bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Collusion Course
Authors: Rice Denis
Published: July 2007

The recent coadjutor appointment in Nottingham diocese met with some criticism. I could sympathize with the critics—and with the chosen candidate. However, the situation was more than an example of non-consultation about episcopal selection. Clouds of debate and confusion around the freshly-embroidered mitre obscured something deeper, farther back in time.

For some years, the Ordinary of the diocese has been a target of comment for allegedly rigid views and activities. In particular, his stance on Humanae Vitae (H. V.) was strict in its expectations of what priests should teach about the encyclical. Five priests were suspended on the issue. In 1968 and 1969, widely-reported arguments and public meetings were held in the diocese about H. V. and its aftermath.

I chaired one of these meetings in March 1969. It was attended by four hundred people. Many of them were for liberal interpretations of H. V. and against the Bishop’s sanctions on priests who did not accept his line. Some in the audience were supporters of the growing Renewal Movement. Many more people were concerned about the need for an articulate but critical lay voice in the Church. I directed part of my summing up at the meeting to these groups. I suggested that, perhaps, enough had been said and done locally about H. V.; that attention should be turned to more important, if less exciting, issues. The example I offered was the manner of appointment of Bishops. I said that, in Nottingham, discussions or protests about this would be too late after a retiral or death. As far as I am aware, nothing was done from that time in 1969. Yet when Mgr McGuinness was appointed in 1972, the protest was strident.
The Function of Criticism and Tragedy
Authors: Beisly Phil
Published: July 2007

When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument?

Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’?
Communes and Communities
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The ideal of communal living often fails to survive the ordeal of practical realities. A recent book by Clem Gorman combines a survey of the movement towards communitarian life-styles in Britain since about 1965 with a practical manual for would-be communards which is packed with useful information and some reflective insight. At no point does the author make any reference even to the existence of monasteries and convents. It is fascinating and touching to see how, in an experiment less than a decade old, the problems and structures arise which have been familiar in religious communities now for centuries. People always have to learn things for themselves, of course; and one need not lament the fact that the hard-won wisdom of monastic experience has not been available for modern communards to draw upon. For that matter, our communities have been undergoing fairly radical changes during the relevant period, and we have not always given much attention to the proven principles we have inherited, far less practised them impressively enough to instruct others. In fact the blunt advice which Clem Gorman offers can perhaps help to cut through the pious odour that hangs about religious life and sometimes prevents its practitioners from realizing elementary facts. The sheer naivety of the discoveries the communards are making casts fresh light on the hoary truisms of monastic life.

Clem Gorman prefers to speak of ‘communes’, but he allows that the difference between communes and communities is not clear. He sees a spectrum, with a left and right wing: ‘On the far left are the very poorest communes, often squatting, frequently having to support a fair proportion of members who are not working, and probably more likely to involve group marriage and absence of personal property concepts.
Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence
Authors: Egner G.
Published: July 2007

I turn to the newer theories of the eucharistic presence. They are not as accessible as the old: that much we can all admit. In fact, I begin what I have to say about them by giving two reasons for this inaccessibility. First of all they have been published for the most part in Flemish or Dutch, and in periodicals not easily traced in England. I got round this difficulty by having a large selection of material microfilmed in Holland: what I have to say, although I do not propose to take up much time in quotation, is in fact based upon original sources that I have read and translated for myself. The second cause of inaccessibility is more important. Just as the older theory was couched in the terminology of Aristotle (misleadingly so, if my contentions are correct), so the newer theories have their philosophical setting. The setting is the tradition known as phenomenology, and associated with the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who died in 1938. To understand what the newer theology is getting at here, one needs to know something of this way of philosophizing.

I have one help in embarking on a brief description: the relationship between the newer theology and Husserl is not the same as the relationship between the traditional account and Aristotle. The newer opinions do not abuse phenomenology in the way that the concepts of actuality and potentiality are abused in the theory of transubstantiation. On the other hand, phenomenology is a very difficult brand of philosophy to put into a few words. Be that as it may, I think it is possible to pick out one or two things from it that have influenced recent theological speculation on the eucharistic presence. First, an insistence that meaning and significance are not to be understood in isolation, but in the whole context of the world of life which we have in common. (Some of you may find resemblances here to another philosophical tradition.)
Alice and Anarchy
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.
By Law Established
Authors: Brown J. P.
Published: July 2007

When I was a youth in England, a favourite anti-Protestant argument ran: ‘We were here first.’ ‘We’ meant St Augustine of Canterbury. When I came to Wales, this would not do, for as Bede tells us, there were Christians here before St Augustine, and, when he met them, they rejected his authority. To the argument that these Christians were obviously not Roman Catholics, we used to reply: ‘Yes, they were, but cut off by barbarian Saxon invaders of England, they were unaware of Roman liturgical changes and were so attached to old Roman ways that they quarrelled with Augustine.’

