bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Future of the Secondary Modern School
Authors: Robin C. E.
Published: July 2007

The Secondary Modern School takes about 70 to 75 % of the children of England and Wales for their education from the age of eleven upwards. It is a type of school which is virtually the product of the 1944 Education Act: for what went before had a leaving age of fourteen instead of fifteen, and had a more limited objective: the addition of a year to the school life has brought with it both difficulties and opportunities.

Ubiquitous as the Secondary Modern school seems to be, a great many children do not have the choice of Secondary Modern or Grammar School. 141,000 children are educated in comprehensive schools; the number is growing: Anglesey is completely ‘comprehensive’: Coventry, London, Derbyshire, Birmingham are moving in that direction with varying degrees of conviction: Leicestershire has evolved a scheme different from any other, avoiding selection at eleven without embarking upon a scheme of comprehensive schools. The areas which have tried out some degree of ‘comprehension’ are not all controlled by the same political party. Southampton has avoided secondary modern schools altogether by giving every secondary school in the town some speciality of its own, leading up to some particular type of advanced course.

The Secondary Modern School is not the same thing in every area. Some areas have a very large grammar school entry; the secondary modern schools get on with a remnant, of which it could truly be said that there are not many gifted or talented among them; their more spectacular achievements are dependent upon the inefficiency of the selection process at eleven.
Alternatives to the Western Deterrents
Authors: Wharton Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In a previous article I argued that the present Western nuclear deterrents are immoral because they involve their operators, if not the Western governments, in the intention to destroy normal cities. And if this is true, we must stop co-operating with the present deterrent policies and try to change them.

The most obvious alternative to these policies is unilateral nuclear disarmament; and some people believe that we should accept unilateral disarmament in any case because the deterrent will sooner or later break down into nuclear war. But many would say that the disastrous immediate consequences of unilateral disarmament would outweigh the remote risk of war which attaches to the nuclear deterrent. If unilateral disarmament is the only alternative to our present immoral defence policy then we should adopt it, no matter how dangerous it may be. But if unilateral action is dangerous, we should not advocate it until we are quite sure that there is no alternative to our present policy which is morally permissible and less dangerous. Many people, including Catholics, view the nuclear deterrent not as an active preparation for mass murder but simply as a means of avoiding the situation which would arise without it. If Russia alone had nuclear power, she could blackmail us into surrender; we must have nuclear power too, not because we want to attack Russia or because we envisage a Russian attack - there is indeed virtually no danger of war - but simply to prevent the possibility of convincing Russian blackmail. One may point out to Catholics who regard the deterrent in this way that however unlikely war is and however much we are keeping the present deterrent just to avoid the consequences of not having it, it does still require its operators to be on the alert to destroy normal cities at a moment’s notice.
‘That Best of All Things, Greek’
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

‘Ancient tragedy, ancient tragedy’, insists Cavafy somewhere, ‘is as holy and wide as the universal heart’. Of late this holiness has demonstrated its universality beyond the printed page, beyond the stone amphitheatre or the wooden stage, to make its impact all over again from the cinema screen; an impact, moreover, which is surprisingly unweakened by its transference to so unfamiliar a medium.

The process has not long been at work: Medea and her children, it is true, made a fleeting appearance in Never on Sunday when, Melina Mercouri explained, in spite of all appearances to the contrary they were really on their way to the beach. And when the bodies Uttering the stage rose to acknowledge the applause it was not easy for Dassin, as the American professor, to prove her wrong. The first serious example, however, of the new wave of adaptations from the great Greek dramatists (though not the first to reach this country) was probably the Electra of Michael Cacoyannis, which won a prize at Cannes in 1962; then came another Electra, that directed by Ted Zarpas, which was shown in Venice in 1962 and in the London Film Festival later last year; these two, together with Antigone, directed by George Tzavellas, seen earlier this spring in London, are straight-forward presentations of the original tragedy. Phaedra directed by Jules Dassin, is a modern transposition of the play, with details of the plot significandy manipulated to suit the twentieth-century setting and the geographical expansion of the action.

I have not, unfortunately, yet been able to see the Zarpas Electra, which stars the famous Greek classical actress, Anna Synodinou, as Electra and is, it is widely agreed, a revelation. This film avoids any personal angle - it is simply a magnifi- cendy photographed version of an actual performance of the play by the Greek National Theatre in the great stone amphitheatre of Epidauros; the same stage, incidentally, where Melina Mercouri saw Medea and which she so assiduously haunted that the sign ‘Closed owing to Greek Tragedy’ was hung on her door for the duration of the festival.
Words, Facts and God
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

A traveller from a far country has the obligation to entertain his hosts with tales of strange customs and mythical monsters, heroes and spells. The country of which I am to tell you today is a very strange one indeed. I do not know if President de Gaulle ever became acquainted with English philosophy during his stay in England, but certainly it would entirely justify his claim that England does not, today, at least, belong to Europe. Perhaps, however, as a middleman of ideas, I shall be permitted here to enter the intellectual Common Market; fortunately there are no tariffs on ideas, though as we all know only too well, there are more serious barriers to communication, cultural, existential, confessional—and linguistic.

