bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dominican Letters
Authors: Anstruther Godfrey
Published: July 2007

The story of the exile and extinction of die Dominican nuns of Dartford has been told elsewhere. It will be enough here to recall that by the intercession of the Spanish ambassador at London they were allowed by Elizabeth I to leave England as a community. They numbered nine nuns and a postulant, together with two Dominican priests. They sailed for Antwerp with the Bridgettine nuns of Sion and the Carthusians of Sheen in June 1559. They were assigned a part of a ruinous monastery occupied by a small community of Dutch Dominican nuns at Leliendael on the island of Schouwen in Zeeland.

The plight of these exiled contemplatives aroused considerable compassion. They were granted pensions of twenty crowns each by Philip II of Spain, who was the ruler of the Netherlands. The trouble was that these pensions were paid only fitfully, as the money had to be raised by local taxation and the Flemings were already heavily over-taxed to provide money for the war against the Dutch Calvinists who were devastating the country. There was also an annual donation of five hundred crowns from Pius IV, and the nuns had their share in this. There was however much delay and uncertainty in the payment of the papal alms.

The Dominican nuns were the object of special compassion because one of them, Elizabeth White, was half-sister of Bishop John Fisher whose martyrdom twenty-five years before had sent a thrill of horror through Europe that was still remembered. At least something might be done for her.
Some Recent New Testament Work
Authors: Potter Roland
Published: July 2007

This survey will consider introductory works, and then apologetic and finally theological and devotional studies.

Let us start with Professor Alfred Wikenhauser’s New Testament Introduction. The publishers are to be congratulated on this production which now becomes the best recent manual in English. The translation is made from the second, revised and enlarged German edition; and the bibliography is brought up to date by the author himself up to the spring of 1957. Thus it is good to see an adequate note on Papyrus Bodmer II and references to the principle articles thereon. Among other good points we could single out the admirable summary on form-criticism. There is a wealth of information concisely set out. Altogether a fine example of sound Catholic scholarship is now made available to a much wider public of theological students and educated layfolk.

For seemingly the same sort of public, but this time non-Catholic, and in a very different style is a new work on the Gospels by Professor Frederick Grant. Here we have the work of a well-known scholar and life-long lover of the Gospels: yet we cannot avoid the impression that this work is redolent of past rather than present and future trends of New Testament study. True, there are wise lessons. Nothing can replace method and hard personal work in the reading and close comparison of gospel with gospel. Yet we would hesitate to urge, as our author does (pp. 41-50) the marking of our texts (even in red and blue!), as if that was the only way to enter profoundly into synoptic and other problems.
Art in the Middle Ages
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

The subject is a vast one. I cannot therefore give more than a few leading ideas on the general theme of art as it was used and understood in the Middle Ages. We could hardly begin from the early Christian artists and follow the history of painting, sculpture, music, stained glass and so on through the Byzantine period right up to the Renaissance. It is an inspiring and vast history, until modern times very much overlooked, but now studied in great detail through a whole library of volumes.

I should like first to deal with the general characteristics, because so often people have supposed that the lack of realism displayed by the artist of the Middle Ages represented a lack of skill. The earlier age of Greek and Roman sculpture reached an extremity of realism to be seen in such popular figures as the Venus of Milo, every detail of the human figure, every fold of the loosely falling clothes described in stone with a finesse of observation which today is called photographic. And later as the Middle Ages passed into the Renaissance we find the same accurate observation and skilful representation, culminating in the pathetic marble of Michel Angelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s at Rome. In between these two triumphant periods the Christian artists seem to have been like children unobservant of details and incapable of any but the crudest representation. The modem man trained in an age of photography and extremes of technique tends to measure all art by the accuracy with which the painting or the statue represents the natural object it depicts.
On the Building of a Church–The Dream and the Business
Authors: Velarde Ralph
Published: July 2007

If I were given three words in which to summarize my feelings about church art today, I should choose difficult, dangerous and delicate; and I should add that the nearer we get to practice the more applicable do these words become. It is all too clear that we live today in a non-religious culture. Our current aesthetic ideas and values are secular, even when they are not actually materialistic. Thus the artist who dedicates his talents to the service of religion will inevitably have to work against the current trends and feehngs of the modern world. Then the practical, the technical and economic difficulties are, as will appear, both acute and numerous. It is also a disability that the artist who devotes himself to religion, in this country works in an intellectual vacuum. There is little philosophical or theological literature available to him, and though he is often unconscious of this serious deficiency in his equipment, it is none the less there.

