f moral theology, about the multiplication of devotions and the frequency of the confessions of those who have nothing to confess, about the way of life and rules of nuns; all harmless enough in itself, though liable to be completely misunderstood by outsiders and when said with full seriousness generally betokening in the speaker a particular grievance or a disgruntled outlook on life.

All this forms the setting for a thesis fairly common on the Continent, but so uncommon here as to require in the writer’s eyes the protection of anonymity—the thesis of the Abbé Portal and Dom Lambert Beaudouin that corporate union between the Church of England and the Holy See is both possible and desirable, and that steps ought to be taken to facilitate the setting up of an Anglican Uniat Church in England side by side with the already existing Catholic organization.
A Plan for the Railways
Authors: Kirwan J. R.
Published: July 2007

The public, like the press, lives from day to day. It is not interested in labour disputes. Labour disputes are not news. It is only when a dispute threatens to end in a strike that headlines are given to it and interest is aroused. But then it is often too late. Tempers have been inflamed; the leaders on both sides have made statements, public statements, upon which, being self-respecting men, they cannot go back. The strike, whose threat made news, occurs, and there is more news; but the dispute which caused the strike has passed unnoticed. The student may find a reference to it tucked away in a corner of last month’s newspaper.

Perhaps that is why the present dispute in the railway industry has caused so little comment. It does not threaten a strike; it is concerned with the question of conciliation machinery, and one can hardly see how that can cause a strike. But the men are restive under wage cuts, the Companies will most certainly resist any claim for a wage advance, and that, in the absence of adequate machinery, might cause a strike.

Up to March 1st last conciliation machinery did exist. It had been set up under the Act of 1921, but the Companies, finding it unsatisfactory, gave notice of withdrawal in 1932, and on March 1st it ceased to function. It must be admitted that the machinery was unsatisfactory; the fiasco of 1932 is enough to prove that. Yet it did serve its purpose sufficiently to show the desirability, and indeed the necessity, of some machinery for settling disputes without an appeal to force.