bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Aftermath of Brussels
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

Now that the negotiations on Britain’s application for membership of the European Economic Community have broken down, many people are asking what will happen next. Few are suggesting that the Common Market itself is in danger of disintegration because of the arrogant manner in which General de Gaulle chose to break off the negotiations, with complete disregard for the wishes of France’s fellow members. There can be no doubt that France never wanted Britain to join, for the reasons given by General de Gaulle - if really representing the motives for the French action - should have led France to have rejected the idea of British membership at the very outset. The negotiations were, in fact, a farce, and one can only accept the explanation given by Mr Macmillan in his broadcast to the British people: France brought the negotiations to an abrupt end when they appeared in danger of succeeding, not when they looked like breaking down. What France had hoped for, throughout the eighteen months of negotiations, apparendy, was that agreement would prove impossible, and that Britain would be kept out of the Common Market without France having to incur the odium of exercising her veto.

France’s partners in the Common Market are, no doubt, displeased with the use of the veto, and above all the manner of its exercise. The Common Market will remain, however. The Five may feel that for some time to come, they must assert themselves in the internal discussions of the Common Market. They will show stronger opposition where, as on a number of issues, they do not see eye to eye with France. Far from benefiting the rest of the world, however, this may have serious consequences for countries outside the Common Market.
New Crusaders Voluntary Service Overseas
Authors: Tackaberry John
Published: July 2007

‘Come to Nigeria to die’ was not the specific call that the missionaries of the last century answered when they flocked to Africa. But the Christian ethic of their times and the demand that they go and teach all nations spurred them on to face hunger and death in the service of an ideal. Today the ethic has changed and the cry is for the technocrat to help the underdeveloped and newly free countries find stability, security and material welfare. As then the rich countries of the world provided the teachers and priests, so today only the rich countries can spare the skilled men that are needed. The Churches are being supplemented by the Peace Corps and the VSO Committee. It is the work of the latter, more precisely called the Committee on Service Overseas by Volunteers, that this article is to examine.

The Committee is a co-ordinating body, overseeing four different organizations (their addresses will be found at the end) who are all working towards roughly the same ends and using roughly the same methods, and the discussion concentrates on the ends and methods of VSO itself, as the largest of the four.

It is rare for a volunteer to go out for more than two years, or for less than one. Both cases are known, but they are exceptional and the standard period of service is about twelve months. The variety of the work is impressive: the five heads listed in the official handout comprise teaching, agricultural production, medicine, engineering and administration. In fact, what is wanted are those people who might be described as the architects of society. The countries to which the volunteers go are the new countries, countries in every imaginable stage of advancement and voracious for anyone with the requisite skills.
Science and Religion
Authors: Bright Laurence
Published: July 2007

Most scientists today have ceased to bother about the famous nineteenth-century ‘conflict with religion’. It is over. They do not think that religion has been defeated; more seriously, they think it has become irrelevant to them. And unfortunately the scientists who do believe in Christianity, even those who are Catholic, contribute to this notion. Their religion is best kept at arm’s length, kept for Sundays. Those who write about the matter have found the perfect formula to ensure that no conflict should be possible; they insist that no point of contact can be found. Science and religion are about quite different realms, they say; science deals with the laws that govern the material universe, while religion is about spiritual truths, ultimately about a remote and immaterial God.

Such a picture is thoroughly false and misleading. But it is true that a lot of popular Catholic teaching does contribute to the existence of a general attitude of this kind in the community at large. It is still far too ‘spiritualist’ in outlook; children are still being taught, often enough, that their bodies are not really necessary, that the great moment to hope for is the escape of their souls from imprisonment in matter, from this wicked world of flesh (and, by implication, from all those nasty people) in order to wing away alone to God. No wonder there is a general impression that matter is not quite nice, and in consequence Catholics leaving school still receive nothing like the same encouragement to take up science as they do to take up arts. Or if they have been allowed to go to the science side at school, this is because of the great openings it offers: science is the gateway to influence and power, to be used naturally enough for the Church’s advancement. That scientific work can in itself be a spiritual activity is mentioned much less often.
Images for the Church
Authors: Forbes Alberic
Published: July 2007

