bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Salvation and the Non‐Catholic
Authors: Congar Yves M‐J.
Published: July 2007

The religious problems discussed most frequently in French intellectual circles are, in all probability, the suffering of the innocent, hell, the story of human origins and original sin, the salvation of non-Catholics, the value to be attached to other religions. All of these, it will be observed, represent points at which the positive economy of salvation comes into apparent conflict with the aspirations of modern man and his compulsion to give an account of human history and of human destiny in purely rational terms. Such circumstances cannot but guarantee a sympathetic public for a book of some four hundred pages bearing the promising title of The Salvation of the Unbeliever, especially when it comes from so distinguished an author as Father Riccardo Lombardi.

Profoundly aware of the distress caused by the fact that thousands of men and women have never come, and indeed never have had the chance of coming, to an explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ and his Church, Fr Lombardi approaches his subject with the avowed intention of trying to establish as wide and as optimistic a solution as possible. Such a solution appears to him to be justified, demanded even, by what St Paul says in i Timothy: ‘It is (God’s) will that all men should be saved, and be led to recognize the truth.’
Mysticism and Mysticism
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

Professor Zaehner’s new book is most timely, and—to anybody with any interest in the subject, from whatever point of view—quite absorbing. It is also a pioneer work, for although the study of ‘comparative mysticism’ is not totally new, the little that has hitherto been written about it has been mainly from an a priori standpoint with little regard for the actual records. Moreover, such writing has often been based on assumptions, or wishful thinkings, of very doubtful validity. At one extreme is the assumption that all ‘mystical experiences’ are essentially identical, whether they be of Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Wordsworthian Romantics, drug-takers or schizophrenics. At the other, that only Catholics (or Hindus, or Moslems, or the clinically sane, etc.) have authentic mystical experiences, and that all the rest are frauds, delusions, or at best purely natural phenomena from which any intervention of God’s grace must at all costs be excluded. The outstanding merit of Professor Zaehner’s book is its rigorous empiricism, its careful scrutiny and comparison of the plain facts, which can only be the testimonies of the mystics themselves, or those who have been called such. Even as a collection of texts, and apart from his own thoughtful comments, hypotheses and deductions, this is a most valuable book.
A Discernment of Motes
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

The opinion that it is impossible to make moral judgments about other people is sufficiently widespread amongst Christians to be worth attacking. It is of course a Christian doctrine that it is hardly ever my business to pass adverse moral judgments on people, but that is an entirely different matter. It is Christian teaching that I am very rarely justified in killing a man by shooting him with a gun, but we ought not to confuse this with the theory that it is impossible to kill a man by shooting him with a gun. In practice the latter theory will lead to a whole lot of death; similarly the theory that moral judgments are impossible leads to a whole lot of slander.

The theory is that while we can judge the behaviour of a man and say whether his external actions are good ones or bad ones, we cannot penetrate to his soul to see if he himself is good or bad. I can say that Peter did something that was ‘objectively’ or ‘materially’ wrong, but only God can say whether Peter was ‘subjectively’ or ‘formally’ committing a sin.
Mr Jones
Authors: Walker Peregrine
Published: July 2007

It was said that Mr Jones had never seen the sea and that he believed the earth to be flat. I never knew his geographical views at first hand, and I would scarcely have dared to discover. For he was a formidable man, occasional of speech and always infallible. He spent his seventy years in one place, nearly all in one house indeed (apart from the irrelevant years of childhood, which in Mr Jones you could hardly believe had ever happened). He began as hall-boy in The Court in 1890, or thereabouts, with a wasp waistcoat and a proper respect for the protocol of place in a household of thirty servants. He lived to see much change, and when he died in 1952 the family he had served so long had moved to a much smaller house, The Court had become a school, and there were even council houses in the village.

But Mr Jones was more than a family retainer who had lived on into a world he could never really understand. He was fashioned, certainly, by the circumstances of time and place: the old General was the law and prophets for him, and there could be no countryside to match the gentle borderland, with the menacing mountains beyond. Yet he gave you a wonderful sense of the complete man, for whom change and decay could never seriously disturb the given order of things.
William Blake: A Mental Prince
Authors: Hirst Désirée
Published: July 2007

