bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ananda Coomeraswamy, 1877–1948
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

The name Ananda Coomeraswamy conjures for me folk-weave ties, strange theories of social credit, and Ruskin-Morris sympathies. Before now he has been labelled a crank—and I think that there is some truth in the charge. By the same coin, Eric Gill has also been called a crank. Yet, now that their work can be seen in retrospect, a fair degree of modification is necessary.

There is a type of Englishman or American, as there is a type of Indian, who while remaining loyal patriots find that both patriotism is not enough and that their countries can only be best served (or saved) by the most vigilant eye of criticism. Both Gill and Coomeraswamy, who equally admired each other, were opposed to many of the trends which they saw in England America and India. They disapproved of the growing power of technology and yet it was largely because of technology (as it had come to affect printing) that their opposition to it could be disseminated and published so widely. That is the paradox.

Coomeraswamy’s father was the first Hindu to be called to the bar in London; his wife was an Englishwoman. When her husband died she left Colombo in 1879, taking with her a young boy of two. It was not until twenty-five years later that her son returned to his native land.
Automation
Authors: Hoskin Michael
Published: July 2007

The flood of literature on automation which has appeared in recent months has left no one in doubt as to the importance of the subject. Most of the discussion, unfortunately, has been of the effects of automation rather than of automation itself; the public has not been allowed to acquire any background knowledge, with the result that automation remains mysterious and menacing. I came across an example of this recently, when I was asked to take part in some Staff Association negotiations on the introduction of machines into office work ‘in case they try to blind us with science’. In fact all the science needed could have been explained in five minutes, and it would then have been clear that in this case there was no need for anxiety.

Until recently it was not easy for the layman to obtain reliable information on the many topics which are grouped under the heading of automation, but this situation has been much improved by the publication of an official survey which is a model of lucidity and careful writing. This survey picks out three streams of technical progress: automatic data-processing, automatic machining, and automatic process-control. I shall discuss each of these in turn, describing first examples of the equipment involved and afterwards the kind of effect which this equipment is having.

We begin with automatic data-processing, which in its most advanced form is carried out by electronic digital computers or ‘brains’. These computers are perhaps the most remarkable of automatic machines.
Catholic Contributions to the Sociology of Religion
Authors: Fogarty Michael P.
Published: July 2007

Let us forget ‘religious sociology’, a misleading mistranslation from the French, which to an English audience confuses two quite different things. The ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic’ sociologist studies, like the sociologists of any other denomination, how behaviour—not particularly religious behaviour, but behaviour in general—is affected by the social structure. His method is factual and scientific, like that of the non-Christian. But he uses insights from the theology of social order and the Christian conception of the natural law as a guide in picking problems to investigate, and to help decide what should be done about them once the facts are revealed. ‘Religious sociology’, on the other hand, as it has come to be understood on the Continent—the right English translation is the ‘sociology of religion’—is a much narrower field, and one not specifically Christian. It studies how the practice of religion, that is religious as apart from general behaviour, is influenced by the social structure. As Fr Virton, s.J., puts it in a question quoted in this report:

‘If I were a wage-earner, an employer, a shopkeeper, a farmer, in this or that part of the country, working such and such hours in such and such a plant, living in such and such a neighbourhood, what difficulties would I find in coming to a mission, in practising my religion regularly, or in helping others to know Christ and his Church?’
The New Hero
Authors: Cuddon J. A.
Published: July 2007

Mr George Scott’s Time and Place is a semi-autobiographical analysis of the influences which he believes have contributed towards the formation of a new kind of hero in everyday life—echoes of whom are to be found in fiction—and also of the state of contemporary society in Britain. He posits an imaginary, composite hero—alluding to Mr Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim as an indicator—whose passions are ended before he starts on his journey; who distrusts his own intellectual pretensions and emotions even more than those of others; one who is ‘fearful above all of not being “wide” enough to forestall delusion’ and who ‘is forced back into the defence of laughter, at himself and at the world’. And if he finds within himself ‘any weakling inclination towards constructive ideas for the world, for “crusades” or any phoney nonsense of that kind, then he must secrete them in some dark cellar lest the neighbours discover them and subject him to ridicule.... He brings with him the supposed coarseness of the hobnailed navvy and the Teddy Boy’s fear of being thought soft.’

