bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sin and Social Welfare
Authors: Grain Mary
Published: July 2007

In pre-Reformation England religious orders undertook the main share of what is in modern parlance known as social or welfare work, that is, the care or relief of the sick, the fatherless, the needy and the aged. After the Reformation this kind of work was apt to be neglected, or undertaken in a somewhat inhuman spirit under the auspices of the Poor Law. By the eighteenth century, however, the country’s conscience began to be stirred by the sight of so much misery, and hospitals, orphanages and rescue homes were founded by public subscription or private philanthropy. This good work continued throughout the nineteenth century, inspired generally by religious principles and in the main sponsored by various religious organisations. By the end of the century, however, a more scientific approach to social work began to manifest itself. The Charity Organisation Society was founded to discourage indiscriminate almsgiving and substitute an organised system based on family case-work, and the Webbs, although they disapproved strongly of C.O.S. methods, were among the most vociferous champions of a more scientific approach to social problems.

This scientific attitude has in our century led to the transformation of the social worker from a well-meaning amateur, usually with a strong sense of vocation, into a trained professional. Most social service posts advertised today require of applicants a Diploma in Social Science such as is granted by universities on completion of a course both academic and practical. The academic part, includes study of such subjects as constitutional and economic history, economics, political theory, local government and psychology.
A Crisis in Latin American Culture
Authors: Sarmiento Edward
Published: July 2007

There have not been wanting signs in recent years that Latin American culture is passing through a crisis. In many countries cultural tendencies have changed or been intensified—the Fall of France was an acute shock to Argentina, North American influence gives rise to disquiet in some Colombians, there is an increase in English influence in Brazil. Some outside critics have asked what the Latin American contribution to world culture is, now or in the past, and it is a difficult question to answer, more for lack of a definition of terms than for lack of material to adduce (for at once many things come to mind: the relics of pre-Columbian civilisations, the lovely colonial art, some contribution to science in the eighteenth century and to medical art in our own times, contemporary peasant arts and the interesting developments in serious painting, a solid contribution to the law of nations and international relations, and above all the formation of a way of life and a tradition). So much depends on how far a contribution to world culture is made to coincide with what the world wishes to receive or with a preconceived view as to what it ought to wish to receive. An ingrained habit of self-criticism and depreciation makes individual Latin Americans question very seriously whether they have in fact a culture of their own, while governments have taken to stressing the national traditions of each individual country. Some analysis of the root conditions of Latin American culture may help to clarify its present crisis for us.
The Rumanian Catholic Disruption
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

The people of the country we call Rumania are in part descended from the ‘veterans of Trajan’, colonists drawn from several parts of the Roman empire, chiefly Italy and Illyricum, and planted in the province of Dacia in the early years of the second century A.D. They fused with the Thracian natives, and during the great migrations were overrun by Goths, Huns, Avars and other barbarians; the new people thus produced retained a language Latin in origin but modified by Slavonic and other influences—the name ‘Romania’ explains itself.

St Niketas of Remesiana (d.c. 414), to whom the composition of the Te Deum is attributed, is claimed as one of the apostles of the Dacians, and they certainly at first formed part of the Western church. But they were conquered by the Bulgars in the ninth century, passed to the Eastern church, and so were eventually involved in the Byzantine schism during the later middle ages. For a long time the Rumanians (or Vlachs) depended on hierarchs of the Bulgarian and other churches, and it was not till the fourteenth century that three separate metropolitans were given to the Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia by the patriarch of Constantinople; there were some Catholics of Làtin rite and earlier in the middle ages bishops were appointed to look after these Kuman converts and Magyar, German and Polish colonists. The Moldavian metropolitan, Damian, signed the act of union at the Council of Florence in 1439, but his church refused to support him.
Catholics into Politics
Authors: Hope Charles Graham
Published: July 2007

The discussion between Father Aelred Graham and Mr Douglas Woodruff—with Father John Fitzsimons intervening—seems to me to be typical of the sort of controversy that arises in almost any Catholic gathering of today when the subject of politics is introduced, though to be sure it is on a much higher dialectical plane than most. There is a great temptation to join in and develop the many fascinating but well-worn themes that have been raised in ever-widening circles round the original splash; but it would be unprofitable, if only because it has been done so often and much better before. What I am going to attempt is something much more presumptuous, that is to break out of the circle, which however wide is still a constriction of both Catholic thought and action.

First, may I offer a definition of politics? It is, I suggest, the art of the organisation of society for the common good. And the problem that does, or should, face the politician is how to preserve the liberty of the individual while securing the common good of all.