So much for difficulty! But surely also, to jump a point, the practice of church art calls for delicacy and restraint, and in artists or craftsmen who are not of the first order there is a woeful lack of either. This makes the whole business exceedingly dangerous for those who engage in church art. I mean that below a certain level of competence the ‘artist’ is a menace! It is no light matter to seek to give aesthetic expression to Christian truth and mystery, which, I suppose, is what is really meant by church art.
The Romantic Conception of Life and the Marxist Conception of History
Authors: Cottier M. M.
Published: July 2007

The mystery of life has intrigued man’s mind from the beginning, as his earliest ideas and beliefs show. Some men, indeed, have been so fascinated as to make it the focal point of all human experience and to see in it the basic type of reality on which everything else is modelled or to which, at least, it is ordered. There is, of course, one field in which such notions as ‘life’, ‘soul’ and ‘organism’ have a particularly powerful attraction, namely that of political philosophy. The ideal city- state of Plato is based on the conception of society as a great organism, a living universe animated by a single soul. Nor is it by accident that in his political philosophy Hegel was so greatly influenced by Plato’s thought, even if in taking it over he modified it profoundly. And Hegel, in turn, is in this matter the principal source of Marx’s thought.

If in fact we are to grasp Marx’s thought in its original contours before these became ironed out under the successive manipulations of his chief disciples Engels, Lenin and Stalin, we must try to see it in the context of the Hegelian school which was its starting point. The main lines of Marxism were laid down in the philosophic climate of Germany—more exactly Prussia—of the years 1830-1845. Hegel himself had died in 1831, but his thought dominated succeeding thinkers who could do no more than repeat the Master’s philosophy while at the same time struggling vainly against it.
T.S Eliot and Children
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: July 2007

Mr T. S. Eliot has often shown a preoccupation with childhood, and at times this preoccupation has shown itself as a search for a lost Eden. In Burnt Norton the leaves are alive with the laughter of children:

‘Quick, said the bird, find them, find them…’

In Little Gidding there are

‘the children in the apple-treeNot known, because not looked forBut heard, half heard, in the stillnessBetween two waves of the sea.

Moreover, as the waves of the sea recall the river-god from The Dry Salvages that ‘was present in the nursery, so the apple- tree, acting as a double symbol, recalls both the expulsion from the garden and the cross that made redemption possible.

This theme has found its repetition in the plays, notably in The Family Reunion, where Harry speaks nostalgically of the hollow tree in which he played ‘Injuns’ and regrets the summerhouse that has been put in its place ‘to please the children’. For the question that confronts Harry is ‘Who am I?’—a question, in some form or other, that all Mr Eliot’s dramatis personae have to answer. In The Confidential Clerk the problem is intensified because there the question or quest of self-identification is closely allied with that of heredity and illegitimacy. In The Cocktail Party the problem is the same, though there the quest is concealed in the question.
Et Nos Mutamur in Illis
Authors: Martindale C. C.
Published: July 2007

I was kindly asked to write something for the first number of Blackfriars, in 1920, and now, to suggest what changes may have occurred during those Forty Years Gone.

When the Archduke was murdered in 1914, our insularity may have asked: ‘Who was he? Where is Sarajevo?’, even, ‘Does it really matter?’ But a member of the Austrian imperial family, when asked: ‘But you don’t think it means the end of a dynasty?’ answered: ‘It’s the end of a world’. Exaggerated? Well, in 1918 many were exclaiming: ‘Now for a new world!’ and I too, though lastingly bruised by the sorrows of that war, felt full of hope. Why? One must select.

It was obvious that there would be an immense influx of students into the depleted universities. It was agreed that Catholic societies should be reinforced, or revived, or created, to welcome Catholic arrivals. It was hard to get the better of the idea that such societies existed only to ‘safeguard’ the faith and morals of their members. Some, however, hoped for the formation of a liberally-educated Catholic mind which would make a positive impact on public opinion. ‘The International Society of Intellectual Co-operation’ soon enough existed in Geneva alongside of, not part of, the League of Nations. But this impact seemed far more likely to happen if such societies were ‘federated’, learned to meet and know one another, and become more than merely local groups of which the members just ‘talked to one another’.
The Irish in England
Authors: Fitzsimons John
Published: July 2007

From the beginning of the eighteenth century there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Ireland to Britain, so that by 1841 there were about 300,000 Irish-born men and women living in the country. Then, in 1846-7, came the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, and famine stalked the land. The immediate result was that the flow of immigrants became a flood. By 1851 the figure for England and Wales had risen to 500,000, and ten years later it had increased to over 800,000.