This is a convenient and, probably, to some extent, true analysis of certain kinds of people with whom most of us are familiar. Whether or not they are to be regarded as heroes in reality the next fifty or hundred years may demonstrate; and whether or not they are likely to be interesting as fictional heroes it is also a little early to forecast. So far it would seem otherwise.
The Christian‐Jewish Debate
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

Christianity is without doubt the most disputatious of all religions. The Church was bom arguing, and Judaism was the first opponent which it wrestled with, like the infant Hercules, in its cradle. In modem times this venerable controversy has been pushed into the background by the more urgent battle against a rationalism, that in its many different guises has threatened orthodox Judaism no less than Christianity. But the old volcano, though not very active at the moment, is by no means extinct. Thanks to the labours over the last fifty years or more of Dr J. Klausner, an eminent professor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, it has been steadily building up pressure which has recently issued in a premonitory puff or rumble. This literary activity did indeed take place more than thirty years ago, and has been through a second and third edition since, but all that happened in modem Hebrew, which rendered it practically unavailable to the Christian reader, and therefore non-explosive as regards the Christian-Jewish controversy. It is only this year that it has appeared in this country in English—well, to be quite frank, in a quaint patois which is recognizable as a variant of the current language. According to a preface by the translator, the rendering of modem Hebrew presents special problems. We can well believe it; but they can scarcely be responsible for such unidiomatic, and at times incorrect, English as Dr Stinespring manages to achieve here. He would have served his author better if, besides submitting his translation to him and another Jewish scholar for correction, he had also taken the trouble to consult some suitable person who has English and not German for his mother tongue. Incidentally, we are curious to know what Hebrew words may lie behind such contraptions as ‘ethico-political’, ‘religio-spiritual’, ‘politico-material’, which creak at us from every other page.
Newman, Christian or Humanist?
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

Two books appeared in the course of this year, one by Professor Culler dealing with Newman’s life as a humanist, the other, edited by Fr Bouyer, publishing for the first time many of the autographical memoirs that show forth Newman very much as the delicately conscientious Christian. It would appear to be Professor Culler’s view that these two aspects in Newman’s character were never fully harmonized. In fact, one wonders whether, in the professor’s view, they could be harmonized, at least in the forms they took in Newman’s mind. So unharmonized were they in Newman’s early life, we are led to believe, that their conflict resulted in five crushing illnesses during his youth and early manhood. However, ‘as adolescence passed and as Newman moved into a religious position which was not distrustful of intellect, the conflict gradually resolved itself into the precarious balance which is achieved in the Idea of a University.’ But, though Professor Culler here says that the conflict resolved itself, it is obvious that he does not really believe that such a resolution ever took place. The author of the humanistic discourses in the Idea of a University is, according to Professor Culler, a survival of the vainglorious person who dabbled in un-Christian speculations, but who was suppressed in Newman’s youth from his conscious life, when he turned to religion. The author of the religious discourses in the same book is the other Newman, ‘the docile and submissive creature who emerged’ when the early crisis has passed. We are, then, to believe that the Idea of a University reflects two characters in rebellion against each other, one representing the spirit of humanistic and religious liberalism, the other pietistic and anti-liberal evangelicalism.
Some Christian Problems in the Far East
Authors: Teeling William
Published: July 2007

The last ten or eleven years since the end of the war with Japan have shown some fascinating problems for the Catholics and other Christians in the Far East. I cannot claim to be an authority on them, but I have watched them as best I can and would just like to tell here something of what I have seen and to hope that others may answer my doubts with far greater knowledge and experience.

To begin with, I went back to Japan ten years ago in 1947 and saw the air of expectation in the Catholic world, which I now feel seems to have been unjustified.