It is surely clear that the successful organisation of society for the common good must depend on the members of this or that society having a fairly unanimous idea of what is the common good for which they strive, and on their living and carrying out this organisation within a common structure or framework as to the essentials of which they are all more or less agreed. As Christopher Hollis has said, quoting and supporting Cecil Chesterton, ‘party government is only tolerable when the two parties agree in their political opinions’. Furthermore, as Fr Graham rightly enjoins, they must ‘see things steadily and see them whole’.
The Future of Offensive War
Authors: Ottaviani Alaphridus
Published: July 2007

When two societies which are only materially distinct from each other come into collision neither is to be sacrificed to placate the other, but the interests of each are to be catered for in a rigidly fair manner.

This principle is based on the fact that these two societies are of equal standing, enjoy therefore identical rights and have neither of them any legal advantage over the other; neither in fact is obliged to waive any of its rights in favour of the other. On this account a balance in no way derogatory to either must be struck as accurately as is possible between the conflicting rights; for example, by dividing up the disputed matter (granted it is divisible) or by making compensation. At times indeed the right claimed on one side may be a putative one only, and that on the other side clearly unimpeachable (objective); or at least one rather than the other may have a greater interest at stake or stronger grounds on which to quarrel. But even in situations such as these, peaceful methods of settling the issue must take precedence over all others.

First of all, therefore, every effort should be made to establish the existence of whatever right is being claimed; then an attempt should be made to compose differences amicably; finally, should this fail, war must not be declared without first trying out certain coercive measures which, though of less consequence than war, may be equally effective in the circumstances.
The Black Friars in Wales
Authors: Attwater Donald
Published: July 2007

A well-known picture by Fra Angelico shows the meeting at Rome, in the year 1216, of St Francis and St Dominic. They were men of very different experience and temperament; yet they were one in heart; and between them they gave to Christianity a new form of apostolic ministry that still, over 700 years later, is operative in the world. Francis and Dominic were the founders of the friars. And a friar—the word simply means ‘brother’—a friar is one who combines elements of the earlier monasticism—its dedicatory vows, its communal life, its daily round of praise of God in church—with the manifold works of the pastoral ministry. For the friar, contemplation of divine things issues in activity outside his monastery: he is, as it were, both monk and missioner—‘revivalist’, if you like . . . Dominic was a Spaniard by birth; and in the south of France in the early years of the thirteenth century he was faced with the ravages of a doctrine that was both false in the abstract and vicious and anti-social in practice. Moved by intense compassion for those who erred in ignorance, he saw that what was wanted was intelligent presentation of the truths of Christian faith by men who lived really in accordance with those truths—a real ministry of the word and of example. And so he brought into being the Order of Preachers or Black Friars.
Goethe and The Catholic Church
Authors: Weetman S. A. H.
Published: July 2007

Those of us with a taste for idle speculation may be tempted to wonder how Goethe would have turned out if he had been born in Munich or Vienna instead of in Protestant Frankfurt and gone to school with the Jesuits. Voltaire, we may recall, was a pupil of theirs; and a certain respect for his old masters never left him. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the absence of any direct Catholic contacts in Goethe’s early years it was from Voltaire and the Encyclopedists that he acquired his first notions about the Church. For although the young poet reacted against the French classical tradition in verse which Voltaire represented, he was like the whole age in which he lived deeply influenced by French writings. How far the Voltairean attitude towards the Church in the eighteenth century was justified it is difficult for us to realise in an age happily free from gross ecclesiastical abuses. As we know, Voltaire did not limit himself to attacking abuses. That the period in which Goethe grew up was one in which the Church had largely lost the allegiance of the intellectual world must regrettably be admitted. As for the Protestantism in which the poet was educated, it was a dull and formal affair from which the genuine enthusiasm of the Reformation had long since evaporated, and it was rent by internal dissensions. It could not but be wholly unsatisfying to Goethe's genius; and since the ‘paganism’ of his temperament and the prejudices of his youth prevented him from ever considering Catholicism seriously, he evolved a religion of his own out of the various elements he collected in the course of his reading and experience. In this he was typically modern.
The Christian and the Post‐Christian
Authors: Ashe Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

