bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The New Latin Psalter
Authors: Ginns Reginald
Published: July 2007

In writing about the new Latin translation of the Hebrew Psalter there is a temptation (to which I see some have yielded) to use , some such title as Psallite sapienter; then one can follow up the title with St Augustine’s commentary on these words: ‘David here teaches us to sing the psalms intelligently, to seek rather the heart’s enlightening than the sounds that strike the ear’. But under the circumstances I thought I had better first look up the 46th Psalm in the new translation, and there I found that I should have fallen at the very first fence. The phrase does not appear; it is psallite hymnum instead.

You see how warily we shall have to walk, if the new translation becomes official, both in quoting the psalms and the Fathers’ commentaries on the psalms. Not only that, but we shall have to say farewell to many of our favourite verses: such verses as have, rightly or wrongly, nourished the piety of the faithful ever since Latin became the common language of the Western Church. No longer will the priest be able to pour out his soul at the foot of the altar with the words Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetijicat juventutem meam.. There is no mention of anybody’s youth in that verse, apparently. And, horribile dictu, we may have to begin the canonical hours not with the gloriously resounding Dens in adjutorium meum intende but with the more modest if more correct Placeat tibi Deus ut eripias me.
A New Approach to God
Authors: Maritain Jacques
Published: July 2007

If civilisation is to survive, if the emergent civilisation is to achieve the fulfilment of its potentialities, the coming age must be an age of spiritual as well as social integration.

Today the human mind is torn and divided between positivism and irrationalism. The endeavours of pragmatism succeeded in making important discoveries concerning a number of basic attitudes in thought and morality, and in what might be called the sociology of knowledge. As a universal system of knowledge and life, as a philosophy, however, pragmatism has been a failure.

What is essentially needed is a renewal of metaphysics. The conceptions of modern science—the unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, the notion of space-time, the new reality recognised both as to quality and duration—are invaluable means of deciphering material phenomena. A cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, subjected everywhere to genesis and transmutation, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained because of the curvation of space, and which dynamically evolves in a definite direction, namely toward the highest forms of individuation and concentration and toward a simultaneous degradation of the quality of its total energy—all this is external description and scientific imagery rather than ontological insight. Such knowledge can never directly serve the purpose of any philosophical or metaphysical extrapolations. Yet all this constitutes at the same time a basic representation of the world incomparably more favourable to the edification of a philosophy of nature and more open to the deepening labour of metaphysical reason than the old Newtonian physics.
The Cross of Gold
Authors: Derrick Paul
Published: July 2007

This little book is introduced by a quotation from William Jennings Bryan attacking the Gold Standard but it turns out to be a plea for a restoration of a gold currency as the only kind of currency likely to maintain its value. Money is generally defined as anything—from cowrie shells to cigarettes—which is generally acceptable in settlement of debt and is not consumed but used as a medium of exchange and standard of value. The fact that gold has been used as money for thousands of years suggests that there is much to be said for its use; it is homogeneous, portable and, above all, though it may vary in value is not likely to vary very much or become valueless because the supply is limited. Paper money, on the other hand, is liable to be issued in excessive quantities, as happened in Germany after the Great War and in China, Hungary and other countries after the second world war, and to lose its value practically altogether. Even the pound, in spite of price subsidies, blocked sterling and other devices, is worth less than half what it was worth in 1930 and is likely to be worth still less, especially if people expect its value to decline further instead of recovering. The best way to maintain the value of the pound, says Mr Pepler, is to restore a gold currency; and he reinforces his argument about the solidity and intrinsic value of gold with analogies about the sun and moon, magnetism, eggs, anchors, keels and barnacles.
Medieval Values
Authors: Schlegel Dom G. D.
Published: July 2007

The period in the life of the Church during which one and the same tradition flourished throughout the Christian world, in East and West alike, is generally supposed to be the first five centuries, or, in other words, the period before and up to the medieval. The Middle Ages, and especially what may be called the Latin Middle Ages, are either discounted altogether or else mentioned only in order to eliminate them from the field of investigation; three charges in particular being levelled against them.