I began to study the validity of this reply and hence, twenty years later, this article. My amateur thesis is based on the work of the late Rev. A. W. Wade-Evans, complemented by that of three Blackfriars contributors: Mr Donald Nicholl, Professor Finberg and, especially, Mr Eric John.

That barbarian Saxon invaders cut off Wales from the Continent rests entirely on the story of the Loss of Britain, which forms part of a work ascribed to the Welshman Gildas. Bede made important changes in this story and also wove into it independent traditions of a Saxon advent in Kent. He interpreted the whole in the light of his knowledge that the Saxons were of Germanic stock.
Joyce, Dogs, Eros, Metamorphosis, Revolution, and the Unity of Creation
Authors: O'Brien Darcy
Published: July 2007

A wise Dublin theologian recently reminded me of Whitehead’s doubts about the unity of creation. Whitehead noted that on a fine blue day he could wake up conscious that all nature was harmonious and one. But when, stepping into the street, he was attacked by a large nasty dog, nature became suddenly at least two.

Joyce hated and feared dogs, yet in Ulysses, a cur—the one which bounds like a hare, trots like a pony, trips like a buck, rears up like a bear, lopes like a calf, roots like a pig, claws like a panther, sniffs like a dog—becomes Joyce’s symbol of protean interconnections among disparate species. Simple changes of verb link animals together.

Joyce, whose word-play was sometimes unashamedly childish, chose a dog for his symbol because of what dog spells backwards. When we speak of Joyce’s sense of unity we speak of his sense of God. This is not to force Joyce back into the Church—though we should remember that, asked when exactly it was he had left the Church, Joyce replied, ‘That is for the Church to decide’. Joyce’s faith was peculiar and its motives may have been more literary than religious, but I am concerned here not with his salvation but with the idea of unity which his later works, especially Finnegans Wake, express.
Missionaries Go Home‐?
Authors: Boivin Marcel
Published: July 2007

Some time ago I met here in England a missionary priest with whom I had worked while in Tanzania. I knew him for an excellent missionary, a man who had adapted himself well to Africa and had put himself entirely at the service of his people. Yet, when I met him, he stated his firm intention of never returning to Tanzania.

Why had he so radically altered the course of his life? Was it for personal reasons—failing health—or a compelling desire to marry? No. He had come back because he could not see why he should stay in Tanzania any longer. For one thing, the ‘new theology’ had considerably weakened the motives for which he had gone to the missions in the first place: if pagans already know God, why bother to cross sea and land in order to announce God? If men can be saved without being baptized into the Church, why go on instructing catechumens and making converts? Besides, after twenty years of experience, he had reached the conclusion that conversion to the Church did not appreciably affect people’s lives—Christians seemed no better than pagans. Then, thirdly, there are enough Tanzanian priests to cater for the flock, and in the sectors of education and health, the country is sufficiently developed to look after its own people. Better leave now than wait to be expelled in five years’ time . . . our time is limited, anyway.
Workers' Control
Authors: Fleet Ken
Published: July 2007

‘In the past workmen have thought that if they could secure higher wages and better conditions they would be content. Employers have thought that if they granted these things the workers ought to be contented. Wages and conditions have improved, but the discontent and unrest have not disappeared. Many good people have come to the conclusion that working people are so unreasonable that it is useless to try to satisfy them. The fact is that the unrest is deeper than pounds, shillings and pence, necessary as they are. The root of the matter is the straining of the spirit of man to be free.’— William Straker (Northumberland miner), in evidence before the Sankey Commission, 1919.