The first exhibition of William Blake’s paintings was held in 1809, just 148 years ago, in the house where he was born, 28 Broad Street, Golden Square. (The building can still be visited in Soho and contains a shop-sign business.) His brother James Blake, who had taken over their father’s hosiers’ trade, lent the first floor of the house for the exhibition which had several famous visitors. Among these was the poet Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and the Boswell of the age, Henry Crabb Robinson. It is interesting to remember this first humble showing at a time when the great galleries of the nation are vying with one another to present William Blake bi-centenary exhibitions. To celebrate the birth of this amazing poet and painter on November 28, 1757, the Tate Gallery has arranged an especially lavish display of its Blake Treasures. The Print Room of the British Museum has shown not only its Blake collection but examples of the work of Blake’s contemporaries and followers. The Fitzwilham Museum at Cambridge, which possesses beautiful examples of Blake’s illuminated books as well as many paintings, has also been holding an exhibition. Up in Manchester the Whitworth Art Gallery has shown its Blakes together with those belonging to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the Victoria and Albert has arranged a special exhibition where newly acquired paintings as well as drawings and engravings which have long been housed there were shown.
Old Priest and New Presbyter
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

The book of this name by Professor Norman Sykes is a learned exposition, as impartial in the circumstances as it could well be, of the mind of the Church of England upon the problem of the Church’s ministry. It examines the way the originating formularies of Anglicanism concerning the nature and necessity of episcopal rule have been understood and acted upon during the course of Anglican history. Professor Sykes’s conclusion, after reviewing the relevant evidence, may be summed up in his own words:

‘The Church of England has never set forth any theological or doctrinal theory of episcopacy, but in its Articles, the Preface to the Ordinal and die writings of its representative divines has contented itself with a historical statement of its intention to continue the three-fold ministry on the ground of its tradition in the Church since the Apostolic age’ (page 244).
Your Jewish Neighbour
Authors: Solomon Charles
Published: July 2007

Since I am myself a Jew and the nature of my work constantly involves me in the activities of the Jewish people, I had supposed that the preparation of this paper would occasion me very little trouble. But the more have considered the matter the more I have been forced to the—perhaps salutary—conclusion that really I know very little indeed about my own people.

In the first place we have to ask ourselves the apparently simple but perhaps insoluble question: what is a Jew? It has been truly remarked that a Jew is very easy to recognize and very hard to define.

There are, of course, definitions, but none that seem to me very satisfactory. According to Jewish religious law, a Jew (other than a proselyte) is the child of a Jewish mother—the faith of the father is not an essential factor. The test is, of course, logically indefensible, since we are bound to ask what made the mother Jewish, and to reply that she in turn was the daughter of a Jewish mother who derived her Jewishness from her mother, and so on for ever. We are thus landed in one of those infinite regressions that bedevil all logical argument. The same objection—together with a host of other objections—applied to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, according to which a Jew was a person, whatever his or her faith, who had one or more Jewish grandparents. That grandparent presumably was Jewish by reason of having the same stain on his or her escutcheon, and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
Christian Theology and Natural Science
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

At the end of the last century people pretty generally believed that Christianity could not much longer survive the rapid progress of science; there was a battle on, and its conclusion was inevitable within a matter of years. Today the situation looks completely different. Scientists are more cautious in their speculations and Christianity has proved more resistant than could have been expected. The idea has grown up that perhaps collaboration rather than rivalry may be of more value to each: there are signs that the lion is prepared to lie down with the lamb.

The publication, a few months ago, of E. L. Mascall’s Christian Theology and Natural Science is an important step in this direction. Dr Mascall is a theologian who has maintained his interest in the science he studied in earlier life. In his new book he examines in detail a number of the points at which theological and scientific studies come into contact. As a result of this examination he insists that Christians should neither ignore nor repudiate scientific discoveries. There is not the slightest need for them to fear that science will make it necessary to abandon traditional Christian teaching, or that reconciliation can only be effected by desperate expedients such as turning Christian dogma into mere metaphor. Of course some apparent conflict must still remain, but the sensible procedure is then to examine each situation with care, and see whether valid conclusions have been drawn by theologian and scientist from the evidence available to them; if either has gone too far, we may have to suspend judgment until further evidence comes to light. Each is seeking truth, and the Christian especially must be fearless in accepting truth from whatever source it comes, since he believes that ultimately it comes from God and tells him something of its author.
Vinoba Bhave
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

India is one of the few countries left in the world which still has the capacity to produce saints. One of the most authentic of these was Ramana Maharshi, who died only a year or two ago and whose life by an English disciple, Arthur Osborne, was published recently. He lived a life of austerity equal to that of the greatest of the Fathers of the Desert and reached a state of contemplation which in Christian terms could only be described as habitual union with God. He himself remained a Hindu of the strict advaita (non-dualist) school and maintained simply that his ‘self’ had ceased to exist and that he had realized his true ‘self’ in God. I have met many people, both Christian and non-Christian, who have known him, and all of them testify to the extraordinary holiness of his character, which was shown not least in his wonderful compassion and kindness. It can hardly be doubted that the transition from a life of complete silence and solitude in the isolation of a cave to the later life of the Ashram with its constant concern for every human need marks the influence, at least unconsciously, of Christianity on the Hindu mind, but Maharshi remained typically Hindu in his character.

