bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Sinner
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: August 2024

If we were truly humble, we should never be astonished to find ourselves giving way to sin. We should indeed be horrified but not surprised. This is one of those things that are so hard, so impossible, to understand. Once we have really begun to try to see what we are like, we recognise ourselves to be the most evil of all creatures. This is no mock humility. At least, we can put it another way round by saying that we know more evil against ourselves than against anyone else. I know others in history or amongst my acquaintances who have done worse things than I, but I cannot say truthfully that they are worse because I do not know. I do not know either their temptations or their conditions of interior life, nor do I know their motives; and until one knows motives one cannot tell whether what was done was sinful or not. The Catholic Church never claims to judge intentions, to judge why people do what they do. She may condemn acts, but never persons in their own consciences: ‘All judgment must be left to the Son’. It follows, then, that I know worse against myself than against anyone else. I know that I am a sinner.
The Mother of the Priest
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

Our Lord, remembering the family occasions in his home town, once remarked on the joy of a mother who has just brought a child into the world. The joy is not merely the negative one of relief from pain; it is, he implies, a human joy because she knows that a man child now has existence apart from her own and yet so close-tied to her own existence that his very blood is hers. Our Lord, thinking of that, must have thought too of the reciprocal joy of the son belonging to his Mother, a separate being and yet the same blood—and more than that, the same mind and the same words, as his bringing forth continues to his maturity. The son belongs to his mother all those years as she, even more than his father, inspires his imagination with homely pictures and places on his lips homely words, the first being those of ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’.
Angels in Scripture
Authors: Heddon Rosemary
Published: August 2024

I am Raphael, one of the seven angels, who present the prayers of the Saints before the throne and who go in and out of the courts of Heaven…. I cannot eat and drink and walk the earth with you; I am less than a breath. Now therefore, give God thanks; for I go unto Him that sent me.’ This quotation taken from the play Tobias and the Angel, by James Bridie,and itself a paraphrase of the scriptural account of Raphael's farewell to Tobias and his son, sums up the varying angelic activities which are described in the Old and New Testaments. They are shown to us in the courts of heaven, and for this we must depend on the attempted descriptions of visions descriptions necessarily failing in words, for their human authors were 'carried up into Paradise, and heard mysteries which man is not allowed to utter' (II Cor. xii,4), yet, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, conjuring up a picture of power, splendour and light.
Our Lady in Scripture—III: The Child and his Mother (Matthew 1 and 2)
Authors: Weatherhead Benet
Published: August 2024

As it stands now, the infancy narrative of the first gospel is the work of the Greek writer who perhaps translated and certainly expanded the original Aramaic gospel of the apostle Matthew. But equally certainly he did not invent the episodes which he has used to construct it; they come to him, perhaps already somewhat moulded or schematized, from the traditions of the earliest communities. His narrative falls into two parts, conicident with our two chapters; the first traces and proves the Davidic descent of Jesus, the true king of Israel; the second narrates his danger from the actual usurping king, Herod. Within the narrative in its final form, there are secondary themes; in the first part, the defence of the purity of Jesus’ mother, in the second, the homage paid to him by the Gentile world and its co-operation in preserving him.
What is the Church?—in: The New Creation
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: August 2024

In this article and the ones which follow we shall be looking in some detail at the system of sacraments which constitutes the framework of the Church. It will perhaps be remembered that in a previous article I said that certain things which are said metaphorically of the people of God in the Old Testament are said literally of Christ; and these same expressions—'first bom son of God', ‘priest of Yahweh', etc., are to be said sacramentally of the new people of God, the Church. The Church is Christ existing sacramentally in the world; existing, that is, in our hearts by means of the system of sacraments.

It is common to treat of each sacrament as fulfilling some particular spiritual need of a man or as corresponding to some phase of his natural life. In what follows we shall use a rather different method. We shall try to understand each sacrament by seeing what part it has to play iin the realisation of the Church.
Scripture Words—II: World and Flesh
Authors: Johnston Leonard
Published: August 2024

Hebrew thought, and therefore the Hebrew way of speaking, is concrete and realist. Greek thought, which has influenced to some degree all our western civilization, is abstract, speculative, analytic. For example, by reflection and analysis Greek philosophy arrived at the notion of man composed of two elements—the one visible and material, the other invisible and spiritual; and for most of us it has become almost instinctive to speak of man as composed of ‘body and soul’, without realising that we are speaking in terms of Greek philosophy.

