bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Monarchy of Britain
Authors: Edwards T. Charles
Published: July 2007

The achievement of which St David has become the symbol and patron stands out like a mountain massif on a starlit night. The detail is obscure, but the patient work of historians, geographers, archaeologists, philologists and the experts in place-names, church dedications and folk-lore are gradually having their effect. The main peaks are already clear and unmistakable. Furthermore, this achievement, as we consider it, serves to emphasise that truth on which wisdom has always insisted—the futility of paying attention to the ignis fatuus of immediate success and failure. First, however, the setting must be grasped. By the year 400 Stilicho had pacified and reorganised Britain; he then withdrew the regular legionary troops. The problem of the western hill-country, much of which had been occupied by Goidelic pirates and settlers, was left, it would appear, to Cunedda, who probably held the office of the Dux Britanniarum. He was, it would seem, the commander of a corps of foederati who had been settled beyond the Wall of Hadrian. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather all bore Roman names. His grandfather, Paternus, was surnamed Bais rudd, of the Red tunic, which denoted probably the official purple of Rome; and it has been suggested that his great-grandfather, Tacitus, had been a protege of Constantine the Great. The mixture of Celtic and Roman names appears among his sons.

Cunedda’s expedition was a success. In conjunction, probably, with the Ordovices of Powys, he and his sons expelled the Goidels from the greater part of Wales.
The Wall of Brass
Authors: Wynne R. O. F.
Published: July 2007

‘Iron Curtain’ is a term well understood today, but long I before that had ever been heard of, I had learnt the meaning of the Wall of Brass. It was in the course of a, conversation with a friend—a Welshman and a countryman. He was speaking of the squire of a certain neighbourhood not far from his own home. A man who had been popular with his tenants at a time when certain others of his class in Wales decidedly had not. But he had never mastered the Welsh tongue although he was of Welsh stock and it had been the language of his forbears. ‘And do you know’, said my informant, ‘the language was like a wall of brass between him and his neighbours ‘.

Mr Saunders Lewis, in one of his collected essays, ‘Tragedy’, refers to a similar instance and one having peculiar pathos. It concerns George Powell of Nanteos, the scion of an old Welsh family that had become anglicised by the middle of last century as had so many others. This young man’s natural tastes were literary and artistic and all round him there grew and throve a living culture, soon to break forth into the Welsh literary renaissance initiated by Sir John Morris Jones and carried forward into our own day. Yet of that life and that culture he knew nothing.
A French Revival
Authors: Shirley M.
Published: July 2007

The gradual evolution of the imagery of abstract art and the corresponding growth in familiarity with its language have failed entirely to dispel criticism. The general acceptance that usually follows an established artistic convention has not been accorded this form of art and the critics of modern painting remain intractable in their attitude. We need only to mention briefly the already well known objections. They fall mainly into two categories which are diametrically opposed to one another. We are told in the first place that abstract art is based upon a series of symbols conceived in a dispassionately intellectual manner and placed upon the canvas with scientific severity. But then conversely others say that it receives its impetus from an unfettered outburst of emotionalism.

Each of these generalisations results from the limited sagacity of the critic. The former is actuated by an inability to enjoy and enter into communion with the spirit of a new iconography. The persistent dissipation of his faculties through a surfeit of descriptive painting finally deprives him of intellectual clarity, so that when confronted with the uncompromising formalities of a Braque, he is filled with an immediate desire for the emotive evocations of lesser romantic art.

But where is all this leading; what are these people trying to say? The underlying plea is for a human art, and eventually, although sadly unrecognised, a religious art, the demand is unconsciously being formulated for an idiom capable of re-integrating the complexities of life and transcribing them into a visual form.
A Catholic Dilemma?
Authors: Scally James
Published: July 2007

That Catholic social teaching has made but little impact on the public life of this country is a fact too well known to require emphasis here. We are now well accustomed to hear public speakers bewail Catholic apathy from cur platforms. Apathy is, however, but a partial explanation of the failure of the Church’s social teaching to make a deep impression even upon British Catholics and it is urgent that, instead of continuously bewailing this state of affairs, our writers and lecturers should make diligent inquiry as to the causes.

In so far as making an endeavour to shape the future social order of this country is concerned, it is, of course, quite true to assert that Catholics, as a whole, have shown little but indifference. But it is also true that this indifference is by no means confined to Catholics. Communist infiltration in Great Britain and, indeed, throughout the world (save where Communism has been imposed by armed force) has been made possible only by the neglect of the ordinary man to carry out his duty as a citizen in a democratic state.