The same must be said of Vinoba Bhave, who continues the tradition of Hindu sanctity in our own day and who has also found an English disciple to write his life. Mr Tennyson has written an extremely good book. He lived and worked, and what is more walked, with Vinoba, and though his actual contact with him was only for a short period, it was obviously the most momentous experience of his life and he has the bom writer’s flair for revealing the feeling and quality of his experience. The result is a book which not only gives a vivid record of the life and work of Vinoba, but is also able to show something of its historic importance for India and for the world.
The Mystery of Lourdes
Authors: Mulvey Kieran
Published: July 2007

Fifty years ago the extraordinary J. K. Huysmans wrote his Crowds of Lourdes. Huysmans has been described as ‘un ecrivain precis, subtil, et tourmenté’ and certainly his study of Lourdes reveals these characteristics. Though one may disagree entirely, his devastating comments on religious art and architecture in this city of our Lady are refreshing and provocative. His observant eye misses nothing. The most critical visitor to Lourdes could not rival his invective about the commercial by-products of the shrine. And that, after all, is what the apologist for Lourdes has to face.

Huysmans’s book can be taken as a half-century mark in the history of the Lourdes shrine. He wrote it after he had become a militant convert to Catholicism. Surprisingly, though it is probably now neglected, the book is not out of date in essentials. Mrs Ruth Cranston’s The Mystery of Lourdes (Evans; 18s.) might well be taken to mark the approaching centenary of the apparitions, 1958. It eclipses the Huysmans book and, one might even venture to say, all the English books on Lourdes. It is a remarkable book to have come from the pen of a Protestant bishop’s daughter, herself a Protestant. Huysmans, after his conversion and quite against his own inclinations, came to Lourdes to investigate it for himself. A specialized interest in faith healing drew Mrs Cranston to the place where so many miracles of healing take place. ‘The three years since I began the study of this wonderful place, and its great cures of soul and body’, she writes, ‘have been among the richest of my life.’ Huysmans, who detested crowds, went to Lourdes reluctantly but he, too, like so many others, was captured by its spirit.

Huysmans describes the Lourdes of about 1900; Mrs Cranston describes the Lourdes of today. She has the advantage of superb photographs to supplement her descriptions; Huysmans has the advantage of that style ‘precis, subtil et tourment?’. He suffers aesthetic agonies because of, as it seems to him, hideous religious art. Mrs Cranston is untouched by this, as probably even the most sensitive pilgrim is, in face of the overwhelming faith and suffering nobly borne.
Wales: Catholic and Nonconformist
Authors: Daniel Catherine
Published: July 2007

There seems to be no doubt that the Church, as a visible society of baptized persons, was fully established and functioning in Wales by 200 a.d. Her influence is to be discerned in our earliest vocabulary, e.g. the word for ‘universe’ in Welsh is ‘bedyssawd’, the Latin ‘baptizati’, an assembly of baptized persons. By the sixth century Welsh epic poetry was being written in die context of a Christian culture. Taliesin, the poet, describing the court of Urien Prince of Rheged in Southern Scotland, which formed part of Roman Britain, describes a Catholic family life as lived in the court of his exalted patron. By 314, when the Council of Arles met, Bishops from the whole of Christendom attended and ‘lesser clergy’ from Spain, Italy, Gaul, and Britain. The three orders of Bishops, Presbyters and Deacons were present. We have every reason to deduce that the Catholic Church in Wales was well established, vigorous and in full cognizance of its sister assemblies on the Continent. We hear of British representatives at all the subsequent councils except that of Nicaea. When in 383 Magnus Maximus was proclaimed Emperor by the British Legions before he left for the Continent to defend the fortunes of Rome, he was baptized as an orthodox believer and won the approval of St Martin of Tours, St Ambrose of Milan, and Pope Siricius for his faithfulness in belief.

There is no need to stress this aspect of Welsh history to a Catholic audience. It was part of the general picture of the Europe of that day. What is perhaps not so generally realized amongst Catholics is that Wales in those days was part and parcel of the Roman Empire, under the direct rule of Roman Emperors, for all of three centuries. After an initial period of resistance to Roman arms our forbears seem to have attained a modus vivendi and to have co-operated with their rulers and actually to have enjoyed a long period of tranquillity.
The Catholic Resistance in Wales: 1568–1678
Authors: Cleary Martin
Published: July 2007

In 1575 a Welsh priest in Rome wrote down a plan which he had cherished in his long years of exile, since the time when the death of Mary Tudor had extinguished his hopes of becoming Bishop of Bangor. He imagined the galleys of the Papal fleet coming to anchor at Menai, and disembarking an army led by Catholic exiles. The mountain passes from Harlech to Conway were to be blocked by Welsh Catholic sympathizers, and when sufficient English Catholics had made their way into this bridgehead, he proposed a breakout into the Midlands to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the English throne.