But the Hebrews took man as they found him—he is just a man, a single thing, a living being endowed with movement and intelligence and speech. of Course, they did distinguish different aspects of this single being, they could look at him from different points of view; but these different aspects were simply aspects of the same single whole— not separate parts which were really different things and only accidentally united.
The Council And Liturgical Language
Authors: Cunliffe C. R. A.
Published: August 2024

At the annual general meeting of the Vernacular Society of Great Britain in April this year, it was decided that a memorandum of evidence, concerning the use of English and Latin in the liturgy, should be prepared by the executive committee and submitted to the preparatory commission for the sacred liturgy of the Second General Council of the Vatican. The recommendations put forward in this memorandum have provoked no small measure of interest among Catholics and non Catholics alike, having been reported widely in the press at home and abroad, notably here in The Times, Guardian, and Daily Telegraph. They were welcomed in the religious press from the Universe to the British Weekly. I have a two-fold purpose in discussing them now: to explain something of the principles by which the committee were guided in formulating their recommendations, and to place the much discussed problem of liturgical language in the new perspective created by the approach of a general council of the Church.
Person and the Place—IV: Fontevrault
Authors: Webb Geoffrey
Published: August 2024

Fontevrault is not one of the compelling architectural landmarks of the Val de Loire, Saint-Benoît or Cunault. It is just apeaceful, rambling old place that one visits because its splendid name and all its connotations have a fascination of their own. The English remember that Henry II and Richard, Queen Eleanor and King John's wife were buried There, whil the French will remind you that Bertrade de Montfort, the mistress of Philip I, took the veil there and died of her austerities. But beside its well known connections with royal families, there is the attractive contradiction of Fontevrault having housed women of quite another StamP—lepers, prostitutes, and social outcasts of various kinds. That contradiction is sufficient to convince us that a really original and Christ-like mind must have been at work in this place.

Within the abbey, a first impression is of size and splendour and fine Materials. The elaborate kitchen gives an idea of the numbers involved In the institution.
The Scapegoat and the Underdog
Authors: Foster John
Published: August 2024

In comparing the very vivid sense the Israelites of the Old Testament had of themselves as the chosen people to the shght feeling modern-day Christians have for themselves as the new people of God, it is interesting to notice that a powerful symbol (that of the scapegoat), integral to the Jewish law of holiness, has been reproduced in the Christian way of life with a much less valid one (that of the underdog).

In the book of Leviticus (16. 2-28) one can read how, before the high priest entered the Holy of Holies each year, two buck goats were presented to him, one of which was not killed but symbolically through a laying-on of hands, invested with the sins of the people; then led away by a man appointed for the purpose to an uninhabited place in the wilderness, there to be let loose or pushed over the rocks from the top of a mountain.
A Catholic Approach to the Bible
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: August 2024

If a reasonably well-instructed Catholic were asked to say what the New Testament meant to him, his answer might be somewhat as follows: The New Testament is a highly interpretative but historically true account first of what Jesus Christ was and said and did, secondly of the effect which this had and continues to have on his believers, on mankind in general and on the powers of heaven and earth, thirdly of the final consummation of Christ's work and Christ's words, in which this present age will one day be terminated. The divine meaning of what Jesus was and said and did explicitates itself through the human faculties of his own chosen teachers by the power of the Holy Spirit. The divine truth that is Jesus Christ projects itself beyond the spacetime dimension of his earthly life into the transcendent dimension of written words on a page.
A Diurnal for July
Authors: de Kiedmatten Henri
Published: August 2024

We must leave to him all our anxieties—the loved one whose faith seems almost to have failed, and be certain that love is in his heart still and that all will come right. You will not be afraid to live, for ‘neither breadth, nor length, nor height, nor depth, nor things present, nor things to come’, can separate you from the love of Christ. You will not be afraid to live, nor when the hour comes, to go down with him into the Valley of Shadow. How should you be afraid, for you can only say ‘I live: now not I, but Christ liveth in me’.
Objective Spirituality
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

Quite often the modem type of spirituality is partially condemned as subjective and introverted, as too self-conscious to be fully God-conscious. No doubt some truth lies in this accusation; for the whole renaissance and post-renaissance attitude of mind as exhibited in philosophy, science, theology, has been centred on human experience and the analysis of human life and values. Perhaps this was what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote The Present Age, saying that it is killing itself with reflection, that even the children who should typify the middle ages in their direct and outgoing lives are often precocious, consuming with the rest of European grownups an 'enormous amount of scruple and deliberation'. The accusation of beiug too self-analytical and reflective has often been made against the great Spanish mystical writers.
The Divine Mission of the Holy Ghost
Authors: McDonagh Hilary
Published: August 2024

In the prayer composed by Pope Pius XII for the Jubilee Year of 1950, there is one petition that comes strikingly back to my mind as I am invited to write on the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is: ‘grant unto orphans, affectionate protection'; and it is particularly by the gift of the Holy Spirit that God answers such a petition. Indeed it Would be better to say that it is with no less a gift than that of the Holy Spirit that the prayer is answered. We who are ‘orphans’ as far as the lives of our spirit are concerned, have ourselves to blame if we do not benefit always by that affectionate protection with the giving of which the mission of the Holy Ghost is concerned.

