bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Myth, Symbol and Revelation
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

It may be helpful to approach the subject of the place of symbols in Christianity from the consideration of two sets of difficulties or disabilities which seem to affect many Catholics nowadays in the western world.

First, Catholics are often accused of not reading the Old Testament. If this is true, and by and large it seems to be, it is important for us to discover why it is so; and the likely explanation seems to be that to a great extent we have lost the clue to the reading of the book, we have forgotten the ‘language’, the idiom, in which it is written. Again it seems undeniably true to say that the modern Catholic, however deep and vivid his belief in the efficacy of the sacraments, often finds little meaning if any in their ritual, the ritual for instance of the baptismal waters; whereas it is clear that in the days of primitive Christianity this same ritual had on the neophyte an immensely vivid impact.

Secondly, many Catholics nowadays seem to feel that the formulas, the propositions, in which the Christian faith is stated and propounded to them in creed or catechism have about them a certain unreality: they seem so dry, so technical, so remote from ordinary everyday speech and everyday reality, that they may easily come in the end to seem meaningless: the dogmatic formulas, the definitions of faith, so remote and so dry as to be unreal; the moral principles, so neat and tidy as to seem lacking in validity.
Browning, Grammar and Christianity
Authors: James G. Ingli
Published: July 2007

A Grammarians Funeral is possibly one of Browning’s best known poems, and one which provides a useful introduction to his work as a whole. To begin with, the subject is typical; the grammarian is a man of intense energy and determination who has devoted his life to the pursuit of an unattainable goal. As such he is a figure who affords Browning an opportunity for doing what he can do well. Time and again Browning chooses themes which allow him to exercise his skill in describing violent emotion and strenuous activity. Not that his range can be entirely restricted to any simple formula: one has only to recall Andrea del Sarto, ‘the weak-eyed bat’, and the deft strokes with which his mood of fatalistic apathy is evoked. Nevertheless, the fierce exultation of the Epilogue to ‘Asolando’ and Prospice, the grimly amusing pent- up fury of the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, the searing jealousy of The Laboratory, the bitter hatred of The Confessional, the boisterous enthusiasm of Fra Lippo Lippi and the desperate exhilaration of How they brought the Good News are sufficient indication how well grounded is the common association of Browning with strong feelings and vigorous effort. The poem is rich, moreover, in examples of those technical devices which he employs to express themes of this kind. The distorted syntax, which wrenches words from their normal order, frequently with the aid of parenthesis, produces a broken, abrupt, breathless rhythm which is characteristic of his style;
Delinquent and Neurotic Children
Authors: Burns Charles
Published: July 2007

The title of this article is also that of a recent book on the subject, which is a worthy attempt to evaluate certain hypotheses against an objective study of social and psychological factors. The author says: ‘Our fundamental aim was to make a comparison, critical for our theoretical understanding of later social maladjustment, of the divergent routes taken in emotional development by neurotic and delinquent children, from their early years’.

There is no hard and fast distinction between the two groups, any more than there is in any category of human beings, but by trying to find the relative frequency and importance of the various factors in the two groups, it was hoped to throw into sharper relief and render more clear, those factors which are most important in the making of delinquents. The stress of the book is in the main on delinquency rather than on neurosis, as is evident from the excellent ‘Historical Background’ of the first chapter. It is rightly stressed, and this cannot be repeated too often, that: ‘The term “delinquent” is in no way a psychiatric or diagnostic entity in the proper sense, but gives a description of certain types of behaviour in many recognizable personality types’.

The study was undertaken by the teams of the three child guidance clinics in West Sussex under the direction of Dr Bennett, who is a psychologist, originally from Australia. She gives credit to the late Dr Kate Friedlander who originated the project when she was psychiatric Director of the West Sussex child guidance service.
A Lawyer's View of the Natural Law
Authors: Hamnett Ian
Published: July 2007

No doctrine of jurisprudence has so distinguished a history as the theory of the natural law. One of its earliest and noblest expressions is to be found in Sophocles, when Antigone refuses to obey Creon’s unjust commands and appeals to a law greater than human ordinance. In the form given to it by Greek Stoicism it was received and developed by the Roman philosophers and jurists; through St Isidore it passed into the middle ages where it found its most perfect expression in St Thomas Aquinas. It was adopted and applied by the Dutch Protestant jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it is still embraced by most Catholic thinkers today. It links the pagan and Christian traditions from classical antiquity to the twentieth century; and while its independence of supernatural revelation can be said to give it value as a praeparatio evangelica, its perfect consonance with dogma has led to its almost universal adoption in Catholic thought.