Dr Morys of Clynnog, the author of this scheme, made Wales his landing place for three reasons: her potentialities for resistance, her separate language and history, and her fidelity to the Catholic faith. All these points are made, from the opposite side, by Morys Clynnog’s supplanter in the Bishopric of Bangor, the Protestant Nicholas Robinson. ‘I have found’, he wrote in 1567, ‘since I came to this country images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and indecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the country full of beads and knots.’ Fr Robert Persons, s.j., likewise turned his attention to Wales at the start of his famous missionary journey with Blessed Edmund Campion in 1580 as a region where priests would be welcome and would do great work for the Catholic cause.

Our enquiry leads us to consider the way in which the Catholic Church adapted her mission to the Welsh nation in the unprecedented circumstances of the Elizabethan persecution. First we must study the part played by the seminary priests from Douai in North Wales. At the very beginnings of the Douai seminary we find associated with Cardinal Allen a Welsh priest from Anglesey, Dr Owen Lewis, like Morys Clynnog, an Oxford graduate and an exile.
The Image of God
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Adam, says the Bible, was made to the image of God, and the Church adds that so are all men; and that this image-hood is chiefly in man’s soul. What then is ‘soul’? In our philosophy the term, or its equivalents, denotes life; anything alive has a soul. But ordinarily, of course, it means the life- principle in man; and human life is very different from that of other terrestrial beings. Whether or not any animals reason, it seems absurd to compare the cleverest dogs or monkeys with the enormous range of human achievement. On this planet at least we stand out pretty clearly. Now this, Catholics say, is due to a radical difference in the human life-principle—that it differs from the rest of the world we know not only as dogs differ from roses or horses from dogs, but as something that is not strictly part of the physical world differs from the entire physical world. The human soul is partly outside the physical and even the animal world. To use a question-begging term, it transcends all bodies animate and inanimate. What does this mean?

The ‘transcendence’ of man, his ‘spirituality’ as distinct from mere vitality, is commonly approached negatively. It is said that precisely as a human agent I have certain activities which are not activities of my body or of any part of my body, in which something other than any organ of the body is operating. The body may concur with or condition such activity, it is not precisely the agent acting. The reference is to intellectual activities. Reflecting, then, on these, I think I can make two affirmation about them which, on analysis, yield some understanding of that boasted ‘transcendence’: that I am aware of things (a) as real, and (b) as significant.
Hilaire Belloc
Authors: Haynes Renée
Published: July 2007

It is not yet four years since Mr Belloc died. He left a vast and varied opus; a collection of friends almost as diverse as his books; a legend; and an enormous quantity of diaries and papers. It is astonishing that in so short a time Mr Speaight should have been able to work through so many sources of information, assess their relevance, extract what was of value, bring the legend into focus in the man, and write this admirable study, objective, affectionate, detailed and just. He has handled his great and complex task with detachment, and has succeeded in doing something which must have been very difficult indeed; that is, in describing the multifarious events and labours and interests and adventures of Belloc’s torrential, centrifugal life, without ever obscuring his unity of character, centripetal in religious loyalty. He is seen, first and last, as a single human being; not as a volcano in ceaseless highly unpredictable eruption. This means, of course, that some of his personal impact is diminished; but many vivid impressions or that impact are available, with J. B. Morton’s memoir as the most intensely vital of them all. The present biography is the first to give the facts, the documents, the time sequences, which form the bony structure of that long and vigorous life. For the most part Mr Speaight stands well away from his subject matter, and records without comment both the attractive and the unsympathetic aspects of Belloc. His childlike goodness and generosity and loyalty emerge, his overwhelming vitality, ‘the spouting well of joy within’, his capacity for friendship and singing and laughter; and so do his anti-semitism (neither soft-pedalled nor excused, but traced to French influences in his youth, especially that of the Collège Stanislaus where he spent some formative months) and his lack of imaginative sympathy.
Religion in a Welsh Boom Town
Authors: Fogarty Michael P.
Published: July 2007