This widespread indifference lies not so much in lack of interest (for the ordinary man of reasonable intelligence is keenly interested in discussion of at least those social problems which he thinks he can easily grasp) as in lack of energy—energy to acquire the necessary knowledge, energy to think out conclusions and energy to enter public life and act upon such conclusions. This lack of intellectual energy is, I think, a product of our industrial system, which, in the interests of increased production, has removed all pleasure from work, often leaving undiluted drudgery.
Racial Policies in South Africa
Authors: Magrath Oswin
Published: July 2007

Since wartime days South Africa has been faced, both at home and abroad, with a rising tide of feeling and opinion which demands a solution to its problems of population groups, European, African, Cape Coloured and Indian, on lines in accordance with justice and Christianity. It is no longer possible to look upon the Non-White peoples as perpetually or indefinitely condemned to be servants and labourers; and such views, common in the press ten years ago, are now rarely seen. All parties realise that only a policy that gives full justice and opportunity will have any hope of success. Hence the rival policies, which formerly tended to don the appearances of Liberal and Repressionist, now meet on grounds of fairness and practicability. Each claims to be the only policy which combines justice to all groups with practical feasibility; while all, in greater or lesser degree, claim to represent Christian principles.

Leaving aside, therefore, political policies of parties, which aim largely at political or commercial ends and which do not face the problem squarely, it will be useful to make a short survey of the theoretical policies at present being advocated in the Union. They may be classed as four in number: Apartheid or Separation, Parallelism, Trusteeship, and Assimilation.
Thomas Hardy & The Rural Tradition
Authors: Martin E. W.
Published: July 2007

If it is true that we may be on the edge of a renaissance of heroic humanism, then it should also be the proper time to observe that, in a cultural sense, the word tradition has always carried within itself the weight of two inseparable meanings. The first has a bearing upon all that has been attempted in the unifying of mankind, the breaking down of barriers and the bridging of gulfs; it is international and universal in application; the second meaning relates to the regional and rural tradition which is the source of cultural variety. Culture, like society, is made up of many parts each contributing to the total effect, and Marx’s definition that history is nothing but the progressive transformation of human nature is a reminder of the fact that the transformation which is taking place now is away from all the limitations of nationality towards a world-view which recognises the need for co-operation and the fact of inter-dependence.

If only because of the social influences which bear upon creative artists at the present time, they stand in danger of being carried away on abstract themes which could lead them to forget the homely and common-place factors which shaped them as men. Certainly there are large numbers of writers who must see things whole and who will take little account of parts; yet the pattern of world-culture is made up of regional and national cultures and it is safe to say that the narrower meaning of tradition will retain its attraction for those who are by training and natural aptitude inclined towards it.
Catholic Sociology
Authors: Riley J. A.
Published: July 2007

Catholic sociology may perhaps best be described as the mind of the Church on social questions. It is the application to social life (man in society) of the universal concepts of the faith. This is the first thing to be grasped about Catholic sociology, that it is essentially an inference from Catholic theology, and such as could be made therefore by anyone having a perfect knowledge of the faith.

As a matter of fact, however, the social implications of Catholic theology have been worked out at a very high level, so that there is in existence today a code of social principles which may be correctly described as the authoritative teaching of the Church on social questions. The corpus or main body of such teaching is to be found in various Papal encyclicals from the time of Leo XIII.

The nature and scope of Catholic sociology are well indicated in the following passage from Quadragesimo Anno in which Pope Pius XI asserts the right of the Church to pontificate on social questions:

We must lay down the principle long since clearly established by Leo XIII, that it is Our right and Our duty to deal authoritatively with social and economic problems. It is not, of course, the office of the Church to lead men to transient and perishable happiness only, but to that which is eternal; indeed the Church believes that it would be wrong for her to interfere without just cause in such earthly concerns. But she never can relinquish her God-given task of interposing her authority, not indeed in matters of technique, for which she has neither the equipment nor the mission, but in all those that fa11 under the moral law. With regard to these, the deposit of truth entrusted to Us by God, and Our weighty office of declaring, interpreting and urging, in season and out of season, the entire moral law, demand that both the social order and economic life be brought within Our supreme jurisdiction.
The Christian and the World
Authors: Mauriac Françlois
Published: July 2007