It is the strangest of paradoxes that the philosopher who was perhaps more influential than any other in giving modem English philosophy its character and stance was an Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was more utterly dedicated to philosophy than anyone I have ever met; and I think the main benefit I gathered from his lectures, most of which I did not understand when I heard them as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the academic year 1946-7, was the encounter with a living example of philosophical depth and integrity, a standard of seriousness, by which I could, and can now, measure my own deficiencies. It is, I believe, important to remember that he was a kind of philosophical ‘primitive,’ a Douanier Rousseau of philosophy, who came to philosophy by way of engineering and the mathematical logic of Frege and Russell. Like all young Austrians of his time, no doubt, he had read Schopenhauer and been deeply impressed by him; but his acquaintance with the great philosophers of the past was extremely fragmentary. In what follows I shall try to indicate certain features of his thought, with particular reference to the problems it sets for metaphysical theology.
Nuclear Deterrents: Intention and Scandal
Authors: Midgley Brian
Published: July 2007

It is difficult to persuade people to reflect seriously about moral questions concerning war. Most people who turn to the subject of war are primarily interested not in the choice between moral and immoral acts but in the search for ‘a practicable defence policy.’ Such people— especially if they are Christians—may occasionally recognise that the possession of nuclear weapons is what moral theologians call a proximate occasion of sin but they often feel that they are faced by a dilemma.

I believe that the extent of the duty to avoid the occasions of unlawful warfare is very commonly underestimated. Nevertheless one is bound to recognise that many Christians consider—in view of the magnitude of the Soviet threat to our natural and Christian liberties— that the case against nuclear deterrents of all types remains non-proven.

This dilemma disappears once it is shewn that, in a position in which we are bound to be tempted, there is a whole family of acts and omissions which are gravely sinful not after the manner of an occasion— namely, on condition that there is an alternative which is not equally an occasion of sin—but in an absolute manner. This has already been substantially demonstrated. In England, the most convenient presentations of the arguments are: E. I. Watkin’s article ‘Unjustifiable War’ in Morals and Missiles, edited by Charles S. Thompson; Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, edited by Walter Stein, and Father Anthony Kenny’s article ‘Counterforce and Counter-Value’ in the Clergy Review for December 1962.
The Elusive Values: A study of contemporary artistic forms
Authors: Jennings Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Perhaps the greatest paradox in modem art, popular or esoteric, is the gap between the sort of music and verse which expresses itself in breathless, banal statements (often, incidentally, employing a diluted version of the poetic diction of the Romantic poets of the last century), and the quiet, withdrawn, secret and mysterious world of Abstract Expressionism and atonal music. It is as if two kinds of art were constantly at cold war with one another, and as if neither knew what war they were fighting in or who were their enemies. There is no communication, either friendly or aggressive, and the reader, the listener, the looker at pictures seems to be in a state of siege which he or she has not chosen and is powerless to explain.

Since communications between these two different kinds of art seem to have broken down so painfully, we are left with the spectacle of a world where man seeks stimulus through art, yet is not prepared to admit that art is, in some sense, amenable to reason, and where most people believe that if you are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, you will be happy, accepted and fulfilled. The Beat poets appear to have taken this dubious credo to its logical conclusion when they seek peace in the oblivion provided by drugs and in a kind of pseudo-mysticism which has little to do either with discipline or God.

Are we then to conclude that this is a decadent, a dead age, a century which is suffering from accidie rather than from violence or masochism? I do not myself think so. In Action Painting, Beat Poetry, and so on, I see an attempt to be realistic and honest, and to achieve something which has nothing to do with nihilism or despair.
Enlightenment?
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

The peculiar and precarious balance between elegance and brutality which is the hall-mark of the eighteenth century took many forms, varying widely according to country and society; but basically the intelligence, the vitality and the ruthlessness inherent in its self-confidence are instantly recognisable, whether in Versailles or the vernacular. By one of those curious coincidences endemic in the muddle of the film-exhibitor’s world, adaptations of two of the great classics of the period have reached the London screens within a few weeks of each other this summer, one British, the other French.