How must those who preach the Gospel speak if they arc to be listened to? For the sociology of religion this is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Here in Wales audibility seems to have varied over the years right up and down the scale. Two hundred years ago the chapels were unbuilt, the cathedral of the Archbishop of Wales was in ruins, and the Gospel message was heard hardly above a whisper. But come forward a century, to around 1850 or 1880, and the same message is heard so loudly as to drown everything else. The Church of England, presently to be the Church in Wales, is back on its feet. ‘These eminent propagandists of the Faith, the Irish’, as a contemporary priest at Maesteg called them, begin to pour in even before the Famine. Above all, the chapels are being built, literally in their hundreds. ‘Sin and savagery’ is how one historian describes the Glamorgan and Monmouth valleys in the early Industrial Revolution. Yet this chaotic, rootless proletariat was converted in a couple of generations into Christian communities, centred round the chapels, one of the greatest triumphs of evangelism in modem times. But come on yet another century, to the present day, and the picture changes again. The proportion of regular church- or chapel-goers to the population has in many places been halved, though still remaining far higher than in England. The influence of Christianity in work or leisure or politics is a mere shadow of what it was. The Free Churches can still stop the Cardiff Students’ Union from having a bar. But they cannot stop the Sunday shifts which—-with, admittedly, other things—have led two-thirds of Port Talbot people, in a recent questionnaire, to put down Sunday as ‘just like any other day’. Whatever the conditions for hearing the message of Christianity may be, it is clear that they were not satisfied two hundred years ago, came to be satisfied in the nineteenth century, and have ceased to be so well satisfied now. The problem of course is whether they can ever be satisfied again.
Christians and International Institutions
Authors: Riedmatten Henri de
Published: July 2007

There is no lack of scepticism about international institutions, and it is particularly widespread in Europe. It is a well-known fact that many Catholics subscribe to it. Europeans do not forget the failures of the League of Nations, and Catholics are distrustful of formulas which are often deduced from philosophical principles hostile, or at least indifferent, to Christianity. There are many, especially among the Catholics of the U.S.A., who do not easily overlook the historical links between modern internationalism and the liberal tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The present article does not seek to plead the cause of international institutions; its purpose is merely to provide information. There is no reason for Christians to be ignorant of the facts which explain the ever-increasing interest in international institutions which is taken by the Holy See, as well as the important place which relations with the United Nations and its Specialized Agencies take in the activities of the big Catholic international organizations.

First of all, it will be useful to set out what is original in the existing family of international institutions as contrasted with previous ones.
Supplication in the Psalms
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

Far the largest category in the psalter are the ‘Individual Laments’, the psalms in which an individual Israelite—as opposed to the whole community—complains to Yahweh of some distress, and pleads to be rescued from it. In the very nature of the case the attitude here must be more self-conscious than in the hymns of praise. He who praises strives to lose himself in his awareness of Yahweh; he who supplicates strives to find himself in Yahweh’s awareness of him. Before it was a question of man reaching up to Yahweh; now it is a question of Yahweh bending down to man. Yet still the focus of attention is fundamentally the same. Still Yahweh is there among his people, united to each single member by the covenant-bond. Still the soul of the suppliant Israelite is dominated by the overwhelming consciousness of Yahweh listening, and Yahweh there.

What is in the mind of that suppliant, standing in the presence of his God, praying not quietly in his heart but at the top of his voice, with every resource of human eloquence, with wild gestures and with tears?
Monsignor Ronald Knox
Authors: Stern G. B.
Published: July 2007

Many years ago I was discussing with Father M. a fairly obscure point of Catholic scholarship, and, rather out of my depth, asked him what Ronald Knox had had to say on the subject. ‘Ah, well’, he replied, ‘Ronnie Knox is of course hors de concours.’

And something slipshod in my mental French translation left me surprised at hearing Monsignor Knox spoken of as hors de combat! Later, amused at my mistake, I passed it on to Monsignor himself, thinking it would amuse him too; and ‘I expect I will be hors de combat next Wednesday’, he remarked; ‘I’m flying for the first time, out to Uganda.’

And I have since wondered what his mind did with that description of himself as hors de concours, for it was certainly by no visible act of diffidence that his comment had left it discarded on the floor. I was still to learn that this great prelate of modem times, this famous wit and scholar, was celled with humility like honey in the comb; an innate humility; he could no more keep it concealed than some people can conceal their innate arrogance. Yet by some spiritual poise he was likewise immune from having to supply those tiresome protestations of inferiority which Freud forgot to remove sharply into a wholly separate classification; true humility exists in its own air of freedom, and when we are in its presence perhaps we remark ‘there must be humility in the room’ as we might say ‘there must be violets in the room’. . .. But an inferiority complex is a miserable sandwich-man with boards front and back; and if their announcements are blatant, the person has an extrovert inferiority-complex: but if the sandwich boards get lugged about with their message turned inwards so that we cannot see what it is, they have an introvert inferiority-complex, just as tiresome.
The Vocation of Philip Howard—II
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

All suspicions that the Dominicans were indulging in kidnapping were soon laid to rest when the Prior delivered his prisoner into the hands of the Cardinal Archbishop at Milan on the morning of this same July 27. So far this boy’s vocation had involved merely one Pope, four Cardinals, the Master-General, a very worried Bishop and the English Queen’s agent in Rome. But they had reckoned without the Countess. As she was living in Antwerp there was an inevitable time-lag of about a month. She was as much distressed as her apostate husband, and was to prove far more active. Perhaps it was increasing illness that prevented the Earl from further participation in the dispute. Having written to Digby and to his wife, he seems to have left the matter in their capable hands.