The vast majority of these immigrants had landed at Liverpool and then fanned out through the mining districts of south Lancashire to the cotton towns of east Lancashire, on to the woollen mills of Yorkshire, south to the industrial Midlands and London, or north to the coalfields on the north-cast coast and Tyneside. At first they presented problems not unlike those of the Diaspora in Germany at the present day. They arrived in areas where there was little or no provision for Catholic worship, where the Catholics (what few of them remained) were emerging from three centuries in the catacombs, and where there was a great dearth of clergy. In the early days many thousands were lost to the faith due to their lack of opportunity to practise. For example, it has been estimated that had there been sufficient clergy the population of industrial Yorkshire would have been more than half Catholic instead of less than the third that it is at present.
Oxford Philosophy
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

Mr Gellner’s now celebrated little book is an attack on a philosophical school, centred in Oxford, called ‘linguistic philosophy’; in assessing it we have therefore to ask, ‘Is there such a school?’ The idea that there is, of course, is not original to Gellner. Professor Flew, for example, has long proclaimed the existence of such a school, membership of which apparently depends upon nomination by Professor Flew. Now it is certainly the case that there was before the war an identifiable and self-conscious group of révoltés among the professional philosophers at Oxford: men like Austin, Ayer and Ryle, who had been variously influenced by Moore, the Logical Positivists and Wittgenstein, and who formed a common front against Joseph and Prichard. Their cohesion derived from the contemporary Oxford situation: they could not even then be said by themselves to form a school against any wider background than that of Oxford. This group was so successful that after the war it captured almost all the philosophical posts in the University. Victory attained, its cohesion fell away; apart from certain publicists like Flew, philosophers at Oxford ceased to think of themselves as belonging to any definite group or party. This may, of course, be an illusion, or, as Gellner appears to think, a deliberate pretence: we have still to ask whether there are any tenets to which all the members of this ‘school’, and only they, subscribe.

Although Ayer was the only card-carrying member, the predominant influence on the group before the war was the Logical Positivist movement.
Religion and the Anthropologists
Authors: Evans‐Pritchard E. E.
Published: July 2007

When I was considering what subject to treat in the Aquinas Lecture, which you had so kindly invited me to deliver, in the state of near-despair one reaches on such occasions I went to an Oxford bookshop where a selection of volumes may be bought for sixpence each and bought one at random in the hope that I might derive some guidance from it. The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) was an at-one-time popular work of fiction by a socialist republican, Eliza Lynn Linton, though it was published anonymously. It is a story of Jesus returning to earth in mid-nineteenth-century England and of how he acted in the situation then confronting him. At the end of the book the authoress says that ‘if sociology is a scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised not only in vain, but against unchangeable Law’. This gave me an idea for my address for, though she was speaking of the doctrines of Political Economy current at that time and as she understood them, it appeared to me that it might be of interest to you were I to discuss the attitude of sociologists, and social anthropologists in particular, towards religious faith and practice. It has been for the most part bleakly hostile.

It is scarcely possible to discuss social science in this country without some reference to its French background. We may regard it, if only for convenience, as beginning with Montesquieu in his great book L'Esprit des Lois (1748). In it he set out to discover the laws of social life, the necessary conditions of its existence in its various forms, but he did not, in my opinion, think of these laws in a deterministic or mechanical sense.
Not All That Anomalous
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Moral indignation is no substitute for moral information, not least on the subject of homosexuality, and therefore two recent books are recommended. The first, which is free from preoccupations with the circumstances of criminal proceedings or clinical treatment, is an examination of the family background, social behaviour, and activities of one hundred and twenty-seven cases; that they amount to a representative sample is not claimed, yet they do help to dispose of some popular misconceptions, for instance, that male homosexuality spells effeminacy or that seduction has any appreciable effect on the perpetuation or development of the condition. The second is a revised edition of a summary account of the modern evidence, mainly anthropological, biological, and physiological, together with suggestions for treatment.

Yet among the items in the bibliographies, 134 and 203 respectively, only two are directly concerned with morals, and through no fault of the authors. Have, then, the English theologians failed to fill a gap which affects perhaps one Englishman in every twenty-five? Or have they good reason?

Let us reflect that however much a misfit a homosexual may appear to some systems of reference, to an interior theology devoted to the growth of friendship with God and our neighbour he is not a queer or an odd man out, but one with the rest of us, heir to the same original sin and the same promise, beset by temptations and fortified by the graces which arc fundamentally the same for him and for us.
What is a Displaced Person?
Authors: Pire Dominique
Published: July 2007

For three years when I asked myself the question, I thought I knew the answer. A D.P. was a human being who had lost his country, and all that was needed to stop his being one was to give him another. But during those three years I decided myself, and ten years of subsequent experience have confirmed the lesson of my initial error: you cannot give a man a new country. All you can do is just make it possible for him to dream free from care of the old.