To begin with, the Middle Ages in the West are held to have been juridical and institutional, fenced about by an intricate system of legislation; they were the Golden Age of Canon Law and thus opposed to the spontaneous developments characterising the Eastern Church over the same period of time. The medieval West was also marked by moral and psychological trends of thought in contrast with the mysticism of Eastern Christianity, and religious life tended to be more practical than contemplative in spirit. The immediate present and its concerns bulked larger than the disinterested pursuit of eternal life, and the temporal preponderated over the eschatological in importance. There is, moreover, a noticeably psychological bent in the writings of the men most representative of the centuries in question; to quote examples from either extremity of the period, we find St Gregory the Great pre-eminently the moralist of Scriptural exegesis, and St Bernard’s conscious fervour far removed from the ancient spirituality of the Charisma.
The Mind of Middle Age
Authors: Velarde Ralph
Published: July 2007

Many in middle age are finding how far they have travelled from the opinions of their youth, in most of those sublunary matters subject to the rule of opinion. In youth our opinions commonly present themselves to us in the guise of convictions; it is part of the process of growing up (and indeed of growing old), that we learn how much greater the field of mere opinion is than we imagined it in our youth. The two books before us represent for the present writer, and for others of his generation, something of that gradual revolution in ideas which the sheer pressure of events has brought to birth in us.

First let us look at Gill, who recalls our youth, Distributism, Belloc, Chesterton, and all that happy romantic hangover from the 19th century into our own day, which beguiled us in the twenties. Few will take Gill as seriously as does the Editor of these letters, describing him as one of the ‘greatest minds of the day’, and even gracing his thought with the high name of ‘philosophy’. One admits readily the fascination of Gill, his passionate didactic style, his capacity for self-revelation, his sincerity at times almost fanatical, his vision crystal-clear but narrow in range. But these qualities which constitute the attraction of Gill for so many are bought at a high price—the price of a sort of affected ignorance on his part of those many things which did not interest him. Say if you will a sort of refusal to acknowledge the existence of the total field of reality—a vicious habit of simplifying the complex.
Blessed Are the Poor
Authors: McNabb Vincent
Published: July 2007

After these things, Jesus went over the sea of Galilee, which is that of Tiberius . . . (St John 6, 1).

Let us think of these five barley loaves and two fishes. As you know our blessed Lord and Apostles had nothing. You will remember when our blessed Lord began to preach the redemption of the world he took care to begin at the beginning, the first thing necessary—‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. Religious life begins too with that poverty. Until that is right we have not begun right. We are in a sense not bound to pay more than other people (ten Commandments)—but we are more bound. For instance I might be bound to pay £50 to someone from whom I had stolen it. I might say, ‘Well I am such a wicked person that I will take a vow to pay it back’. I should not be bound to pay £60 because I’d taken a vow to pay, but I am more bound to pay the £50. Because I am bound in justice and also by vow. A great number of people can’t see that.

All the world is bound in justice to poverty, chastity and obedience. Not by vow, of course. Now if we, being bound more, commit a sin against poverty, chastity or obedience, we also commit a sacrilege, so that we are obliged because we have taken a vow. The primary thing is the poverty of our state. Now this is a very important thing, very simple.
Poverty and the Land
Authors: Jebb R. D.
Published: July 2007

Poverty is an essential attribute of the good landsman. That is a truth that may easily be misunderstood, but it is a truth nevertheless.

It may be well to begin by dispelling some misconceptions. First of all it must be made clear that poverty is neither a synonym for destitution nor for financial failure. Poverty is a positive way of living that implies sufficiency, but rejects the accumulation of superfluities. It is indeed more than that. It is the inevitable result of the practice of charity, since Catholic teaching insists that ownership is not absolute, but must be limited by the needs of others. In this wider meaning of universal application obviously the landsman takes his place beside every other kind of worker. Charity is incumbent upon every human being, and is not the special perquisite of any particular kind of man. The landsman like everyone else may practise charity imperfectly or not at all, but, if he be a good landsman, he will at all events have created conditions for himself compatible with the practice of that greatest of the virtues—in a word he will be poor.

But there is another misconception that must be cleared away. Given freedom and the absence of unfair handicaps beyond his control, the good landsman will in one sense be rich. Not only will he enjoy food better in quality and more unrestricted in quantity than those who are out of touch with the land, but his production will always be in excess of his own needs.
Poverty and the Marxist School
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

Marxist revolution, Bebel tells us, differs from all its predecessors in this, that it does not seek for new forms of religion, but denies religion altogether. ‘The first word of religion,’ wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘is a lie’. ‘The idea of God’, said Marx, ‘must be destroyed; it is the keystone of perverted civilisation’. ‘It is useless’, adds Bax, ‘blinking the fact that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of today than the Saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians’; and elsewhere: ‘In what sense socialism is not religion will now be clear. It utterly despises “the other world”, with all its stage properties—that is, the present objects of religion’.