In the Encyclical ‘Divinum Illud’ (9 May, 1897), specially devoted to the Holy Ghost, Leo XIII deplored the fact that the third Person of the Trinity is so little known and his divine mission so little appreciated by us.
… And in the Holy Ghost
Authors: Armstrong Pease
Published: August 2024

The Forgotten Paraclete', the title of a small and now unobtainable book by a Catholic writer (Mgr Maurice Laudrieux), suggests that the ‘normal’ spirituality taught in seminaries and faithfully distributed to the Catholic flock since the seventeenth century has tended to ignore both the theology of the Holy Ghost and the necessary corollaries which should develop from it in daily Christian prayer and life.

This has not happened without some historically recognisable reason. Pére Congar, O.P., explains the situation when he writes: ‘Heresies always represent the erection into a system of undue or partial emphasis on a particular point of view…. In face of these one-sided deformations of truth the Church affirms indeed not only the particular truth which is perverted, but the whole corpus of truth which is above all partial statements…. It is quite impossible that apologists should not seek to re-establish the partially misunderstood truths, and that theologians should not devote themselves to more precise and detailed development of doctrine…. Wherever an erroneous emphasis or statement is made, the organism of the Church stiffens into concentrated resistance, with the result that since error is always partial, dogmatic truth runs the risk of appearing partial as well.’
The Angelical Salutation
Authors: De St Francis
Published: August 2024

The early Church, all over the world, in perfect agreement, always greeted God's Mother in this angelic manner: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace'. And our Rarest ancestors, following in pious harmony the hallowed tashion of their forefathers, sang the ‘Hail Mary’ everywhere and at all times. They thought by reverently honouring his Mother to make themselves very pleasing to the heavenly King. They knew no more fitting way of paying her this honour than Stating the respect and distinctions decreed and bestowed upon her according to his good pleasure by God himself. This was to do her honour on the day that his divine Majesty wished so greatly to honour the rest of mankind this Virgin as to become man himself. Holy greeting! Genuine praises! Splendid and unique homage! The great God inspired them; a great angel pronounced them; a great evangelist recorded them; the earliest ages have used them; our forefathers have taught them to us.
Marriage
Authors: Sheed Rosemary
Published: August 2024

In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue i t … .

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. (Gen. i. 27-8; 2. 23-5).

This was what daily life was to be for man, unfallen and unredeemed. Then man rebelled, trying to make himself independent of God, and succeeded only in making himself subject to his own weakness and dependent on the rest of creation.
No Time to Pray
Authors: Holdsworth Philip
Published: August 2024

It's all right for you monks. You live in a monastery, where it's easy to pray. Things are arranged to make it so. But if you live a busy life in the world it's impossible. You're on the go from morning till night. How does anybody think one can pray in those circumstances?’ Such is the complaint and one is tempted, as a monk, to point out its false assumptions. That even in a monastery it is not necessarily easy to pray; that it is possible to be very busy even in a monastery; that even in those monasteries in which the pressure of work is less or the conditions more secluded it appears that there is no guarantee that praying will be easy. Whatever the way of life a person leads there would seem to be a strong likelihood that there will be no effective praying unless he is prepared to take vigorous steps to foster it.
On Visiting the Sick
Authors: Boos Thomas
Published: August 2024

Some years ago I spent several days in the surgical ward of a provincial hospital. My coming had, I learnt later, wrought a subtle change in the patients’ general behaviour, but I was accepted as one of them, and was pleased to find a camaraderie of quite a remarkable kind among the men, who were of all ages. There were two exceptions to this, but each of these unfriendly characters was eventually won over by the whole ward. There was officially no other Catholic patient, and this perhaps made it easier for each of the men to look on the monk as ‘belonging’ to him.

It was an enriching experience in many ways. Among much else I learnt something of the complex problem provided by the injunction to visit the sick, which the catechism calls one of the corporal works of mercy.
Bringing up Father
Authors: Campbell Duncan
Published: August 2024

I want, for my own satisfaction and perhaps others', to set down as clearly as I can some thoughts about the place of the priest in today's world. It wants some thinking about, I feel.

First of all there is very little written on the subject that comes my way. I remember a deliberately superficial and snap picture in the Observer recently of various clergymen, very sympathetic with the Catholic priest, though one wondered on the evidence just why; a strange novel, The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor, which I found evasive and lacking in the decisiveness there must be in a priest, somewhere one hopes even in the vague, tired, washed-out priest that one does see often; and another book I have just got hold of, Priests and People, by Conor Ward: this an excellent sociological study so far as I can judge of a ‘typical’ Liverpool parish, though it leaves out deliberately the personal life of the priest.
The Liturgy as Prayer—I
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

I want to begin by quoting a passage from St Paul which provides a good introduction to what I have to say. He is talking to the Colossians about rising with Christ and living in Christ's life. He goes on to say:

Put ye on as the elect of God, holy and beloved, the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience, bearing with one another, and forgiving one another if any have a complaint against another; even as the Lord hath forgiven you so do you also. But above all these things have charity, which is the bond of perfection; and let the peace of Christ rejoice in your hearts, wherein also you are called in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you abundantly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles, singing in grace in your hearts to God.
An Aristocrat of Poverty
Authors: S.C.
Published: August 2024

At a time when an anthology such as ‘The Pleasures of Poverty’ is published, for one thing perhaps to help stiffen the economic morale of the general public, it may be instructive and even interesting to learn how one of the Church's great women personalities reacted to the problem of material security.