Having recently encountered the scorched and blackened ‘Assemblages’ of the American artist John Latham there, I nowadays approach the Bear Lane Gallery, in Oxford, with a certain caution. One can never be quite sure what is going to happen next. This month‘s exhibition, Modern Art and the Church, sounded like another challenge. On the earlier occasion, a few people were, I believe, rather indignant when they discovered what Mr Latham had been up to, with all that old gas-piping and burned secondhand books. But no one had to be carried out kicking and screaming as once they might have been. By now most of us have made our peace with Modern Art and the Modern Artist. But when one puts Modern Art and the Church together in the same room, one becomes aware how uneasy their alliance has always appeared. The problem is to see why this should be so. It is not that there is anything in the present exhibition which would upset one. One almost wishes there were. But problem there is, and it is made all the more difficult by the fact that nearly all the exhibits are meant to be seen in quite another context, as parts of a larger complex of architecture, or as things used and worn. It is not, however, just that stained glass is best judged when seen in the situation for which it was designed rather than when displayed under artificial light, even when this is done as effectively as it is in the depths of the Bear Lane. Most people are capable of makmg the required imaginative adjustment and allowing for the necessary restrictions imposed by a gallery. No. The sense of confusion has, I always feel where this matter is concerned, a deeper source and one more difficult to get at. It may perhaps be worthwhile attempting to say something about it, if this review is to be more than a mere elaboration of the catalogue, a list of ‘what I liked and what I didn't like’.
Dr Robinson's Book
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

Dr Robinson has written an important book about God, Christ, the nature of religion and morality. He does not claim to be a professional theologian; it is not, as he says, his academic field, but the book will nevertheless be of great interest to theologians as well as to the general reader, and it deserves a more discriminating reception than it has so far received in the press. Those of us in particular who are grateful to the Bishop for his work in his own field of New Testament scholarship will want to pay him the compliment of treating his book seriously and critically.

The book suffers a good deal from the author’s lack of acquaintance with the history of theology. Thus he can open Chapter Two with the astonishing statement: ‘Traditional Christian theology has been based upon the proofs for the existence of God.’ This is, of course, flatly untrue. Traditional theology has always been based on faith in the Word of God. Whether and how God may be known apart from such revelation is itself a question within theology. To satisfy oneself that this is so one needs only to read the first three questions of such a classic of traditional theology as the Summa Theologica. In fact we might well complain that the area of theology connected with such proofs has been unduly neglected in recent years by conventional theologians—one good effect of the Bishop’s book may be to remind us that this is after all an important topic. He exemplifies some of the mistakes that may be made when it is neglected.
Keep Left for the Church—II
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

I said at the end of my first article that what was needed at the present time, in order to restore a proper sense of tension between the Church and the World, was a deeper theological understanding especially in the moral field. But theology is a practical as well as a speculative activity: and moral theology must always bear upon practical life if it is to have any value. This is why the most important developments in moral theology have come from people with immediate and practical interests in the central moral issues of the day. Above all this nowadays means an interest in the problem of modern warfare and its prevention. I think one must single out, in this context, Père Regamey’s Non-Violence et Conscience Chretienne as one of the most important pieces of contemporary moral theology, though it bears little resemblance to the usual books on morality. I think the challenge of Pè Regamey’s book is its stress that, as a response to the colossal issues confronting us, a minimal ‘code’ morality (Is it licit to do this? Am I forbidden to do that?) is no longer adequate. This is not to say that a code morality is no longer necessary: but it is no longer enough to suppose that the avoidance of sin is all that we can expect from the average Christian. The average Christian, not only the exceptional one, must become morally heroic if the world’s problems are to be solved. By going to Gandhi for his inspiration, Regamey is able to sketch the requirements and the possibilities of such a Christian heroism.
Sengai
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Reading from right to left, a circle links with the base of a triangle, which in turn touches a rectangle. This is Sengai’s universe, abstract and symbolic. ‘The circle represents the infinite’, writes Suzuki in the catalogue, ‘and the infinite is the basis of all beings. But the infinite in itself is formless. We humans endowed with sense and intellect demand tangible forms. Hence a triangle. The triangle is the beginning of all forms. Out of it comes the square (the triangle doubled). This doubling process goes on infinitely and we have the multitudinosity of things which the Chinese philosopher calls “the ten thousand things” - that is, the universe.’