Before I begin I have a confession to make: it was not I who chose the subject of this address. It was understood, at first, that I was to speak about Faith, a task quite beyond my power. Then, without asking me, the organiser of this gathering changed from this high theological theme to the simple question: ‘Is the Christian of this earth'?’ At first I was disconcerted by the apparent simplicity of this question which demands the obvious answer: ‘Of course the Christian is of this earth. We have only to look at ourselves’. But, this first reaction over, it occurred to me that those who chose the question had not mistaken its importance, and the urgency of an adequate answer which it requires of us. It brings us, in point of fact, into the very heart of our own personal history, and the history of the Church. To have to give my answer to this question in the presence of your Eminence is an honour of which I am well aware, an honour which would certainly alarm me if I did not know that here we are all of one family and that I stand beside the most indulgent and most understanding of fathers.

If I begin by considering myself, and start with my own case, as one always should, then it is only too true that I am of this earth, as also the Académie Française ‘is of this earth, the Légion d’Hon-neur is of this earth, the theatres, the big newspapers, the editors are of this earth, my house, my lands and my loves are of this earth.
German Catholicism Amidst the Ruins
Authors: Roegele Otto B.
Published: July 2007

The Church in the early days of 1945 was no longer the same as the Church of 1932, and we shall pay heavily for any failure on our part to recognise the importance of this fact. On the one hand the Church has suffered the loss of almost everything that is normally associated with the Faith as it is practised in the family and in the parish; its scaffolding and its organisations have almost all been destroyed. Nor can the Church in Germany be entirely exonerated from the accusation of having failed over long periods of recent history to provide the nation with spiritual leadership and from its guilt on this account. But there is another side to the picture. New life has been poured into the Church by the blood of its martyrs, it has been purified by a flow of superhuman suffering, and it has undergone an interior rejuvenation. A generous missionary spirit is animating many of its members who have rediscovered the meaning and the richness of the Christian community; it can claim a trained, if small, elite, joyously prepared for sacrifices, who have it in them to serve as leaven for the masses.

At the same time as the Third Reich was brought low, the philosophy which had inspired that Reich, its ersatz religion, also came to an end. Millions of people were ready to entrust whatever hope and faith they had left to the Church because it had proved itself wiser, mightier and more enduring than their idol, the State. Yet there should be no illusions about the nature of this return to Christianity.
Islam and the Holy See
Authors: Fairfax John Ramsay
Published: July 2007

Commenting on the recent presence in Cairo of the Egyptian Minister to the Holy See, The Times has twice alluded to the probability of some joint action by the Vatican and Islam with regard to the formation of a common front against the dangers of Communism. That some form of general rapprochement is under consideration can indeed hardly be doubted, since only last November the possibility of this was mentioned by the Holy See itself in an announcement made by the Congregation de Propaganda Fidei. This announcement was not, however, any new or sudden departure, but can be best understood if it is regarded merely as a further step in a process that plainly appears as steadily developing during recent years.

Since the Catholic and Islamic Faiths jointly account for a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants, the growth of friendly understanding between the leaders of both is of profound importance, and the details of such growth are of much significance. Islam itself has been described as a sounding-box on which an event occurring in one place immediately affects the whole. This is particularly true of Cairo, capital of Egypt, since political happenings there have speedy repercussions among the various Muslim states of the Arab League, whilst also influencing Islamic opinion as a whole, because Muslim students from all over the free world are numbered among those attending at the great University of Al Azhar, one of the main centres of Mohammedan religious thought and teaching today as it has been for ages past.
Infallibility: Stalinist and Papal
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E.
Published: July 2007

I have often wondered how Communists can make their faith acceptable to their reason. Granted that in most cases the emotional forces released by their mystique leave little room for reasoning, yet man is a rational being and ultimately everybody is driven to rationalise, in however haphazard a manner, and thus to justify to himself the faith that is in him.

Most difficult of all to rationalise must surely be the ultimate foundation on which the whole structure of the Communist party rests, I mean belief in Stalin’s infallibility. And let it not be said that to use the term ‘infallibility’ is an exaggeration. Members of the Communist party are expected to hand themselves over entirely to its cause, to consider its claims as overriding those of any human tie, any interest, any personal conviction, and to be ready to sacrifice for it all they have or are, even their life. And for them this life is the end: they cannot be buoyed up by the expectation of any future reward, they cannot esteem this short present life of theirs as nothing compared with a future eternal life. They are pledged to an oboedientia cadaveris which for them is not a mortification of the will which brings its rewards, quite irrespective of whether the order obeyed is in itself right or mistaken, whether it will or will not further the end aimed at. Success—earthly success—is, for the Christian, suspect; for the Communist it is the only possible criterion.