The D.P., this man uprooted from his native soil, torn from his social setting, and cowed by want and the kind of regulation ill- luck that attends all state-aid, has been thrust into an unreal world. He has been taken out of his own time and projected into this superneolithic present which we may call ‘The Age of Hutments’, and he begins to acquire a special sort of mentality. His personality disintegrates to a larger or smaller degree, according to his level of intelligence and strength of will, and becomes merged in the mentality common to all D.P.s.

A dull new world takes shape, a realm of shadows. For three years I deceived myself; I mistook the refugee for a pauper. But ‘poverty’ is not the word to describe his misfortune, the refugee is primarily someone who has been uprooted and who drifts between the East from which he has fled and the West which very often will not admit him unless he has retained his muscular strength.
Morality and Social Progress
Authors: Hamilton Bernice
Published: July 2007

The Eddington Memorial Lectures were founded to foster interest in the relationship of the natural sciences to religion or ethics, with the hope of finding some common basis between different methods of seeking truth. In particular, as Professor Polanyi says at the beginning of this year’s lecture, the founders were preoccupied with the tardiness of moral improvement as compared with the swift advances of science; this aspect, neglected by his predecessors, he proposes to examine. But in the first place he doubts the assumptions which lie behind the ‘problem’, for, he writes:

Never in the history of mankind has the hunger for brotherhood and righteousness exercised so much power over the minds of men as today. The past two centuries have not been an age of moral weakness; but have, on the contrary, seen an outbreak of moral fervour which has achieved numberless humanitarian reforms and improved modern society beyond the boldest thought of earlier centuries.

He is not, in fact, here saying that moral improvement does or does not lag behind the advances of science, but that the problem with which we should concern ourselves is something quite different.

With the subject to be discussed, and the first stage in Polanyi’s answer laid before us, we can already see some of the difficulties which lurk within the lecture, although others, scarcely less important, will arise as the arguments develop. Leaving aside for the moment Polanyi’s criticism of the problem, we may doubt its validity for more fundamental reasons.
Firsts and Seconds in Sex
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

Research scientists and manufacturing chemists lighten many of the burdens of existence, yet sometimes, as when they produce the means for individuals to make love and nothing more, they shift them from body to soul. Only a pill; all the same the weight may prove unsupportable when, leaving behind the world which has been given to us, we launch into another of our own making. The first is a harsh school, exacting recognition of our subordinate place in the scheme of things and acknowledgment of the established rules. Still there are compensations: we can know where we are and where to lay the blame, we can pit ourselves against resistance, we may be broken but at least we have belonged, and to something that was not us. Whereas if we rebel against our limits and adventure according to our merely personal wants, we lose all pattern, for each person as such is an original; we grasp for one shadow after another projected from ourselves, yet, being what we are, we keep our guilt-sense, no longer, however, with an object to prevent it turning morbid. It is as though we have strained to become pure persons and have ceased to be human beings, as though we have set ourselves the goal of absolute freedom and, having reached it, found ourselves empty.

I

Strip ideas and you simplify the opposition between the anarchism which stirs at the root of personality and the subjection to law which is the consequence of having been born into human nature as a specific kind of thing.
Hinduism and Christianity in India
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

It is a remarkable fact that the Church has been established in India for over fifteen hundred years and has had for the most part everything in its favour, and yet in all this time hardly one in a hundred of the people has been converted to the Christian faith. The position is, indeed, worse even than this figure would suggest, as the vast majority of Christians are concentrated in a few very small areas and in the greater part of India the mass of the people remains today untouched except in a very general way by the Christian faith. It is necessary to go even farther than this and to say that for the immense majority of the Indian people Christianity still appears as a foreign religion imported from the West and the soul of India remains obstinately attached to its ancient religion. It is not simply a matter of ignorance. This may have been true in the past, but in recent times there has been a remarkable revival of Hinduism, which is more or less consciously opposed to Christianity, and the educated Hindu today regards his religion as definitely superior to Christianity. These facts, which can scarcely be questioned, suggest that there has been something wrong with the way in which the Gospel has been presented in India (and the same remark would apply to all the Far East) and especially in the relation which has been established between Christianity and Hinduism.
The Vatican Dogma
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