Fielding’s Tom Jones appears in a full-blooded Woodfall production, directed very much in the mid-century manner by Tony Richardson from a first-class script by John Osborne, in variable but, on the whole, beautiful Eastman Colour adorning the camera work of one of Britain’s best operators, Walter Lassally, and a score byjohn Addinsell. Optimus quisque, as you will note. The coruscating collection of stars studding the cast list means, in the event, that even the smallest parts are so well acted that the whole film has a homogeneity of style that is only too rare in historical pictures. Voltaire’s Candide, on the other hand, retains its eighteenth century style but not its manner in the modern version directed, produced, adapted and scripted by Norbert Carbonnaux. Though to be sure this black and white picture begins neatly enough by getting the best of both worlds (even if neither is demonstrably the best of all possible ones) with its credit titles set wittily against dissolving toile deJouy backgrounds; moreover the film opens with a fancy dress dance for Cunegonde in which everybody (except Candide himself) makes a first appearance in eighteenth century costume.
‘The Deputy’
Authors: Lawler Justus George
Published: July 2007

A few months after the beginning of the second World War, Father Max Metzger, founder of the Una Sancta Brotherhood, wrote a letter from his prison cell pleading with Pius XII for the convocation of a council of peace and of reunion. This letter—the full English text appears for the first time in the new American quarterly, Continuum, Summer, 1963—has a bearing not only on the prehistory of Vatican II, but even more significantly on a recent dramatic production, Der Stellvertreter (The Representative or The Deputy), by a young German publisher’s assistant, Rolf Hochhuth. In the play as in the letter, the Pope was requested to speak forthrightly in the name of justice; in the play the request is openly ignored, while the fate of Max Metzger’s letter remains unknown. In both instances the question that seems to rise spontaneously concerns the failure of the Pope to fulfil his role as servant of the servants of God.

The play has been recognized in the European and American press as perhaps the most controversial drama of the post-war era. An English translation is about to appear; it will be produced in Stockholm by Ingmar Bergman; Georges de Beauregard is filming it in France; and it will open next season in London and New York. While there is no doubt that some of this immediate fame is due to the dramatic merits of the piece, an even larger part is probably the result of the ‘scandal’ on which it is based, on the alleged failure of Pius XII to speak out on the persecution of the Jews. It may be observed in passing that, aside from the religious issue, much German acclaim for the work probably derives from the national need for a catharsis of the Nazi past, and, on the West-Berlin theatrical scene, from the desire to achieve a local work comparable to Brecht’s social dramas.
Polish Culture at the Millennium
Authors: Black Antony
Published: July 2007

After the millennial celebrations of the founding of the Polish state and the conversion of Poland to Christianity, the Poles may look back with some pride and with some horror. In modern times they have been perhaps the least favoured of European nations, with a recent past consisting of dismemberment, unsuccessful rebellion, two great wars, and the suffering of the worst imaginable crimes; under the Nazis there were about twelve extermination camps in Poland, of which Auschwitz was only the most well-known. This was followed by the poverty and oppression of the post-war and Stalinist period. Being poised between east and west has not been in Poland’s favour, however interesting the phenomenon; only in the last seven years has it turned strangely to their advantage. October 1956 was the great moment in the history of modem Poland; they look back on it now as ‘The Polish October’ and ‘The October Springtime’. The bitter but concealed intrigues in the back-streets of Warsaw, by which Wladyslav Gomulka came to power and bloodlessly achieved a change of régime that deserved the name of revolution, demonstrated the political genius, and reversed the destiny of Poland. So did the glowering crowds, assembled in imitation of the earlier Poznan rioters and with no clear idea of what action they were going to take; when, rather to everyone’s surprise, they accepted Gomulka’s assurances quietly. They stood in the background as a lever for Gomulka against the Russians, but without committing any indiscretion which might have incited Russian reaction. (The Polish adage has it that in 1956 the Poles behaved like Hungarians, the Hungarians like Poles, and the Czechs like pigs).
The Monk in the Diaspora
Authors: Merton Thomas
Published: July 2007

It is no secret that the Church finds herself in crisis, and the awareness of such a fact is ‘pessimism’ only in the eyes of those for whom all change is necessarily a tragedy. It would seem more realistic to follow the example of Pope John (and of Pope Paul after him) and to envisage courageously the challenges of an unknown future in which the Christian can find security not, perhaps, in the lasting strength of familiar human structures but certainly in the promises of Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. After all, Christian hope itself would be meaningless if there were no risks to face and if the future were definitively mortgaged to an unchanging present. Christian hope is confident not in metaphysical immobility but in the dynamism of unfailing love. ‘Crisis’ means ‘judgment’, and the present is always being judged as it gives way to what was, yesterday, the future. Only when we try to drag yesterday bodily with us into the future does ‘crisis’ become ‘cataclysm’. An ‘optimism’ that insists on denying evident realities is hardly inspired by Christian truth, and true hope is that which finds motives for confidence precisely in the ‘crisis’ which seems to threaten that which is dearest to us: for it is here above all that the power of God will break through the meaningless impasse of prejudices and cruelties in which we always tend to become entrapped. It is in the crises of history most of all that the Church knows, from experience, that the truth shall make her free.
Contraceptives and Natural Law
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