This very acceptance by Catholics has, however, led to a great deal of confusion and to the advancement of some exaggerated and often meaningless claims. It may be useful to subject the natural law doctrine to an analysis based largely on theoretical and practical jurisprudence. Such an analysis will reveal the inadequacy of much that is commonly said about the doctrine as a possible theory of law and will illustrate, perhaps, why few lawyers show much enthusiasm for it.
Odious Corollaries in D. H. Lawrence
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The most serious and perceptive assault on Lady Chatterley's Lover, in the recent flurry of controversy, issued from Dr Leavis in his review of the Pelican Special which told the story of the trial. Apart from his judgment that it is a bad novel, and the persuasive rationale that he offers there to support this decision, which, though much sharpened and more circumstantial, is essentially the one he reached in his book on Lawrence in 1955, Dr Leavis makes an interesting sociological comment on the significance of the Defence’s success. The Prosecution, he observes, was defeated, ‘not by the presentment of any sound or compelling case, but by its realization that it was confronted by a new and confident orthodoxy of enlightenment’. The verdict, in fact, registered a change in the values of educated people—a change which owes a good deal, in ways that it would be instructive to examine, to the deep impact of Lawrence’s work on a whole generation, and of Dr Leavis’s own faithful interpretation of it (the terms in which the novel was, and is, generally defended, and even read, were originally put about by him). Now, if it is true, as it seems to be, that our moral environment has been sensibly modified, so that people brought up on admiration for Lawrence can now carry the day, it is important to insist, as Dr Leavis does in his review, and has always done, on how intimately and indissolubly the worst in Lawrence is related to the best.
The new social encyclical
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

Three times in the last seventy years, a major encyclical has been devoted primarily to economic and social questions. Each has made its contribution to the social doctrine of the Church, setting forth the moral principles which should govern economic and social relationships, drawing attention to the chief social evils of the day, and suggesting the general lines of reform. The latest of these encyclicals, Mater et Magistra, makes important contributions to the social teaching of the Church in four areas. First, there is a clear and authoritative re-statement of the principle of subsidiary function at a time when the provision of social services has been and is being greatly extended in many countries, and when the proper role of the state in this field is a subject of considerable controversy. Secondly, in its discussion of wages, profits and the status of the worker, the new encyclical clarifies the Church’s teaching, and also shows that despite the reforms that have already come about, in some measure in response to the earlier encyclicals, much still remains to be done. Thirdly, it calls attention to the depressed state of agriculture relatively to industry, and sees in this an evil to be remedied. Finally, far greater attention is paid in this latest encyclical to international economic questions than in Rerum Novarum or even Quadragesimo Anno.

One Catholic M.P. appears to have found in the new encyclical support for the Welfare State as it exists in Britain to-day, whilst a correspondent writing to one of the Catholic papers has suggested that countries wishing to put the social encyclicals into practice would do well to copy our National Health Service.
Reflections on a Canonization
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

There took place in May the canonization of Martin de Porres, the mulatto, seventeenth-century, Dominican laybrother of Lima. We do not know for certain whether he was, by his coloured mother, of African or of Indian blood; the fact that he was usually called a mulatto, not a mestizo, rather suggests the former, and one may think there is something African about his laughter and gentleness. We do not even know for certain whether he was, technically, a laybrother, or simply a familiaris in the priory; he certainly took vows, but he seems always to have been referred to as a donatus, and the legislation of the Order at the time (for instance at the Chapters of 1580, 1642, and 1647) seems officially to have excluded half-castes from receiving the habit. But these details are of little significance by comparison with what he was in himself. The important thing is that he belonged to the class of the despised and the underprivileged. He was illegitimate, brought up in poverty, a coloured man; he spent his life doing chores. But he overcame all this by the sheer breadth of his charity. The Acts of the General Chapter of 1642, three years after his death set it on record that at his death ‘clergy and people came in great crowds, and kissed his feet and hands with tender devotion’. We know that he died at the moment that the words of the Creed were being sung: Et homo factus est, He became man. That is perhaps the great significance for our time of his long-awaited canonization. He had penetrated to the ultimate humanity of men, past the barriers of pride and cruelty, of oppression and resentment.
Priest and People in South Africa
Authors: Braithwaite Guy
Published: July 2007