For the Communist to hand himself over body and soul (as we would say) to the directives of the party can therefore only seem justifiable to himself, because only by following them does he think that success can be achieved. And the directives of the party are in the last resort of course those that are validated by Stalin. The course steered by Communism may be a zig-zag: it is for Stalin to say when the ‘zig’ is right, and when the ‘zag’. He is always right, unquestionably, because infallibly right.
The Delinquent in Borstal
Authors: Owen Ralph
Published: July 2007

There are at any one time about three thousand boys and young men in the Borstals of this country. They vary in age from sixteen to twenty-three years of age (for though a youth must be under twenty-one when he is sentenced, lie can be nearly twenty-four when he leaves). They vary also considerably in the degree of their experience of crime. They are rarely first offenders: if a boy is sent to Borstal on his first appearance in Court, it signifies either that his offence was very grave, or that he had in fact been committing offences for some time before he was caught. Most have been on probation, often more than once; many have been to Home Office Approved Schools. They have almost certainly been in the habit of committing offences for not less than twelve or eighteen months, and may quite easily have been doing so for as much as ten or twelve years.

They come from all over England and Wales, and from all walks of life, though the vast proportion are from the big cities, and from the working-class homes of those cities. There are a small number from criminal homes, where father or mother are known to the police; but in most cases the families are sound enough, and no other member has been in trouble. The broken home produces its quota, the home, that is, where one parent is missing by reason of death, desertion, separation or divorce: but in view of the number of such homes nowadays this is not as significant as at first might appear. One would need to know the statistics of such homes as against normal homes, and the number of good, honest young men who had been brought up in them, before one could form a sound judgment.

Educationally they range from the boy not far removed from mental deficiency to the boy of superior intelligence, though the latter is only one or two per cent of the whole. Most fall under the head of ‘average’. Brains are not a distinguishing mark of the criminal classes.
The Church and the Colour Question
Authors: Synnott Finbar
Published: July 2007

The Catholic attitude to the colour question is necessarily I bound up with the doctrine of human origins. It is clear, from the recent Encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, that we cannot maintain that the names Adam and Eve in Genesis should be taken in a generic sense, and so must hold that all existing men are descended from only two first parents. It follows that such differences of race or colour as exist among men can only be regarded as partially fixed characteristics due to periods of different climatic, cultural and hereditary factors. These periods may have been very long, and the fixing of characteristics so deep rooted that it cannot quickly be changed. But all have developed from a common beginning and, if the differentiating factors were now neutralised, particularly if inter-marriage took place, colour distinctions and all other racial distinctions could disappear in a common future. Moreover it must always be remembered that these distinctions are, from the Catholic point of view, only in the less essential part of men. The ‘living soul’ that God breathed into Adam is similarly breathed into each individual by him, and is that which makes him to be a human person. Human persons who, in addition to this, have the bond of grace in the Mystical Body of Christ, have a greater unity, however far apart they may be in their physiological composition, than even blood-relations who have it not.
Man The Modern
Authors: Badenoch A. G.
Published: July 2007

Mind you, I don't mean to say that men and women in the world, around us are wallowing in mortal sin: they haven't got the constitution for it.—Mr Frank Sheed, .addressing the Boseo Conference. Edinburgh, 1947.

Mr Sheed (Man the Forgotten) and Mr Alexis Carrel (Man the Unknown) both chose to write a book about Man. The Catholic wrote didactically, emphasising the known truths about man and his divine origin and destiny. The scientist came very near in many ways to the Catholic position. Both entered a protest against the materialistic trends that would move man from his central and unique place in the universe and regard him simply as another species and subordinate his individuality to the laws that govern masses. These two authors, however, differed, as far as my present subject is concerned, in that the Catholic tended to look backwards while the scientist took cognisance of something that the other decided to ignore, the possibility that man is still undergoing evolutionary change.