Workers’ Control is about the struggle for a genuine system of industrial democracy. It is based on the premise, and contradiction, that while we live in a political democracy, however weak and limited that democracy may be, we certainly do not have any real economic democracy. And, furthermore, that without a swift development of democracy in industry we are not very likely to maintain much of our existing political democracy, which has already been seriously undermined by the rapid growth of huge economic empires accountable to no-one. On the other hand if we can create genuine democratic institutions in the industrial sphere we shall have a substantial base from which to attack the weaknesses of the present political framework and to make it much more responsive to human needs and aspirations.
Egner on the Eucharistic Presence
Authors: Mascall E. L.
Published: July 2007

The interesting and provocative article entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence’, which appeared in the issues of New Blackfriars for August and September under the name of G. Egner, lead one to anticipate with eagerness the forthcoming book on which it is based. In the mean time I am glad to be allowed to make some comments upon it, and if these are largely critical it is simply because there is not much point in endorsing passages (of which there are many) with which one is in entire or almost entire agreement.

Think that a consecrated host is still bread’, Egner writes on p. 354, ‘bread in precisely the way that an unconsecrated host is bread.’ If what is meant is that all the natural properties of bread remain, I fully agree, and I would emphasize that I have just said ‘natural’ and not (using words in their modern sense) ‘physical’ or ‘material’. There has been, from time to time, a lamentable tendency in Christian thought to assume that sacramental realities are concerned simply with the spiritual aspects of man’s being (his ‘soul’) and that his material aspects (his ‘body’) need only natural nutriment. In the Catechism of the Anglican Prayer Book of 1662 there is a most unfortunate statement that, in receiving Holy Communion, the benefits are ‘the strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the Body and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the Bread and Wine’, in other words that, while our souls need supernatural nutriment, natural nutriment is sufficient for our bodies.
Those who Dare not See
Authors: Murphy Richard
Published: July 2007

The journals give the quantities of wrong,Where the impatient massacre took place,How many and what sort it caused to die,But, O, what finite integers expressThe realm of malice where these facts belong?W. H. Auden

Man is conceived in aggression: too often, he dies in it.

The sexual act may be enhanced by its manner, exalted by its intent, transfigured by its context. But the instinct that impels to its performance is the aggressive instinct.

It is a primitive instinct, in the neutral sense that it strikes to the roots of our nature. In the past as in the present, it is often a necessary compulsion: the tribe of the timorous hunter was a hungry tribe.

Drives deeply rooted perpetually seek an outlet. But to find an outlet they must first be canalized. Therefore aggression seeks initially a focus, an object.

Now the world is full of objects; yet we direct aggression on our kind. It is on people rather than on things that we inflict violence. As the lover craves response from the beloved, so does the aggressor from his victim. The shattered window does not whimper; the smitten plane tree does not bleed. But the ravished woman whimpers. And the thrashing body bleeds. Thus does aggressiveness achieve its terrible catharsis.
The Old Wine is Good
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In the great effort of ‘ressourcement’ in which the Church is currently engaged, while the Dominicans have set themselves to produce a massive new edition of St Thomas, the Cistercians have undertaken a multi-volume series of new English translations of the Cistercian Fathers.

This venture is warmly to be welcomed. The Cistercian corpus is intrinsically valuable, and is, historically speaking, one of the major monuments of western monasticism; it is also peculiarly significant as revealing the immediate context for the great theological synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas.

To take this last point first. It is often forgotten just how thoroughly monastic the early Dominicans were. The De modo studendi generally ascribed to St Thomas himself is thoroughly monastic. It is curious how Victor White, for all his insight, missed the reference to the Song of Songs in the bit about the wine-cellar—a monastic commonplace. St Bernard, for instance, says that anyone who proposes to teach others must himself have been ‘introduced into the wine-cellar’, that is to say, must have had personal experience of the intoxicating force of heavenly sweetness. A book written by an anonymous Dominican novice master, and enthusiastically approved by the General Chapter of 1283, leans heavily on Bernard and William of St Thierry. A little later, St Vincent Ferrer’s On the Spiritual Life teaches the same, monastic, spirituality.
An Introduction to Byzantine Music
Authors: Wellesz Egon
Published: July 2007

I regard it as a great privilege to be allowed to speak to you about Byzantine music and to introduce a performance of some melodies, chosen from MSS of the flourishing period of Byzantine ecclesiastical music.

Members of the Hellenic Society will be aware how much we owe to the indefatigable work of my friendi and collaborator, Professor H. J. W. Tillyard, whose contributions in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and in the Annual of the British School at Athens during the last twenty-five years have gradually aroused interest in this particular field of studies, not only here, but in'all countries in which scholars are dealing with Byzantine studies. Our mutual interest in Byzantine music and ,our aim to decipher its musical signs have made us collaborators for a long time, and I am glad to say that this co-operation has proved felicitous.