The Countess did not hear of the fatal news until July 28, exactly a month after Philip’s clothing. By then he was safely lodged in the Archbishop’s palace at Milan, but of course she had no inkling of that. She wrote to her husband to express her sorrow, and to comfort him with the thought that there would be at least a year before Philip could be professed. The action of the Dominicans was so manifestly unjust that a letter to the Marquis de Velada, Governor of Milan, would, she hoped, be sufficient. He could if necessary call in the authority of the Nuncio there to force the fathers to surrender their ill-gotten novice.
R. L. Stevenson and the Lepers
Authors: Marshall George
Published: July 2007

That the first biography of the Belgian missionary priest who devoted his life to the lepers at Molokai should be written by a Scots freethinker, a grandson of the manse, is curious. That it should be the cause of a controversy which made Father Damien’s name known throughout the world, and which may yet make it even better known and venerated, is an indication of the often seemingly round-about way in which God chooses that his will be done on earth. No two men with less in common and with less possible mutual sympathy than Father Damien and Robert Louis Stevenson could easily be imagined. The one a Belgian peasant who only just managed to qualify academically for ordination, and who took the ceremony of being covered with a funeral pall at his profession so seriously and so literally that he promptly volunteered to be exiled to a living death in the leper colony at Molokai: the other a brilliant young Scots writer whose one object in life appeared to be to achieve a reputation as a wit and conversationalist. Their paths never crossed even. But Stevenson landed at Molokai a month after Damien’s death, and was possessed shortly afterwards by a religious determination to defend Damien’s reputation. The story is well known but what is not generally realized is that: (1) Stevenson had little time for missionaries in general, either Catholic or Protestant (he was associated in South Sea politics with the anti-missionary faction); and (2) his first impressions of Damien (based on what observers in Molokai told him) were not too favourable —it was only after reaching Australia some weeks later that he became a fervent admirer of Damien.
Holy War in Islam and Christendom
Authors: Daniel Norman
Published: July 2007

A recent book about the Islamic law of war and peace suggests comparisons with Christian law which have interesting implications. In this comparative field the plough has so far scratched only the surface. Among the more obvious questions provoked is this: does Christian law derive in this matter from Islamic law, or is the character of holy war always in all religions necessarily similar? Certainly such a book as this reminds us that the similarities between the Christian Crusade and the Islamic holy war—jihād—are more apparent than the differences. It also reminds us that certain general principles must be relevant to the question in any religion. One particular conclusion to which it seems to lead us is that any just war is a holy war. A war is either wrong, or a Crusade; the cause that is proportionate to the evils of war must be a great one indeed and one that claims our whole devotion. I am not, of course, concerned with the question whether there can be a just war at the present day; I only point out some alternatives.

War—struggle, aggression—is a condition of life, whether spiritual or material. Some people have been so unreasonable as to jibe at the combative character of pacifists. It is obvious enough that it is not war, but certain kinds of physical war, that all Christians abhor and some renounce. The holy war against evil angels, the struggle to live righteously, are as really warfare as the war of bombs.
Liturgy: A Pastoral Need
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

When Father Joseph Jungmann, S.J., rose to speak at the great International Congress of Pastoral Liturgy at Assisi in September 1956 he was greeted by applause so loud and so long that even a cardinalatial chairman could scarcely bring it to an end. It was the spontaneous recognition, by two thousand delegates from all over the world, of the special place that Father Jungmann holds not only among liturgical scholars but among all who have worked for the liturgical revival of our time. His subject at Assisi was ‘Pastoral Care: The Key to Liturgical History’, and it summed up his own achievement, which has been to apply the resources of an exact and unflagging scholarship to liturgical history but always so as to preserve a lively sense of its true purpose. At Assisi he compared the Liturgy to a tree: ‘if it has developed in the changing climate of the world’s history, if it has known times of storm and times of fruitfulness, nevertheless its growth has come from within and from vital forces which it manifests. The Liturgy is the life of the Church in the sight of God, of the Church which is the community of all those who are incorporated in Christ by baptism and who, Sunday by Sunday, gather to celebrate, under the direction of the priestly ministry, the memorial of the Lord.’
Designs for Loving
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