Fundamentally, it goes without saying, man does not change. If the concept man differs from the man whom the psalmist sang of and Christ provided for and St Thomas considered in his cosmic and eternal setting then not only philosophy but also theology are challenged. Terms, above all the major term in all our syllogisms about man, have changed their meaning and we are wandering in the jungles of incertitude again.
Avicenna and Western Thought in the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

There was something indefinite about the effect of Avicenna on the West in the thirteenth century. Constant and pervasive as his influence was—from its beginnings in Spain in the twelfth century, through the confusion of its first contacts with the Cathedral Schools and the nascent University of Paris, down to Albert and Aquinas and Scotus—yet it nowhere crystallised into a definite set of doctrines accepted by a clearly marked group or school, as did, later in the century, the influence of Averroes. Some years ago Père De Vaux brought into circulation the term ‘Latin Avicennism’, parallel to the ‘Latin Averroism’ which Mandonnet had disclosed in his great work on Siger of Brabant. But Père De Vaux’s term, unlike Mandonnet’s, has not gained general acceptance; there is too much difference between the confused eclecticism at the turn of the century, studied by De Vaux, and the clear-cut, far more unified position of the Averroists of the 1270’s. More acceptable perhaps as a name for that earlier phase is Gilson’s ‘augustinisme avicennisant’, though this denoted originally only one aspect of it—the attempt to adapt an Avicennian theory of the ‘agent intellect’ to the Augustinian tradition of the human mind’s dependence upon illumination from God. And in any case one must not overstress the Augustinian element in the currents of thought that were running at the end of the twelfth century, and that largely derived from other sources—Boethius, for example, and Erigena.
Catholic Writing
Authors: Meath Gerard
Published: July 2007

Mr Evelyn Waugh once wrote, in a letter, I think, to a Catholic newspaper, that it is the business of the novelist to portray man ‘against a background of eternal values’. Few novelists and few critics have been sufficiently clear-headed to attempt such a succint definition. In making his point so neatly, Mr Waugh has disclosed the dilemma in which the modem poet and novelist find themselves, a dilemma which is fairly represented in this passage from Elizabeth Bowen’s own notes on novel-writing:

‘Great novelists write without pre-assumptions. They write from outside their own nationality, class or sex.

‘To write thus would be the ambition of any novelist who wishes to state poetic truth.

‘Does this mean he must have no angle, no moral viewpoint? No, surely, without these he would be (a) incapable of maintaining the conviction necessary for the novel; (b) incapable of lighting the characters, who to be seen at all must necessarily be seen in a moral light.

‘From what source then must the conviction come? and from what morality is to come the light to be cast on the characters? The conviction must come from certainty of the validity of the truth the novel is to present. The “moral light” has not, actually, a moral source; it is moral (morally powerful) according to the strength of its power of revelation. Revelation of what? The virtuousness or non-virtuousness of the action of the characters. What is virtue in action? Truth in action. Truth by what ruling? in relation to what? Truth by the ruling of and in relation to the inherent poetic truth that the novel states.’
The Adult Education Movement
Authors: O'Rahilly Alfred
Published: July 2007

I have been interested in University Extension since 1915. But it was only a little over four years ago that circumstances combined to make a new scheme possible. Its success has been so astonishing—and the movement is destined to grow apace—that a brief explanation may be of general interest. It is hardly necessary to stress the importance of adult education for workers —and indeed for employers. It is absurd to suppose that men and women can be adequately equipped for life and for their social responsibilities while they are attending a primary school or are still in their teens. It is equally absurd to suppose that education teases when the boy or girl finally leaves school; the most influential part of education or miseducation continues through press, radio, cinema, and social intercourse. In our arithmetical democracy the real power lies ultimately not with the highly educated but with the mass of men and women with the minimum of formal education. I am not referring to technical training such as tradesmen receive; I mean education of human persons as such, particularly as regards social principles and current ideologies. Even for Catholics the Sunday sermon is not enough, nor even does the sodality suffice. What is required is a further education which will enter fully into men’s daily secular lives and deal with their responsibilities as citizens, as workers, as trade unionists. I think that we have now made a real beginning in Ireland. There are already over three hundred adult students, in ten centres, attached to University College, Cork; and next year, if we could cope with them, these numbers could be doubled.
The Philosophical Predicament
Authors: Ryan Columba
Published: July 2007