A hundred years ago there were four fairly well defined attitudes in the Catholic Church to the question of the papal prerogatives, and to infallibility in particular. First of all there was the Gallican position. Gallicanism, though still strong, had been on the wane in France since the revolution. It may be described—perhaps not quite fairly—as the idea of a constitutional Church in the interests of an absolute monarch. It was really the residue of the late medieval conciliar theory propounded at the Councils of Constance (1415-18) and Basle (1431), carried over into the post-renaissance Europe of absolute rulers. It is conveniently summarized in the four Gallican articles drawn up in 1682 and which (1) reject the pope’s power of deposing princes and of interfering in civil affairs; (2) assert the validity of the decrees of Constance (never ratified by any pope) on the authority of general councils over the pope; (3) declare that the exercise of papal authority is to be regulated by the canons, and in France by the customs of the Gallican Church; and (4) declare that in matters of faith and morals, while the pope has the chief part, his judgments are not irreformable of themselves, but only if ratified by the consent of the Church.

At the Vatican Council there was only one full-blooded Gallican bishop present, Maret, and he submitted to the Council’s definitions.

The contrary position to Gallicanism was the Ultramontane. It held to the papal, as opposed to the conciliar, view of papal authority.
Holy Writ and Holy Church
Authors: Congar Yves M‐J.
Published: July 2007

For several years now one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has been the problem of Tradition. The kernel of this problem consists in the relations between Scripture and Tradition and between Scripture and the Church. Several important studies have been published on this theme, and it is undeniable that continental Protestantism has become sympathetic to some notion of tradition. At the same time it must be admitted that Protestant theologians today are no more able than was even so conciliating a figure as Melanchthon at the period of the Reformation to get over the notion of a separation between Scripture and Church, a separation which inevitably leads to the subordination of a purely human Church to a tradition regarded as divine, external and superior to this Church.

However, there have been some excellent studies in this field from the Catholic side which have helped to clear the ground of certain false problems and inadequate notions. Professor J. R. Geiselmann and E. Ortigues have put us all in their debt by their efforts to lay bare the precise meaning of the Tridentine decrees. The Acta of the Council of Trent remain indeed a useful and fascinating quarry for the theologian of today. It is, for example, of the greatest importance for the advance both of Catholic theology itself and of the ecumenical dialogue to learn that the Fathers of the Council deliberately omitted a proposed text according to which Revelation was to be found partly in Scripture and partly in unwritten apostolic traditions.
The Language of a Mission
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

The liturgical congress, held at Uden near Nijmegen in Holland last September, was in a sense a successor to those which were held in recent years at Lugano and Assisi, and one may hope that it will be of no less importance in the history of the Church. By turning attention to the problems of the Liturgy in the missions its scope was in one sense more restricted, but in another sense it was much enlarged. There is, on the one hand, more scope and freedom for the development of the liturgy in the missions where the field is less trammelled by the past than in Europe, and on the other hand, the problems of the liturgy in the missions have an even greater urgency. This was brought out by Bishop Blomjous of Tanganyika in his opening address, when he showed how the Church has reached a moment of crisis in the missions. When we speak of the ‘missions’, we are speaking of the new world of Asia and Africa which is coming into being at the present time and which is undergoing a radical transformation year by year. The problem of the liturgy in the missions is nothing less than the problem of the Church in the face of this new world.

The Congress was admirably representative of this new world. It was presided over by Cardinal Gracias and included about thirty bishops and thirty priests from different parts of Asia and Africa, besides experts on the liturgy from all parts of Europe and America.
Gnosticism and Christianity
Authors: Bourke Joseph
Published: July 2007

It was in 1945 or 1946 that a group of Egyptian peasants, digging on the site of an early Christian cemetery near the village of Nag-Hammadi, unearthed an urn containing thirteen manuscripts. The contents of this urn have subsequently proved to be of epoch-making importance for the study of the New Testament and of early Church history.

In those early stages a few leaves of the papyrus were unfortunately burned. But the collection as we have it today comprises between eight hundred and one thousand papyrus leaves, most of them in remarkably good condition. On examination these have proved to constitute a library of forty-nine treatises written in Coptic about the fourth century a.d., and in several different dialects. It is clear that so fine a library must be attributed to the work of many different copyists, whose work extends over a period of more than a century. This in turn suggests that a religious community flourished at Nag-Hammadi some time in the course of the fourth century, and from the contents of the manuscripts it is obvious that its members must have been adherents of the dangerous and widespread heresy which extends, in manifold terms, from the second to the eighth centuries a.d., and which is nowadays known as Gnosticism.