What is this thing called love?’ The question has been debated times without number: by the great poets, philosophers, mystics; by alert little logicians and portentous statisticians; by playwrights, novelists, songsters; and of course by lovers of various kinds, from those who indulge in a fever of passionate introspection to the simpler souls who sometimes briefly wonder in a bemused and befogged sort of way what has hit them. The plain man may well find himself confused by the variety of often conflicting answers given to the question, the variety of names given to the experience or to different aspects of it. In an interesting analysis of Moral Values in the Ancient World Professor John Ferguson discusses such concepts as the Greek eros, philia, philanthropia, homonoia, the Latin amicitia, pietas, humanitas, and the Hebrew chesed and ‘ahabah—the former of these last two being the steadfast, covenanted loving-kindness of God and pietas of man, the latter the deeper, unconditioned love that has in it something alike of eros and of philanthropia. But the two worlds of thought, the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman, were fundamentally different and could impinge but little on one another until Christianity brought to the world its new inspiration, its new concept of love, and what was in effect a new word to describe it: agape.

Again there has been a great deal of discussion about the difference, and the relationship, between eros and agape; and again the discussion has led to confusion because of the varying interpretations or emphases put on the words by various writers.
The Civil War in Man
Authors: Hirst Désirée
Published: July 2007

‘It seems to be a lesson of history that the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but that the exceptional cannot be understood by amplifying the commonplace.’ These words from the closing passage of a most important recent book, Professor Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, draw attention to a great misconception in the usual interpretation of that movement, spread over a considerable stretch of time, which we call ‘The Renaissance’. It is most often thought that this movement represented simply a revival of classical learning, an enthusiasm for technique, for style in all aspects of life, and a deepening sense of wonder at the mystery of Man himself. All these were features of the situation naturally, but its core is lacking if we merely consider them. Professor Wind has given us the missing heart: the heart of Renaissance art, architecture, poetry, music and science. What he presents to us is, of course, a religious vision, for nothing else could have had these effects. An esoteric vision, which is why he says that he deals with the exceptional, and one that verges often on heresy. But something which has nevertheless deep roots in the Christian past.

What was this vision? What brought these mighty manifestations into being? Briefly, a belief that it is the spiritual and not the material which is the essence of man, and that the truth of Christ existed in the world before Christ. These might seem unexceptionable truths, but in them lurked grave dangers.
The Significance of Teilhard De Chardin
Authors: Towers Bernard
Published: July 2007

The works of Teilhard de Chardin, now being published posthumously, appear to be having a considerable a impact on certain sections of the Catholic community on the Continent. The time is hardly ripe yet for the publication of a full critical appraisal of his writings, and the author of this book would not pretend that it is more than an introduction to Teilhard himself, with an exposition of certain features of his writings which appear particularly to call for critical comment. More important at this stage than commentaries, is that the works themselves should be read and talked about. Slowly, then, by constant usage, we shall extract more and more meaning out of those brilliant new words and phrases that Teilhard has introduced into the study of the history of the world: words such as enroulement, to describe the essential feature of the evolutionary process (compare the traditional déroulement); and hominisation, to indicate the unquestioned tendency in evolution, especially in the Vertebrates, for increasing elaboration of the central nervous system without which, so far as we can see, those characteristics which we recognize as essentially human would not be possible. Hominisation becomes, then, the end of the evolutionary process, for it is admitted by not a few biologists today that, of all the species now extant, it is Homo sapiens alone which is capable of making any further major evolutionary advance. This is attributed by Teilhard precisely to Man’s spiritual capacities by virtue of which, in continuation of the process of enroulement, he is offered the possibility (one species representing all the rest) of discovering at the heart of all creation the Omega, present there from the beginning as the Alpha.
The Qumrân Scrolls: A General Survey
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

Up to a few years ago it used to be said that it was still far too early to make more than a cautious interim evaluation of the importance of the Qumrân scrolls. Today one feels almost that the opposite is true, that in a certain sense it is too late. It has been done so often already. So many popular presentations of the subject have appeared, many of them highly competent, some few sensationalist in approach and grossly misleading, but all of them attempting to answer the same basic questions: What exactly has been discovered and how? What sort of people were the members of that strange Jewish sect who owned, and in many cases who must actually have written the scrolls? What is the bearing of these documents on the origins and on the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity? These are, I think, the questions everyone would like answered. My excuse for going over the same ground again must be primarily that the answers suggested have often been so bewilderingly different.

First, then, what has been discovered is the relics of a sect whose history in its total span (c. 125 B.C. to 68 A.D.) overlapped the lifetime of Christ, and the emergence of the Christian Church from Judaism. These relics are of two kinds: documentary, and archaeological, and the one exactly complements the other. Coins and pottery from the community building which has been found are identical in type and date with coins and pottery found in the caves which contained the documentary remains.
The Individual and the Universe
Authors: Hoskin Michael
Published: July 2007

For a number of years, cosmology has been a favourite science with the British public, and, with the development of radio astronomy and the recent launching of earth- satellites, the choice of a cosmologist to give the recent Reith Lectures was not surprising. Professor A. C. B. Lovell, who is well-known for the part he played in the development of the great Jodrell Bank radio telescope, took as his title ‘The individual and the universe’, and in his lectures he found three points of contact between cosmology and religion, each of which calls for comment.