At that time, General MacArthur and the U.S.A. held complete control. The Japanese had been ordered to cease to believe in their religion (if you can call it a religion), Shinto. To this day, Catholics have been unable to decide whether Shinto was really a religion or a sort of political cult. If the latter, then Catholics could still practise it; if the former, then obviously not. At any rate, Shinto was now dead and every Catholic missionary wondered if Catholicism could not take its place; and the Protestants of course thought the same.
Burke, Rosmini and the Revolution
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Edmund Burke died in 1797, when Rosmini was born. Between their two lives fell the great blow of the French Revolution, striking fire—a fire of fury—from the aged Burke’s mind and then echoing on behind all Rosmini’s political thought. Burke died fighting the Revolution as an unmitigated evil. Rosmini, living through the half century that followed the great upheaval, could neither simply accept nor simply denounce it; his task, as he saw it, was to contribute to the construction of a new order such as the new age required and was confusedly clamouring for. Burke, though an Irishman, was a Protestant; and though too great a man to be a mere politician, he was on the whole a Whig and a strong upholder of the English political system set up by the Whig aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth century. Rosmini, a Catholic and an Italian, could feel no such respect for the pre-revolutionary world. For him that world meant, above all, the Austrian Empire of which he was a subject by birth; the Empire’s Erastianism offended him as a Catholic, and its hold over divided Italy offended him as a patriot. If the Revolution had done nothing else it had punished the old Catholic states for oppressing the Church of which they professed themselves the defenders. To Rosmini, as to many Catholics of his generation, the open hostility of the Revolution seemed hardly more dangerous than a return to the cold suspicious patronage of the eighteenth-century governments. Freedom, they thought, even with poverty and persecution, was better than such patronizing protection.
America and Innocence
Authors: James Henry , Greene Graham , Cassidy John
Published: July 2007

Seventy-Seven years separate the publication of Daisy Miller, by Henry James, from that of The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. With Daisy Miller James made the closest approach in his lifetime to the kind of popular acclaim now enjoyed by Greene; the novel is one of his simplest, and the workings of its author’s mind are revealed in skeletal clarity. The transformation in the significance of America and in the writing of novels which has appeared during that time make it startling that the two books should share something of a common attitude to Americans as symbols. The changes of the intervening three-quarters of a century have naturally had their effect on this symbolic use; the position of America in the world has changed, and the value of the symbol has correspondingly altered from that presented by James. Nevertheless there is a similarity, and it seems that Americans abroad can still provide material for an imaginative examination of society and human motives.

James’s ambivalent attitude to his native country is, of course, widely demonstrated throughout his novels. Always he finds it difficult to reconcile his admiration for the forthrightness, vigour and pragmatism of a young country, with a feeling of its inferiority before the majestical sweep of European history and the society with which he sees that history so intimately twined. The arts and politics of Europe are superb monuments of humanity, but at the same time there is in them a subtle threat, a danger that their greatness dominates the life of the present and cows it into submission to a dead past. Into this world enter the young Americans, Roderick Hudson, Christopher Newman, Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer. Their conflicts with the subtleties and intrigues of Europe form the substance of the novels in which they appear.
Art and the Christkan Tradition
Authors: Dinwiddy Hugh
Published: July 2007

Art is the servant of beauty and beauty is God, ‘Beauty’s self and Beauty’s giver’, and it is only when beauty is seen by the artist and by those who study his work as in no way reflecting God that art becomes an end in itself. We know, of course, the fame of the Church as patron of the Arts; yet her direct influence upon the kind of painting done began to slip late in the fifteenth century.

‘In the minds of many’, writes Berensen, ‘painting, although a very familiar art, was too much connected with solemn religious rites and with state ceremonies to be used at once for ends of personal pleasure. So landscape had to slide in under the patronage of St Jerome, while romantic biblical episodes, like the “Finding of Moses”, or the “Judgment of Solomon”, gave an excuse for genre, and the portrait crept in under the mantle of a patron saint.’
Poets Without a Tradition
Authors: Moody David
Published: July 2007

Poetry has always a hazardous existence, is rarely held or formed in an adequate organ of words; it is too easily dissipated or clumsily fumbled back beyond the mind’s grasping. To be continually a poet, even under the most favourable conditions, requires great power and self-consecration. Today conditions are nowhere very favourable, and least of all in young countries such as Australia and New Zealand. To be a poet anywhere, but there even more, a man needs genius, or the dedication more usually found in saints.