The only claim, in short, that the Revolution of Karl Marx has ever made to religious recognition is that it ‘brings religion from Heaven to earth’. But its major prophets have never been so rash as to promise the translation of Heaven itself to earth. On the contrary the convert to Marx’s materialist dialectic has been heard to put it to the latter’s credit that it has no dope to offer the faithful, no pie whether in the shy or on earth. Herein lies the appeal of the revolution to asceticism. And we cannot deny that the revolution has had an abundance of witnesses, in men and women singularly devoid of self-gratification. The old inevitable gibe about communists foregathering at the sea-side like lords’ and having cars, as other men,
Poverty and the Workers
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

Readers of Labour, Life and Poverty by the Polish economist F. Zweig (Gollancz, 1948) will have met a strange aspect of working class lives. They will have met workers earning £5 per week and spending over 30s. of it on their own cigarettes, or men spending 30s. a week on drink. The general picture of the London worker described in this book is of a class saved from pauperism by council houses and social services only to return to pauperism by their spending habits.

But how can it be otherwise? Our desires in these days are determined by so many factors that have one thing in common and that is that we should have more. The heroes on the films are never without a cigarette, never without a drink; they have no need to work, even when their ‘work’ is part of the background of the film. Money never restricts them, their women have beautiful clothes and their apartments are the last word in luxury. Our popular reading material follows the same line and helps to create, a desire for more and more. Our advertisers do the same. New desires are very often created and they have, in fact, become enshrined in American economics as part of an explaining away of depressions.

So we workers want more money and when we get it we want more still so that we can ape these ideals held up to us by those who want our money. The whole idea of an ever increasing standard of life is promoted by those who benefit materially by our constant strivings to possess more and more money.
The Puritan Denial
Authors: O'Connell James
Published: July 2007

The technical achievements and elaboration since the sixteenth century do not comprise the whole of modern capitalism. Capitalism has been much more than that; it has been an outlook on life with its own peculiar orientation and values. To endeavour to understand capitalism as a socio-economic form, therefore, it will be of help to look at the type of character which played a fundamental rôle in the capitalistic development. There is a vast literature on the relation between capitalism and Calvinism, especially in its Puritan form. The general question does not concern us here. What we shall consider is the Puritan character as it appeared in the middle seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way it will be possible for us to discern more clearly the temper from which the modern technical innovations sprung or by which they were exploited. The spirit that lies behind these new methods in many ways involves an asceticism as rigid and as austere as the older medieval one: but the goal is different, the ascesis is intramundane, while the reward is no longer invisible but very near and very tangible.

When one examines the Puritan mentality at this period, that character with its intense energies and limited horizon, it reveals those features that have made possible the organisation of industry and wealth which has caught millions of human beings in its meshes during the course of the modern era; meshes more unbreakable than steel because they were spun of the fibre of emotionless hearts and held together by the unyielding rigidity of relentless human wills; meshes cast by men conscious of a purpose to be achieved and self-righteous in the pursuit of that purpose.
The Mystery of Gospel Poverty
Authors: Cardiff Ethelbert
Published: July 2007

The morning of April 16th, 1209, witnessed in the square of St George in Assisi (now called the Piazza Santa Chiara) an incident most rare and strange in the history of men. Warned and expectant of good things, a great crowd of beggars and outcasts had assembled, and to them presently came two men bearing between them a deep, heavily-weighted sack filled to the top with money. With that large indiscriminateness that often accompanies Catholic charity they began to hand out right and left the contents of the sack. The method of distribution would have horrified a modern humanitarian. There was no personal interviewing or questioning, no assessment of alms-qualification, no means test. A careless and bountiful profusion characterised this very medieval gesture; and when the last coin had been given away and the last beggar satisfied, it was probably the literal truth that the only completely destitute persons in that crowded square were the two prodigal benefactors.

The sack had contained in money the total worldly possessions of Bernard a Quintavalle, a very rich merchant of Assisi. Some little time before, he had gone one day with Francis to a small nearby church to pray and to seek God’s will in his regard and, opening the book of the Gospels which lay upon the altar, they had immediately come upon the words: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.’
Riches1
Authors: Bourdaloue Louis
Published: July 2007

And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The rich man died also, and was buried in hell…