It is the common teaching of the Church, reaffirmed by successive popes and to be found in all reputable textbooks of moral theology, that the use of mechanical contraceptives which interfere with intercourse is always wrong. Whether this common teaching amounts to the ordinary magisterium in the technical sense and is therefore infallible is another matter, but short of such assurance it would be hard to find a clearer guide for the Christian who wants to know what he should do or not do. It should be emphasized that even those theologians who think there are legitimate uses for the pill nearly always distinguish between this and mechanical contraceptives. It is indeed clear that these are two quite different matters; contraceptives interfere directly with the act of intercourse whereas the pill does not.

It is a mistake to suppose that we do not know anything until we know it infallibly. There are a great many topics about which a Catholic ought to have sure and definite views just because he is a Catholic, even though the infallible magisterium of the Church has not yet pronounced upon them. He should know, for example, without waiting for the pope to tell him, that it is wicked to propose to drop a nuclear bomb on a city under any circumstances. Similarly if a Catholic wants to know whether he should use mechanical contraceptives or not he does not need to wait for an infallible papal pronouncement to get the answer.
African Culture and the West
Authors: Hindmarsh Roland
Published: July 2007

Now that almost every African country north of Angola and Mozambique is independent, there may be a temptation in Western countries to shrug off entirely the cultural responsibility once held by Britain and France, and to limit Western action in Africa to Oxfam, economic assistance and technical co-operation. With the end of the colonial era, there is an understandable reluctance to create the impression in African countries that they are still in any sense under tutelage to the West, or even that they are undergraduates to be guided by Western dons. Yet there is a danger in leaning over too far backwards. The danger is that fastidiousness in trying to avoid giving the impression of interference may be understood by African minds as evidence that the West, in its unconfessed thoughts, still regards African countries as not mature enough to stand the ordinary rough-and-tumble of international exchange. Their reading of Western delicacy of manner may at bottom be right.

These two articles on the role of the West towards culture in Africa begin with the assumption that any culture has something of value to offer to another culture. Western culture is not valueless for Africa, nor is African culture without its lessons for the West. The relationship between cultures should rest on a basis of information and understanding, and their engagement in each other should be forthright enough to make motives clear, and humble enough to accept criticism. This article will try to sketch out some important features of the modern African cultural setting. A second will discuss some of the ways in which the West both is and should be culturally engaged in Africa.
The Current Mood of the Cuban Church
Authors: Dewart Leslie
Published: July 2007

In a week’s brief and hurried visit to Cuba one can gather nothing more substantial than an impression of the current attitudes, problems and prospects of the Cuban Church. This is not, therefore, a full report, but only a note which attempts to portray the climate of opinion and experience among Cuban Catholics today.

To understand better the remarks that follow one should first sketch in the general Cuban background against which the Catholic mood develops. The most obtrusive fact about Cuban daily life today is that the economic situation is very difficult. Though no one actually goes hungry, for some food is always available, the diet is annoyingly unappetizing. Stores offer practically no choice; one simply eats what is available. For the poorest people, especially among the peasants, this is an improvement over the past, but for most Cubans this is a hardship to which they are unaccustomed. All things considered, however, it is rather well borne, an index of which is the lack of general patronage of black markets. Not only food but also clothing is in very short supply. All other ordinary goods are similarly scarce and often not to be found. The distribution system is erratic: today matches have suddenly disappeared from all tobacconists, but beer is available at any bar; tomorrow there is no beer, only cider; then one can get matches, but nothing to drink. Only luxury goods are plentiful. Art galleries exhibit a lavish variety of oils by Cuban artists, and along San Rafael Street one can find tempting bargains in Chinese jade. What the deeper economic situation might be and whether it inclines upwards or not is anyone’s guess—and contradictory estimates are as easily found among Cuban as among American and other experts.
Graham Greene's Indirection
Authors: Poole Roger C.
Published: July 2007

This article presents a parallel to my previous article entitled ‘Dante’s Indirection’. Both are attempts to study a certain method of achieving effects in a reader, a method to which Kierkegaard gave the title ‘Indirect Communication’. Both articles are concerned basically with Kierkegaard’s technique, due to the angle from which I approach indirect methods in other writers. The expression ‘Indirect Communication’ is ambiguous, as was its use in Kierkegaard’s own hands, and sometimes in studying it, in and for itself, one’s attention is drawn to parallel and much clearer uses of the principle, when one finds it in poets or novelists of less involved theoretical pretensions. Such a man is Graham Greene, novelist, Catholic, individual. It is to him that I turn for further illustration of the principle which seems to defy (in Kierkegaard’s case at least) all attempts at analysis and capture. Critics for over a century, from all countries in the world, have tried to solve the enigma of Kierkegaard’s use of Indirect Communication. Perhaps his Indirection can only be approached indirectly. This essay on three novels of Graham Greene is such an attempt.