This exhibit, number 6, was the one reproduced on the posters, and the one judiciously placed to be the first seen as we entered the exhibition, still marvelling that we had to pay only a shilling for the superbly presented catalogue that contains a reproduction of each one of the eighty exhibits, together with Suzuki’s comments. Here indeed are ten thousand things, and each a world of its own. This was an exhibition quite unlike any other, needing to be pondered over, communicated with. One needed absolute silence, and it was best to be alone. The ‘fleeting world’, as Sengai paints and models it, is as significantly crystallised in the brush stroke and the moulding as it would appear to be in the flying calligraphy of the accompanying poems. A chummy old harlot offers him a gift of rather special pickles, and Tai-ki smashes his lute as an excuse for not playing at court to entertain a king. A crippled beggar is observed, and Hotei, the patron of children, gesticulates with a perpendicular arm after the manner of Edward Lear or awakes from a nightmare looking like someone from Thurber. A group of old men demonstrate how ‘indispensable are a hood on the head, wrappers, a stick and spectacles ... a hot water bottle, a heating stone, a chamber pot and a back scratcher’. Then there are the gods and devils, pantomime figures full of animation, and a bodhisattva full of reflection and enlightenment. An orchid, a spray of plum blossom, a cluster of bamboos driven by the wind. Two exquisite evocations of Fuji, sailing boats on a fan, and a meditating frog which is no more a caricature than any of the grotesque and humourous human figures. Sengai brings out the character of everything he sees and loves.
Continuous Mediation: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Authors: Shackleton Agnes
Published: July 2007

Peace on earth—the passionate longing of mankind everywhere. Peace is a word which is on everyone’s lips, and the desire for it in everyone’s heart— statesman and layman alike. The achievement of total and universal disarmament, the biggest step on the road to peace, is, as President Kennedy said only last year, no longer a pipe-dream of a few idealists: it is a stark matter of whether mankind is to survive on this earth or not.

Women, by their very nature, have always had the privilege and responsibility of feeding and nurturing the human family—hers the joy of bringing children into the world and hers the main responsibility for them till they are of an age to fend for themselves. She has a unique opportunity of moulding these children into the kind of beings with the kind of outlook she desires. Her power for good or evil is enormous. It is therefore of the utmost importance that women should be fully alive to the problems of the world in which these children have to live. Nowadays in the complicated state in which the human family lives, each nation and indeed each individual so interdependent on other nations and individuals, relying as everyone does on at least some of the produce of other countries for their very existence, women have a very special duty to extend their sphere of influence and their activities from their own immediate family to the family of the whole world. These are at least some of the reasons why women have a special interest in the achievement of a true and lasting peace, more than ever necessary today when the effects of artificially induced radiation, e.g. by the explosion of atomic weapons, are exceedingly grave, not only to the living, but also to the unborn, maybe for generations to come.
Social Work: Professionalism and Catholic Reluctance
Authors: Butrym Z. T.
Published: July 2007

The attraction inherent in social work and the corresponding reluctance of Catholics to commit themselves wholeheartedly to it has always struck me as a curious paradox.

It is too obvious a fact to elaborate that to a Catholic conscious of his calling as a member of the Mystical Body and as a representative of Christ, the opportunities which social work provides for carrying out his obligations to his fellow men and for exercising charity to the fullest possible degree are exceptionally great. No discussion of social work with individuals is possible without reference to the casework relationship as its very foundation and I should like to clarify what I see as the reason for attaching such tremendous importance to the quality of this relationship, which the social worker succeeds in establishing with the client. It would seem to me that the high place allocated to this aspect of social work practice stems from our conviction that in and through this relationship we can offer to a fellow human being the most valuable gift which we possess; that part of ourselves which is most in keeping with our supernatural calling. It is only the intimacy of a relationship which provides an adequate means for a meaningful communication of our committal to the membership of mankind, to the fact that we are all members of one another, and to the implication of this truth. It is through this committal that we ourselves live more fully and enable others to do so. Herein is the golden opportunity which social work offers to Catholics. The recognition and acceptance of the unique importance which human relationships play in life must lead to the conclusion that there is no other occupation (parenthood excepted) which enables the same extent of valid concentration on this area.
Letters to a White Liberal
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

If I dare to imagine that these letters may have some significance for both of us, it is because I believe that Christianity is concerned with human crises, since Christians are called to manifest the mercy and truth of God in history.