Of all conceptions which we can shape of the world—the world as profane, perverse, corrupt, and condemned by God—the truest, I think, is that offered by the Beloved Disciple when he tells us that All that is in the world is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Lust of the eyes, rousing in man an inward distaste for what he has, and making him crave and seek after what he lacks; pride of life, exalting a man above himself, instilling contempt for others, and causing forgetfulness of God; lust of the flesh, enslaving a man to his senses and luring astray his reason through the enticements of voluptuousness. These, St Augustine says, are the three plagues which have overspread the world and tainted the healthiest parts of it. Lust of the eyes the desire to have—the root of all evils and specially of injustice. Pride of life, a foe of charity which leads men even to godlessness. Lust of the flesh, the source and spring of impure pleasures and scandalous excesses. My brothers in Christ, it is my conviction that riches as misused by the world feed every one of these wretched lusts, and that the most general and natural cause of men’s injustice and pride and sensuality is that they are either rich or enamoured of riches.
Moving Population
Authors: Synnott Finbar
Published: July 2007

The population of South Africa has been formed by a series of migrations, all of them, if we except the prehistoric wanderings of the Bushmen and Hottentots, within recent times. The Native Africans came down from the central lakes within recent ‘saga’ memory. Their genealogies do not, of course, give dates. But probably 400 years covers the main movement. Among them came the invading Dutch and British. Other European races and, in large numbers, the Jewish people followed. There is a considerable number of Greeks and Syrians who, especially the latter but even to some extent the former, occupy a borderline position on the edge of the South African concept of ‘European’. Into this mixture large numbers of Indians and Malays, and a small number of Chinese, were imported.

It would take many thousand words to describe the mere categorisation of South African population, in which Natives, Coloureds, Asiatics and Europeans have each a separate position, and each their sub-divisions. So all that can be done for the purpose of this article, which is to give South African illustrations of the social-moral effects of movement of population, is to take certain special points of interest and let the many-sided background suggest itself in dealing with them.

To begin with, South Africa has no deported populations, no physically crossed immigrants. The only people who might be so called are the Jews, who are in a sense involuntary immigrants wherever they are. But their condition in South Africa is not sufficiently different from elsewhere to be of special interest.
The Assimilation of Immigrants
Authors: Stone Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Immigrants and persons of recent immigrant stock are more quickly assimilated in American small towns than in cities for at least one quite evident reason. The size and complex organisation of the city allow immigrants to group together and continue in the practice of their folkways. Almost any American city of sufficient size has a number of ‘sections’—Italian, Hungarian, Polish, or other—the inhabitants of which continue to whatever extent is practicable the language, social customs, and even diet of their homelands. In the small town there do not exist the facilities for special ethnic ghettoes of this kind, and the person of foreign origin is compelled to make an adaptation to American ways of doing things simply as a matter of survival. In the ‘foreign sections’ of even small cities one will find persons who came in with the last great wave of immigration in the early 1900’s who still do not speak English—they live in a species of Limbo, without particular allegiance to their place of origin as a political and national entity, and enjoy only an economic nexus with their country of adoption. There is the classic story of the Chinaman who settled in the Polish quarter of Chicago and opened a laundry. After three years he felt that he had sufficiently mastered English to go on a sightseeing tour of the city. When he left his familiar neighbourhood he found that what he spoke was good idiomatic Polish.
China's Population Problems
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E.
Published: July 2007

The ‘numbering’ of people used to be resented in ancient times as presumptuous, unlucky and only meant as a means of further fiscal extortion. The taking of a census for purely scientific, demographic purposes is something quite modern and goes back to the ‘counting of heads’, required by democracy, practised for the first time in 1790 by the United States; Great Britain following suit with a first census in 1801. Subsequently most other countries have likewise introduced the system of a decennial census; but there are important exceptions still, the most serious one being that of China, which is quite innocent of any reliable nation-wide statistics of any sort.

To say anything about China’s population one is therefore left to shrewd guesses, scientific approximations or a lively imagination. The Imperial Government ordered a census to be taken in 1895 and 1910, which yielded a total of 377 and 316 million inhabitants respectively. The Republic, if only on account of the endemic warfare which has bedevilled its existence from the very start, has had to content itself with ‘Post Office Estimates’, which in 1920 suggested 428 and in 1930 445 millions as China’s total population. Finally in 1932 the Government came out with a fiat declaring 475 millions to be the right figure; against which W. F. Wilcox of the American Statistical Association in its Journal for 1980 maintained that 342 millions was the most he could concede.

C. P. Fitzgerald by a painstaking computation of cities actually occupied at different periods of Chinese history arrived at a grand total of 130 millions as China’s population under the T’ang Dynasty in 618 A.D. (China Journal of 1932).
The Fifth Etat in Germany
Authors: Meyer K. E.
Published: July 2007

It is gradually becoming possible to assess the figures concerning the expulsion of Germans from the eastern parts of Europe, from Eastern Germany, Sudetenland, Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia and adjacent countries. Each new figure implies a larger, more extensive, more irreparable sum of human misery; and means, moreover, an accumulation of new problems in almost every field of human relations, the full size of which is quite obviously not yet realised anywhere.