What did Kierkegaard mean by ‘Indirect Communication’? This he sets forth in a book called The Point of View for my Work as an Author, a book about which he had such terrible doubts that its publication in complete form was eventually only undertaken by his brother after his death. In it he draws the distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ works and the ‘religious’ works in his output with such clarity that we would expect no problem. But he himself obviously felt, and any reader of his works feels immediately, that the explanation he gave in that work simply did not answer to the actual feel of his production, even contradicted its spirit. The later theory does not explain the former practice.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

Now that four years have passed since Le Corbusier’s Dominican church and priory at La Tourette burst on an astonished world with the impact of what was described as ‘the greatest ruin of the twentieth century’, it is possible to have later thoughts and to consider the building not as a major tourist attraction but as a place of prayer and study. It is possible, in fact, to ask whether Le Corbusier’s frequent claims for La Tourette as un lieu de silence, un lieu de repos, are justified. It is good to be there in the empty weeks of early spring, before the tourist hordes descend, and if the endless rains of a wet March have left the concrete mass a leaden grey and the waterspouts are for ever dripping—and the many leaks reveal themselves in new places—then at least one is spared the coloured illusions of the picture postcards.

One’s earlier impressions are on the whole confirmed. The building is a triumphant statement, in terms that match the needs of our time, of what an architect of genius can do to give spatial reality to the sacred. The jeu de volumes—that untranslatable phrase that expresses Le Corbusier’s primary concern with the use of space—is even more effective now that even a brief period of time has given the patina of use to what has too often been a sort of cerebration. These buildings, after all, church and refectory and lecture room and cells, arc to be used, not to be written about or even to be admired. And the marvellous counterpoint of solid mass and floating horizontal surface, of the honest concrete and the progressions of the glass, takes on an altogether different meaning when a bell rings and the cloister fills with friars on their way to church or refectory.
Observing Vatican II
Authors: Root Howard
Published: July 2007

Sometimes the Holy Spirit surprises the Church. Some small decision or simple gesture turns out to be much more significant than many official pronouncements from high authority. We are pulled forward into a quite new situation by a seemingly inadequate cause. In retrospect we wonder at the modest beginnings of this new venture. But then why should the Spirit not move with a gentleness characteristic of God's grace?

This, I would suggest, is what happened when Pope John decided to invite official delegate observers from other churches to attend the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. (It was not unnoticed that the invitations were extended to churches and not just to individuals, itself an act of considerable ecumenical importance.) One wonders what Pope John himself thought this gesture would lead to. It is no secret that his decision was criticized and opposed. All that we can suppose is that he persisted in it, despite the criticism and anxiety it aroused, simply from the warmth and fulness of his heart. It was a simple yet profound gesture which, perhaps for that reason, commended itself more to the Spirit than to men. And if there was opposition in Rome, there was a strong reluctance in some Christian communions to take it at its face value, an institutional suspicion that it might be some kind of snare. But the gesture was made, and observers are now a firm part of that vast and complicated reality which is Vatican II.
Crime and Punishment in the United States
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The first discovery one makes about America—and this affects the subject of crime just as much as any other—is the great variety that exists from state to state, and how strong is the resistance to any encroachment of federal government on state rights, which certainly include disposing of the vast majority of criminal offences committed. The importance of local loyalties is real and enduring. They have their roots in American history: have indeed made America what it is. And this is most certainly true, not only of the state laws themselves (the differences in the matter of divorce from state to state is an obvious example) but of the enforcement of the law and the treatment of offenders. Indeed Mr James Bennett, Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, can say ‘the penal statutes of this country are a mishmash of conflict and variation’.

That is why any statistical account of crime in America must be inadequate. The annual report issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, which gives a detailed analysis of crimes committed in the various states, has been described as the cheapest work of fiction in existence. This is a serious libel on a most valuable work, but of course it would certainly help in making a true picture if there were uniformity —or at least consistency—in the penal offences themselves as well as in the punishment they attract, quite apart from widely varying police standards which obviously affect the issue.
Looking at an Election
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

There wasn't much heard about Christian belief in the recent British election campaign, in spite of occasional Christian appeals to the candidates’ consciences; but then, with a renewed sense among Christians of the secular significances of the term ‘moral', this lack of directly Christian discussion ought not to be too disturbing: we were, after all, electing a government, not a parish council. What can usefully be looked at, however, is the degree of moral emphasis, in a general sense, in the parties’ programmes: how far was this a humane election ?