Christianity is the victory of Christ in the world, that is to say in history. It is the salvation of man in and through history, through temporal decisions made for love of Christ the Redeemer and Lord of History. The mystery of Christ is at work in all human events, and our comprehension of secular events works itself out and expresses itself in that sacred history, the history of salvation, which the Holy Spirit teaches us to read between the lines. We have to admit that this meaning is often provisional and sometimes beyond our grasp. Yet as Christians we are committed to the attempt to see some meaning in temporal events that flow from human choices. To be specific, we are bound to search ‘history’, that is to say the intelligible actions of men, for some indications of their significance, and some relevance to our present choice as Christians.

‘History’, then, is for us that complex of meanings which we read into the interplay of civilization. And we are also (this is more urgent still) at a turning point in the history of that European and American society which has been shaped and dominated by Christian concepts, even where it has at times been unfaithful to its basically Christian vocation. We live in a culture which seems to have reached the point of extreme hazard at which it may plunge to its own ruin, unless there is some renewal of life, some new direction, some providential reorganization of its forces for survival.
Placing Indian Religion
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

Professor Zaehner is one of the few Catholics in England to-day who is seriously concerned with the relation of Christianity to other religions. Though his special subject is Zoroastrianism, he has an intimate knowledge of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and has worked out a definite theory of their relation to Christianity. This was made clear in an earlier work, At Sundry Times, where he tried to show how all these traditions ‘converge’ on Christ and find their fulfilment in him. In his most recent work he develops this idea further, particularly in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the convergence of the whole creation on Christ, and tries to show how in the evolution of human consciousness the different religious traditions are stages in the progress of mankind under the guidance of the Holy Spirit towards the consummation of both man and the universe in Christ.

What is perhaps most original in his vision of human history is that he regards Marxism as an important stage in the development of religion. Marxism, particularly in its most authentic exponents like Marx himself and Engels, is concerned with the ultimate nature of man and the universe and with their ultimate destiny, and in this sense it may be called a religion. In Professor Zaehner’s view the Indian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are concerned almost exclusively with the salvation of the individual soul through its escape from this world of time and space. Marxism on the contrary, rejecting both the concept of the individual soul and any world beyond seeks the collective salvation of mankind in this present world through the working out of the ‘inner laws’ of nature, by which the ‘essence of man’ (in Marx’s phrase) will be realised.
Piers Plowman at Vatican II
Authors: Atkins Anselm
Published: July 2007

The front cover of the Penguin paperback Piers the Ploughman shows a woodcut of Langland lying beside a Malvern stream watching his vision of Piers. Piers is plowing the field of the world—there are the jackdaws flapping up out of the furrows and the sun shining hotly. Piers is giving Will a straight look, and Will is looking back: respectful, but a little dull and sheepish. They are both, naturally, barefoot. Then this other book, in covers exceedingly hard, and with no woodcut, opens to page thirty-five and, after a pointed quotation from St Augustine, commences a summary: ‘The Church needs, not only one to form her in the first place, but always, because she is deformed, a reformer. And this is Christ himself. This is why, throughout everything that we must not shirk saying, and in painful compassion and sorrowfully recognizing our co-responsibility, about the shadow-side of the Church, yet we can always firmly believe, in glad and unshakable faith, not in a sinful Church but in the holy Church.’ And further down the page (of The Council, Reform and Reunion) Hans Küng goes on: ‘ . . . insofar as God’s holy Church is a Church of men and sinful men, she, with everything that she is and has, is subject to that word of the Lord which reads “Do penance and be converted.” Insofar as the Church is deformed, she has to be reformed: ecclesia reformanda.’
Discerning the Real Situation
Authors: Stein Walter
Published: July 2007

In Spring 1963 the British Council of Churches appointed a Working Group ‘to study, as a matter of urgency, the question of Britain’s continued possession of an independent nuclear deterrent’. The group (which included a Catholic observer, Father Corbishley, s.j.) reported back to the Council that ‘there is no case for independent nuclear action—that is, without prior consultation with our allies—in any part of the world’, and the Council of Churches endorsed the report in a resolution of October 16th, 1963. The Resolution, together with the Working Group’s Report, forms a document of considerable importance.