Each of the books here under review testifies in its own way to the predicament in which philosophy finds itself. But ‘predicament’ has to be taken in a much wider sense than in the title of Professor Barnes’s book. For the predicament of philosophy is this: that the eminent who claim to speak its tongue (and there can be little doubt of the genuine eminence of such thinkers as Russell or Whitehead or Heidegger or Husserl or Maritain or Gilson, to name but several) speak languages not translated, and perhaps not translatable, to each other, about subjects not related, and perhaps not relatable, to each other; and by the very fact of engaging in the conversation of one the would-be philosopher appears to forfeit not merely the right but the very possibility of conversing intelligibly or interestingly with the others; nor (such is the predicament) is he permitted to make any preliminary enquiry before committing himself to one or other company, since to do so is, by the very fact of doing it, to commit himself, in the eyes of one or other group, to an investigation or to some facon de parler vicious and vitiating from the outset. So the contemporary positivist has no use for and is not interested in, and, for the most part, is quite ignorant of, the thought of the existentialist, and the existentialist of the positivist, and each of the thomist, and the thomist of them both. To read the books here reviewed together is to feel the disconcerting difficulties of this predicament.
The Sign of The Cross
Authors: Pepler Hilary
Published: July 2007

This article is concerned with gestures in religion not I with religion in gestures, with the action seen rather than with the prayer prayed as when the hand touches the forehead and completes the sign of the Cross upon the breast. It begins with the story of other actions in a large pageant or spectacle in order to give the setting to so small a gesture as the Sign of the Cross, because that contrast follows my own experience; I saw the Miracle many years before the Sign of the Cross ceased, with my conversion, to be merely a sign of superstition!

Reinhardt’s Miracle happened forty years ago in Olympia, London. It was a good ‘period’ piece, modem in production, medieval in inspiration, and may be described as an example of religious mime; although its theology was faulty and its actors hired only to reproduce the shape or picture of a medieval pageant, it was clearly intended to appeal to the religious instinct of the beholder.

Since that time (1910) pictures, pageant and mime have become more popular. Europe has suffered the upheaval of great wars. Most big cities have become cosmopolitan with large numbers of inhabitants ‘illiterate’ save in their own tongue and therefore avid for the common language of picture and spectacle—a fact which propagandists are not slow to appreciate.

Twenty years ago, a branch of the Moscow Olympiad of the Revolutionary Theatre (M.O.R.T.) in New York ‘where one of the strongest dramatic councils’ then existed (according to a Bulletin of the ‘International Workers’ Theatrical Olympiad’)
The Sculpture of Anthony Foster
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

Having rashly consented to the Editor’s request for an article on my brother I find myself doubly embarrassed; by having to write about my brother and about art. But die latter embarrassment is the worse. Being assured of his entire unconcern, I do not really mind discussing my brother in public. Indeed the situation has its advantages; it compels one, at least, to try to be objective. But to play at art-criticism is a game I do not relish.

Let me begin with the fact, plain to me, that my brother’s is a quiet talent. Decidedly not precocious as a boy, he had turned twenty before a bent for carving showed strongly in him. It came then with remarkable spontaneity; not chosen to suit a theory, still less a pose; hardly encouraged by others; not even, it seemed, the result of any specially urgent desire for self-expression. He never appeared tormented or oppressed by any abundance of feeling and imagery striving for an outlet. He was recollected rather than expansive. And so, though its range has widened, his art essentially remains; content with relatively few images. Yet he is drawing attention now, not only because (and this is his own chief conscious concern) his figures evince good craftsmanship, but also because of a quality in them, let me risk calling it a certain sober sweetness, which I shall try, I will not say to define, but to suggest, summarily, in these few remarks.

My brother learned his craft from Eric Gill, during seven years in the workshops at Pigotts or on tour with that master.
The Secrets of Wardour
Authors: Smith Naomi Royde
Published: July 2007

Wardour Old Castle was built in 1392 by John fifth Lord Lovell of Tichmarsh. During the Wars of the Roses it changed hands several times and, in 1499, was sold to Lord Willoughby de Broke whose grand-daughter re-sold it to a Cornish knight, Sir John Arundell of Lanheme. The family’, wrote John Francis, 12th Baron Arundell of Wardour in 1906, ‘has never ceased to be Catholic since mediaeval times’, and in 1552 Sir Thomas Arundell was executed because he belonged to the old religion. Queen Mary restored Wardour to Matthew Arundell, son of Sir Thomas, who in spite of his faith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. He modernised the castle and built new Tudor windows into the Norman walls. Matthew Arundell’s son, Thomas, went to the Wars in Hungary, captured a Turkish banner at Esztergoum and was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire. Queen Elizabeth objected to this Popish honour and Count Thomas was sent to prison. James I, who could never quite forget that he had been born a Catholic, set Thomas Arundell free and made him the first Baron Arundell of Wardour. His grandson, the third Lord Arundell, was granted a special licence by James II whereby he and his heir were established as Counts of the Empire for good.