That these countries have not an excessive share of genius, and that their writers are as mortal and divided as all the world, is the evidence of two recently published anthologies, one of Australian and the other of New Zealand verse. The intention of the editors in each has been to trace from its beginnings the evolution of a distinctly national idiom, to show the growth of a poetic tradition which is characteristically ‘Australian’ or ‘New Zealand’. In each case they have felt that the poetry of their country began to come of age in the 1930s, with the result that the earlier writers are offered mainly as an historical background to the larger number of poems by living authors. That there should be so many living writers of verse (about forty in the Australian book, and twenty-seven in the New Zealand) persistent and skilful enough to have won recognition even in their own country, shows at least the presence of a vital desire for creativity, a vital desire for poetry.
The Response to Holiness
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

H E is religious to whom something is holy’. The most basic experience of man is the impact upon his own .person of power from without. Towards the ultimate source (or sources) of this power he cannot be indifferent. He may react in one of two ways: he may regard it as something to be controlled and used, or as something to be served and propitiated. The first of these reactions is condemned by religion as such. It is the attitude defined as hybris, arrogance. Man attempts to place himself above the ‘Source of Power’ instead of acknowledging himself its lowly servant.

‘You said in your heart,I will climb the heavens,I will raise up my throneAbove the stars of God.’ (Isaias xiv, 13.)

The essence of religion consists in the second kind of reaction. Man feels himself confronted with an Other Being, one which wholly transcends himself and his own small circumstances, yet one from which constant impacts upon himself and his world are being experienced. The idea of holiness is in fact derived from these two elemental intuitions of Otherness and of Power. The holy is that which controls and transcends the profane, ‘a Being of Power, strange and of a different order, dangerous and lifegiving, terrifying and repelling and at the same time attractive, far away and near at hand, full of mystery’. The impact upon his awareness of such a ‘Being of Power’ summons man to acknowledge its sublimity on the one hand and his own lowly dependence on the other. Worship is man’s ‘Complete Responser to this summons, the response of religion to holiness.
Teleology and the Anatomist–II
Authors: Towers Bernard
Published: July 2007

To continue this brief survey of some recent exponents of those final causes which, if they are dead, certainly wont He down, here is a quotation from Professor Agar’s Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (2nd edition, 1951). After discussion of the significance of organs of perception and their function he says : ‘The anticipatory aspect of perception compels us to recognize the reality of final causation in all perceiving organisms. Anticipation implies the power of directing action in accordance with that anticipation; otherwise it would have no function. The function of the capacity of anticipating future occurrences is to influence present action in relation to that anticipation. Causation in this sense is teleological or final causation. It is directed towards bringing about a situation which is not yet existent.’ Once again the argument seems to depend on a prior assumption that living organisms are in some way essentially different from non-living, and such an assumption is unwelcome to those of us who have a natural sympathy with monist rather than with dualist interpretations of the things of nature.

Dr L. E. R. Picken, the Cambridge zoologist, writing in 1955 of the significance of final causes in the development of biological structures, says: ‘Claude Bernard expressed the opinion that science is not concerned with first causes (origins); he might well have added that scientists are also scared to death of final causes (ends). But it is clear that the biologist at least cannot be indifferent to final causes—to ends—any more than was Aristotle himself, whose entire analysis of types of causation is coloured by his biological studies.’
Teleology and the Anatomist: I
Authors: Towers Bernard
Published: July 2007

To some, no doubt, the two terms that constitute the title of this paper will seem to make strange bedfellows. Teleology, one might think, is a curious speculative anachronism, a remnant of a long outworn system of metaphysics, the discipline that it has been the fashion, at least until recently, in philosophical circles in this country to decry as meaningless vapourings on an unknown and in essence unknowable theme. In complete contrast to this speculative science of abstraction, anatomy, one might think, is essentially of the earth, earthy. It is unhappily true that many otherwise intelligent and well-informed members of academic circles still look upon anatomical science as one that of set purpose limits and confines itself to studies in the mortuary, describing in ever more bewildering detail the relationships one to another of the myriad structures that comprise the embalmed human corpse. Such descriptive study is not, of course, without its own intrinsic interest and value —‘know thyself’ has from time immemorial been the maxim that points the way to the beginning of wisdom, and no one can deny his body a significant place in the constitution of whatever it is one calls ‘oneself’. But if pure description of the details of the inner recesses of the human body were all that constituted anatomy, as some of those not engaged in it still seem to suppose, then such a study, exercising the essentially sub-human faculties of visual perception and memory-storing, would lead inevitably to intellectual stagnation; being devoid of theoretical and experimental content it would not indeed even warrant the dignity of the name of science.
Family Doctor
Authors: Pole K. F. M.
Published: July 2007