A Cultured priest of my acquaintance has remarked to me more than onee that the penny Catechism, with all its virtues, is out of date. Many of its precise definitions and carefully chosen texts are aimed at a Bible Protestantism which hardly anyone believes in. On the other hand, difficulties which the modem convert is apt to raise are not met, and the standard ‘companions’ to the Catechism do not always-help. Similar objections apply, I believe, to a great deal of recent apologetic writing. Brilliant and compelling as it can be—I am thinking of books like The Everlasting Man—it frequently fails in two respects. First, it often does not carry the battle on to the ground where the modern intelligentsia choose to fight. This was the Complaint made by Professor Haldane against Mr Arnold Lunn, and the same could have been said, perhaps with more justice, in a number of other controversies. Secondly, an apologist labours under the immense handicap that whereas he is inside the Church, most of the people to whom his work is addressed are outside—and not only outside the Church, but outside what is popularly called Christianity. It is a testimony to Catholicism that it transforms one’s thinking even when it does not transform one’s life; but the difference must be paid for. Catholic spokesmen suffer from being Catholic. They try to communicate a vision which can only be had from within, and this is the business of the artist, not the apologist.
The Economic Crisis
Authors: Derrick Paul
Published: July 2007

The economic crisis with which Britain is faced today has very little to do either with Tory Misrule before the war or with Socialist Mismanagement since. It is to some extent due to the loss of most of our overseas investments during the war; but it is mainly due to the fact that we are finding it more and more difficult to export our manufactures in exchange for food and raw materials. More than a hundred years ago Disraeli declared that ‘the continent will not suffer England to become the workshop of the world’, and he was right in spite of the fact that during the latter part of the nineteenth century we grew wealthy by exporting our manufactures in exchange for cheap food. The situation today is very different. The rest of the world is becoming more and more industrialised and the world is short of food. The ruthless exploitation of virgin forests and farmlands has resulted in erosion in five continents so that yields are going down and land is passing out of cultivation. At the same time populations are increasing and there is somewhat greater equality of income so that the effective demand for food is increasing. The result is that the terms of trade are moving against us. We are having and shall have to pay more in manufactures for what food we cannot produce at home and for the raw materials we need to keep our factories going.
Statistics and Causality
Authors: Taschdjian Edgar
Published: July 2007

In a recent number of Blackfriars (July, 1949) Dr A. W. Gledhill has discussed very competently some aspects of the statistical method as used in modern physics. He has tried to show there ‘that modern physical theory does not contradict the principle of causality’. Having made a study of this subject over quite a number of years, the writer, while agreeing with some of Dr Gledhill’s conclusions, feels nevertheless that there are a few points which have not been covered as adequately as the importance of the subject for modern philosophy seems to warrant.

In order to understand the controversy about the validity or non-validity of the principle of causality, which has been initiated by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is necessary to realise, first of all, that when a physicist speaks about causality, he usually does not mean the same thing as a scholastic philosopher. In scholastic philosophy one distinguishes different kinds of causes, such as the material, the efficient, the final, as well as the formal and exemplary causes. The classical physicist, on the other hand, since the time of Galileo, admits only efficient causes. Let us therefore give a brief sketch of the development of this concept of scientific causality and show the reasons for this limitation.

The purpose of a scientific theory is the prediction of events among the natural objects which form the field of enquiry of the particular science concerned. Evidently, the more certain the prediction, the better the theory on which it is based.
The Conscience of Capital
Authors: Prince J. F. T.
Published: July 2007

A Writer was recently rebuked in the Catholic Press for asking the question: What would have happened if every pulpit in the land had thundered against the factory conditions of the early industrial revolution; supposing the Church had said, ‘We care not one jot or title for your iron laws of Economics, we care nothing about the alleged financial ruin of the country; these are not our concern’? And the same writer withal is again reproved for his belief that de facto economic forces are more powerful than moral ones, that we are driven daily to greater and greater completeness of monopoly control, that private interest would have it so, that government supports the process, and that war speeds up its tempo. It is of course understandable that to authors and journalists, recendy busied in boosting a highly moral war, and looking for another, any doctrine of economic supremacy should be repugnant. For it must be granted that the economic argument, however true, gives a shaky moral basis for planning—whether of wars or the peace. Habitaculum quamquam miserum quomodo non palatium aequiparantur coelestium ipsimet enim aedifcaverunt....

It is not quibble but objective fact that communism and capitalism cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. Even Lenin admitted as much when he introduced the N.E.P. Capitalism postulates distribution (however unequal) and co-operation (however unwilling). And the world has yet to witness a communism that has dispensed with capital. There have been communists and communists, Essenes, monks and nuns as well as Bolsheviks. So much for its practice. As for the theory of it, it has had other prophets than Marx.
A Christian Interpretation of Marxism
Authors: Langdale Eugene
Published: July 2007

Two conceptions of the world are struggling for the possession of the soul of man, the Christian and the Marxist. And it would seem that nothing can ever reconcile their antagonisms. The Christian vision of the world involves a triple transcendence; that of spirit over matter, of the human person over society, of God over the world; whereas the Marxist vision of that same world seems to be built on strictly corresponding negations. Spirit does not transcend matter, since it is matter itself that makes spirit; the human person does not transcend society, since man can only become truly himself in and through society; and God does not transcend humanity, since ‘it is not religion that makes man, but man who makes religion’.