The manuscripts found their way to Cairo in three separate lots. One of them, now entitled the ‘Jung Codex’, was illegally smuggled out of Egypt by a Belgian antiquarian, bought in America, and given to Dr Jung as an eightieth birthday present.
The Impact of Aristotle on Medieval Thought
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: July 2007

As a philosopher St Thomas had very little to say that was his own, and I suspect he would have looked askance at anyone who might have suggested that he was an original philosopher. If you try the experiment of dipping into one of his commentaries on Aristotle, I think you will get a vivid illustration of what I have in mind. Take any of his commentaries—on the Metaphysics or the Ethics, the de Anima or the logical works—open it at random, and what you will find is something like this: first you will have reproduced the Latin version which he used; this will normally be the word-by-word translation prepared by William of Moerbeke. This is practically incomprehensible, unless you go through the labour of turning it back into Greek first. Then the commentary. The standard pattern of this is to begin by relating the passage to be considered in each particular lecture to what has gone before: ‘having dealt with so-and-so, the Philosopher now discusses . . .’. The problem under discussion is stated, the reason why it is necessary to discuss this problem and discuss it at this stage; then you have the steps in the argument distinguished and their logical structure displayed, the various reasons given by Aristotle for holding a view tabulated, and so on. Within each of the closely mapped out divisions the text of Aristotle is paraphrased, usually in a slightly extended form. Criticism or disagreement is almost totally absent; the nearest we get to that is in the occasional hints in the interpretations adopted by St Thomas, the shifts of emphasis, the unobtrusive play of overtones.
The African in Transition
Authors: Duggan A. J.
Published: July 2007

In these days, when it is fashionable to pay lip-service to what everyone calls democracy, one hears a good deal of verbal by-play with Rousseau’s phrase ‘All men are born equal’. No greater fallacy than that has ever been reiterated with more determined disregard of obvious truth. No matter how bitter it is, the fact remains that none of us has been born equal to anyone. Individually, we all enter and remain in this world either richer or poorer, cleverer or duller, stronger or weaker, quicker or slower, than everyone with whom we come into contact in our daily lives. This inequality of endowment stares us in the face even more conspicuously when we consider nationalities than it does on the plane of purely personal relationships. And nowhere in the international sphere does it stand out more clearly than when white men and black stand side by side amid the cataclysmic changes now taking place in Africa.

Today we live in an era when, throughout that continent, hitherto unsophisticated peoples are forming themselves into national organizations, which, although rudimentary and experimental by Western standards, will ultimately exert a very considerable influence upon our own national interests by their participation and possibly their opposition, vote for vote, in the great council chambers of the world.

It is therefore necessary for us to know something of the physical and mental heritage of African peoples in general, that our future relations with them, whether in commerce, in politics, in academics or in the mission field, may be conducted at least with understanding, if not with agreement.
Father William Houghton, O.P.: 1736–1823
Authors: Gumbley Walter
Published: July 2007

All but five of Father Houghton’s sixty-three years of priesthood were spent in the care of a small and scattered missionary centre in the unobtrusive way of life forced on priests by the still-active penal code; a seclusion however that undoubtedly made possible the literary activity which was a marked characteristic of the Catholic clergy in the half-century preceding the Act of Emancipation. On literary grounds more than a score of Father Houghton’s clerical contemporaries have been included with him in the Dictionary of National Biography, whilst at least an equal number appear in Gillow’s extensive Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics. When we reflect that the total number of priests in England during Houghton’s life never exceeded four hundred, it can be seen that the percentage of those who wrote was very high. Moreover, there must have been many studious priests who from an excusable diffidence never published what they wrote. One remembers that even so industrious a scholar as the eminent historian Père Mandonnet admitted his dislike of putting pen to paper, leaving on his desk when he died a note with these words: ‘Lire, joie; penser, délices; écrire, supplice’.

Father Houghton was born in 1736 in the hundred of West Derby, Lancashire, where his family, a branch of the Catholic family of Hoghton Tower, near Preston, had lived for some generations. In baptism he received the names of William and Narcissus, the second one for its classical flavour being much to his taste in later life and he kept it in constant use.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Evans Illtud
Published: July 2007

The monumental tradition of stained glass has so closely tied its creator to the architect that as an art of its own, with a unique territory for the imagination to explore, it is as yet scarcely known. But things are changing, and the Arts Council’s travelling exhibition of modern stained glass (which will visit most of the principal cities of England and Wales during 1961) is an encouraging sign of the emergence of an independent art, freed from the near-monopoly of the commercial firms who up to now alone had the resources for its complex and expensive manufacture. And the recent exhibition at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London of the work of Patrick Reyntiens revealed an artist who combines a superb mastery of the technical problems of this most exacting of crafts with a rich and original imagination.