In this article I want to examine some of the obstacles which stand in the way of mutual understanding between white priests and black people in Southern Africa today. Initially I had intended to discuss the African and the Gospel preached to him in a more impersonal way, in terms of contrasted cultural backgrounds. As will appear, this has not proved possible, for, at least in the Republic of South Africa, the giving and receiving of Christian truth is complicated at every turn less by the cultural inheritance of the giver or the receiver than by the colour of his skin.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the missionary’s fulfilling his task is his own ignorance. This ignorance may be of the customs and languages of his people: a deficiency which missionaries throughout the world learn to contend with by imaginative hard work. At the same time Southern Africa does present particular difficulties in this matter because the African people themselves, unlike, say, the Chinese in the time of Fr Ricci, do not have a clear cut idea of what their culture is. Under the influence of European civilization the old tribal customs are dissolving or else mixing uneasily with what Europe has brought to Africa, some of it good, some of it very bad. With the best will in the world the missionary will often be perplexed.
The Gospel and the Church
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It has been widely acknowledged that Dr Hans Kiing’s The Council and Reunion (fluently translated by Cecily Hastings in a Sheed and Ward Stagbook) is one of the most important of the vast flood of publications released by Pope John XXIII’s announcement of his intention to summon an ecumenical council. So far, however, this acknowledgment has not been accompanied by any serious examination of the book, at least by Catholic reviewers in England. Its reception has been generally favourable, even rapturous (see The Clergy Review, January 1962, p. 33); but there seems to have been a marked disinclination to enter into detailed discussion. What is particularly unfortunate about this is that the book has become to some extent the manifesto of a party; there is sufficient evidence, though not in print, so far as I know, that a resolute opposition to the book among certain Catholics has been able to take shape in silence. It seems to me that silent opposition and vocal enthusiasm form a particularly vicious combination; and surely the best way of releasing what tension there is is to look at Rung’s book critically.

Criticism ordinarily implies detachment; yet it might be claimed that here if anywhere detachment is out of place. What could demand a more passionate commitment than the reform of the Church? The critical detachment which we shall try to practise here, then, is not a detachment from the profound reforming purpose of Kiing’s book or indeed of the Council itself; but it will be a serious attempt to find a standpoint which is neither simply ‘conservative’ nor simply ‘progressive’, nor for that matter simply ‘middle of the road’.
Holy Land Divided
Authors: Boase Alice
Published: July 2007

To visit the Holy Land must be the dearest ambition of every Christian. To live in it as I have done for more than five years is a rare and wonderful privilege.

Even so my picture of the Holy Land is incomplete, for it has been tragically divided since the Jewish-Arab war of 1948 led to its partition between Israel and Jordan. The two countries are still at enmity, so the cleavage is absolute. Even the Holy City is rent in two, for the western suburbs have been developed to form Israel’s capital, while the eastern region, including the Old City, belongs to Jordan.

At an ordinary level there is no communication at all between the two countries, or even between the two halves of Jerusalem. Only diplomats and United Nations officials may move between the two with relative freedom, and by a special arrangement, tourists are allowed to pass—but not re-pass—from one to the other. For those like myself—and I am an Irish woman living in Jordan by reason of my husband’s employment—there are no such concessions. Never once in the years I have lived in Jerusalem have I set foot on the soil of Israel which lies only a few hundred yards west of our house.

To begin with I found this situation frustrating in the extreme, for from our windows we can clearly see people and cars moving about in the other Jerusalem which is so near—and yet so very far away. Gradually I have become resigned to the knowledge that I am never likely to see Galilee or Nazareth, which together with a great many places of purely historical interest, are ‘on the other side’.
The Church and the Artist: Visual Arts at Spode House
Authors: Reyntiens Patrick
Published: July 2007

The annual visual arts week held at Spode House is small, badly attended, relatively amateurly run, and unsupported by public funds, and seemingly of very little consequence to the Church. It is thus important, if one judges the genesis of art movements in the last hundred years, or is at any rate in the right category to be considered so. Not that I am trying to establish a rule of importance being always inversely linked with ineffectiveness, but the conception behind the visual arts weeks has been sufficiently difficult and exhausting to put off perhaps all but a small group of people who were willing to niake the effort to grasp it.
Freedom from Hunger
Authors: McCormack Arthur
Published: July 2007

The ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign has focussed the attention of the more favoured countries on the glaring inequalities that exist in the world today between nations. There is much talk of ‘one world’, and with the immense speeding up of communications, physically speaking, this concept is now real. But the world is divided into two camps as clearly as when Disraeli wrote about the ‘two nations’ in Victorian England. On the one hand, there are the ‘provided for’, those who enjoy this world’s goods and live in plenty and luxury; and on the other hand, the ‘have-nots’ who stagnate in want and are familiar only with the fear of hunger, sickness and death. Far from being filled up, the gap between these two groups is growing wider, for prosperity breeds prosperity, and want engenders want.