Our method of investigation may be compared with that of an archaeologist, who is obliged first to clear the foundations of a more recent place before he is able to unearth the traces of an old city. We, however—if I may continue the comparison—have had the good luck to discover a whole town, completely intact, in all its splendour. Our rather hard and often discouraging task to find the-clue to the riddle of Byzantine notation was finally rewarded. We discovered that the Byzantine neumes not only helped to read the melodic line, but also contained dynamic and rhythmical signs, providing the most subtle nuances of expression. This discovery enables us to revive Byzantine melodies as they were sung in the time of the Byzantine Empire.
Why Exhibit Works of Art?
Authors: Coomaraswamy Ananda K.
Published: July 2007

It is, then, by the notion of a vocational making, as distinguished from earning one’s living by working at a job, regardless of what it may be, that the difference between the museum objects and those in the department store can be best explained. Under these conditions, which have been those of all non-industrialised societies, that is to say when each man makes one kind of thing, doing only tnat kind of work for which he is fitted by his own nature and for which he is therefore destined, Plato reminds us that ‘more will be done, and better done than in any other way.’ Under these conditions a man at work is doing what he likes best, and the pleasure that he takes in his work perfects the operation. We see the evidence of this pleasure in the Museum objects, but not in the products of chain-belt operation, which are more like those of the chain-gang than like those of men who enjoy their work. Our hankering for leisure is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.

We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can be only a hothouse and unreal culture where work itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make, we are not cultured.
A Greek on Art
Authors: Durkan John
Published: July 2007

‘What follows is ho more than some annotations on the very suggestive phrases towards a theory of art, thrown out almost casually by Aristotle in the course of his Poetics. All of these phrases must be taken together, as each may be seen to imply the other at almost every point: and taken together they help to clarify Aristotle’s position with regard to the nature of the aesthetic experience, its nature as an intellectual experience felt as physical or as a physical experience with strong intellectual overtones.

For the Platonic school the artist was a creator of myths, a pseudothinker who merely mirrored the mutable world of sense which in turn merely mirrored the world of Ideas, so that the poet’s creation was distant from life by two removes. ‘Aesthetic distance ‘for Plato meant deliberate withdrawal from the pressing and fundamental issues of life, the moral issues. We shall examine later how to put an Aristotelian complexion on the term. Aristotle, however, makes art an affair of language, and language whose adequacy can be tested by the closeness of its approximation to an experience, by its vividness in reproducing the experience for us. That is what he implies when he says that art imitates not merely the world of sense, but the world of man’s mind, his character, his emotions, his actions : and this world it presents with an almost physical vividness. He calls this artistic reproduction mimesis : ideas are suggested through physical things, just as mime (in the bodies of Greek maskers or Balinese dancers) reproduces emotion in the language of gesture. The master of mime proportions his gestures to the directives of the emotion he wants us to feel: and the lack of this proportion is evidence that the work of art is not under full artistic control.
Imagination and Society
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

A number of books dealing with the function of imaginaton in humanu life have recently appeared. Is this because external experience is becoming harsher, as the war proceeds, shattering deli cate sensibility, so that we are forced into the internal world of images? Is it escapism? Or is it not, rather, a dawning realisation that in this interior faculty of sensation lies ‘the key to the great puzzle of our mental decay and to future remedies for civilisation? Excluding, therefore, the complications of psychology and aesthetics, of reflexes and poetic experience, we may profitably return to the simple truths about the human imagination which still throw much light on present problems.

Of the works here under review, the four-page News-Letter Supplement by Philip Mairet stands high above the rest in importance and value. He shows that the imagination, which is the property not merely of men of genius and ‘vision,’ but of all men, is a faculty of ‘etherialised’ sensations. With the memory it forms a kind of treasury of all one’s external experiences, so that a man can see, hear, touch or taste things which he has experienced in the past almost as strongly as if they were physically present and acting on his nervous system. Miss Ellis-Fermor, although she claims that this faculty ‘exists in most men,’ wrongly identifies it with a poetic faculty in the sense of an essentially active and constructive power, creating new reality from the data of experience. This is only one function of the imagination which, as Mr. Mairet seems to suggest, automatically provides a background to life, so that one can interiorly retain contact with the day-to-day physical experiences even when withdrawn from them, as in sleep.
Church and Stage
Authors: Pepler Hilary
Published: July 2007

Aladdin’s lamp revealed, to its fortunate possessor, the riches of this world and many would fain have h rub of it; the lamp of Faith which has infinitely greater powers is not so popular. This is odd. The riches of that other world, where one may ‘turn but a stone to start a wing, ‘lie idle; yet we are of that other world in saecula saeculorum.