Julie (now Saint Marie Madeleine) Postel might never have become so interested in the question of poverty had she not lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, in a France which was rapidly heading for economic disaster. She herself, belonging to good middle-class country stock, had always known a fair measure of security. But that was an exceptional experience in a country, where, for all but a privileged few, misery haointed the land in the form of famine and squalor.
On Becoming One
Authors: Dominic Br
Published: August 2024

We know exactly as much as we have suffered; neither more, nor less. If it were not possible to suffer with, and even for other people, what follows would not follow, since it is these to whom it is addressed who are suffering directly. But !if these lines contain any value it is only in so far as the writer has been able to suffer with, and for, those suffering directly, who are in need of sympathy and comfort. Should they, in fact, be born of illusion and shallow sentiment they are worthless and will fail to stir any deep longings, in which case may they at least do no harm.
The Structure of Religious Chastity
Authors: Magrath Oswin
Published: August 2024

A certain obscurity seems to surround the idea of religious chastity (manifest even in the various names given to it, chastity, perfect continence, purity, virginity), and there is a tendency to envisage it in a negative manner, as chiefly the exclusion of sex and marriage. On the other hand, many recent studies have emphasised the positive richness of the idea and the many elements involved in it. It may therefore not be out of place to try to give a synthetic view of the whole. Basically it is a special kind of temperance called chastity, balanced between lust and insensibility, and supported by the sense of sharne and modesty, and by the attraction of a spiritual beauty. Its specific difference as religious chastity comes from a vow, which belongs to the virtue of religion; while charity, both towards God and the neighbour, is its end.
Palm Sunday
Authors: Tauler John
Published: August 2024

We read in today's Gospel that our Lord went into the temple and drove out of it the buyers and sellers, saying to those who sold doves: ‘Take these things hence’. By that he meant that he wanted the temple to be pure: ‘It is my temple’, he seemed to say, ‘I have full right to claim it. I alone intend to dwell there. I alone mean to be its master.’
The Englishman's Worship
Authors: Richards Michael
Published: August 2024

In spite of everything that has been achieved by the liturgical movement in this country, it still seems reasonable to ask whether it has in fact produced greater unity or greater disorder where public worship is concerned. Schools of thought have been formed within denominations, and across denominational barriers. While greater common understanding does exist, it may well confine itself to academic circles; to ordinary worshippers, the variety may appear as great as ever.

However that may be, all who are working in the liturgical field would probably at least agree that they are trying to make the public worship of their respective churches as full as possible an expression of the authentic Christian tradition. They would say also that the closer we approach to realizing that aim, the nearer we shall be to restoring the unity which we have lost.
Dom Paul Nevill, O.S.B.
Authors: Bailey Bede
Published: August 2024

Few things would have surprised, or indeed amused, Father Paul Nevill more than that someone should think it suitable to write about him in the pages of The Life of the Spirit. And that is a clue to the sort of man he was. During his thirty years as Headmaster at Ampleforth, Father Paul met many thousands of persons, very few of whom will not have been struck by the impact of his personality. He has been called the greatest of modern headmasters. Certainly it is true that his prestige not only among the senior officials of the Ministry of Education but also among his fellow members of the Headmasters’ Conference was very great. Yet his position as Headmaster of Ampleforth had little to do with the influence he attained. With his fine presence-great height, magnificent head, and natural grace—he was made for fame; but natural gifts of themselves achieve little the union in him of grace and nature that won him the unique place that was his in the educational world of this country.
Alter Christus
Authors: Kolb M. B.
Published: August 2024

The possession of an immortal soul opens up such wonderful possibilities to man that a thinker, over- whelmed by the greatness of life, once exclaimed: ‘However great things a man would say about the meaning of life, he would always say too little.’

These marvellous possibilities begin to be realized as soon as a soul is received into the bosom of the Church. ‘O marvel of Baptism', a convert joyfully exclaims. ‘If only we had faith, we should be wrapped in joy whenever we assist at a Baptism, if we remember the spiritual greatness of the neophyte, who becomes the living tabernacle of the Holy Ghost.’