The amount of actual hunger and under-nourishment in the world is difficult to calculate, for under-developed countries have underdeveloped statistics. And scientists differ about what actually constitutes under-feeding in terms of calories and so on. This has led at times to exaggeration. It does not seem at all true, as is sometimes claimed, that two out of three people in the world go to bed hungry. The best evidence, produced by Dr P. V. Sukhatme of FAO in May 1961, estimates the proportion as between ten and fifteen per cent, that is to say between 300 million and 450 million of the inhabitants of the world. Malnutrition is also a scourge of the less developed countries and leads to diseases such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, beriberi, etc. The same report puts the number of those suffering from under-nutrition and malnutrition as fifty per cent of the world’s inhabitants.
Uprootedness and Alienation in Simone Weil
Authors: Vetö Miklós
Published: July 2007

Simone Weil was still a school-girl when she discovered Marx, and in a way through Marx the crisis-stricken Europe of the late twenties and the early thirties. While deeply influenced by Marx in her earlier writings, his doctrine was never a revelation or a religion for her. Her syndicalist experience showed her the inability of orthodox marxism to cope with twentieth century problems. Her enormous knowledge of the history of philosophy prevented her from being satisfied by a relatively poor and fragmentary philosophical system. Her moral and metaphysical aspirations were not met by Marx’s answers to eternal human problems. She threw off his influence quickly, long before her religious experiences. She still retained a strong interest in several marxist problems and especially in that of ‘estranged labour’. Her early writings describe and question. The works of her maturity answer. No one else has created so rich a synthesis of the problems which might have been raised while attempting to analyse labour. Although Plato and Marx are the most important contributors to this synthesis, its answers are of purely Christian inspiration.

One may say without hesitation that the most original, if not the only original, idea of Marx in the field of philosophy proper was that of the alienation of labour. The whole pathetic richness of his early writings culminates in his description of ‘estranged labour’. How the worker is alienated from the product of the work which will be not his own. How he is alienated from his work since it does not serve him, and how he comes to hate it as causing pain and suffering. The worker is no more the subject but the object of the work.
Augustinus Semper Vivus
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

In his recent novel Island Mr Aldous Huxley says some very silly things about St Augustine, or to be quite fair he makes one of his ‘wiser’ characters say them. From them it can be deduced that all he actually knows about Augustine is the Confessions, or a vague impression about that work, massa damnata, and unbaptized infants. This is probably representative of what the average educated man knows about Augustine, and so he will readily accept Mr Huxley’s dismissal of the man as a neurotic rigorist predestinationist. But the average educated Englishman cannot be excused this absurd misconception much longer, for what is in fact a monumental biography of St Augustine, Augustine the Bishop by Professor F. Van der Meer, is now available in English. Describing Augustine’s death the author says this about him: ‘To his Church he bequeathed two things; the memory of his humble and indescribably lovable personality [so much for the neurotic pessimist], and his great library, the archive of his spirit’ (p. 274).

It is quite clear that Dr Van der Meer knows that library inside out, and that he has read every word of Augustine’s letters and sermons, which are the most self-revealing of his works. And so in an immensely readable 589 pages (excluding notes) he substantiates over and over again the humble and indescribably lovable personality of his hero. I feel bound to say that it seems a pity that the publishers have presented his work in a volume that is handsome indeed, and well printed, but whose weight (3 lb.) and price (£4 10s) can scarcely fail to deter many possible purchasers and readers. The book is really a classic. It has had to wait almost twenty years for translation into English - understandably, perhaps.
A Propos of a new book on Dante
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

A drawing of Dante on the dust-cover of this new study of the Divine Comedy gives the poet a slightly Oriental look—and is that a helmet he is wearing? The suggestion, anyhow, of the Mongolian and the martial, whether intended or not, may perhaps be linked with the fact that the author is a young North Korean who served with distinction in the Korean army against the Communists before going to America to study philosophy at Yale. Mr Swing is a convert to the Catholic faith and, to judge from this book, his Dante studies have a good deal to do with his religion. He has fed his mind on the strong Christian meat of the Comedy: it has formed in fact his introduction to theology, and he now repays the debt with a theological introduction to it. And because his mind is exceptionally vigorous and original, and because he is very well acquainted with Dante’s poem (though not, I think, with its literary and historical background) he has given us an extremely interesting and even valuable book. So much had better be said at once, and emphatically, because it would be only too easy to multiply objections in detail to Swing’s work, while missing or only half-appreciating its merits as a whole. It is likely to irritate scholars—that irritable race—and on the other hand it takes its subject too seriously to prove easy reading for people who do not already know the Divine Comedy fairly well. Thus it may in effect fall between two stools, leaving the scholars full of their ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, and the others somewhat bewildered. And that, I am sure, would be a pity; but before I go on to say why, it may be of interest to glance round the field which our young Korean critic has entered as a newcomer.
Background to Home‐Making
Authors: Deeds D. M.
Published: July 2007

The most important factors in any home are the people in it and the relationships between them. This paper is, however, mainly concerned to discuss other aspects of home making because it was originally delivered at a conference at which the strains and stresses of human relationships within a family were covered by other papers.