By this time Wardour Castle, though still inhabitable, had during the Great Rebellion, undergone two seiges in the space of ten months. Lady Blanche Arundell, a god-daughter of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, had not the blood of the Plantagenets in her veins for nothing.
For the Month of May
Authors: Vann Gerald
Published: July 2007

The gulf today between body and spirit, between material things and the praise of God, is widening at a pace and to an extent never known before. It would be very easy to despair. It would be very easy to despair of this civilisation of ours; very easy to despair of the future of our race; very easy to feel that, so far from marching triumphantly forward to a golden age, we are sinking rapidly into an abyss; very easy to feel that man is doomed because all the physical side, the material side of his life and his world must continue to drag him down and degrade him till the heavens are closed to him. But no; it is just at this very moment that the voice of the Church comes to him like a challenge : we are on the contrary to shout aloud our belief in the dignity and holiness of material things; we are to affirm again our faith and our hope in the future of man’s flesh. The woman who stands in the heavens is the mother of men; and her glory is the guarantee of theirs.

That is why the definition of our Lady’s Assumption is far from having a purely domestic interest or importance. The greatest definitions have always been defensive: defensive of some more central truth which would otherwise be in danger. But the Church is not merely concerned with the guarding and defending of her own children; she is concerned with the guarding and defending of the whole world.
Three Sisters: Science, Philosophy and Faith
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

‘The medieval divines’, I was reading, ‘strenuously resisted the profane philosophers who seemed to threaten the most cherished traditions of Christianity; however, the revolutionaries of yesterday are the respectabilities of tomorrow, and the aristotelean schoolmen themselves were to be the first to bear the brunt of the attack from the new scientific humanists, who...’—It was not the book, nor yet the chapter on Faith, Philosophy and Science, one would choose for reading on a wet afternoon, still less after the brown Windsor, mock cutlets with vapourish potatoes and khaki cabbage, topped by stewed pears and custard—all the Bishop and Mermaid at Barminster can rise to in these days. But it had to be reviewed. Still, I was not sorry for the distraction when three women were shown into the lounge.

They had that look of perennial middle age, of making for fifty but not a year beyond, presented by women who have never thought of marrying and who have occupied themselves with a routine without anxiety about a wage. Despite their differences, for one was stocky and bustling, the second vaguely rounded and languid, and the third rather angular and restrained, there was a family resemblance between them, elusive yet unmistakeable: the set of eyebrow or cheekbone perhaps, or a similar air of faint and well-bred insolence, the hint that they could never find themselves in circumstances to ask for permission. They might have been in their own drawing-room; they glanced at me with incurious interest as though I were of a piece with the leatherette armchair in which I was sunk.
Roy De Maistre
Authors: Gibson William
Published: July 2007

One of the ablest critics of contemporary art has distinguished two groups among the more abstract types of painting today. The one, deriving through cubism from Cézanne and Seurat, is characterised by this critic as intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometric, rectilinear and classical. The other, deriving from Gauguin through fauvisme, and especially Matisse, he defines as instinctive and emotional, organic or biomorphic, curvilinear and romantic.

The opposition of these two groups is the modem equivalent of the old opposition of the classical and the romantic or, to formulate the distinction in still more general terms, it might be said to represent the eternal distinction between the draughtsman painter and the colourist. It is to the former that the art of Mr de Maistre belongs. He is the leading exponent in this country of the later developments of cubism. His conventions are personal to himself, being dictated by his personal experiences, but his point of view is analogous to that shewn in recent work by the continental artists who created cubism.