Can a Christian content himself with such a rough and ready interpretation of Marxism? If it corresponds entirely to reality, then there is nothing more to be said and all doors are closed, since no possibility of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists can exist. There is a very real danger in simplifying doctrines, as theologians only know too well; and though Marxists are often guilty of crude generalisations about the Catholic position, Catholics themselves can over-simplify their assessment of the Marxist standpoint. ‘The low materialism, the shoddy history and the false messianism which made up Communist propaganda in the nineteenth century.... ‘I find these words in a Catholic manual of sociology published in recent months for use in schools. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from using rude words about one’s opponents; but it is a game that two can play, and go on playing indefinitely. And one can ask oneself: is it a game that Christians should play.
The Claudel‐Gide Correspondence
Authors: Ryan Mary
Published: July 2007

The publication of this exchange of letters is in some ways unique, and of great religious and philosophical significance. The two men are of absolutely outstanding eminence and influence, and each in his way of outstanding experience. They are of the same generation, Claudel born in 1868, Gide in 1869. They were friends and have long since fallen apart. They stand for two absolutely opposite conceptions of man’s duty and destiny.

During his recent visit to Rome, Claudel told an Italian interviewer (Mario Guidotti) that neither he nor Gide had taken the initiative in publishing this correspondence. It came from Robert Mallet, a friend of Gide’s (who has supplied the letters with a minute and enlightening factual commentary). Claudel consented, in the hope of exercising a moral influence: ‘I should like the letters to do good today to young people whom Gide may have harmed: the good that I tried to do, unhappily in vain, to a great writer and friend’.

Both correspondents hold strongly to what they stand for. Both have allowed the letters to be supplemented by other documents: passages from Gide’s Journals, and one from a literary interview of 1947 in which Claudel utterly disavows the other’s position. That position is indicated in a typical passage picked out by the English, or rather American, translator of the Journals: ‘In the name of what God, of what ideal, do you forbid me to live according to my nature; And where would that nature lead me if I simply followed it? Until now I had followed the rule of Christ, or at least a certain puritanism that had been taught me as the rule of Christ.
The Touchstone of Juvenile Deliquency
Authors: Burns Charles
Published: July 2007

I once gave a talk to sixth-form boys in a Catholic public school about delinquency, and at the end of it one of my audience remarked: ‘with all due respect, sir, I think you have been talking nonsense. I think that human beings are responsible and if they do wrong they should be punished, unless they are mentally defective’. That is a perfectly reasonable and refreshing statement concerning the freedom of the will and the essential simplicity of human action. At the other extreme we find the elaborate analyses of human motivation made by sociologists and psychologists, which appear to deny all freedom of choice and responsibility.

The subject of delinquency is indeed nowadays a touchstone for everybody’s opinion—expert or not, and the trouble is that they are all in the right—in varying degrees. Every general statement needs qualification and particular application, but so often we get nothing but the general statement dogmatically pronounced.

For example we are told that the main causes for the alleged increase in juvenile delinquency are to be traced to the lack of religion, with the consequent decline in the stability of family life and in respect for authority. But, for argument’s sake, a State could be imagined where there was no family life or religion, as we conceive it, but in which the social sanctions against theft were so stringent that delinquency of this type would be practically eliminated. We have no proof that in die Middle Ages or in Victorian England, there was less minor delinquency such as pilfering, than we get now. We have only exact figures for the past half century or so—a period which has seen two very major wars—themselves both a symptom of man’s fallen nature, and the causes of further depravity and lawlessness in Society.
Catholics and Adult Education
Authors: Belfield Eversley
Published: July 2007

The great growth in adult education through the tutorial and other types of classes has been one of the most interesting educational developments of recent years. This in its turn has led to an increase in the numbers of adult educational centres and colleges; these vary from the purely technical non-residential schools to long-term residential colleges such as the Catholic Workers’ College and Ruskin College at Oxford. There are also shorter courses, normally of a week or week-end, running throughout the year at places like Ashridge, Burton Manor and Grantley Hall. Many of the ideas which inspired the founding of this latter type of college are attributable to the Danish Folk High Schools, and in England, to the work of Sir Richard Livingstone, in particular to his valuable little book, The Future in Education. The other force behind this growth in adult education centres has been and still is the work and ideals of bodies such as the Workers Educational Association and the University Extra-Mural Departments. Those who attend tutorial classes, one-year, or terminal classes, have in many cases wanted to meet together away from their normal, and often grim, environment; this desire has been met by holding summer schools in the universities or other large residential centres.
The Universal Mission of the Church
Authors: Hislop Ian
Published: July 2007