The stained glass artist can rarely know the freedom the painter or the sculptor enjoys. His work is almost always commissioned, usually by clergy, and he is often expected to conform to structural patterns as well as to conventions of design. His failures are the most permanent of all, as a glance at almost any church built during the last hundred years or so will clearly prove. So vigorous a discipline is not necessarily a limitation, and the windows of Chartres or Fairford are there to declare it. Since the war, intelligent commissions (not, alas, from any Catholic source) have enabled artists such as John Piper to design windows on the heroic scale—as in the baptistery of Coventry Cathedral and in the chapel of Eton College.
Return to the Resurrection
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

St Paul said that Christ was ‘delivered up for our sins and raised again for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25); and the whole point and purpose of Fr Durrwell’s book is to bring out as clearly as possible, in the full context of New Testament teaching, the meaning of the second half of that sentence: to show how we are saved by the Resurrection. It was a bold thing to attempt on such a scale. The Resurrection of our Lord is the central fact of the New Testament, both as historical narrative and as a doctrinal message, and to explore its mysterious meaning is a task calling for the finest theological intelligence as well as a consummate skill in the interpretation of some extremely difficult texts. Let us say at the outset that Fr Durrwell shows himself not unequal to the task. One may differ from him in detail or remain unconvinced by this or that particular analysis, but there is no denying that his work as a whole is a masterpiece; a deeply pondered, beautifully constructed doctrinal synthesis, full of the light and sweetness of a noble intelligence entirely dedicated to the noblest of subject matters. It is a strikingly original book and its main thesis certainly calls for further sifting and elucidation. A work of purely biblical theology, it remains, as Fr Charles Davis says in his interesting Introduction, ‘within the world of biblical ideas and expressions.’ But it cannot and will not be left there; it is far too powerful a work not to have a profound effect on speculative theology in the Church for many years to come.
Newman: Theologian of the Word in Christian Life
Authors: Davis H. Francis
Published: July 2007

Theology in its normal sense is the science of God’s word. God’s word may be considered in the abstract as the revealed truth about God, in so far as this is expressible in human language. Alternatively it may be considered in the concrete as it lives and grows in individual human minds and hearts. Until the nineteenth century litde attempt had been made to describe and reflect upon the word of God in this latter sense. It would have been dismissed as unscientific. But scientific theology in its normal sense had existed for many centuries. The technical terms used in scientific theology were not, of course, revealed to us from heaven. Part of the achievement of the Christian theologian was to invent technical symbols to express what had been given to the Church untechnically in the inspired literature of the Scriptures and in the living tradition of the Church. Man’s capacity for scientific thought is one of his greatest gifts, and it was inevitable that he should apply it to the study of the greatest of all subjects, the revealed word of God. Christian man’s first attempts at theology came in the very beginnings of the patristic age. The need for clear-cut terms and arguments as a safeguard against heresy led to a great increase of theology during the golden age of patristics, the fourth and fifth centuries. But, contrasted with later theology, all this early period was a period of the literary expression of Christian life and tradition rather than of its systematic exposition and defence.
Trade unions and individual liberties
Authors: Jackson J. M.
Published: July 2007

From time to time, we read in the Press of attempts by trade unions to enforce a so-called closed shop. More often than not, it is really a union shop that is being sought, whereby all workers in an establishment are required to join the appropriate trade union: a closed shop implies that only workers who already belong to the union can be considered for engagement in the first place. The subject is one which arouses strong feelings on both sides. On the one side, it is regarded as a natural right of the trade unions, and, on the other, as a gross interference with the liberties of the individual citizen. The argument is not confined to Britain. It has long been a subject of debate in the United States, where the closed shop is illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act, but the union shop is permitted by Federal law, though it may be banned by State law. On several occasions, attempts have been made to introduce ‘right to work’ laws which would ban the union shop in the State concerned. For the most part, Catholics have been prominent in their opposition to these moves to ban the union shop, and have shown greater unity on this issue than have English Catholics. The subject is clearly an important one, and calls for careful and dispassionate study in the light of moral principles and the realities of the world in which we are living.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Butcher Maryvonne
Published: July 2007

There is little doubt that the most ok cinematic name in England to-day is that of Michelangelo Antonioni; critics back from Cannes brought reports of I’Avventura as voluminous as they were contradictory, and when last autumn it finally came to London—briefly at the South Bank Festival and then for an extended commercial run—the wave of interest and praise gathered momentum. In January and February of this year the National Film Theatre, sensibly cashing in on a vogue which it had done much to initiate, has been running an Antonioni season, and at the time of writing we have been able to see all his work except La Notte, the latest, which may not be available in time for this series.