All without exception can happily become temples of the Divine Spirit; in everyone the consoling word of Christ can be fulfilled: The Father and I will come and take up our abode in him.’
Odo Casel: Mystery, Worship and Word
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: August 2024

It is just fifty years since the inception of the liturgical movement associated with the great Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach in the Rhineland. What has come to be known as the theologia lacensis, the theology of Laach, is only the doctrinal side of a multiple appeal to the Catholic world to foster its truest insights, an appeal which goes out just as much in the way the monks worship in the ancient basilica and in the works of religious art that come from the ateliers. But whatever the place and importance of other aspects of this manifold undertaking, the theological ideas which derive from Maria Laach have proved by far its most decisive influence on the general life of the Church. The most characteristic of these ideas are those of Dom Odo Casel. Born at Coblenz in 1886, he entered the monastery in 1905 and was soon caught up in the liturgical and patristic research which was to form his life's work.
The Life of Grace : II
Authors: de Riedmatten Henri
Published: August 2024

While Christianity was claiming to have found true wisdom, secular philosophy was still seeking it with all its might. Since Plato with his amazing intuitions had constructed a system of philosophy directed towards the Possession or contemplation of the Unchanging, a current of philosophy had been trying to take the realities of metaphysics by storm and enjoy them, if only for a moment, at the risk of neglecting the patient labour and slow deduction championed by Aristotle. After painting his splendid picture of the universe, from the One to the lowest degree of being, matter, Plotinus sets up an ideal for the human soul. “There are as many ways of living possible for the soul as there are levels of reality: at the bottom, life in the world of the senses, whether it be the life of pleasure, in which the soul is entirely passive, or the active life, the rule of which is given by the social virtues. Higher up comes reflection, in which the soul gives itself up to its autonomous activity, judging and reasoning.

After painting his splendid picture of the universe, from the One to the lowest degree of being, matter, Plotinus sets up an ideal for the human soul. ‘There are as many ways of living possible for the soul as there are levels of reality: at the bottom, life in the world of the senses, whether it be the life of pleasure, in which the soul is entirely passive, or the active life, the rule of which is given by the social virtues.’ Higher up comes reflection, in which the soul gives itself up to its autonomous activity, judging and reasoning.
The Scandal of the Assumption
Authors: White Victor
Published: August 2024

We should not be ourselves scandalised because the announcement of the definition of Mary's Assumption has scandalised many earnest and honest minds. Bather may we ask whether we have fully appreciated its significance if we ourselves are not in some measure shocked and disturbed. True, the Pope will tell us nothing that we have not always taken for granted as part and parcel of the Catholic faith; we have meditated upon it in the last two decades of the Rosary, we have celebrated unquestioningly every August 15th. Yet it is no obvious, easily credible commonplace which is to he formally proclaimed to be an article of our faith; rather does it tax and test our faith to the utmost, and present a crucial challenge to our profession of acceptance of the central Christian mystery.
A Devoute Meditacyon upon the Anteme 'Salve Begin a Misericordiæ'
Authors: C.K.
Published: August 2024

If thou wilt devoutly hail this glorious virgin, first consider her worthy muchness: what she is; she is God's Mother, worthier might she not be, and therefore with mirth and with wondering raise up worthyness to God's Mother and say to her here with reverence thus: Salve— Hail; and with that word stint into beholding and say: Lady! though I vilest and unworthiest of all creatures presume for to come to thy presence and to greet thee, thou art queen of heaven, lady of angels, mother of God, nevertheless I trust on thine unmeasurable meekness that thou wilt suffer me. And therefore thou, thou that be God's ark, without comparison worthier and holier than the ark of the Old Testament that Moses made, and I arm much worse and uncleaner than Oza was, nevertheless Lady I trow that if I touch thee with devotion of heart, and greet thee with my mouth, I shall not be smitten to death ns Oza was, that touched Moses's ark, hut I hope to he quickened and more inflamed with thy love, for to say to thee heartily oft, salve Regina—Hail Queen! Well is me that I have such a queen, and such a lady, under whose rule and ladyship I may lead my life.
The Vows Of Religion: II—Religious Obedience
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: August 2024

It's very simple, you just have to do what you're told, and because you're told to do it'. But the religious does sometimes meet situations in which he legitimately hesitates whether he ought to obey or not. And then what becomes of'doing what you're told because you're told to do it'? And if hesitation can sometimes occur, how is the religious to know when this crucial moment has arrived?

‘Of course, religious obedience is not like what you find in the army. Religious obedience has got to be voluntary and interior, not just a matter of external discipline.’ But there is a sense in which obedience can never extend beyond external behaviour (Sum. Theol. II-II, 104, 5), and if this kind of statement only means that religious obedience must come from the will it is difficult to see that army obedience or any other should do otherwise, at any rate if it is to be dignified by the name of obedience.
The Church Unity Octave
Authors: White Victor
Published: August 2024

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that this is an octave of prayer for unity. A time, therefore, not so much for talking and listening to each other about our divisions and how we might heal them, but rather for talking and listening to God— trying to see our divisions with his eyes, and asking for his unity.