As I face this audience I am overcome by that compounded feeling of fascinated envy and sheer fury which overtakes, in different proportions, my countrymen when confronted by the quintessence of English cultural achievement, Oxford; so profoundly attractive and so irreconcilably alien. As a child I thought that Englishmen were just the same, Scotsmen with a different accent; but now I know, through experience, that they are different; that environment and tradition have moulded their characters according to a different pattern, a difference which expresses itself in a thousand subtle contrasts of emotional reaction and temperament—perhaps most strikingly emphasised in the contrast (so difficult to define) between English humour and Scottish wit.

Such contrasts, deeper experience shows, do not utterly divide. Quite apart from their common history, not always a uniting factor, both peoples recognise that they share a common culture pattern and, more important, that they are the same kind of beings. No doubt a platitude, but one pregnant with significance.

Generalise the analogy! Within infinitely greater contrasts, beneath the most diverse cultures, breaking through cleavages due to colour, custom and opinion, which stretch back indefinitely beyond recorded history, man remains irreducibly man. Biologist and theologian are at least agreed in that.

Irreconcilably opposed in everything save their humanity! If you doubt it look at the record of history: issues, so easy to settle, so simple at root, twisted and travestied beyond recognition and buried under the bodies of whole generations till the problems they beget are so beset by tension, so clouded by emotion, that they can only be solved by annihilation.
Eric Gill: A Retrospect
Authors: Chute Desmond
Published: July 2007

Eric had an engagingly boyish, at times almost infantile, sense of humour. He delighted in a stock of comic stories which he retailed with inexhaustible relish both for their formal nearness and for their garnered wisdom. Among these was a dialogue between three men in a railway-carriage:—

First man: ‘What lights are those?’

Second man: ‘They’re the lights of Hanwell.’

First man: ‘How strange they look!’

Third man: ‘Not half so strange as the lights of the train look from Hanwell!’

Perhaps this unassuming little allegory may enlighten the chequered history of the Money-changers from its thwarted beginnings in 1916 to its recent and painful aftermath in 1949.

rA representation of the turning-out of the money-changers has been chosen for a war memorial, for it commemorates the most just of all wars—the war of Justice against Cupidity—a war raged by Christ Himself.’

The sculptor had long dreamed of a great monument which should embody this struggle and at the same time be his crowning achievement. The original design—for a bronze group in the round—done in 1916 for a competition as a monument for L.C.C. employees, was rejected. It may be seen reproduced in Eric Gill published by Ernest Benn in 1927; it is also extant in a wood engraving. The upsurging rhythm of this bronze group is finer than the more geometrical movement of the relief ultimately carved in stone at Leeds.
Christian Education in the World of Today
Authors: St John Henry
Published: July 2007

We are all of us unconsciously influenced by the atmosphere or climate of thought of the world in which we live, though upbringing and mature thought may have taught us to analyse and at least partially discount this influence where it runs counter to the principles of our Faith. The children who come to us come from this same atmosphere; with some their upbringing in a truly Catholic home has gone far to fortify them against the absorption of what is bad in the atmosphere of the modern world, but with many more this is by no means so, and our main educational problem is how to train them in such a way that they grow up to judge the world in which they will have to live by a scale of values drawn, not from the general climate of opinion of that world, but from the principles of their Faith applied to the problems of every-day living.

It would be an impossible task to give a complete analysis of the elements which go to make up the atmosphere or climate of thought which the children who come to us begin to breathe long before they come to the age of reason, and which they will almost inevitably absorb completely, unless they are fortified against it by their homes or their schools or, better still, by both.
David Jones
Authors: Grisewood Harman
Published: July 2007

‘The only artist retaining the image and its allusions today is David Jones, and his paintings exhibit very clearly the enormous difficulty of finding pictorially the relation between it and the coherent whole—for unlike Rosetti and like Dante he is not content to see his image in the unknown.’

These words are found in the concluding passage of Nicolette Gray’s study of the Romantic Image and of the dilemma to which it gives rise in the art of today. Her thesis is that Dante was not content to see the vision of Beatrice as prefiguring a reality beyond herself, but in addition he needed to know what is the nature of the relation. To Dante there was available the idea of a world order as really existing. But by the end of the eighteenth century this knowledge of the whole was reduced to an abstract idea of order so attenuated ‘that it had no place for the particular’. Thus the idea of the image became divorced from order, romantic from classical art. Henceforth the artist can with certainty use no valid terms in which the mind can rest.