The first occurred in his introductory lecture, which was devoted to the transition from the medieval geocentric and ordered cosmos to the infinite universe of the late seventeenth century. ‘In the three centuries since Galileo and Newton we have moved far, but the vital break with tradition belongs to their age, not ours.’ Now Professor Lovell shows that he appreciates that the revolution sparked off by the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus rapidly involved not only physical science as a whole, but also philosophy, religion, and in fact many of the features of man’s world picture. But it is on the religious aspect that he dwells. ‘The story’, he says, ‘is mainly one of persecution of the astronomers on religious grounds’, and in this way he produces a thoroughly distorted and unsatisfactory picture, for which he was rightly censured by Mr Arthur Koestler in a long letter to The Listener the following week.
The Career of a Dramatist
Authors: Berry Francis
Published: July 2007

The Elder Statesman is a success within special limits. It is an extension of the model of its predecessors, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk. Anyone familiar with those predecessors could have foretold what was to seen on the boards at Edinburgh last year, could almost have read the text of the play before it was printed. One thinks of another sequence of four closely-related plays concluding with The Tempest.

To make such a comparison, even momentarily, is to pay vast tribute to the later poetic dramatist. But a comparison, momentary or studied, points this capital difference: the poetry of Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale yields more significance, and therefore more delight, at each re-reading; the verse of The Confidential Clerk or The Elder Statesman says nearly all it has to say, at a single hearing or reading—unlike the poetry of The Waste Land, or even of some of the speeches of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, where the resources or reserves appear limitless. This difference in the quality of language has consequences for the theatre. The plays of Shakespeare are a challenge to the producer. Because of the suggestiveness of the poetry, they ask to be produced in all manner of modes, whereas one production of The Elder Statesman cannot—or should not—differ from another production, except in minor points of emphasis depending on the skill of players. A standard production is ensured less by the stage-directions than by a pallid fixity of language.

The Elder Statesman is depressing in that it follows the conventions— conventions which compel a thin language—of its immediate predecessors.
The Religious Situation in Russia Today
Authors: Nantet Jacques
Published: July 2007

As I go through the notes I made on a recent trip to the U.S.S.R., three of these strike me as throwing a certain amount of light on the whole question of the information and impressions one gets in that country. In the first place, I had been told that the Moscow crowd was drably and poorly dressed; and certainly at first glance one does feel there is something odd about the Muscovite’s appearance. One could easily be led to conclude that this was due to the poverty of his wardrobe. But in Leningrad, where people in fact dress in much the same way as at Moscow, the impression left is quite different. All this would remain most mysterious did one not remember that whereas in Leningrad we find a population that has always been urban, the Muscovite is fresh from the country. Between 1917 and 1958 the population of Moscow increased from 600,000 to more than six million, and the immense majority of the newcomers are peasants unfamiliar with town ways. Thus what gives us the feeling of strangeness about Moscow is really the unexpected rustic appearance of these new inhabitants.

Again, I had heard the fact that even V.I.Ps. sit in the front of their cars beside their chauffeurs put forward as an example of the real democratic feeling one finds in the Soviet. During my visit, however, I discovered that the seat next to the driver is considered to be the place of honour.
The Judicial Settlement of International Disputes
Authors: Johnson D. H. N.
Published: July 2007

Recent statements by leading American statesmen, including the President himself, in support of a ‘Peace through Law’ campaign, coupled with the proposal presented at the N.A.T.O. congress in London that the N.A.T.O. countries should establish a Court of Justice to solve their mutual differences, lead one to suppose that the cause of judicial settlement of international disputes is once again coming into favour. This cause is one which has been successively in and out of favour ever since the first and second Peace Conferences were held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. It is proposed in this article to set out, in a manner as free from technicalities as possible, the present situation in regard to the judicial settlement of international disputes; to consider, from a practical point of view, the advantages and disadvantages of this means of settling disputes as compared with other means; and finally to consider the matter in its moral aspect.

In article 2(3) of the Charter of the United Nations one of the principles of the Organization is stated as follows: ‘All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered’. On being construed carefully, however, it appears that this principle does not impose a positive obligation to settle all international disputes so much as a duty not to settle them in a certain way. The reason for this is the feeling that international law cannot compel its subjects never to be in dispute with one another; its primary concern is rather to prevent them from taking the law into their own hands and disturbing the peace.