This octave—or eight days—of prayer for unity all began about fifty years ago at a place called Graymoor in the State of New York. A small community of very Catholic-minded clergymen of the American Episcopalian Church lived there, trying to follow the rule and way of life of St Francis. They called themselves— they are still called—Friars of the Atonement. They were not, so far as I know, very distinguished theologians or what we should regard as abnormally saintly men; just sincere, hard-headed and hard-working American pastors living a community life.
Asking Others to Pray for Us
Authors: Georgiadis Helle
Published: August 2024

The week of prayer for Christian unity culminates with the feast of the conversion of St Paul on January 25th. St Paul is probably the most energetic and tireless worker for unity whom the Church has ever known. Many passages in St Paul's epistles are devoted to the theme of unity and the epistles themselves bear witness to his work for it.

But when we read these epistles we are struck immediately by St Paul's tremendous sense of the power of intercession and its importance in the life of Christians. Thus he writes to the Romans:

'For God is my witness … that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers’ (Rom. i, 9).
Nearer to God Means Nearer to Each Other
Authors: Sartory Thomas
Published: August 2024

May I begin by welcoming you to the Haus der Begegnung (meeting house) and to the Abbey of Niedcraltaich. We have come together for a singular enterprise, and as far as I know nothing of the sort has taken place before since Christendom became divided. We, Protestant and Catholic Christians, are to spend these days of spiritual retreat together … .

Regarding reunion, nothing could be further from the spirit of Niederaltaich than any expectation of patent solutions. We do not much care for over-simplified and smooth formulae. But we do Know this; it is certainly not contentious thought, nor is it even only strenuous intellectual effort that will heal the wounded Body of Christ. The forces conducive to reunion lie deeper, and must be sought on the level of a spiritual growing towards one another. And this coming nearer together in spirit should surely be well served by these coming days of shared retreat.
Sol Justitiae Et Sanitas In Pennis Ejus
Authors: Keyes L. L.
Published: August 2024

Pope Leo XIII once called the Heart of Christ ‘a new Labarum, a battle standard in our war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the world of this darkness'. It might look like a Mazdean symbol, the winged sun disc that the prophet Malachias sings about: ‘the Sun of Justice shall arise with healing in his wings.'

Surely our world is sick; healing is to be found in the Heart of Christ. Nervous breakdowns are all too common. They follow the formula: where P stands for predisposition, S for stress and R for resistance. The predisposition is our character which is an integration of habits on temperament. Now the temperament part of character is inherited. It is physical, or if you prefer, chemical, glandular. Medical science is learning to manage it more and more, but whether any complete cure will ever be found for a difficult temperament, other than getting a new set of grandparents, yet remains to be seen.
Saint Raymund Penafort
Authors: S.M.C.
Published: August 2024

In the state papers of the Kingdom of Aragon is to be found this record: ‘1275. On the day of the Epiphany Raymund Peniafort of Barcelona departed this life in the convent of the Friars Preachers, than whom in Spain at this time there is no more illustrious example of a perfect religious life and longstanding holiness.'

In 1175-76 Raymund was born, probably at Villafranca de Banades, the family estate of the Penafort. His parents came of knightly stock, being descended from the royal family of Aragon.

From childhood, Raymund was serious and mature. Like so many saints and great men of the Dominican Order in its early days. he preferred study to amusement. He was a precocious student and by the time he was twenty years old had graduated in the school at Barcelona and had his own class of pupils to whom he taught the liberal arts, accepting no payment.
An English Martyr On The Tubilee Year
Authors: Wright Peter
Published: August 2024

The Indulgences of the Holy Year are usually extended to the Universal Church after the closing of the Holy Doors. In 1650 there was such an extension till Easter Sunday, 1651, which fell on 30th March in England, but on 9th April in countries that had adopted the reformed calendar. The following sermon was written by Bl. Peter Wright, S.J., and exists in a volume of sermons, all in his own handwriting, at Stonyhurst. I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of Fr H. Chadwick, S.J., the Librarian, in allowing me to transcribe and publish it.