Let us look first and very briefly at the economic factor. How do we reconcile the contradictory views of our society which are from time to time presented to us, an affluent society on the one hand, slums and poverty stricken homes, on the other.

Some recent figures of average earnings published by the Ministry of Labour are significant. These include overtime, nightwork and bonuses; they cover both skilled and unskilled workers in industry, mining and quarrying and transport, but do not include employees of the National Coal Board and the National Dock Labour Board for whom separate statistics are given. The figures are based on returns made during one pay week published in February 1961. The heaviest concentration of earners lay between £12 and £14 and more than half earned between £9 and £15. Average earnings in these industries as published last February were £14. 17s. for manual workers and £14.19s. for weekly paid clerical and administrative staff. A very few (0.42 per cent) earned less than £7 and about 5 per cent earned less than £9, all these figures refer to what is described as full time adult work. Skilled craftsmen could well earn a good deal more than the average, but the unskilled man might earn a good deal less.
Afghanistan
Authors: Avery P. W.
Published: July 2007

A first visit to the quarter of a million odd, landlocked square miles of Afghanistan should act on any but a finished, finite clod rather in the same way as Samuel Johnson’s tour of the Hebrides did on him. The analogy is not entirely inapposite for, like the Hebrides, Afghanistan is a land of rock; and where one is lashed by the cleansing sea, the other is bathed in the cleansing light of brilliant sunshine out of clear skies, so that both (and one has St Patrick’s Breastplate in mind) may be considered similarly to uplift the susceptible spirit.

Afghanistan’s rocks, however, are threaded through the valleys down which, in sharp contrast to mauve and grey stone and biscuit-coloured sand, stretch strips of green (from the air, black) cultivation, the fields of corn and millet turning yellow, lush vineyards, apple trees and screens of poplar and willow, the more lacey and delicate for the harsh contrast of the major portions of a country clustered round the southwestern spurs of the majestic Hindu Kush.

What a formidable thing and an evocative word the Hindu Kush is! No wonder the Afghan people, ethnographically varied though they be, are all brave and bright eyed, tending to tallness and litheness of limb—men capable of leaping from rock to rock with the long muskets of independence in a land where everyone is his own Khan. Here might be recalled the answer to a question. In a garden of the Kabul Valley, a garden of gaily coloured flowers, high in the hills with a stream rushing down over the rocks, when some peasants appeared an Afghan host was asked: ‘Do they belong here?’—meaning ‘Are they the men who look after this garden?’ The reply was: ‘No. “Here” belongs to them’.
Catholicism in America
Authors: Cameron J. M.
Published: July 2007

My opportunities for studying Catholicism in the United States were fragmentary, in the course of a year devoted to university teaching and travel. I had the good fortune to be teaching at what is generally taken to be the best of the Catholic universities, Notre Dame, Indiana; and it was in the main from this particular listening post that I picked up my information and my views. I did travel a good deal in the Middle West and the Far West and this gave me an opportunity to see in passing some aspects of Catholic life. As well, I went to non-Catholic universities and was able to see both the reactions of non-Catholic Americans to Catholicism and the work of Catholics in non-Catholic universities, particularly through the Newman centres. I was also a steady and, in some instances, horrified reader of the Catholic press.

What I want to do is to examine American Catholicism as a social and political phenomenon. I do not think that anything I have to say is directly relevant to the problems of Catholic higher education in this country, except in so far as comparisons are always likely to turn out to be instructive. American society and its problems are so remote in many if not all respects from the problems of any European society that it is hard to see at first that American Catholic higher education offers either models for us to imitate or examples of what we should avoid.

Perhaps I ought to make it plain at the start that I conceived an enormous affection and respect for the society of the United States. It is possible that it will in fifty or a hundred years produce one of the great civilizations of the world. My critical comments, and there will be many in the remarks that follow, are those of an admirer. Perhaps I might even, before I begin my analysis, try to explain what it was about American society that fascinated me and filled me with affection and, it is not too much to say, a certain intoxication.
From Wrede to the New Quest
Authors: Bullough Sebastian
Published: July 2007