No one is more fully aware of the difficulty this thesis presents to the artist than Mr David Jones. He has met the difficulty frontally not only as painter but intellectually as a scholar, as shewn in his hitherto un-collected critical writing, and as a poet in In Parenthesis. He comprehends our cultural predicament and has allowed himself in his work no evasion of the formidable difficulties that arise for one who adds to an artist’s response to the material world a need to endow the result with a validity that stands the tests of the intellect.
Elgar's ‘Dream of Gerontius’ Aet.50
Authors: Taylor Eric
Published: July 2007

Fifty years have passed since Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ was first performed at the Birmingham Festival. This great music now holds an established place in the general repertoire of choral societies: indeed, so secure is its present position that it is easy to forget how chequered has been its career in the half century, to what accidents it has been a prey, under what misunderstandings it has suffered—and does still suffer.

When ‘Gerontius’ first appeared, Elgar was just beginning to attract attention as a national rather than as a provincial composer, very largely because of the enthusiasm Hans Richter had shown in conducting the ‘Enigma Variations’. Though the forty-three year old composer at this time, therefore, commanded a certain amount of respect among musicians, his new work must have seemed a strange affront to the old, but extremely vigorous, oratorio tradition of choral singing, well nurtured on a staple diet of Handel and Mendelssohn. Even Parry and other composers of the English musical renascence of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made no really significant advance in this genre, and while Elgar refrained from describing ‘Gerontius’ as an oratorio (although the proportions of the work make this seem a more suitable description than Jaeger’s ‘cantata’) the new durchkomponiert setting of Newman’s poem must have appeared as a determined tilt at the venerable oratorio tradition, to which indeed it virtually gave the death blow.
Catholics and The Stage
Authors: Milton Ernest
Published: July 2007

It goes without saying that, before the Reformation, all actors or mummers or players—or whatever else those vagabonds performing in theatres or on platforms or on inn balconies or just in front of a circle of chairs on a bare floor were called—who happened, irrespective of race, colour or shape to be believing or practising Christians (in so far as this was allowed), were necessarily Catholics and members of the Church.

The fine flowering of the English Theatre occurred during the later years of Elizabeth, far into the reign of James I, and was functioning throughout the most enthusiastic and novel period of Protestantism. There is no reason to suppose that any of the acknowledged great players illumined by the comet-brilliance of Marlowe or enveloped in the solar warmth of Shakespeare’s genius were Catholics—unless secretly; and even this last possibility is pure theory or wishful thinking. A great deal of delving into old archives might prove whether or no men like Alleyn, Burbage, Hemyngc and Condell had yearnings towards the Faith, and I daresay that with more time for a little research it would be easy to ascertain the final spiritual convictions of such writers for the theatre as Chapman, Webster, Tourneur, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others; but within the limits of this space it is hardly desirable to offer a directory or Who’s Who of all the eminent players or writers who have been, or who are, Catholics.
Andre Gide: The Ethic of The Artist
Authors: O'Flaherty Kathleen
Published: July 2007

Writing so soon after Gide’s death, one would like to remember only his charm, the music of his prose and, above all, the prayers addressed to God in Numquid et Tu. Yet the influence of such a writer does not cease with his life; as long as French is read the sinuous harmonies of that prose will ceaselessly convey a definite message.

That ‘message’ renders neutrality impossible. Gide, by subordinating a moral code to aesthetics, of which he declared it ‘a dependency’, raised fundamental questions which it would be inexcusable to evade. While he repudiated any wish to make ‘converts’, books are not published in a vacuum. Moreover the Journal reveals that, at times, Gide was fully conscious of the power of corruption which he wielded. In fact, if his basic postulate be accepted—the necessity of the full development of one’s individuality, unhampered by ethical considerations—a pagan moral code has been adopted. This invalidates the undoubtedly sincere advice which he gave to his readers to cast aside his book —to free themselves from his influence as well as from that of others.