The latest figures are as follows. Those expelled number altogether about 11 millions, of whom approximately half, 5 1/2 millions, are Catholic. In the American Zone there are now 3 1/4 millions, in the British Zone 3 1/3 millions, in the Russian Zone 4 1/2 millions, and about 100,000 in the French Zone. It is assumed that about 3 million people died in consequence of the expulsion; these are not included in the above-mentioned total of 11 million. Out of a total of 4,500 Catholic priests who worked among these people only 2,500 are still alive. Only 15 per cent of those expelled had the opportunity of taking enough of their belongings with them in order to have a minimum of clothing, furniture and outfit of any type.
Lutherans, Please Refute!
Authors: Miller B. D. H.
Published: July 2007

Symptomatic cures are rarely effective. Satisfactory treatment, medical or political, demands a knowledge of causes, as well as symptoms. So long as the cause is unknown, remedies are futile. Yet the Western Allies are striving to impose just such a symptomatic cure for Nazism, without ever investigating its causes; that, perhaps, is all political action can do. But to dismiss Nazism, in theory and practice, as a policy of anti-Semitism, concentration camps, imperialism, militarism and compulsory sterilisation, is not enough; all those abuses may be eradicated by A.M.G., but they are merely the symptoms, just as unemployment and degradation were merely the occasions, of Hitler’s revolution. The inherent disposition to Nazism will remain until its causes are diagnosed and treated. The writer believes this inherent disposition to come from tendencies engendered or encouraged by Luther, when he denied Natural Morality, and rejected the claims of the Church; without that rebellion, Nazism might never have occurred.

I do not enjoy making such bold assertions;. I should be glad to see them disproved; but there is no virtue in concealing the truth. Let me not be misunderstood, however. No one would make Luther a champion of Dachau and Buchenwald; one might as readily accuse George Washington of defending the atomic bomb; but Luther suffered from having disciples. In fact, only a chemist can detect the affinity between coal and diamonds, but none the less it is there; so with Luther and the disposition to Nazism.
In Praise of Quakers
Authors: Edwards H. W. J.
Published: July 2007

In the year 1924 the Society of Friends, which cherishes an ancient ‘testimony’ against the celebration of special days, waived its scruples to celebrate the birth of George Fox, who, if not exactly the founder, was the coherer of those wandering souls who became known as Quakers.

About the time the Quakers [I must be forgiven if from time to time I call them Friends] are, if not celebrating, at least turning their minds to the tercentenary of their existence as a religious body. I believe also that other religious bodies, especially Christian bodies, will according to their capacity give thanks to God for the Quakers. Even that Christian body to which I have been given the grace to belong, that body without which there could not be in any sense a Christian body, very properly and without retracting in the slightest degree from her witness to herself as Christ’s one and undivided Church outside which there is no salvation, may rejoice.

Strictly and narrowly the thing called Quakerism is a heresy and as such it must be condemned and detested. As a Catholic I abjure with all my heart and mind the heresy of Quakerism. Yet very few Quakers are heretics. They are not because very few have received the sacrament of baptism. Those who have received it are those who have joined the Society of Friends from some Christian group which gives valid baptism. Looking at the Society of Friends still in this narrow way, we may doubt whether it is, in fact, a Christian body at all.
An Old Controversy Recalled
Authors: Poynter J. W.
Published: July 2007

In her admirable biography, Gilbert, Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward dwelt at some length on a notable controversy in which her hero was engaged at the beginning of the present century. ‘He was still’, she says, ‘writing every Saturday in the Daily News. Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas. The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford, Editor of The Clarion, who had written a rationalist Credo, entitled God and My Neighbour. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open The Clarion to the freest possible discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called The Doubts of Democracy’.

The writer of the present article read these sections of Miss Ward’s book with special interest, for he remembers vividly the controversy to which they refer, and thinks it may be useful to describe it in some detail, as it has lessons for our own times. He has also another reason for recalling it.

At the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the present century (in fact, up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war), debates on religion held a high place in the attention of the reading part of our people.
The Unimportance of Property
Authors: Quinn Edward
Published: July 2007

Any attempt to dissipate the confusion that reigns in Catholic circles on the subject of private property must be welcomed. Fr Drostan’s paper is to be welcomed also as a very notable clarification of the question and as an attractive preface to the major work which he may be persuaded to produce.