Von Reimarus zu Wrede was the original title of Albert Schweitzer’s book in 1906. In the translation made by William Montgomery and published in 1910, the title was freely rendered as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and thus an important phrase in New Testament scholarship arrived. The original title indicated the author’s desire to outline the development of thought on the Gospels since the work of H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768), published in 1778, which he saw as a first attempt to present Jesus as an historical person freed from all dogmatic preoccupations, to the work ofWilhelm Wrede (1859-1906) of 1901, which was concerned with the presentation of Jesus’ ideal, the Messiasgeheimnis as the principal theme of the Gospels, freed this time from all historical preoccupations. For Wrede the preaching of Jesus was far more central to the Gospel than any attempt to portray an historical person, and Schweitzer saw the development of this point of view as the beginning of a new era. This indeed it was, and Schweitzer’s own thought, epitomized in the brilliant title coined by his translator, suggested that the Quest had come to an end: Schweitzer’s quest was leading him to see the whole meaning of the Gospel in the eschatology of Christ’s message, that is, in his preaching to mankind of the coming end of all things, and the consequent need for mankind to prepare for a spiritual renewal. For Schweitzer, the Master’s preaching looked forward to a fulfilment that never came, but nevertheless the significance of his preaching for me and for every one of his followers makes it the greatest teaching ever given to mankind. Schweitzer presented Jesus as the great idealist and it is essential to see Schweitzer’s teaching on the background of his own personality, for his understanding of Christ’s message led his own generous spirit to throw up everything to become a medical missionary in Africa. For Wrede the whole secret of the Gospel lay in Jesus’ messianic ideal; for Schweitzer not only was this so, but the preaching of Jesus emerges as the dominant factor, with an effect on the lives of all Christians.
Six Pillars of Wisdom
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Professor A. W. Lawrence has complained that the Speigel-Lean film which has his brother for its hero is false to the spirit, and certainly to the text, of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It has to be admitted that Mr Robert Bolt’s admirable script has little in it of the Doughty-and-Authorized-Version grandeurs, and inevitably some foreshortening of the epic was necessary to make the film at all. As it is, you are imprisoned for four hours, and, however voluntary a captive you may be, enough in this context must mean a good deal less than a detailed recapitulation of the book.

The narrative is simple, confined almost entirely to the desert campaigns that led to the capture of Aqaba and the entry into Damascus. There is mercifully little attempt to use Lawrence as the peg for an interpretation of abnormal psychology. His illegitimacy is referred to (by himself), and the humiliation of his treatment at Deraa is indicated (though with much less sadistic detail than the book itself supplies). In effect we are shown a resolute, romantic Englishman who has a deep love and understanding of the Arabs and who is convinced that he can win them unity in their common revolt against the Turks. The film is an account of how this happened, and how in the end Lawrence’s hopes were betrayed by the politicians and by the Arabs’ failure to preserve into peace the resolve they had known in battle.

In a curious way we know little more about Lawrence in the end than we did in the beginning. Peter O’Toole’s much praised performance preserves an odd reticence, not only of word and gesture (which the character of Lawrence requires) but of understanding.
Reunion or Conversion
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

In recent months there has been controversy in the Catholic press casting doubt on the expediency of the ‘reunion’ or ecumenical work taking place within the Church, and promoted by the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians at the Vatican Council. It is said to be drying up the normal inflow of conversions, because some potential converts are encouraged to stay where they are in order to work for eventual unity between the Church and their own dissident communion. It has been asserted, though the authority for this does not appear widely based, that in Germany, for this reason, there is a calculated refusal on the part of some priests to accept prospective converts for instruction and reception. Whatever the truth may be in this matter the question is certainly being asked by a number of priests and lay people in this country whether this new apostolate is not encouraging a kind of indifferentism, in the minds of Catholics, concerning the uniqueness of the one true Church as the way of salvation for all men and so hindering individual conversions.

The question came up for discussion at the Heythrop Conference and, as far as I know, the general conclusion reached was that the work of attracting, instructing and receiving individual converts, and the work of mutual penetration and understanding between ourselves and other Christians, which is the aim of ecumenical encounter, are specifically different from each other in technique and approach, but in the long run compatible because they are complementary. Catholic ecumenism is a preparation of the ground, on a wide and corporate scale, for a conversion to truth, which will ultimately lead by God’s grace to unity in faith.
Catholic Historians and the Reformation—I
Authors: McGrath Patrick
Published: July 2007

It is not my intention to attempt a systematic examination of what Catholic historians have had to say about the Reformation in England. Such an examination, beginning, perhaps, with the work of Dr Nicholas Sander and Fr Edward Rishton in the sixteenth century - De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani - and working through to Fr Philip Hughes’ three volumes on The Reformation in England would indeed bring the enquirer into contact with a large number of fascinating personalities and would incidentally, provide him with a number of examples of prejudice and propaganda, as well as with models of painstaking and disinterested scholarship. Nor am I concerned only, or even mainly, with Catholics who have written historical works, but with all Catholics who have in one way or another to deal with history and with historical problems, particularly with historical problems which still arouse religious prejudices and which may be the occasion of religious propaganda.