While this fundamental clash between Gide’s ethic and that of the Christian is continually touched on by Mr Thomas in his book published just before the French writer’s death, it might be argued that, because of the chronological presentation and a certain, perhaps inevitable, lack of synthesis, the idea will be insufficiently clear to the ordinary reader, less familiar than Mr Thomas with the texts.
Dryden's Dominican Son: Father Thomas (Sir Erasmus Henry) Dryden, O.P.
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

According to Edmond Malone, the poet’s most considerable biographer, Dryden’s family after being long established at Staff hill in Cumberland migrated south about the middle of the sixteenth century and settled in Northamp- shire, where the then head of the family, John Driden, married the daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope, through whom he became possessed of the estates and manor of Canons Ashby which had been seized from the Austin Canons by Henry VIII some twenty years before. His eldest son Erasmus, who was created a baronet by James I in 1619, had three sons, of whom Erasmus the youngest became the father of the poet born in 1631. As this Erasmus had thirteen other children to provide for, it is not surprising to read that on his death in 1654 he left John but a small patrimony, although he was the eldest child. This was the inconsiderable property of Blakesley, about three and a half miles from Canons Ashby, reckoned as bringing in an annual sum of -£60, of which a portion had to be paid by John to his widowed mother, so that he had to look elsewhere for a living. Already at Cambridge he had shown ability in literature, and now he embarked seriously upon the career of a poet and dramatist with such success that before he had completed his thirtieth year he was already accepted as a writer of eminence and had even attracted the notice of the newly restored Stuart king, Charles II.
The Christian View of History
Authors: Dawson Christopher
Published: July 2007

The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelhng and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the Liberal Protestant movement and dominated religious thought both on the continent and in this country during the later nineteenth century.

Today the situation is entirely changed. Both philosophic idealism and liberal Protestantism have been widely discredited and have been replaced by logical positivism and by the dialectic theology of the Barthians. The result is that the idea of a Christian philosophy of history has also suffered from the reaction against philosophic idealism. It is difficult to distinguish the authentic and original element in the Christian view of history from the philosophic accretions and interpretations of the last century and a half, so that you will find modem representatives of orthodox Christianity like Mr C. S. Lewis questioning the possibility of a Christian interpretation of history, and declaring that the supposed connection between Christianity and Historicism is largely an illusion.
Catholics and The University: A Personal View
Authors: Armstrong A. H.
Published: July 2007

This article should be regarded, perhaps even more than others in this series, as the expression of a very personal point of view. Dons are individualistic people, liable to hold highly original and sharply divergent views on questions both of principle and policy within the university, and I am very conscious that I have no right whatever to speak as representing any considerable body of opinion among Catholic senior members of universities in this country; indeed it cannot be said at present that any such coherent body of opinion exists, though the sort of subjects about which I am going to write are certainly being increasingly seriously considered and discussed.

The appearance of a body of Catholics playing any noticeable part in the life of the universities of this country is a very recent phenomenon. It was the great movement of liberalism (in Newman’s sense of the word ‘liberal’) in the middle nineteenth century which opened the universities to Catholics; and they were permitted to take advantage of the new possibilities only after what must now seem to us an unnecessary and regrettable delay. It was regrettable, not only from the point of view of the standards of taste and intelligence of the Catholic body, but from the point of view of the university: for, though some sort of university reform was certainly urgently needed, the reform which actually took place broke the connection between religion and learning which still existed in the ancient universities ana effected a thorough-going secularisation of university life which has had very far-reaching consequences.
Catholic and Protestant in Western Germany
Authors: de Hirsch Donald
Published: July 2007

Observers surveying the political scene in Western Germany immediately after the Second World War were apt to agree that the good understanding between Catholics and Protestants was one of the few positive results of the ghastly experience of Nazism, war and defeat. Everything seemed to point to the permanence of this new harmony. Catholic and Protestant Christians had both suffered for the same reason, both had learned to understand one another faced as they were by the totalitarian menace—first Nazi and later Communist. And both had reason to regard themselves as the ‘saving remnant’ that had redeemed the soul of Germany. The temporary disappearance of a German state had led finally to the emergence of the two Churches as the only remaining pillars of native authority which could give guidance and solace to a despairing and bewildered people.

The situation is unfortunately radically different today. As long as the majority of Germans remained stunned by defeat and preoccupied with the burden of day-to-day existence, old feuds and rivalries seemed meaningless. The stabilisation of their currency, however, with its almost magical effect on the living standard, together with the re-emergence of German statehood—even though with limited sovereignty—have once more led to conditions in which echoes of the past can be heard with increasing and alarming clarity.
The Tradition of the Maries in Provence
Authors: Girdlestone C. M.
Published: July 2007

Few local traditions of evangelisation have been maintained with as much tenacity and defended with as much passion as that of the Bethany household and the Maries in Provence. Among Catholics of the modern dioceses of Marseilles, Aix, Avignon and Fréjus, which have succeeded the medieval dioceses of the same churches and those of Orange, Carpentras, Apt, Arles and Toulon, now divided between the four survivors, the belief that their province was christianised by these Gospel figures is held with conviction and is still a source of devotion. Whereas elsewhere the name and legend of the first bishop are only matters of archaeology, in Provence the memory of Lazarus and his sisters, of Mary Salome and Mary the mother of James, is a living one, honoured by novena, procession and pilgrimage in the crypt of St Victor’s abbey in Marseilles and in those of the churches of Tarascon, Saint-Maximin and Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and in the cave sanctuary known as the Sainte-Baume.