Not the least disturbing feature of the situation is that it appears so simple to many. Remaining wholly on the plane of reason, we can show Communism to be false, first because it is atheistic—and the quinque viae can quickly be pressed into service to show the folly of atheism—and secondly because it rejects private property—which natural law alone upholds as a fundamental right. But the Communist is not convinced, and to quite faithful Christians it does not seem as if there were much respect for God or the basic human rights in the stronghold of liberty and capitalism. And when American bankers turn to the crucifix before accommodating their clients—at the usual rates—militant atheism, if not more sincere, seems to have a better understanding of the meaning of religion.

Fr Drostan rejects this unholy simplicity and exposes the limitations of a largely hypothetical natural law. At the very opening of his paper he places the problem in its proper setting—where it is all too rarely placed: ‘private property is essentially and basically a theological question’.
Other Men's Thought
Authors: Nicholl D.
Published: July 2007

Historians of philosophy have been notoriously unsuccessful in the past, either through hanging their own thoughts on other men’s pegs or through simply giving a list of the pegs; of the former error the supreme example may for long be Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, whilst the second failing is one which Laird found difficult to avoid within the limited space of his Home University volume on Recent Philosophy. It is all the more pleasing, then, to find that Fr Bochenski has written a history of European philosophy during the present century which presents the main lines of modern philosophers neatly and lucidly, yet makes it quite clear that the question of truth is one which the philosopher, whatever his capacity, may not neglect, and he himself unobtrusively indicates the direction in which solutions of the difficulties are to be sought. He proves himself such a stimulating guide to the thought of our own day that we can whole-heartedly express the hope of seeing the work translated into English in the near future.

The characteristic notes of the book are neatness and precision. In his short preface Fr Bochenski points out with great modesty the shortcomings which are scarcely to be avoided in giving an account of other men’s thought, though his modesty does not prevent him from insisting that it is only a mark of respect towards another philosopher to offer criticisms of his work. To have expressed an essential truth so briefly is typical of the book.
The Conversion of England
Authors: Velarde R.
Published: July 2007

The ‘Conversion of England’ presents itself to us both as a problem and a mystery, but for one reason or another we become so preoccupied with the problem that we overlook the mystery. Yet our very handling of the problem is bound to be influenced by our awareness of the mystery. It must be confessed also that the problem has hitherto received only intermittent attention, and that nothing like a strategy of conversion has yet been evolved. It is my contention that our tendency to date has been to view the question as a matter of immediate practical concern demanding immediate action; and there seems moreover to be a belief abroad that this is a problem which will yield like any other to persistence and the correct technique—backed always by the grace of God. Certainly we should be active if only intermittently, but have we any reason for believing that our usual methods of tackling this immense problem are likely to lead to improved results? I would submit that the inevitable sense of frustration which follows on our efforts is due to an insufficient consideration of the truth that the problem is not only a problem, but also a profound mystery. In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.

In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.
The Catholic Philosophy of Education
Authors: Versfeld Marthinus
Published: July 2007

I am going to define education simply as the process of making a man of a man, First, note that the thing is a process, that-is, something that takes time. In understanding any process the most important consideration is its end, and this we have said to be the perfection in his own kind of the person educated. We must notice further that any being of which it can be said that it is perfectible, in its own kind, can be perfect only in a relative and not in an absolute way. What is perfectible, even when perfect, will lack the perfection of having always been perfect. It will be perfect only in a particular kind, since what becomes must always be of a particular kind. God alone is perfect absolutely and hence the notion of education is not applicable to him, as it is to the pseudo-god of W. James. Further, what is perfect of its own kind or in a relative way, cannot be the sufficient reason for its own perfection. It must exist in view of that whose perfection is wholly contained in its own act of existence, that is in God. We may thus say that education is the process of making a man of a man because God is God. In other words, being a man makes no sense apart from God, being like whose perfection is the only perfection which a perfectible being can have.

To know what education is, therefore, we must know something about what man is and in order to know what man is we must know something about what God is . . .
Whither Women?
Authors: Eden Helen Parry
Published: July 2007

A woman must always remember that, she is a woman. She must dress like a woman, talk like a woman and walk like a woman. For the enrichment of her personal life, her personal happiness, she must observe the purely feminine attributes and feminine virtues. . . . We have neglected the special education which girls need to become good mothers and good wives and we must give it to them.—Olga Mishakova, Secretary General of the Russian Youth Organisation.

It may well be that economic necessity makes a supply of female helots an inevitable part of our industrial life.—John Newsom, County Education Officer for Hertfordshire.