Bl. Peter Wright was born at Slipton in Northamptonshire of a Catholic yeoman family, lost his faith as a young man, and went to Holland to fight with the English Protestant regiment against the Spaniards, who then possessed half the Netherlands. He soon, however, deserted, was reconciled to the Church and became a Jesuit. He was appointed chaplain to the English regiment fighting on the side of the Spaniards.
Spirituality Of The Judaean Desert—II: Mar Saba and St John Damascene
Authors: Potter Roland
Published: August 2024

All pilgrims and visitors to Jerusalem include Gethsemane, the valley of the Cedron, and the Mount of Olives in their itinerary. This eastern side of Jerusalem is all ‘holy place', for as St John tells us, our Lord was often there (cf. John xviii, I-2). Very few however linger long enough to trace the course of that occasional torrent-bed or wadi, which starts as the Cedron and continues down towards the Dead Sea as the Wadi en-Nar. But let us suppose that we have done so and skirted the site of Old Testament Jerusalem, past the pool of Siloam (John be) on our right. If we continue down the course of the wadi by what at best would be called a bridle path, twisting and turning, strewn with boulders, we finally plunge down between high cliffs of sombre and sinister rock. We start south, but a sharp bend serves to make the general direction south-east.
Holy Abandonment
Authors: Dent Barbara
Published: August 2024

St Alphonsus said, ‘Lord, I am poor, but I give thee as much as I can; having resigned to thee my will, I have nothing more to offer thee.'

To give the will unreservedly, in generous love, to God, is to give him all. The wise man said, ‘My son, give me thy heart’, but before the heart can be given, the will must choose to give it, for the will is always the prime mover. In yielding it to God one seeks deliberately to negate the effects of the fall, and ally oneself with the creator's original plan for mankind. One shoots an arrow back into Paradise, with a string attached to it that leads one, as Theseus in the maze, through all the intricacies of life straight to union with God.
BL. Anthony Neyrot, O.P., Martyr (10 April 1460)
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: August 2024

The story of Bl. Anthony's capture by pirates, of his apostasy, recantation and glorious death, comes to us from two very trustworthy witnesses who both knew the saint. One was his fellow-captive and an eye-witness of his martyrdom, the other was the Dominican provincial in Sicily, from where Anthony had sailed to imprisonment and death. The first of these was a Jeronymite hermit, Fr Constantius of Capri, who had been carried captive to Tunis some considerable time before the arrival of Anthony. Shortly after the latter's martyrdom on 10 April 1460 he wrote a long account of all that had happened to him, and sent it to the Dominicans in Sicily, whose provincial, Fr Peter Ranzano, had welcomed Anthony to the island three years before. Fr Ranzano embodied this account in a letter he wrote to Pope Pius II, and added details of his own which he had evidently learned from the Genoese traders in Tunis on their visits to Sicily.
The Active Purification of Silence: (The Ancren Riwle, Part III)
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: August 2024

In discussing the purification of the exterior senses the Ancren Riwle naturally goes into the matter of the mortification of hearing. We may well anticipate that silence should play a large part in the life of a recluse, both as a mortification and penance in itself, and as a way to the full flowering of the love of God. For though it be only a means, and a negative one at that, silence does in fact lead the soul forward to contemplation in a very direct way, so direct that it provides a special foundation for the theological virtue of hope:

‘Keep well my tongue, I may well hod on in the way toward heaven. For, as Isaiah saith, “The tillage of righteousness is silence”. Silence tilleth her, and she being tilled bringeth forth eternal food for the soul…. Therefore Isaiah joins together hope and silence… . “In silence and in hope shall be your strength”.’ p. 60).

For prayer is the breath of hope, and it is impossible to ask God for anything or to raise the mind to him without this theological virtue.
Sin
Authors: Jarrett Bede
Published: August 2024

In dealing with our conscience we try to remind ourselves of the fact that it is almost impossible to be sure to what extent we are answerable for the evil of our lives. We never know with what bias or handicap we start life. God only knows. He knows what is beyond our personal control. We can't really tell—we may be worse than we think ourselves, we may be better. We can only make a shrewd guess with no certainty. We don't even know whether we are in a state of grace or not; we can't go by feeling—self-complacency—there are no internal or external signs. We can be pretty sure we are trying, but we don't know for certain.

It is best to leave it to our Blessed Lord. When he was asked whether a large proportion of people would be saved he said, ‘Strive thou to enter by the narrow gate'.
The Territories Of Grace
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: August 2024

Religious sociology, as an academic study in its own right, is scarcely twenty years old, and as yet its true dimensions have hardly been realized. Indeed Professor Gabriel Le Bras, its virtual founder, can speak with pardonable rhetoric of its ‘limitless horizons', since it ‘embraces all times, all countries, all man's dreams of time and the infinite'. Of course there is a sense in which the material which the religious sociologist considers has always been there. The Church exists among men, in time and place, and even the old testament provides ample evidence of the close connection between men's worship of God and the social setting in which it is to be achieved.