Speaking under correction (for my similes may be as inaccurate as they are inadequate) I would assert that the rays of our lamp not only pick out abstractions, ideas, reasons, and so forth, the apprehension of which adjusts the soul to the Divine Will, but shines upon material things to be seen; and, having an ‘x’ quality, upon things to be heard, felt, and even tasted. The beams of its light not only dispel the immaterial darkness so that we may see the material way, but enlarge the mind so that we enjoy the journey on it; in short, the light enables us to see God in his creation, especially at its fulness within the narrow borders of his Church.

The Church, irrespective of specifically spiritual truths, is the most amazing storehouse of material truths, the truths also of sound and sense which, as the ray shines upon them, are seen to be of the very texture of Beauty. The adventurous soul under this illumination feels as though she were inspecting the wardrobes of heaven and at last apprehending the music of the spheres.
Prayer and Politics (I)
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Nobody wants to live in a world that is blind and insane; and if that is what we are heading for, then we had better try to do something about it. Aldous Huxley makes this very plain in his latest book, Grey Eminence. One of the main points he makes there is this : that a world totally without prayer would be a world ‘totally blind and insane.’ His actual phrase is a ‘totally unmystical world ‘; but I am going to keep to the simpler and less misunderstood word ‘prayer,’ because people sometimes think that mysticism means either a tendency to swoon away at odd moments, or else a sort of permanent woolly-headedness. I am going to use the word ‘prayer,’ but I don’t mean just ‘asking for things,’ and as I am going to define it, it wili agree with what Huxley has in mind. A world totally without prayer would be a world totally blind and insane. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish ‘; and Huxley’s judgment of our own world is tjhat we are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.

Now, the first thing to notice about this is that it is not an odd or uncommon view. It is not only Huxley’s view; it is the Christian view. It is also the view of all the great religious teachers of the world ; and more than that, learned men of all kinds are telling us that this society of ours, the modern Western world, is the only civilisation in the whole of the “world's history which has not held that view and based its life upon it.
The Catholic Church in The United States of America
Authors: Orchard W. E.
Published: July 2007

The Catholic Church in the United States of America is a very impressive institution ; especially if one comes to it as a v'isitor from England. For then one usually lands on the eastern seaboard where Catholicism will be found to be at its strongest. Moreover such an one must bring to it the memory of the Church in England, where Catholicism is, by comparison, small, poor, and overshadowed by the much more impressive Establishment. Anyone who undertakes to give his impressions of America must ask for it to be remembered that it is a vast country, with not only many but with extreme diver, sities ; so that what is true enough of certain areas or strata could be off-set by something just as true, but very different, elsewhere. It is in the eastern States, and, with the exception of a few middle State cities such as Chicago, only again in California, that the Church is well represented, not to say dominant; whereas it is hardly visible in such States ‘as the two Carolinas and Georgia, for it. has made very small conquests among the coloured people, while in what is called ‘the Bible belt’ a still existing, though gradually disappearing, open hostility may be apparent.

Numbers have some meaning, and the latest census gives the professing Catholics as over twenty-two millions : perhaps nearly ten times as many as we can really count upon. Moreover, what tells even more, this record has within ten years beaten the number counted as Methodists, which was for long the leading denomination, and perhaps the most influential, at least politically, for it had much to do with enforcing Prohibition.
St. John of the Cross
Authors: Graef H. C.
Published: July 2007

The first monastery of the Carmelite Friars of St. Teresa’s Reform consisted of a small house with a porch for church, one single room for dorrnitory, a kitchen which also served as the refectory, and, a garret for choir. Its roof leaked, and in winter the snow would fall on the coarse habit of Fray Juan, who had changed his name of St. Mathias to John of the Cross, for it was the Cross with which he was in love, and the mystic teaching he gave to the Church is sealed with the sign of our salvation.

Mystics, alas, seem to be en vogue again among writers Christian and otherwise — alas, because mysticism by its very name seems to suggest mystery, dark and wonderful experiences, losing oneself in the One or the All (it does not matter which), tempting men to spiritual experiments which can only end in disaster. But mysticism is nothing of the kind, and anyone who longs for mystic experiences or who would understand Christian mystics with such notions in . his head is grievously deceived. ‘Do not seek Christ except on the Cross,’ St. John once said to one of his friars, and the Christian mystic who always seeks God through Christ, will also be found only on the Cross.