The Liberal Party is important here, because it focusses a complex of attitudes which have been dominant in British politics over the past few years. At the peak of its form, Jo Grimond's party stood for an impatient, dynamic streamlining of society, a tough concern with efficiency; Liberalism was a force to disperse the cobwebs, and the cobwebs included talk of class-warfare and socialization of industry as much as Tory old-boyism and bungling. There was an attractive radicalism about this, and it won over a good many people who failed to see that dynamism and efficiency are morally neutral terms which can shove out the central moral issues and reduce politics to technique and organization. At the Liberal Party conferences the hall was full of young men rearing to get industry off the ground and eliminate wastage and failure; the talk centred on expansion and cutting through red-tape, progress was the key-term.
Heard and Seen: Television, medium of Reform?
Authors: Thomas Huw Ballard
Published: July 2007

If all the energy and ingenuity expended on criticizing television were diverted into creating for it, the face of the medium might well be transformed. At the highest level, television is a twentieth-century art form. At all levels, it is an artefact – but an artefact peculiarly subject to the limitations of time and money. Every producer and scriptwriter – cameraman and film editor too – knows the frustration of having to compromise because conditions (physical or economic) make it impossible to do otherwise. Three days of rain during filming and a whole plan must be re-thought. And they know, too, the second wave of frustration when critics, professional and lay, suggest the very things which would have been done if only television were the all-miraculous, ail-endowed medium which those who have little or no practical experience of it suppose it to be.

It is a mistake to say, as many do, that ‘television is primarily a form of entertainment’. Television is primarily a medium of communication. That is its alpha and its omega. But entertainment is the use to which it is generally put and it would be naive in the extreme to presume that people buy, or rent, their television sets for any other purpose.
The Church as Institution
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

The Foreword to the original edition of Hans Küng’s Strukturen der Kirche is dated May 1962; the new Foreword to the English translation is dated March 1965. Apart from a Preface by Cardinal Cushing and some paragraphs from Pope Paul’s striking speech at the opening of the second session of Vatican II, no changes seem to have been made for this English edition. One might have expected that a book written on the structures of the Church before the Council had met at all would date painfully after three sessions of the Council and the enormous upheaval in the life of the Church which has accompanied them; and this might seem especially likely for an author whose writings are always ‘conversational’ (or should one say ‘dialogical’), contributions to a continuing debate, or even sometimes publicist, more concerned to change other people’s ideas than to explore ideas in depth. Indeed Küng’s own writings, including this book, have played a considerable part in the upheaval, and no future history of Vatican II will be able to ignore the impact of The Council and Reunion, especially on the English-speaking world.

It must then clearly be said that Structures of the Church retains real value and interest even today. This is not to say that a good deal of the rather longwinded book (358 pages in English) has not now outlived its immediate interest, the first part in particular. The general thesis of the book, for instance, that the ecumenical council by human convocation is the representation of the Church as ecumenical council by divine convocation, should by now be familiar to Küng’s more popular presentation of the thesis in The Living Church;
The Catholic‐Orthodox Dialogue
Authors: Georgiadis Helle
Published: July 2007

With the stage set for a Catholic-Orthodox dialogue one is inclined to welcome any book which might have a bearing on this matter, since the lack of material available in Western languages is a serious difficulty in preparing for such a dialogue. Fr Schmemann, Dean of the Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, has a long record of ecumenical activity and any book by him is bound to raise hopes among the friends of the Orthodox in the west. It is therefore all the more disappointing that The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy makes such an equivocal contribution to this dialogue.

In fairness to the author it must be said that the book, which originally appeared in Russian, was intended for the non-specialist Russian Orthodox of the diaspora. But, as has been shown by the Second Vatican Council, the internal affairs of any Christian communion have ecumenical relevance, and thus what the Orthodox say to each other in these days is also of concern to those outside their communion.