Although it must be said that, like previous similar documents, such as The Valley of Decision (1961), The British Nuclear Deterrent fails to maintain its grip at the most decisive levels, it is a serious expression of concern, and its well-informed respect for the strategic and political realities of our situation is particularly striking after the endless hypothetical abstractions that still disable so much Catholic thinking in this field. One can only heave a sigh of gratitude when one reads that ‘the Churches are bound to bear witness’ where one’s nation ‘is prepared to annihilate vast populations in another country’ and that ‘our concern is to find God’s will in this given situation—the will of a God of whom it may not be said that He does certain things in general but nothing in particular’.
Dr Kildare and the Couch
Authors: Dworkin Martin
Published: July 2007

Screen psychiatry inherited much of the cinema’s older mythos of medicine. Young Dr Kildare, old Dr Gillespie, and their myriad colleagues easily switched from homey simplifications of the medically arcane to palatable psychoanalysis, the old soap-opera science keeping up with progress, prescribing Freud’s protean penicillin.

Of course, the new language had to be learned. And sometimes, the screen refracted the careful terminologies with disconcerting imprecision. The language of the couches and clinics, often beclouded enough, seemed to have been imperfectly absorbed by the popularizers themselves, emerging like the spirited garblings of matrons describing their illnesses and operations over tea—or Thurber’s triumphantly inexact maid, Della, whose sister, she confided, ‘got tuberculosis from her teeth, and it went all through her symptom’.

Much of the difficulty had to do with the importunate imperialism of the new depth psychology, whose revelations, formulated in the special language of its own province, could usurp so easily the imaginative essences of works of imagination. Dostoievsky had written psychological novels, and Goethe and Coleridge had projected the turmoil of personality upon creations of action and symbolic meaning. But their terms were always those of the novelist and poet; their characters were not case-studies masquerading as fiction; their claims to universality were persuasively inspired, not dogmatically pre-supposed.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

The programme for the sixteen days of this year’s Cannes Festival, the seventeenth of the series, was considerably more uneven than it has been for several years past and this, it seemed to me, made it more than usually interesting for the serious student of cinema. With three or four exceptions the great names were absent, and the number of predictable smash hits was surprisingly limited when one first looked at the complete list of entries. But as the brilliantly sunny days passed, it became increasingly evident how stimulating was the great proportion of work by very young or inexperienced directors, and one became used to seeing nervous young men sitting behind the microphone at the post-performance press conferences, waiting to be thrown to the wolves. So nervous were some of them, in fact, that even the journalistic wolves relented sufficiently to temper their bite to the shorn lambs.

Apart from one or two quite outstanding pictures like Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which in the event won the Grand Prix outright and shared the Catholic prize, or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned—not at all what you might expect from its title—you could almost divide the entries into films with very interesting ideas made by directors with insufficient experience to make the most of their material; and films made by experienced directors trying to put over insufficient material by means of accomplished technique.

For once, I found myself wholly on the side of the first category, many of which provided extremely rewarding viewing. One that I liked almost the best, though I was in a minority here, was a Swedish film made by a young man called Bo Widerberg; Kvarteret Korpen was translated as Raven’s End, the name of an industrial quarter outside Stockholm.
The Second Vatican Council and Religious Freedom
Authors: Ryan
Published: July 2007

One important issue that confronts the third Session of the Vatican Council is the question of religious freedom. With the recent publication of a number of the speeches made at the second Session we are able to follow something of the lines along which the discussion is likely to proceed, and to understand something of the issues at stake, issues of great significance to the ecumenical movement. The matter arises in fact from the Schema on ecumenism with which the Council was concerned at the end of the second Session. That Schema comprised five chapters—on the principles of Catholic ecumenism, on the practical applications of ecumenism, on the separated Christians, on the Jews, and on religious liberty. Bishop Schmedt of Bruges introducing the fifth chapter expressed his hope that ‘it will be possible to complete the discussion and the approbation of this very brief, but very important decree before the end of this second session’. ‘The whole world’ he said ‘is waiting for this decree. The voice of the Church on religious liberty is being waited for in universities, in national and international organisations, in Christian and non-Christian communities, in the newspapers and in public opinion— and it is being waited for with urgent expectation’. His hope was not in fact fulfilled, and though this was to many disappointing it is surely better that in so difficult and controverted a matter the final decisions should be seen to have emerged from slow and mature reflection rather than by what might have appeared a snap-decision reached under the pressure of a guillotine procedure.

The importance of the decree to the ecumenical movement was well put by Pete Le Guillou, O.P., in a conference given at Rome at the time of the discussions.
Colour Bar or Community
Authors: Townsend Henry G.
Published: July 2007

The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dead. It was buried in January of this year, just ten years old. For its epitaph some would write ‘A Great Experiment That Failed’; others, nearer the truth, ‘The Unwanted Partnership.’