Whether they like it or not, Catholics have to concern themselves with history. They belong to a church which claims to have been founded by an historical person at a particular point of time in history. They claim that there is continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Church today. They claim that the line of supreme pontiffs is not eventually lost in the twilight of fable but can be traced back to St Peter. The Catholic explaining or defending the claims of his Church must continually have recourse to history, not only because his Church makes particular historical claims but because in a great many of the attacks made on that church, the arguments employed are arguments from history.
The Conscience of the Contemporary Cinema
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

The major moral problems to be tackled on film - seriously tackled, not exploited for commercial or publicity expedience - are, as might be expected, problems that affront the social conscience rather than the religious. And to those who frivolously take this to be a reflection on the immorality of the cinema, it might be useful to consider whether it is not rather a reflection on the lack of real charity among the conventionally religious. These major moral problems can be, I think, most easily explored under a few broad headings, though these are necessarily fluid and some films could as easily fit under any of three and some, perhaps, fit uneasily under any. I would suggest then, that it is convenient to survey them under the headings of war, justice, society and the individual, and what one might almost call ‘conscience and religion’ or perhaps more accurately ‘conscience and God’. There is even, I think, a faint embryonic shaping of a category which might almost be called ‘conscience and sex’, though most of the films I myself would put here could probably be just as well placed under the category of the ‘individual’, because the situation explored is nearly always conveyed in terms of limited personal relationships rather than in wider implications of the moral law as it is understood by classical theologians.

War. The theme of war in the cinema is, roughly speaking, treated in two quite different ways and it is important to realize this because it is, after all, one of the most constantly recurrent themes in the film output of nearly every nation that played an active part in the last war.
The Religion of the Early Humanists
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

To start with, a tempting text for the anti-humanist; only let him take care how he reads it. In 1485-6 a Flemish Carmelite wrote to the Venetian scholar Ermolao Barbaro to compliment him on his work and ask some personal questions: is Barbaro married? Or is he a priest or a religious? Answer: I am neither this nor that nor the other: paganus et spontis meae sum. Duos agnosco dominos, Christum et litteras; cetero sum liberrimus . . . Obviously, the context saves us from misreading that paganus; Barbaro is using classical Latin and the word here means simply ‘layman’. And yet an unsympathetic reader might cavil still. That acknowledgement of two lords, Christ and . . . ‘letters’! Did not our Lord tell us we cannot serve two masters? Certainly; all the same it might be unfair to jump to conclusions: better, for the moment, to keep Barbaro’s phrase in mind as a kind of motto of the humanist mentality we shall be considering, epitomizing both the integration it aspired to and also, no doubt, the risks that it ran.

The literary sense of ‘humanist’ - as referring to ‘one devoted to or versed in the hterary culture called the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a latinist’ (O.E.D.) - is almost obsolete in modem English, except in history books, where Humanism designates the revival of classical studies in the later Middle Ages and the currents of thought and feeling that it occasioned. A discreet definition on these lines is offered by the American scholar E. H. Wilkins: ‘the scholarly strand in the Renaissance’; which in turn raises of course the question of what we mean by the Renaissance. As an historical term it obviously contrasts with ‘Middle Ages’; there was, it is implied, a rebirth bringing those Ages to an end; and they, as ‘middle’, intervened between a time when something was alive and a second time when it came back to life; and so were a more or less dead or dormant epoch, an interval of darkness between two luminous eras.
Catholic Historians and the Reformation—II
Authors: McGrath Patrick
Published: July 2007

The dangers which threaten the Catholic historian writing on controversial topics were all too plain in the works of Hilaire Belloc. Great as Belloc was as a writer, outstanding as he was in his capacity to recreate the past, he was nevertheless primarily a controversialist with a number of bees in his bonnet, and tragically, in many ways, he was a man in a hurry who had to turn out many books in order to support his children, who were, he said, crying out for pearls and caviar. All this helps to explain why Belloc, who was capable of being on occasions so brilliant an historian, wrote a remarkable amount of bad history. Moreover, partly because he had been denied the opportunity of pursuing his work without the perpetual nagging of financial worries, he turned on the university which had failed to give him the chance of exercizing his undoubted talents, and built up a picture of official academic historians, stupid, prejudiced, deceiving their readers by a spurious critical apparatus and footnotes which on investigation did not support the text. The stupidity, the ignorance and the deceitfulness of the dons became something of an obsession with him, and he thought official historians had entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Now it must be admitted that when Belloc started writing, there was accepted by most educated Englishmen a picture of, say, the Middle Ages or the Reformation which is vastly different from what would be accepted now, and it is probable that Belloc’s writing did something to break down the old myths and prejudices, but it is still true that if Belloc was not acceptable to many non-Catholic historians it was because much of what he wrote was unbalanced and unsound.
Hypocrite Telespectateur ‐ Mon Semblable ‐ Mon Frère
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