There is, perhaps, no other Saint whose life as well as whose doctrine bear the imprint of the Cross so openly, so challengingly even, as the life and the writings of St. John, whom the Church calls in the Collect of his Feast ‘Perfectae sui abnegationis et Crucis amatorem.’
Prayer and Politics (II)
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

For some people the worlds of prayer and politics stand in direct opposition ; there can be no question of passing from one world to the other; prayer means a flight from activity, and if it attempts to pass over into the world’ of activity it destroys itself. Now this is the typical Eastern view of prayer ; it is not the Christian view. Indeed in Christian eyes it is the great mistake of the East, just as a zest for action without prayer is the mistake of the West. The Christian ideal is neither action without prayer nor prayer without action, but prayer overflowing into action. And the reason why is not difficult to see. Let me put it in three points. First, the Christian holds that the world about him is a world of real things and real persons, made by God and loved by God, but fallen upon evil days. Then secondly, he believes that God so loved the world that He took upon Himself our humanity to heal it, so that all men should be won back to sanity and peace in Him. And thirdly, the prayerful Christian not only knows about God, he knows God : he has the knowledge that begets love and is begotten by love ; and because love means union of will—we “want to do the will of those we love—he is driven to work for the fulfilment of God’s desire, he cannot but try to help and serve the world ; and the more he is filled with God, the more he will love the world and spend himself serving it.
The King of Nations
Authors: Pepler Conard
Published: July 2007

The third requirement for peace laid down by His Holiness Pius XI is “ some juridical institution which shall guarantee the loyal and faithful fulfilment of conditions agreed upon and which shall in case of recognized need revise and correct them.” There can be no guarantee of loyal fulfilment of treaties and contracts without a recognition of the universal laws of right and wrong ; and these laws proceed from Christ the ‘‘Lord of all.” Peace and order therefore demand the rule of Christ the King. The influence of the Incarnate ‘Word must extend over the whole of society.

When it comes to concrete realities, does not this seem quite impracticable? Pius XI wrote: ‘‘Not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honour and obedience to Christ.” But can we visualize this “ reign of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ “ in a world where Hitlers and Mussolinis sprout like mushrooms in the night? Is the gentle spirit of the King of Kings a match for the powers of this world, which have seized dominion over society and are rapidly destroying it? How can Christ nde in the twentieth century? He does not enforce his laws with armaments and sanctions. No police force takes its orders from him and patrols the nations to see that they observe the eternal injunctions of their King. It is difficult enough to visualize its working even in a society that was wholly Christian in name, for the downward tendency of fallen nature always plays its part. Indeed many of the worst blackguards are Christian in name—Hitler and Mussolini are Christians, yet there seems to be no superior Christian power to stop their destructive arrogance Since in actual fact all men do not give their allegiance to Christ, and since there are vast tracts of modern society that definitely reject him, his ruling over the hearts of men seems a Utopian dream.
The Ridge of White Waters
Authors: Synnot Finbar
Published: July 2007

One who is outside the danger-zone, as we are in South Africa, must feel bound to apologise for asking those whose thoughts are preoccupied with the war to consider other things. When men are fighting for survival it hardly seems the time to speak of the uncertain future and lands as far away as dreams. So it is with diffidence that I write this. But I write for three reasons. First : the work of God must go on as ever among those who have no fault or part in the great quarrel, and it may be a consolation to those in the war to know that it is going on. Secondly it should introduce to their thoughts of post-war reconstruction a land that seems to be destined for construcion at a pace similar to that of the growth of the United States in the last century. Thirdly I believe that the place I am to speak of, the Gold Reef of South Africa, is a focal point in the war. When the German armies began the attack on France, the bells were rung (the German people were told) for the beginning of a battle that was to carve out for them a great empire. Empire where? Surely in Africa, where the German Empire had been. And which is the most minerally wealthy, and the most temperate part of Africa, that which the thorough German mind sees to be most capable of rapid development? Without a doubt it is South Africa. (The last German Emperor said he would never permit Britain to hold it). And the present centre of this desirable land and of its industrial possibilities is in the hills surrounding Johannesburg, called the Wit watersrand, or Ridge of White Waters.
Dafydd AP Gwilym
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

To get to Wales is a morning’s journey from London. Yet to reach the Welsh that is the language of the poets is one of the rarer English achievements. Returning anthropologists are apt to say that the poetry of the llbangi is unrivalled, but there are few who will be impressed, since Ubangi is not usually found on the English curriculum. There is perhaps a chauvinism of the mind that looks for some connection between great art and national prestige. The lesser breeds may be conceded a memorable folk-tale, but the growth of imperialism has given a quantitative, and therefore false, importance to the artist who uses the imperial language—English, French or German.