Time and again the question is discussed whether the age of the Family Doctor, as our forebears knew him, has passed. Many seem to think it has. Many blame the National Health Service, under which, they hold, this relationship of the patient to the doctor—as to the friend, philosopher and medical adviser to the family—is no longer possible. Others seem to think that the progress of science has brought a progress in medical treatment which does away with this approach to doctoring, which they consider outmoded. ‘Make available to each and all the latest discoveries, under the most scientific control and in the most hygienic surroundings’ is their slogan. The sponsors of this approach cry out for health centres, for group practices with rotas based on them, and for all the trimmings of a miniature hospital to be provided in all such little units. ‘The Doctors say’, no longer ‘My Doctor says’, is what one can hear more and more when patients discuss their ailments with others. Depersonalization of medical practice is a direct result of this tendency, praised by some and deplored by others.

To my mind there is much good in both ideas. We need both the personal and the scientific approach in the Family Doctor. Happily I feel certain that they do not exclude each other, that a synthesis of all that is best in each is possible and is even now on its way.

The swing of the pendulum has become proverbial. It is something of this that we are witnessing at this present time. The period in which medicine was regarded as a more or less pure science, when patients wished to consult directly specialists in the various fields and either ignored the general practitioner or made use of him simply as a sort of traffic policeman to direct them to the various out-patients departments, is swiftly passing as more and more people realize that there is always a border country between the fields of the different specialists which would become a no-man’s land but for the general practitioner.
Social Medicine
Authors: Fairfield Letitia
Published: July 2007

Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions
Son Et Lumière: A Footnote to France
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

During the last few years French taste and ingenuity have added a new dimension to the tourist’s pleasure— Son et Lumière, the articulated harmony of spoken commentary, music and floodlighting which evokes the past glory and the present beauty of such places as Versailles or Vézelay. As night falls the buildings come to life, their details made piercingly true in the brilliantly devised arc and shadow, and their meaning recalled in the actors’ declaiming of a sermon of St Bernard’s or a passage from Madame de Sévigné. And the music of Rameau or Lully, marvellously amplified without distortion or excess, completes the illusion of the years of magnificence.

Sound and Light: there remains Heat, the third of the trinity of the Physics one learnt at school. And Heat is absent on these summer evenings, so gracious yet so cold. Each monument has fundamentally the same history: war or revolution, the edicts of secular power, eviction, destruction, death. And now, for a moment, it painfully springs to light, but not to life, not to the warmth of a place where men live or of an altar where men worship—except it may be by occasional concession, the toleration that can be exercised now that the power is gone.

It is perhaps a fantasy to find in this an analogy of the state of France today, but it is as useful as any other. There seem as many diagnoses of the disease as there are men to make them. Political instability, inflation, a fossilized bureaucracy, the freemasons, alcoholism, religious unbelief: you may take your choice among these easy explanations and many more besides.
On Finding God
Authors: McDermott Timothy
Published: July 2007

This book gives one the deepest kind of delight. It is intensely moving spiritually and morally. Too often the word of God, which in the Scriptures moves us so compellingly, seems to lose all its power when clothed in theological language. The book that can present theological truths so that they move the spirit to love and follow God with spontaneous joy is a rare exception: among such works in English I remember the books of Dom Anscar Vonier. Many attempts make shipwreck at the start by relying on a pious emotionalism foreign to the theological truth itself. Here, however, in Father de Lubac’s Sur les Chemins de Dieu, theology moves the soul by its own power, by the presence of God’s word within it. Fr de Lubac succeeds in the task he explicitly set himself: to help men to find God, not merely to indicate to them that there is a God to find. He convinces the reader experimentally of a difference between proving God’s existence and revealing God as present and essential in our own Eves. He succeeds in showing that God is not just a need of the human mind, but my need.