It is, however, quite possible to come to some general conclusions about the work of this enigmatic director from the films shown already and, judging from I’Avventura, it seems unlikely in any case that the new picture is going to be radically different from the rest. Antonioni would never, I think, be a director with whom I would feel instinctively at home; his world is not mine, nor his obsessions; the people in whom he is interested are not those whose fives I should often feel drawn to study minutely. But his seeing eye, his concentration of observation, his obvious intellectual and sensuous delight in image and composition and movement compel one’s attentive admiration. In other words, though I often do not agree with what he has chosen to say, I would defend to the death his fashion of saying it.
Family Limitation
Authors: Dominian J.
Published: July 2007

Within a very short time of entering the practice of medicine most Catholic doctors realize that by far the biggest single issue facing them in the arena of moral and professional responsibility is contraception. What may still be for us a controversial issue is a settled matter for our non-Catholic colleagues and almost a universal practice for our patients. As a community, Catholics have the tendency to protect themselves from disagreeable facts either by denying their existence or entertaining the most naive notions about them. This is an outlook which hitherto has spelled disaster in our handling of this problem.

We can begin a useful reassessment by examining the size of this problem. One of the studies of the Royal Commission on Population in 1949 was devoted to the subject of family limitation. They took a representative sample of married women, covering all parts of the country and the years of marriage from 1900 to 1947. The following facts emerge. Before 1910, the percentage of women who used birth control was 15%; in the thirties it had risen to a figure of 66%. I would go further than this and suggest for practical purposes we have to accept to-day the fact that almost all childbearing couples at some time resort to some form of birth control. The only reasons for its exclusion in marital life appear to be religious opposition, sheer ignorance and, rarely, aesthetic considerations. It is a practice accepted as sensible and practical, and to entertain an alternative demands in itself an explanation and evidence of sanity from the person who proposes such a contrary view.
Heard and Seen
Authors: Cornford Christopher
Published: July 2007

By way of respite from their indefatigable re-fighting of the battles of 1939-45 (I take it that by about 1971 we shall be getting down to ‘I Was Rommel’s Batman’s Uncle,’ No. 368 in the series Now It Can Be Told, And Just You Try And Stop Us Telling It) the editors of the Sunday Times occasionally suborn some eminent personage to act as guide to the British middle classes in a brief tour round quite another battlefield—admittedly a peripheral one and of no strategic importance—that of painting. Sometimes, I suspect, they don’t get quite what they bargained for. Thus Professor Lawrence Gowing, asked to provide some useful tips on sketching for the amateur, offered a ruminative, elliptical, and, to his professional colleagues, fascinating, account of his own profound researches and procedures in the landscape art. Thus Victor Pasmore, of whom it had perhaps been hoped that he would mitigate the austerities of pure abstraction with a little apologetic honey, came up with a difficult, uncompromising and disdainful manifesto with as little of the glad-hander about it as a curled-up hedgehog.

But when Sir Kenneth Clark agreed to contribute a series of articles on important pictures of his own choosing, I think everyone must have been delighted with the result. He could not be faulted on matters of fact by the art-historians, being himself an illustrious elder of their tribe. The generality of painters might dissent in detail from his judgments, but they could not dismiss or deride them, based as they are on scrutiny of the works at least as long and acute as any which they themselves would be capable of, and on a far wider frame of historical and cultural reference.
Authority and Radicalism
Authors: Coulson John
Published: July 2007

This is not a statement of a political kind: a manifesto for yet another Catholic Guild; nor is it what Field Marshal Montgomery would call an excuse for belly-aching. It is rather an agenda for further study—a plea for a new attitude of mind. I say attitude of mind, because my own experience of Catholics has been that in this country they still tend to look at social questions differently from their fellow Christians—as aliens, not as members by birth of a society which ‘belongs’ to the members of the other denominations, in their capacity as citizens. This attitude is expressed in terms of keeping oneself to oneself, or the halfresentful assumption of a superiority which is not felt: ‘They have the society, but we have authority’.

But as far as social questions go, what does this authority amount to? A few half-remembered phrases from St Thomas, a couple of encyclicals? If so, this is not authority, but mere slogan-thinking.

I have also met Catholics who say that social problems do not really exist as such. The only problems are theological. It is all a question of applying the answers already available in the deposit (that is, I think the term) of the faith. Thus an exact study of social questions is unnecessary, especially as the Welfare State has eliminated poverty, starvation, bad housing, and all the normal objects of Christian charity.