The knowledge of this tradition comes generally as a surprise to English Catholics. Nevertheless, at least one episode of the series— that of Mary Magdalen’s penance in the Sainte-Baume—has been frequently reproduced in works of art and provides, indeed the usual setting for fifteenth to nineteenth century paintings of the saint. For the rocky background against which so many pictures of her are placed is that of the cave near Marseilles where she is alleged to have dwelt for thirty years, expiating her early life of sin.
Metaphysics and Language
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

There are at present two moods in contemporary philosophy, the existentialist’s and the technician’s. The existentialist mood is disillusioned, sophisticated, desperately mature. The technical mood has no illusions; is without suspicion of naïveté, confidently accepts itself as adult. For they are both moods that belong to our time, one of the more terrible features of which is that its children go to the wall.

To the existentialist, the world in which he lives, with its everyday concerns, its inventions and schemes, is through and through suspect. He sees past its pretences. At its noblest, at its most pretentious, no less than in its trivialities and ignominies, he knows it to be flat and uninteresting, a substitute world, unauthentic. He sees through it to the basic nothingness that its false pretences disguise. He knows, besides, his own core of nothingness. And he dares to face his consequent consuming passion for the destruction of that substitute world which it is the doom of his own unqualified freedom to project upon the undifferentiated ground of nothingness that encompasses him. So with the emancipated cynicism of a man not only lacking hope, but lacking even the desire of hope, he descends (impregnably arrogant in his anguish) into the pit of absolute despair. He recognises his proper human status as cast there; recognises the radical absurdity of his existence at the edge of the irrational abyss of un-being.
A Vernacular Faith
Authors: Haynes Renée
Published: July 2007

The work of Christopher Dawson and others has made familiar the fact that each of the great religions of the world has become the matrix of a temporal culture. Less familiar is the converse truth that such a culture, richly proliferating, can almost smother with the complexities of habit, custom, usage and respectability the faith from which it originally sprang; so that for many selves religion may become at worst the handmaid of civic solidarity, at all events something accepted and taken for granted, and at best a vital pattern of rites, reactions and relationships inherent in a certain place, time, and mode of living, a pattern which fades out of the individual mind directly its circumstances change. Thus, on the one hand stands the ‘catholique non-pratiquant', who clings to the noun rather than the adjective, insists that his children should receive a Catholic education, and has a high regard for faith as the cement of a stable social structure. (This figure is perhaps commoner abroad than in this country; and was well exemplified in those portions of Latin America which abused Costa Rica as ‘Communist’ for trying to organise economic life in accordance with the social encyclicals.) In the centre sit at ease in Zion, as in an overcrowded drawing-room, ladies of pious leisure embroidering in petit point on linen cushion covers ready stencilled designs of the Sacred Heart, such as may be seen in the drapers’ shops of Bruges.
Broadcasting and Spoken English
Authors: James David Lloyd
Published: July 2007

Among the discontents and grievances, real and imaginary, which help to fill the correspondence columns of newspapers, ‘B.B.C. English’ is a veteran. Those who complain usually make an assumption and a statement. They assume the existence of a type of spoken English with definable characteristics to which the term ‘B.B.C. English’ may be assigned. They state that this is an undesirable type of English and frequently, explicitly or implicitly, compare it unfavourably with their own. Critics range from the highly educated to the lunatic fringe. From whatever section of society they derive, they share strong feelings, often express themselves with vehement indignation, and accuse the B.B.C. of attempting to force millions of listeners into the strait-jacket of an accent which is in some way decadent. The adjectives used to describe it sometimes express a relation between the writer’s education, social position or home county and those of an imaginary person, the audible embodiment of the B.B.C.: ‘superior’, ‘lah-di-dah’, ‘snobbish’, ‘slipshod’, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Cockney’, ‘Oxford’, ‘drawling’, are examples of the words used to relieve real irritation. In an age when the niceties of language, spoken and written, command so little appreciation, so much emotion may seem surprising. I believe it is both natural and, in some degree, desirable. But I should not like to say why without examining the basic assumption that there is an accent called ‘B.B.C. English’.