This is what Fr de Lubac would most want to hear, I think, from someone who has read his book: and he would be prepared, I am sure, to enter into discussion about difficulties and infelicities of expression with anybody sincerely concerned to enhance the books power to lead souls to God. Behind the rather unmoving nature of what follows, there lurks such a concern.
India's New Ruling Class
Authors: Floris George A.
Published: July 2007

With important foreign statesmen arriving frequently on courtesy visits to India from East and West and with India’s voice respectfully heard at the international councils, the observer is left with the impression that Mr Nehru’s spectacular foreign policy is paying a high dividend and that Delhi is rapidly becoming one of the most important political centres of the world. Only on close scrutiny of the economic and social conditions does he get the impression of a scene reminiscent of Chancellor Briining’s Germany in the early thirties: a regime desperately trying to camouflage by real and imaginary diplomatic successes the fact that, domestically, it is sitting on a volcano.

In the cities the westernized ruling class—the British-trained civil servants and the American-inspired managing agency executives—seem to run the show at full swing. Although the shortage of technicians is still acute, there is a considerable tendency among the new generation to go in for scientific training. I was told by a university professor in Calcutta that the brightest students take up science these days.

Dr Deshpande, the Secretary-General of Hindu Mahasabha, the self-styled guardian of national traditions, assured me that the idea of a man working his way up—so essential to any industrial society—is by no means incompatible with the true principles of Hinduism; the rigidity of the caste system was the result of later corruption, but his Movement means to go back to the ancient sources.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no obstacle in the way of a new India, rising on the wings of modem technical production and re-invigorated Hindu tradition, utilizing vast, still untapped, raw material and manpower resources.
The Church in Ethiopia Today
Authors: Doughty M. A.
Published: July 2007

The triumphal re-entry of the Emperor Haile Selassie I into his capital of Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, marked the beginning of a new era for the Catholic Church in Ethiopia. As in many countries today in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the Church in Ethiopia has to prove that it is truly a supranational and independent body, notwithstanding its spiritual allegiance to the Holy Sec. The Italian missionaries who followed in the wake of Mussolini’s armies in 1935 could not but help to identify the Catholic faith with the Italian religion in the eyes of the invaded Abyssinians, and not least because French Catholic missionaries who had laboured for years in this territory’ were politely but firmly shown the way out of the country during the Duce’s occupation. As could be predicted, the return of the Negus and the allied armies led to the expulsion of the Italian missionaries from Ethiopia. Not a single one was allowed to remain and the Apostolic Delegate, Mgr Castellani, himself an Italian Franciscan, was conducted out of the country by English officers. To this day, no Italian missionary is allowed inside the Emperor’s dominions.

A knowledge of the history of Christianity in Ethiopia, essential for an understanding of the situation today, can be briefly summarized. The Church was established in the fourth century by St Frumentius who was consecrated first Bishop of Aksum by the great Doctor of the Church, St Athanasius of Alexandria. The Church in Ethiopia unhappily fell away into the monophysite heresy, gradually cutting all links with Rome and Constantinople but maintaining important relations with what became the dissident Coptic Church of Alexandria. The national Church of Ethiopia, comprising about seven and a half million adherents, remains monophysite in doctrine to this day, although it can be reasonably argued that Ethiopian monophysitism is more nominal than real.
Hungary: From Calm to Revolt
Authors: Floris George A.
Published: July 2007

Even if we assume the obvious, namely that the insurrection in Hungary was immediately motivated by previous developments in Poland, our assumption still begs the question. How could the Hungarian people muster such a valiant spirit of defiance in the face of Russian tanks, artillery fire and aerial bombing overnight, after the long years which must have appeared to die impartial observer as inglorious submission? After all, there was an active resistance in Poland in 1945-46 and even General Mihailovitch managed to continue for a while his resistance against Tito in the Yugoslavian mountains. Czechoslovakia, although by peaceful means, maintained her partly Western orientation until the beginning of 1948.

During all these years between 1945 and 1948 the Magyars appeared docilely to accept their submergence behind the iron curtain, the open Communist flouting of the anti-Communist popular vote at the General Elections in 1945 and 1947, Rákosi’s ‘salami tactics’ to reduce the Smallholder Party’s parliamentary majority, the liquidation of the Ferenc Nagy Government, the imprisonment of the Protestant Bishop Ordass and Cardinal Mindszenty.