The book is a history of the Orthodox Church, starting with the Book of Acts and ending with the Russian Church before the Communist Revolution. This, too, is disappointing, since the last fifty years have raised issues which vitally affect Orthodoxy today, particularly the question of jurisdiction, which will continue to complicate inter-Orthodox relations for many years to come. As an exposition of Orthodoxy Fr Schmemann’s book is unconvincing. His point of view, expressed in the concluding paragraph, that ‘the true Orthodox way of thought has always been historical’ is a very personal one and suggests Western influence which also shows itself in other ways throughout the book.
The Ministry of the Word
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

The phrase ‘ministry of the word’ is still an unfamiliar one even to Catholics who are fairly well instructed in the traditional theology of the eucharist. By comparison with talk about the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ the phrase seems odd, and even perhaps quasi-heretical. Historians of the liturgy can tell us a good deal, of course, about the way in which the ministry of the word, as an original and necessary part of the eucharistic celebration, fell into comparative decay, and indeed became almost entirely forgotten as an object of theological reflection for centuries. But here I want to point to an aspect of this subject somewhat different from that which is given to us by the liturgical historian. There is, I think, an important philosophical truth which needs to be dug up from the liturgical rubble in which we have all been poking around for the last few years, before we can give an adequate definition of the ‘ministry of the word’ as part of the whole eucharistic act, and therefore before we can begin to realise once more in practice what it means.

It can be taken as agreed, to begin with, that the eucharistic celebration has to do with the real presence of Christ. It is the permanent sacramental means by which Christ is made present to us and, indeed, in us. But, notoriously, the notion of the presence of Christ has been very variously interpreted.

One might put the point by saying that, in the past all the emphasis, in discussion of the real presence, has been upon the reality of the presence, whereas what we need to explore today in order to restore a balanced theology of the eucharist is the presence of the reality.
In the Days of the Last Vespasians
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Yes, even the last ones are threatened, and it becomes a matter for congratulation, let alone relief, to catch sight of the one opposite the Palais de Justice, or the few they have left in the Latin Quarter, outside the Ecole de Médecine or opposite the Place de la Sorbonne. Other visual clichés of Parisian life are disappearing, too, for ever. A few weeks ago, unthinkable red and grey buses began to appear on a few Paris routes, heralding the disappearance of the familiar ugly green monsters with their capacious platforms, still the best, if somewhat unstable, way of seeing the city. By 1966 at least one Métro line will be running without drivers and dispensing tickets from machines (it’s always been supposed that if they allowed people to travel free on the Métro and dispensed with drivers and clippies the loss of revenue would be less than the wage-bill . . .). And an old landmark is about to disappear from the skyline at the end of the long perspective of the rue de Rennes, where the Gare Montparnasse is making way for a vast new office-block and modernised station. The present station is inadequate to deal with the vast increase of traffic, but some memories will go with it: the ghosts of Modigliani and Soutine haunt it and it was here von Choltitz surrendered to Leclerc when the city was liberated in 1944.
Church and World
Authors: Replies Dummett
Published: July 2007

Mr Terry Eagleton made, in his article The Language of Renewal in the October issue of New Blackfriars, some criticisms of certain things I had said in How Corrupt is the Church? in the August issue. I am not replying in any polemical spirit: for I think that much is gravely wrong inside the Church, and that, in seeking to see what is wrong, we are all of us peering through a fog; and so I hope that what I wrote will be both criticised and supplemented. All the same, some clarification on my part may promote fruitful discussion.

Mr Eagleton accuses me of ‘accepting and reinforcing a whole social status quo’; and, in this, he regards me as representative of the defects of progressive thought. I should like to rebut this accusation.

I might, indeed, claim the highest conceivable authority for the presumption with which he saddles me, that we shall have the poor always with us; but perhaps this would be a misapplication of our Lord’s words. I must, however, repudiate his implication that I regard class division and the inequitable distribution of wealth as desirable. I do not: my views are rather strongly egalitarian. But what I was concerned to suggest was how Christians should behave within a society of which inequality and class division are features. I do not say, what Mr Eagleton attributes to me, that these are the inevitable conditions of human life: but I do say that there is no immediate prospect of their disappearing, at least from Western society.
Forty Ecumenical Years
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

It is not quite forty years since I produced my first published writing concerned with Christian unity; it was a review article on the Report of the Malines Conversations, which the then editor of Blackfriars asked me to undertake, soon after I finished my studies for the priesthood. But my thought and ideas about ecumenism – the clumsy word had not then been invented – have deep roots in my Anglican background. I have always been profoundly grateful for the religion I was grounded in by the Church of England; and that I was able to take it with me into the Catholic Church whole and entire. With a minimum of detailed adjustment – but a complete re-orientation of mind – I was received, without conditional baptism, in 1917.

What I took with me was a religion essentially biblical and liturgical. From earliest childhood – in our daily family service at home, and in similar daily services at school and at Cambridge, I learned to recite the psalter and listen to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Built into this biblical background was the training, more by atmosphere and surroundings than by explicit teaching, of a happy home life, in a large family, with parents at the heart of whose religious practice was the deep personal love of Christ characteristic of the sober Tractarianism of Keble and Newman.
Why the Classics?
Authors: O'Brien Denis
Published: July 2007

The argument that the study of Latin and Greek is justified because it disciplines or trains the mind is a weak one. Taken to its extreme it involves the fallacy that training for an activity is separable from that activity itself; that you can train a mind to discover the truth, without the person whose mind it is having to decide whether any part of his experience is in fact true or false. You cannot do this. If you are to learn the truth, or some part of the truth, then you must learn the truth. There is no preliminary activity you can engage in which makes you able to know, without actually knowing anything. The only way to train the mind is to use the mind: and to use the mind you must direct it to something outside the mind : something that is worth while in itself.