Economically the Federation was a great success. Each of the constituent territories—Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland— benefited much in its own way. Southern Rhodesia enjoyed a remarkable boom, years of extraordinary expansion in industry, commerce and immigrant population, the most striking memorial of which is the present skyline of Salisbury with its soaring buildings. In Northern Rhodesia too there was rapid development and the Copper Belt lived through years of fantastic prosperity. Even Nyasaland, the poor relation, experienced substantial if less spectacular gain. Now all that is over.

Expansion has given way to contraction. This is especially marked in Southern Rhodesia, which is now suffering from an economic recession, unemployment, shortage of overseas investment and a large exodus of valuable white settlers. Worse still, there is great political uncertainty and civil unrest breaking out intermittendy into violence, which occasions more and more Draconian laws.
The Rebirth of the Diaconate
Authors: Hornef Josef
Published: July 2007

There are two ways of reinstituting the diaconate: having full-time deacons without any other occupation and having part-time ones whose main job is something else. Gradations between the two are also possible. The full-time deacon may, if necessary, do a certain amount of other work, whereas the part-time one may fulfil his duties say just in the mornings, or only in his spare time (evenings or weekends). Neither type, however, would be satisfactory by itself. There is a danger that the part-time deacon would lack the necessary firmness of purpose without the example of a full-time one, and that his attitude to the work could degenerate into a take-it-or-leave-it casualness. On the other hand, the church would be unable to manage with full-time deacons only, for economic reasons. It would be impossible to supply them to small mission stations, to the many churches in Latin America which lack a priest, or to the small diaspora areas on the continent. In these cases the only feasible thing is to have a local man as part-time deacon. A full-time one has to be guaranteed an income, while someone working part-time in an honorary capacity would compensate for this outlay, as in his case there would simply be the cost of his training. As part-time deacons men would be considered whose occupations were readily compatible with this work: teachers, social workers, lay preachers who give religious instruction at schools, etc. But the choice of part-time deacons should not be limited to men of these professions. There are men in every walk of life who are suitable for this work. Now that the worker-priests have been suppressed, could not the church make use of the worker-deacon, as a representative of the hierarchy in the world of labour
Catholics and the Universities
Authors: Wheeler Gordon
Published: July 2007

I have been asked to write some account of the place of theology in the new universities, not simply as an academic discipline but as an interpreter of the whole academic process. This is a matter which I have long considered of the highest importance, not only for the Church but for the maintenance of integrated learning in the secular universities. Newman’s writings on this very matter, both in The Idea ofa University and elsewhrre, are too well known to need recapitulation. Indeed his prophetic gifts are only beginning to be realized in this as in so many other matters. The age of the Second Vatican Council is in many ways a Newmanic age and the principles for which he stood, no less than the ethos of true learning which he breathed, interpret, almost magically, the needs of our age.

The whole problem which forms the scope of this article has been admirably delineated this year in a book already reviewed in these columns, Theology and the University, ‘an ecumenical investigation,’ edited by John Coulson. It is a documentary of the first order, and I may be forgiven if I begin by a recapitulation of some of the things which it has to say. The editor himself, sums up the discussions in one sentence : ‘Theology can choose; it can remain dead and neglected, or take the pressure of the times and live; but if it chooses life it has need of three things: a university setting, lay participation, and the ecumenical dialogue’.
The Origins of the Just War Tradition
Authors: Draper G. I. A. D.
Published: July 2007

The Romans can, with some justification, claim the credit for having introduced the most important legal and religious concept of war into the history of human thought. Thereby they made a very notable contribution to the historical development of international law. To the Romans we owe the idea of the ‘just and pious’ war which has for centuries characterized and influenced the thinking of Western Christendom about the place and practice of war. The idea is still with us today. Like the conception of natural law, the story of the ‘just and pious’ war is that of successive contents flowing though an ancient concept.