However profound the impact of the Polish developments on Hungary may have been, particularly in view of the centuries-old Hungaro-Polish sentimental attachment, could the news from Warsaw have changed the national character of the Magyars in a matter of a few hours? Of course not! If we seek to explain the contrast between the Hungarian attitude before and after October 23, 1956, we must go back a few years in history to show that Hungary’s loss of independence came about with a slow graduality which precluded any spontaneous resistance in the past.
Inflation and Social Justice
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

Inflation has been one of the most serious and persistent of our post-war economic problems. Few people however take it seriously, for despite die repeated balance of payments crises it has produced, the threatened disaster has not overtaken us. Many indeed attribute the maintenance of full employment to the same forces that have produced inflation. They recognize that inflation may have incidental evils, but in their fear of unemployment they hesitate to adopt certain kinds of measures that may be necessary for the control of inflationary forces.

Inflation raises both economic and moral problems. It is the economic aspects that must be studied first, for without an understanding of how inflation comes about it is impossible to consider the moral problems associated with the process; nor can questions of social justice be discussed without a knowledge of the effects of inflation.

Inflation is a situation in which there is a general rise in prices as a result of an excessive demand for goods and services. When the demand for any commodity increases (or the supply of it is restricted) there is a tendency for the price to rise. When the overall demand for goods increases and the supply remains unchanged there is a general rise in prices. This idea is not so readily understood as the rise in price when the demand for some one commodity increases. The demand for one commodity may increase because people buy more of it and less of other things. How can the general demand increase? All incomes are rewards for making a contribution to production, either by working, supplying capital, accepting the risks of industry, or hiring out land. Every penny received by firms producing goods is distributed in wages, rent, and interest, or retained as profits.
Iago and St Thomas
Authors: King Donald B.
Published: July 2007

The character of Iago in Shakespeare’s play, Othello, has greatly puzzled critics over die past century, and much controversy has centred around the motivation behind his hatred of Cassio and Othello. The intensity of his emotion and the fiendishness of his actions seem to many critics completely disproportionate to the causes of resentment which Iago declares to be his motives. This puzzlement is, at least, partly caused by failure to recognize and appreciate the nature of sin in the Christian sense of the word. Critics would cease to wonder at the extent of Iago’s moral depravity if they were willing to take seriously those Christian teachings on personal sin and its destructive effects on human nature which still formed a living part of western man’s intellectual equipment in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare’s dramatic analysis of the effects of sin on Macbeth afford one, though not the only, example of how well he understood them. His delineation of Iago is another. In many ways, indeed, Iago constitutes an excellent illustration in dramatic form of St Thomas’ teachings on sin, as well as those on the special sins of pride and envy and on the Devil.

As so many critics have insisted, the specific instance of wounded pride which Iago alleges as the source of his bitterness certainly does not of itself suffice to explain the vicious extremes to which Iago’s malevolence finally carried him. As St Thomas teaches, however, the elements in the immediate occasion of any sin seldom account in themselves for all the evil which ultimately will flow from the sin.
Scottish Protestantism Today
Authors: Walls Ronald
Published: July 2007

Whatever be the exact relation between English and Scottish Protestantism it is certainly true that an understanding of the Scottish religious mind cannot be gained from knowledge, however thorough, of conditions in England. Moreover, the understanding of Scottish Protestantism is more important than is suggested by the size of the population of Scotland, because of the key position which the Scottish theological schools have in the English-speaking, non-Anglican, Protestant world. The faculty of Divinity at Edinburgh University is a most important place of post-graduate study in Europe for students from the U.S.A., and that faculty—and the others at Glasgow, Aberdeen and St Andrews—are very much in touch with Basel and other centres of Protestant scholarship on the Continent. Edinburgh in particular is quite a bottleneck in the traffic of Protestant ideas.

For those whose work is in Scotland this key position of the Scottish faculties of Divinity will be secondary. Their main interest will be in the conversion of the people of Scotland. If we think only of this we are still considering a very important matter. The evolution of Protestantism in Scotland has come to a stage where great opportunity may be given to the Church to make itself known. There are signs that in Scotland earnest Protestants are fast approaching a point from which the next step will have to be either Humanism or the Truth. They are about to bring forth either religious disillusionment or Catholicism. It is imperative that the midwife be on the spot and well equipped.
St Peter's Columns
Authors: de C. Parmiter Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

On entering St Peter’s the eye of the visitor is almost immediately caught and held by the great canopy sheltering the papal altar which, according to an ancient tradition, stands over the burial place of St Peter. The arresting feature of the canopy is the shape of the columns which stand like gigantic old-fashioned sticks of barley sugar in the heart of Christendom. This canopy, executed in bronze and standing on the immense piers necessary to carry its great weight, was made in the sixteenth century by Bernini on the instructions of Pope Urban VIII, and it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable features of a remarkable church.