The structure of the Church's organized life is a palimpsest of her history. To that extent it is a matter of chance, or perhaps one should say of the providence that ordained her growth in terms of particular cultures and societies.
The Living of Religion in the Secondary Modern School
Authors: Young Donald
Published: August 2024

Religion is caught not taught—an old tag—and with secondary education for all there is now more time for the catching. Secondary modern schools (or ‘streams’ in comprehensive schools) cater for seventy per cent or more of the population of the country, a large proportion of school-aged children not suited, in the judgment of the educationalist, to acadernic or intellectual study. For these the proven methods of the grammar school are not applicable, as anyone who has stood in front of forty such will acknowledge. ‘Teach us if you can', they seem to say, as we hesitate, searching desperately for some grain of knowledge remaining from yesterday's lesson on which to build today's. It has taken, and indeed still takes, a long time for many people to realize that what served for secondary education for the educated and educable classes for the past centuries will not serve for the secondary modern child.
The Lamb and the Lion or the Greek Passion
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: August 2024

The psalmists were the singers of Israel; daily they magnified the name of the Lord, crying Hosanna!, Hosanna! … Today the crooner has become one of those psalmists. By means of the microphone, to a billion families and homes, he sends the same message—I believe, I believe. … His has become the voice of Sunday morning religion. His Nicene Creed is a short catalogue—a simple reverence of Nature's holiness, a worshipping of trees and stars and clouds, a palpitating delight in the first cries of newborn babes. Doubtless such sentiments are easy to ridicule; they can be dismissed as clichèd or Pantheistic—or even if they are conceded to have a Christian note of optimism, then the Christianity which they celebrate may be considered rather wishy-washy. Nor is it hard for those who argue thus to add examples.
The Word
Authors: Dowling Adrian
Published: August 2024

God spoke and the world began. God uttered his word and the echo will not die since reality is that echo. ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there: if I descend into hell, thou art present.’ For evermore we shall be within earshot of God. ‘See how the skies proclaim God's glory, how the vault of heaven betrays his craftsmanship! Each day echoes its secret to the next, each night passes on to the next its revelation of knowledge; no word, no accent of theirs that does not make itself heard, till their utterance fills every land, till their message reaches the ends of the world.’ (Ps. 18.) The trees speak in their fashion, and the birds in the trees; the fields in spring; the waves roar entrance along the whole coastline. All echo the word of God.
August Holy Days
Authors: Editor The
Published: August 2024

August brings to many people a period of rest and relaxation, a time for an instinctive worship of the elements—the sun and the sea, the rocks and the rivers, worshipped consciously of old by their forefathers. It is not usually a time for striving very earnestly for Christian perfection save perhaps for the religious who choose this month for their annual retreats. People often feel that in the holiday season they can legitimately let go their efforts towards virtue or to overcome their particular habitual faults. They feel, perhaps, if they ever think about it, that they are—always legitimately of courseleaving our Lord and his ideals a little on one side, a holiday from religion as well as from work.

This false sense of the purpose and need of a holiday may even develop a false conscience. For it is in fact an erroneous conception of the rest from work that is usually provided at this season.
Perfection And Imperfection
Authors: Farrel Ambrose
Published: August 2024

It is a commonplace to say that charity is the fulfilment of the law. Did not St Paul say that charity is ‘the bond of perfection’ ? Charity is to the soul as the soul is to the life of the body, since it is the well-spring of our love of God, which in its expansiveness goes out to all others who claim our love. The love of God cannot stand still if it is not to become retarded and to lose its grip on the spirit. ‘In the way of God, he who does not go forward falls backwards.'l It is within human power, with the grace of God, to desire a greater love of God. As St Francis of sales said, ‘The disgusted sick man has no appetite for eating, yet has he an appetite to have an appetite; he desires no meat, but he desires to desire it.'2
Sister Blandine Merten
Authors: Bullough Sebastian
Published: August 2024

This little book1 makes known for the first time to English readers the noly and hidden life of a German Ursuline nun who died in the odour of sanctity in 1918, at the age of thirty-five.

The story is a beautifully simple one. Sister Blandine was born in the saar district in 1883, the daughter of a farmer. She became a qualified teacher and taught in a little village school, until at the age of twentyfive she entered the Ursuline Novitiate at Calvarienberg near Ahrweiler in the Rhineland. In 1911, after taking her first vows, she was sent to Saarbrücken to resume teaching. Within a few weeks, however, illness caused her to be moved to lighter work at the convent at Trier. Here she remained, occupied in the school, until her last illness confined her to her room in 1916. She was bedridden for eighteen months, and died on May 18th, 1918.
The Carthusians
Authors: Steuart Dom Benedict
Published: August 2024

This is a new edition of a little book first published in 1881; but it is so much larger than the original production and contains so much added matter, that it must rank as almost a new work on the subject. In the first part the author gives a short history of St Bruno and his foundation of the Carthusian way of life and of the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, from its foundation by the Saint up to the expulsion of the community and its return, after an absence of thirty-seven years (1903 to 1940). Part II describes the life lived at the Grande Chartreuse with a full account of the monastery itself, its buildings, etc., while Part III sets before us the ideal of Carthusian life in its marvellous combination of the solitary and cenobitical forms of monastic life, designed to avoid the possible disadvantages and dangers of each.