Ideally, the particularism of the artist who springs from a small nation should be absorbed by the unity of a larger tradition. But poetry is not at its best following!a flag, even a federal one. The conflict between the local language and the wider world of Europe did not in the 14th century relegate the former to a parochialism that has been the lot, for instance, of Welsh poetry since the Reformation. Welsh poetry has indeed survived, and most gloriously, but, as cut off from the fertilising contact with Europe, it has too often seemed moralising, repetitive and trivial—the inevitable results of any sort of isolation.

For Dafydd ap Gwilym, an older contemporary of Chaucer, there was no conflict between Wales and the world outside. He wrote in the traditional Welsh metres (though not usually in the strictest) which had become exactly formulated by generations of professional bards, themselves an enclosed body demanding an allegiance to canons of procedure and expression which we associate nowadays with the Law Society rather than with poets.
The Effects of Schism
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

[The following pages were written in response to a request from a group of Anglican Papalists for some account of the ‘official Roman doctrine’ regarding the practical consequences of separation from visible unity with the Catholic Church. They are here offered in the hope of providing a complement to the writer’s article on ‘Membership of the Church’ (Blackfriars, September, 1941).

As membership of the Church is an analogical concept which admits of many manners and degrees, so correspondingly is privation of that membership. In this essay we abstract altogether from such diversities and degrees of privation, and confine ourselves to the consideration of the results of factual loss of external communion with the Catholica. The question is not, therefore, ‘Who is in schism?’, but ‘What is the practical outcome of being in schism?’]
‘The High Church Tradition’
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

Readers of the June number of Blackfriars, 1941, will be familiar with Mr. Addleshaw’s inspiring call for a return to dogma and worship as the source of our social activities and as a basis for reunion. In The High Church Tradition the Vice-Chancellor of St. Chad’s College, Durham, shows his thesis to be established in the best Anglican tradition as well as in the Catholic teaching of the Church from the beginning. We would recommend this book with vigour to Catholic readers not merely to foster a sympathy for the most characteristic and Catholic Anglican viewpoint, but also that they may learn a lesson in the right approach to social action as well as to reunion We would ask Catholics to banish prejudice before opening the book and to be prepared to learn from someone who has arrived at an insight into the relation between revealed Truth and action far from apparent in many Catholic ‘activists.’
The Prayer of Jesus
Authors: Gorodetzky Nadejda
Published: July 2007

The liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church is known and appreciated by the Catholic West. Less known are its non-liturgical devotions. One such devotion, ‘the prayer of Jesus,’ has for centuries been encouraged in the Eastern Church, though, leaving the freedom of choice in spiritual ways to her faithful, she never imposed it or ascribed to it any particular merits (a practice unknown to the East). With this proviso the Prayer can be compared with the Rosary in the West; and as its roots go back to the early, undivided Church, it could be claimed by the West no less than by the East.

‘Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.’ This invocation has behind it volumes of spiritual writings and centuries of ascetico-mystical tradition. It is known as ‘the art or mental prayer.’

Many seem to have built their whole spiritual life on the prayer of Jesus, though it cannot be regarded as detached from the rest of the Christian life: Bible reading, sacramental grace, practice of the Commandments and theological virtues. In monasteries it was combined with special ascetical practices. Beginners in the use of the prayer abstained from devotional reading in order to concentrate, and the prayer replaced private psalmody in the cell, outside the services. Some kept it as a unique rule. It was repeated with beads several thousand times and was accompanied by prostrations. This acted as the first ascetical exercise of the will in obedience to the rule imposed by one’s spiritual father, teaching also control over the body.
Man the Maker
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein He placed man whom He had formed ... to, dress it and keep it.

God the Lover and Creator made us in his own image and likeness, to be lovers and creators in our turn.