Hypocrite Telespectateur - Mon Semblable - Mon Frere

It was with a certain sense of guilt that in the depths of this cruel winter I abandoned, briefly, both London and the cinema to take off for Monte Carlo and television. A new kind of festival altogether for me, this, though the sixth actually to be organized by UNDA, the international co-ordinating body for Catholic television; and one which in the event turned out to be both rewarding and salutary. Five to six hours of television a day, however, proved to be considerably more taxing to the eyes than an equivalent amount of the larger screen; and since the entries were divided into three categories there was, inevitably, a certain sameness within each category. The shortest programme lasted eight minutes and the longest sixty, though most of them fell between twenty-five and forty minutes; it certainly seemed, on balance, that half an hour was the ideal length from the spectator’s point of view, though this may well be frustrating to the producer. Three out of the five prize-winners were programmes of precisely thirty minutes, it is relevant to note.

A few factual details may be of interest. Twelve countries, mostly from Western Europe, though the United States and French Canada were also represented, submitted entries for the competition and each competing country had one member on the jury, though this was not necessarily the head of their delegation. Entries were limited in number and selected by a preparatory commission; different production companies from the same country could compete in the same section - thus there were two German companies, and from this country both BBC and ITV put in programmes. Countries with autonomous hierarchies, like Scotland, were entitled to separate delegations and entries.
A Humanist Theology
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

You cannot, says Karl Barth somewhere, talk about God simply by talking about man in a loud voice. But it may be asked whether, if you talk about man loudly enough, he does not eo ipso become a ‘god’ in some sense - in the sense in which St Paul says that the god of some men is their belly (Jung, rather unkindly, applies the same text to Freud), and in which the Psalmist said that the gods of the heathen were but idols. These uses illustrate the difference between what one might call the objective and subjective meanings of the word ‘God’. The Being ‘who alone exists of himself, and is infinite in all perfections’ (a well-known objective definition of the God in whom Christians believe) is an object of worship, of valuation above all else, for Christians (i.e. is their ‘God’ in the subjective sense). I call a humanist theology the intellectual formulation of a religious attitude which makes man its ‘god’ in the subjective sense. Someone might object that to call this a theology is an abuse of the term; yet such an abuse may be justified in as far it draws attention to interesting, and possibly disturbing, analogues to theology proper.

Men seem to have a disposition to talk about whatever they value most highly in a way comparable to Christian talk about God. As creatures prepared by creation to know and love God, we might be expected, when we do not believe in him or when we temporarily forget him, to apply the concepts we should have reserved for him to other objects. The Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz finds that he can train goslings of the Greylag Goose to treat him just as though he were their mother goose. H. G. Wells admitted to what he called a ‘Godshaped gap’ in human consciousness; in a similar way there was a gooseshaped gap in the soul of the goslings, which in default of the real goose could be filled by Konrad Lorenz. So much for the justification of the locution ‘humanist theology’. I shall continue with a brief account of the subject, merely sketching its beginnings in Hegel’s philosophy, and giving somewhat more space to its more thoroughgoing manifestations in the work of Auguste Comte and, more recently, Sir Julian Huxley.
Jazz at the Crossroads
Authors: Pearsall Ronald
Published: July 2007

When it is considered that jazz is but half a century old, that it was only the spontaneous means of self-expression of a repressed minority, it is then that one wonders at its international acceptance. Surely, it must cater for some deep- seated hunger, for otherwise how could it have achieved such an acceptance?

Jazz, today, can be divided into three rough categories - traditional, mainstream, and modem. The traditionalists maintain that the old times were the best, and to persuade us that this is true they not only use the line-up of instruments fashionable earlier this century (banjo, cornet, even tuba), but also dress in the style of a bygone era, eras which have nothing at all to do with the genesis of jazz. One band dresses up in Confederate uniform, another as Mississippi gamblers, and one of the best known bandleaders, Acker Bilk, dons bowler and striped waistcoat. In the effort to project the potential listener back into the period, posters and advertisements are executed in a pseudo-archaic typographical style that often antedates all jazz by as much as a century.

The mainstreamers eddy midway between the traditionalists and the modernists, borrowing from both. No one has yet successfully defined mainstream. It uses a harmonic vocabulary more advanced than the traditional variety, more down to earth than the modernists. Mainstream is ideally suited to the middlebrow jazz listener. There is not so much of the plink-plonk of trad, nor the muffled profundities of the modernists.