In the Rome of the kings it was the function of a special college of priests, the fetiales, to carry out the somewhat elaborate religious and legal procedures, the Jus fetiale, determining the declarations of war and peace between the Roman people and their enemies. The jus fetiale formed part of the Roman jus sacrum, and thereby imported a moral and legal element, over and above that of religion, into the formal procedures of establishing peaceful and hostile relations between Rome and other political communities. The task of the fetiales was to determine whether the duties owed to Rome by her neighbours had been violated, i.e., whether or not Rome had been wronged. These wrongs were well established and defined in Roman religiolegal thinking and formed part of the substantive content of the jus fetiale. These wrongs constituted the causes of ‘just and pious’ wars, to the Roman mind.
Ecumenical Survey
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.

This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.
The Equilibrium of the Social Worker
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

The absence of equilibrium implies the presence of tensions; there are tensions in the life of everyone, but nowhere more so than in the life of those who are trying to live up to an ideal. Experience has proved this to be true. But it is the more true of the Christian, continually responding to the urge of grace or failing to do so. Even the great Apostle of the Gentiles was forced to admit that ‘praiseworthy intentions are always ready to hand, but I cannot find my way to the performance of them. It is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing.’ Yet such tensions can be an asset, provided we are clear about our goals. We cannot hope to eliminate tensions—trying to suppress or ignore them can only lead to worse effects—because they are due to our human nature wounded by the sin of our first parents. But we can hope to arrive at a state of harmony, a balance of tensions which will sustain us and even carry us forward.

Again it is even more true of the social worker whose function is, by definition, ‘to assess the disturbance of equilibrium in a given handicapped person, in his family, his social relationships, so as to give appropriate help.’ In order to do his job properly, the social worker has to place himself in a situation that is lacking equilibrium, and through empathy to share—at least to some extent—the client’s problems. The social worker is not to be considered as a person safe and dry who throws a lifebelt to somebody struggling in the water. He has himself to jump in the water and to encourage the person in difficulties to make the necessary strokes to remain afloat, and perhaps eventually to make for the shore.
The Vanishing Diary of Anne Frank
Authors: Dworkin Martin
Published: July 2007

Men of my unit went into two of those places the Nazis had efficiently called ‘concentration camps’, but for which there are other names: Buchenwald, near Weimar, and Ohrdruf, near Gotha. What struck the mind, and remained, was the unbelievable. The greater the horror, the more it was necessary to select details to make the whole have some reality. At Buchenwald, amid the fantastic complex of gas chambers and furnaces, the great sheds filled with human debris piled to the roofs, what seemed to affect the men most of all were some strange decorative plaques. A day or so afterwards, when an article in the service newspaper Stars and Stripes identified the objects as mounted pieces of tattooed human skin, the reaction was not quite melodramatic revulsion, but a more sudden, self-conscious formation of what had actually been seen. The journalistic account put things into place; the sentences, with their plain words and terse phrases, made the entire experience into something that had happened. One man rushed over to say that the things described in the article were the things he had held in his hands. Now, he knew that his experience had been real, and he knew what it was he had experienced.

At Ohrdruf, some indignant civilians from the neighbourhood were being put to work digging graves and burying the bodies left untidily about when the camp was hastily abandoned by the guards. There were corpses with blackening gouges in the sides and back. One or two walking cadavers, their filthy rags flapping, explained that some of the starving inmates of the camp were able to eat the livers and other organs of those who died. Then, much as guides denoting sights of interest to passing tourists, they pointed out the ingenious arrangement whereby the furnaces of the crematoria heated the buildings of the commandant’s headquarters.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

Ever since the dawn of cinema there have been magicians. When Lumière resolutely took the path of realism in those first five-minute films, showing us undeniable trains, veritable fire-engines and disasters and humiliations only too recognisably from daily life, Melies had already chosen, quite as resolutely, to send a man to the moon, to present fairy coaches travelling through sleeping woods, to give us in short marvels instead of documentaries.

Two of the greatest magicians the cinema has ever known have been much in the news of late. Cocteau because in October he astonished us once again, as all those years ago he had done in obedience to Diaghilev’s command, dying this time in fact instead of with that hallucinatory backwards fall in Testament d’Orphee, when he commented gravely that since poets on occasion gave the impression of dying then their friends might permit themselves the appearance of weeping. And Orson Welles—so long a film-maker and still only middle- aged—because he has attempted perhaps the most impossible task of his never cautious career in bringing Kafka’s Trial to the screen, which reached London a good six months after it opened in Paris.