He made us to know him and love him and serve him; and since we are made in his image it is by knowing and loving and making that we serve. Knowing and loving are not means to making; making is the effect, expression and fulfilment of knowing and loving. Knowing is not the means to loving; knowledge of the right kind begets love and love begets knowledge. These three together form the footprint of the Trinity in the soul : without knowledge and love there is no life, without making there is no fullness of life.
Common Ground
Authors: Walsh R. P.
Published: July 2007

‘It is not enough to refute errors; one must overcome them by understanding their grounds. To this venerable truth Bolshevism is no exception.’

The magnificent struggle the Russians have put up in the defence of their Fatherland has warmed millions of hearts to them. In one stroke Hitler, the self-styled scourge of Communism, has done more for the Soviet Union than years of intensive propaganda. From one end of this country to the other, money is pouring in for aid-to-Russia funds, books and pamphlets on the U.S.S.R. are in great demand, and hundreds of thousands wait for news from the Russian front as if it were the British Isles.

As might be expected, the Communist Party of Great Britain has seized the opportunity to interest the masses not so, much in the Russian peoples fighting for their own country as in the class-conscious proletariat fighting for an ideal and for a particular economic theory Anyone who keeps a watch on left-wing booksellers will have noted the flood of pamphlets and books and the rate at which they sell. In comparatively small towns the local communists have the means to hire the main halls frequently and to boost every meeting with plenty of large posters and other publicity matter.
The Apostolate of Christ the Worker
Authors: Spitz C. M.
Published: July 2007

The Apostolate of Christ the Worker, what does it convey? . . . It is a call going out from our Lord’s sacred humanity to all men, asking them to heed the lesson of the thirty years he spent in the carpenter’s home at Nazareth, supposed to be ‘the son of Joseph.’

This call goes out to a world which takes its values mainly from material criteria, forgetful of the interior preparation of the life of the soul, which alone is the safeguard of worth and stability. We are so easily caught by pride, the self-complacency of the ‘practising Catholic,’ self-seeking, and self-pity, or we are downtrodden, worn out through drudgery, forgetful of the divine instinct, by which every man longs for God in his heart.

A great number of the faithful continue to practise their devotions, while taking a thoroughly materialist view on all practical issues and clinging openly to a materialist mode of life. One part of their lives is ‘devotionalised,’ the other part ‘materialised,’ whereas the whole of their lives should be ‘spiritualised.’ This is the great lesson of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that he as Christ the Worker has reconciled matter and spirit in his daily working life. It is this reconciliation of which the world stands in need to-day, and towards which the Apostolate of Christ the Worker strives.
The Workers' Mass
Authors: Meath Gerard
Published: July 2007

It is becoming a convention to object to the Aposlolate of Christ the Worker because the name is misleading, or at any rate inadequate. The common answer, too, is becoming something of a recurrent theme. Yet if the answer is examined with an unbiassed mind it will be seen to be perfectly adequate. To quote from the Statutes : ‘The Apostolate of Christ the Worker ... is intended to be a means of bringing back to God the mass of the workers . . . It directs its energies towards the working masses throughout the world, irrespective of class and profession. It may be parochial, non-parochial or professional, according to the members who constitute the various branches. But though doubtless its work may take on a multitude of different aspects, it will remain, under this manifold activity, one indivisible body.’ An even more forcible answer lies in the actual work of the Apostolate, a work which rises from the principle embodied in the last sentence of the quotation, the spirit of unity and brotherhood. Among the works of the Apostolate the founder has put first the celebration of a monthly Mass. By this scheme, now become the Mass Calendar, all Catholics of any status, workers or otherwise, may share in the work and privileges of the Apostolate by offering Mass once a month for specified intentions. Significantly this monthly Mass intention is not included among the preludes to apostolic work, it is not insisted on only as a preparation, of soul, but it is the first and most important part of the actual apostolic work of the movement.
‘Grey Eminénce’
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

Where there is no vision, the people perish; ... if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep’ that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally” blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onwards, the sources of all mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dangerously advanced into the darkness.

For several centuries now, Europe has been the battleground for an attack upon the very existence of the spirit of man, though it was during and after the eighteenth century that the attack reached its height; and it is man who has been more or less consistently the loser till almost the whole of his heritage has been taken from him. The stature of Christian man was infinite—we speak of Christian doctrine and belief not practice quia omnes nos peccavimus : we betray what we believe but that does not invalidate the beliefs—because seeking first the kingdom of heaven he could find oneness with God and be tilled, and all the other things, the knowledge and love of created things and joy in them, and the whole of a happy human life, were added to him.