How worthwhile then in themselves are Greek and Latin? Simply as languages they have no special magic. If you want to learn a language more firmly inflected than English, you might quite happily learn German. If you want to enter a new world of language, then learn Russian. This does not mean that we should decry the purely linguistic study of Latin and Greek – writing proses, and verse too, if you want. But it should be seen for what it is: a technique, a mental craft.
The Politics of Hope
Authors: Egan E. M.
Published: July 2007

Looking over the list of speakers scheduled for the International Convocation on Pacem in Terris, a Catholic economist remarked, Im afraid it is going to be an international name-dropping jamboree.’ Another reaction was that the gathering would represent no more than the attempt of a feuding family to ‘bury the hatchet’ long enough to pay respects to a deceased and much loved grandfather. As I looked over the massive gatherings at the United Nations and in the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton, I experienced something much more hopeful. For the four days of February 17-20,1965, less than two years after Pope John XXIII addressed his letter to all humanity, 2,300 persons from 20 countries concentrated on that letter. The over-riding impact of the International Convocation was the intensity with which humanity was combing Pacem in Terris for guidance, and yes, for hope.

Paul G. Hoffman, Director of the United Nations Special Fund, in introducing Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the opening ceremony, stated: ‘When Pope John renewed our awareness that war and peace are not only political matters but moral matters, when he reminded us that a cynical divorcement of the moral from the political has historically been the prelude to disaster, he gave us a message that we need and must not fail to heed.’ This was indeed the theme of the Convocation. ‘Peace is a process, not a miracle', said Vice-President Humphrey, and added that the encyclical offered a basis for a ‘politics of hope'. ‘In the encyclical, John XXIII presented to the world a public philosophy for a nuclear era', Humphrey pointed out in his prepared text.
Monastic Renewal
Authors: Weakland Rembert G.
Published: July 2007

No religious Order can stand aloof from the aggiornamento that is affecting the entire Church nor declare itself immune from the impact of Vatican Council II. Even those institutions that are the oldest in the Church, such as monasticism, must reappraise themselves in the light of contemporary trends. Such a re-examination becomes even more urgent in view of the attitude of many that the monastic Orders are to be the preservers of the old or traditional ways while the rest of the Church is updated. Do monastic Orders, in this view, become preservers of a really ancient tradition that is still vital for them, or rather the preservers of a nineteenth and twentieth century interpretation that no longer answers the needs of themselves nor of the Church ? Do they not have a duty to define themselves and their role in the Church, as well as give some consideration to the vitality of the image of monasticism that they have inherited from the great monastic revivers of the last century, before consigning themselves to the preconceived role of museum keepers in the Church ?

Within monastic communities today there is a healthy re-examination of fundamentals. Although not all the answers are present to the questions being asked, it is a sign of growth that such questions are being posed. One of the clearest signs of renewal is a re-awakening of interest in the eremitical life. In the early centuries in the East, the eremitic and cenobitic ways of monasticism existed side by side, and many instances are recorded of monks passing temporarily from one to the other.
Contraception and Natural Law
Authors: Anscombe G. E. M.
Published: July 2007

Father Herbert McCabe's article, ‘Contraceptives and Natural Law', published in the November 1964 issue of New Blackfriars, was based on a paper which he had previously read at a philosophical conference held at Spode House. He was willing to adhere to traditional teaching and was concerned only to criticize a certain argument in its defence.I here publish the reply whichI made to his paper at that time.I have the following credentials which are nowadays thought relevant:I am a married lay-woman with children and a professional career.I was not always prosperous or in possession of good prospects for the future, and am familiar with the fear of having more children, which makes contraception a temptation.

Apart from the conclusion that he draws, the fault that I find with Fr Herbert McCabe's paper is this: he connects the concept of natural law much too closely with the fact ‘that we are not isolated individuals, we are parts, fragments... of a larger community, the human race.’ It is true that some parts of the natural law are based on that fact – e.g. the prohibition on theft.

But the notion ‘against the natural law’ is simply equivalent in extension to the notion ‘what is wrong'. Belief in the natural law is the belief that the discoveries of reason about ethics are the promulgation of laws to the rational creature by the Creator. The content of the natural law is thus simply the content of ethics, so far as this is independent of revelation.