All education is due for overhauling; and that of women, being least concerned with the vital needs of its victims, is justly answerable for the most uneasiness. Papal pronouncements having frequently dealt with the kindred points of heaven and home as the magnetic poles of civilisation, there is no need to reiterate the teaching of the Church on the subject. But because the integrity of the English home is to all intents and purposes a forlorn hope, and the English heaven strikes one as being unlikely of attainment without it, the reviewer proposes to survey two books, one American, one English, and neither of them Catholic, which exhibit a novel awareness of our danger and offer some practicable suggestions for averting it. In the brief space at her disposal, she has almost entirely ignored the unhelpful aspects of the books in question.
Andrew Szepticky: Father Metropolitan
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

Writing in the issues of this review for July 1944 and April 1945, I tried to explain the extremely complex set-up of peoples and Christian allegiances in the borderland that stretches from Lithuania to the Carpathians: that territory which was part of Poland-Lithuania from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, was partitioned between Russia and Austria in 1795, became Polish again from 1921 to 1939, and is now incorporated in the U.S.S.R. The inhabitants of the southernmost part, eastern Galicia (Galych, Halicz), are about one-third Latin Catholic Poles to three-fifths Ruthenians, i.e., Byzantine Catholic Ukrainians; and of these last I wrote that it seemed likely, in view of the circumstances and of historical precedent, that the Soviet authorities would seek to force them into the Russian Orthodox Church. Actually that process had already begun: in April 1945 all the Galician Ukrainian bishops were arrested and deported into Russia, and in March 1946 a handful of lower clergy and laity, calling themselves ‘The Synod of the Uniate Church in the Western Ukraine', reported to Marshal Stalin that the 350-year old reunion with Rome was revoked. It can hardly be doubted that the signal for this move was the death on the preceding November 1st of the archbishop of Lvov, Andrew Szepticky, who had not only been for forty-four years head of the Catholic Ukrainian church but for long the most respected and most loved of all Ukrainian public figures anywhere.
Russian Christianity To-day
Authors: Blundell Richard
Published: July 2007

There are at present two main parties among the Russian Orthodox emigrés. Some of them are in communion with the Patriarch of Moscow and accept his jurisdiction, while the rest stand aloof. The latter are suspicious of the apparently close connection between the Patriarch and the atheistic Soviet Government. The former are impelled by a sort of spiritual patriotism to give their allegiance to the Church of their homeland, no matter what its relations with the Kremlin. Either decision has often been taken only after much prayer and searching of the heart, and may have caused much bitterness.

A number of those who have submitted to the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow have been allowed to visit the Soviet Union on business connected with the administration of the emigre churches. After staying for periods varying from a few weeks to several months, they have returned to take up again their normal work in France or Belgium. Some of them are priests, others laymen. Most of them have been born in Russia but have lived since the Revolution in Western European cities, which makes their description of the conditions among Christians in the Soviet Union all the more interesting. Most of them are still much attached to their homeland and are very proud of the victories which Russia won during the war, though this does not entail approval of all that the present Russian Government says and does. They are pleased to be able to demonstrate their solidarity with their people.
Wales and Monasticism
Authors: Michael
Published: July 2007

Wales, as a separate people of definite historical characteristics, owes its origin under God to the accidental results of an invasion of Britain by pagan peoples from overseas. From statements by Tertullian and Origen, not to mention many other later Christian continental writers, it is safe to say that Christianity had reached Britain before the close of the second century. Its introduction is not to be ascribed to any of the pious personages who figure in the earlier or later fanciful medieval tales of Glastonbury, such as Lucius, but has to be credited in sober fact to innumerable and unknown Christians, travellers and immigrants from the Continent for the most part. These travellers and those religiously influenced by them, gradually, it is clear, formed themselves into Christian communities, each with its own bishop and presbyters and deacons. These communities of simple folk sowed the seeds of the Christian religion in many parts of Britain while Borne was still a power in the land.