Cocteau always insisted that all the work he did, in any medium, was the work of a poet. Certainly none but a poet could have made his films, the first of which he even called Sang d’un Poete. Even in films which he did not actually direct himself, such as J.-P. Melville’s version of his play, Les Enjants Terribles, his influence was as immediately visible as those stars so invariably a part of his signature. Of those he did direct, there are some which more brilliantly exemplify bis power to bind an audience in a potent visual spell than others. First, L’Eternel Retour, his version of the Tristan story in modem idiom, which reached us after VE day; one will never forget the extraordinary richness—an almost overpowering richness—of the experience after all our years of cinematic austerity.
Nightmare of Grace: A Note on Morte D'Urban
Authors: Hinchliffe Arnold P.
Published: July 2007

On the strength of two volumes of short stories the American Catholic writer J. F. Powers seemed conspicuously free of characteristic qualities of our three Catholic novelists. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Whatever the literary merit of the novels of these three writers their work contains in different kinds of degrees the same basic quality of nightmare; their atmospheres are heavy with the macabre, the ugly, the violent, the symbolic, their plots are full of decadence and despair, and their involvement with Catholicism has a great deal of the Gothic about it. Now Mr Powers has written a novel it is possible to judge him tackling the same problems in the novel form, and Morte D’Urban reveals the same quiet detailed observation of spiritual life in America, a life that simmers and then explodes with nightmare. As the titles of his short story volumes show, A Prince of Darkness and The Presence of Grace, Powers is as much concerned as, say Graham Greene, with the heroic life of the Christian, and equally concerned with what makes a hero. Morte D’ Urban with its immediate appeal to Malory seemed a puzzling but impressive novel in which the hero becomes heroic in spite of himself, and, one is tempted to say, in spite of the reader. The epigraph to the novel is a quotation from J. M. Barrie:

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another. . . .

Hence the story of Urban, citified man, seemed to me to finish with his salvation for reasons excluded from the explicit narration of the novel, only gradually realized in terms of qualities praised in that explicit narration; in short a very ironic, compassionate, literate novel on the spiritual life which I thought I had understood.
The Equilibrium of the Social Worker
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

Equilibrium means maturity, a harmony and balance of tensions that comes from intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual maturity. Clearly the first essential is professional competence, the possession of those varied techniques and skills which can give a sense of adequacy. The social worker is often in a certain sense a lay spiritual adviser whose role, at its own level, is comparable to that of the confessor and spiritual director. For that reason a deepening knowledge of techniques and skills must be accompanied by a corresponding desire to appreciate the importance of moral and supernatural means. In this connection we may adapt the words of the famous physician and say that the social worker tends the wounds of the psyche but it is God who heals them. One can never leave out of account the working of God’s grace, and must remind oneself again and again that one’s role is secondary and subordinate. To do otherwise is to fall into the heresy of good works.

Intellectual maturity also implies a true humility. By this I mean a serene acceptance of one’s limitations with the corollary that one is not ashamed through vanity or human respect to seek from others the knowledge that one lacks. But at the same time humility also means a sense of security in one’s strengths. Humility in the face of the mystery of this person, my client, who confronts me here and now, is essential if I am not to be overbearing and patronising, and consequently insecure because I seek security in my attitude of superiority.
Comprehensive Schools and the Catholic Community
Authors: O'Connell P. J.
Published: July 2007

In a previous article it was assumed that the English segregated school school system based on selection at eleven years and the intellectual theories sustaining it were passing away and were being succeeded by various forms of comprehensive secondary education. If this be so, and the events of last summer on the political, social and academic scenes would seem to add confirmation, can the Church sit idly by without examining the meaning that this educational revolution may hold for Catholics and the general community? Understandably the Catholic administrator is concerned, at parish and diocesan level, with providing adequate places for the increasing numbers of children committed to his care; nevertheless the Church has a primary concern for the education of youth whether inside or outside the Church and he will surely wish to ascertain whether any assets of permanent value to Christian life may be obtained from a re-organization of our own sector paralleling the changeover to comprehensive systems in state schools.

Catholic authorities may be reassured that, from the known achievements of comprehensive schools, the adoption by them of the new pattern could have an extremely favourable outcome, if cast within the mould of Christian ideals, on the development and character of the English Catholic community. Initially it may be noted that at such schools a far greater proportion than normal remain on beyond the usual leaving age: for example, in some London comprehensive schools between 40% and 60% is quite common, compared to a national average of 20 % in Local authorities which operate a separate school system.