The recent excavations under St Peter’s have thrown much light on the tradition that the papal altar marks the place where St Peter was buried, and they have illumined much that has hitherto been obscure. The archaeological evidence resulting from the excavations does not, it is true, provide conclusive proof of the authenticity of the tradition, but it is entirely consistent with it. It is certain, however, that from very early times it was the firm belief of the Church that the apostle was buried on the traditional site. This site was in a pagan cemetery adjoining the road which ran near the Circus of Gaius and Nero; it is this cemetery which has now been partly excavated. The early Christians erected a shrine there to mark the place and to honour the remains of the apostle. There can be little doubt that this shrine was the τροπαιον seen by the Roman priest, Gaius, on the Vatican Hill in the third century.
The Relevance of Primitive Religion
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimcs disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.
Christians and International Institutions
Authors: de Riedmatten Henri
Published: July 2007

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

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

First of all, it will be useful to set out what is original in the existing family of international institutions as contrasted with previous ones.
St Peter's Columns
Authors: de C. Parmiter Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

On entering St Peter’s the eye of the visitor is almost immediately caught and held by the great canopy sheltering the papal altar which, according to an ancient tradition, stands over the burial place of St Peter. The arresting feature of the canopy is the shape of the columns which stand like gigantic old-fashioned sticks of barley sugar in the heart of Christendom. This canopy, executed in bronze and standing on the immense piers necessary to carry its great weight, was made in the sixteenth century by Bernini on the instructions of Pope Urban VIII, and it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable features of a remarkable church.

The recent excavations under St Peter’s have thrown much light on the tradition that the papal altar marks the place where St Peter was buried, and they have illumined much that has hitherto been obscure. The archaeological evidence resulting from the excavations does not, it is true, provide conclusive proof of the authenticity of the tradition, but it is entirely consistent with it. It is certain, however, that from very early times it was the firm belief of the Church that the apostle was buried on the traditional site. This site was in a pagan cemetery adjoining the road which ran near the Circus of Gaius and Nero; it is this cemetery which has now been partly excavated.
The Relevance of Primitive Religion
Authors: Ernst Cornelius
Published: July 2007

It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimes disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.

If this is a difficulty for the common reader, it is also a difficulty for the anthropologist himself, one which he frequently fails to solve. Sometimes he may seek experiential resemblances in the form of archetypal patterns, and some of these archetypes are undoubtedly genuine; for instance, Professor Evans-Pritchard refers to the social (the human) significance, manifested in Nuer ritual, of the fact of the bilateral symmetry of the human body; and we are all of us familiar enough with the difference between left and right not to be particularly disconcerted by examples of this in societies with which we are not familiar. Or again, we can sympathize readily with the polar opposition in Nuer thought between the above and the below.
Saving the Fathers
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

The question of saving something would scarcely arise unless first it were worth preserving, and secondly in danger of neglect or oblivion. That the biblical interpretation of the Fathers is worth preserving in general, need not be laboured; but lest this fundamental premise should be evaded, it may be useful to quote the authoritative pronouncement of Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus. He quotes the Council of Trent ‘that it is permitted to no one to interpret Holy Scripture .. . against the unanimous agreement of the Fathers’, and later he adds in his own words, ‘The holy Fathers are of supreme authority whenever they all interpret in one and the same manner any text of the Bible, as pertaining to the doctrine of faith and morals; for their unanimity clearly evinces that such interpretation has come down from the Apostles as a matter of Catholic faith. The opinion of the Fathers is also of very great weight when they treat of these matters in their capacity of doctors, unofficially; not only because they excel in their knowledge of revealed doctrine, but because they are men of eminent sanctity and ardent zeal for the truth, on whom God has bestowed a more ample measure of his light. Wherefore the expositor should make it his duty to follow their footsteps with all reverence, and to use their labours with intelligent appreciation.’