The members, and still more the founders, of these British Churches were not monks, for the very simple but cogent reason that the day of continental, much less British, monasticism had not yet arrived. Monasticism was a forward movement within an existing church. It originated in Egypt in the third century; it spread westwards through Italy and Spain into Gaul (modern France), and thence through the disciples of St Martin of Tours and the influence of Larins and Marseilles, it came to Britain about A.D. 420 or soon afterwards. (Cf. Introduction to The History of Wales, A. H. Williams, Vol. I.)
Introduction to Welsh Hagiology
Authors: Davies J. Barrett
Published: July 2007

The present revival of Catholicism in Wales would be incomplete without the old devotion to the early Welsh Saints, of whose constant intercession for their native land we now begin to see the fruit. Though their cultus was forbidden at the Reformation, they have kept their place in the affection of the Welsh people; and the increased knowledge of their lives gained by modern scholars is a valuable help in restoring their rightful place in popular devotion. To the historian their chief importance is their formative influence on the Welsh nation, which, as is being increasingly recognised, grew out of Celtic monasticism, of which these Saints were the founders. Under Roman rule British Christianity had its centres in the cities and its organisation was interwoven with that urban life which was the framework of the imperial system. The decay of urban life after the departure of the Legions induced a period of stagnation in British Christianity from which it was rescued only by the monastic movement, which introduced a new organisation better able to adapt itself to the tribal system now replacing imperial administration. Thus it was Celtic monasticism which fused the British tribes and the remnants of Roman culture into a spiritual unity so that, from being a merely geographical term in Roman times, by the 8th century Britanni had become the name of a nation. That its ethos even today is essentially religious is the enduring legacy of the early Welsh Saints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the increasing study of their lives by modern scholars has been prompted by historical rather than by religious motives.
Penal Times and After
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

Speaking last year at the centenary celebrations of St David’s church, Swansea (which was also about the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Swansea mission), the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster remarked on the fact that ‘so little has been written of the history of Catholicism in Wales’. Having undertaken some years ago to write a popular account of the Church in Wales, the present writer knows from very practical experience how little that little is; and he hopes that the few pages that follow—to say nothing of all the other pages in this issue of Blackfriars—may perhaps encourage others, better qualified than himself, to put their hands to the work of filling this deficiency in the religious and ecclesiastical history of these islands, a deficiency which may be partly due to the fact that for a century and more the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Wales have not themselves been Welsh.
A Note on Welsh Education
Authors: Lewis Saunders
Published: July 2007

There is a general impression that the Welsh Nonconformist tradition is hostile to the introduction of religious instruction into education, hostile to denominational schools, and is the ally of secularist principles in education. This article can be no more than a note on the matter, but it may help to give Catholics working in Wales some clue to the understanding of the Nonconformist position.

Most people are aware that the Welsh Nonconformist attitude was developed during the struggle between church and chapel in the 19th century. The ‘church’ was the established Church of England, the Anglican and anglicising church of the land-owning Tory Welsh-despising gentry. The ‘chapel’ was the loose confederation of three or four dissenting bodies to which the mass of the Welsh-speaking peasantry belonged. The Catholic Church hardly came into the picture.

Indirectly, it was in it from the beginning of the struggle. It was in 1843 that the Calvinistic Methodist body confirmed its hitherto reluctant ‘dissent’ by a resolution to join the other Nonconformist bodies in the support of British schools, in which no dogmatic religion was taught, as opposed to the National schools of the Church of England. From that date the battle is engaged. The Calvinistic Methodist resolution was directly due to the progress of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. The ‘Puseyites’ roused alarm in Wales. They seemed to herald the capture of the Church of England by Rome. Protestantism was in danger. The Catechism in the schools could be used to Romanise. The last link between the Church and the Methodists was broken, and the British school campaign was the answer of Welsh Nonconformity to the Oxford Movement.
Words From Wales
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Some years ago, during a classical congress which we attended, my wife in conversation with a fellow member, an intelligent woman, well connected, well read and widely travelled, happened to say that I had devoted some of my leisure to translating specimens of Welsh literature, and the reply was: “Is there any Welsh literature to translate?”’

The story was told by Sir Idris Bell in the broadcast talk he gave to introduce a series on ‘The Literary Tradition of Wales’ (reprinted in The Welsh Review, Winter, 1947), and the question is, as he says, typical and significant. Welsh is spoken today by close on a million people; its literature has more than a thousand years of unbroken tradition, and can claim poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Tudur Aled who need fear no comparison with any European contemporaries; and the modem revival of Welsh writing has, in such men as T. Gwynn Jones, B. Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis, falsified any idea that Welsh is antique—and useless. Yet these facts are constantly received with incredulity. A summary account of books and periodicals that have appeared in the last few months may, then, help to complete the picture of Wales this number of Blackfriars is designed to give.

The silver jubilee in 1947 of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth, which has today over eighty thousand members) was an important event in Welsh life and was fittingly celebrated by the publication of Y Llinyn Arian (Urdd Office, Aberystwyth, 15s.), an anthology of original work by Welsh writers, painters and musicians, which is evident proof of the vitality of Wesh culture.