Like theirs, Mr de Maistre’s pictures retain a relationship to natural appearances absent from the most extreme forms of contemporary abstract art. Mr de Maistre takes for his theme the emotional experience provoked by some event, real or imaginary, which has struck his imagination. The ceremony of the coronation, for example, has inspired a picture which he has named The Procession. Form and colour are his means of expression, so that :he forms and colours of the scene which has inspired him are of necessity intimately associated with the emotions which it has provoked.
Divorce After Separation: The German Experience
Authors: Meyer Karl
Published: July 2007

The fact that a Bill proposing divorce after seven years’ separation has passed its second reading in the House of A Commons, and that a Royal Commission is to investigate Divorce Law in general, makes relevant some consideration of the existing German law which provides for divorce after a separation of only three years. As was said during the House of Commons debate, once granted the principle of separation as grounds for divorce, even a shorter time limit might be adopted; and, since the German law provides the evidence of the working of such a law over a period of some thirteen years, it should be possible, from German experience, to consider the similar British proposals and their likely effects.

It is significant that the German law which permitted divorce by the objective fact of separation, in addition to divorce on the grounds of adultery or misconduct, came into force when Hitler had reached the climax of his career in 1938. The Hitler law had for its background theories of race and population: the man who was physically able to produce nordic children must not be hindered by the matrimonial vows which he once gave to a now ageing woman no longer capable of bearing children. One needs just to mention this primitive idea of the sense of matrimony to understand its full bearing. It was very characteristic that the upstarts of the Nazi party—the Kreisleiters and Gauleiters—were the first to make use of this law; their womenfolk who had carried the burden of the past were no longer young and sophisticated enough to fit in with the ‘glory’ of the new class:
Art and its Integration
Authors: Chute Desmond
Published: July 2007

The last thing we are ever told about anything is who made it. Naturally, for what do makers matter in a world of ‘minders’?

The author of The Gothic World advances a half-hearted plea that a like technical indifference may explain medieval anonymity. He persuaded us more when in his former volume Gothic England he set out to deny the allegation altogether and to rid ‘le miracle occidental’ itself of ‘the plague of anonymity’. (Will no one rid us of the plague of notoriety?) In sober fact ‘from the period 1250-1550 a vast number of names survive. It would be no exaggeration to say that the men responsible for all the major developments of art in this period are already known to us by name.’

Mr John Harvey sets himself to answer four questions: ‘What, How, Where and When was Gothic Art?’ He has especially enthralling things to tell us about the ‘How’ and not least about medieval craftsmen, trassours and devysours, their lodges and guilds, their gear and skill. Coming pat at the moment when the swinging pendulum of controversy has come to rest at a point of equilibrium, his researches should greatly help to establish once and for all a true idea of the master-builders and of the vivid world of medieval craftsmen.

For Mr Harvey the master-mason is neither, according to the extreme folk-art view, just one of the lads’, nor, according to the opposite extreme, the irresponsible ‘artist’ he has been since the Renaissance.
The Christian Critic and The Cinema
Authors: Lockhart Freda Bruce
Published: July 2007

Discussion of the impact of Christian criticism on the cinema would be premature. Both are too new. ‘The art of the film is not yet formed’, Herbert Read wrote in his essay Towards a Film Aesthetic (helpfully reprinted in The Cinema 1951: Penguin Books; 2s. 6d.); ‘and to theorise about something which is not yet fully in being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion.’ Without fixed principles, tradition or terms of reference, critics, like other members of the film body, are still making up the rules of their job as they go along doing it; and among them the Christian critic is a late starter. Conscientious Catholics for too many years have passed the cinema by, neglecting, either from fear of its evil or scorn of its stupidity, to learn the alphabet of the language of moving pictures.

Pope Pius XI saw the folly and danger of this attitude already in 1936. But the Catholic community responded slowly to the challenge of his encyclical on films, Vigilanti Cura. Only now is it possible to discern even the rough outlines of a body of Catholic film criticism. Last April, Christian film critics from all parts of the world gathered in Lucerne for a study conference arranged by the O.C.I.C. (Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma). I keenly regret having been prevented at the last moment by illness from being present; for this was a first concerted attempt to define the principles and functions of Christian film criticism.
Some Recent Contributions to Psychology
Authors: White Victor
Published: July 2007

The word ‘Psychology’ has become a capacious umbrella which covers a baffling variety of literature. ‘Contributions to Psychology’ covers, a still wider, indeed an almost limitless, range. Nihil humanum a me alienum: there can be no pre-established boundaries to a study or practice, which is concerned with the sources, motives and patterns of the totality of human experience and behaviour. A biography, a novel, a drama, even a painting or a quartet, often reveals depths of the human psyche unattained by works on medical or academic psychology. But these also have immeasurably widened their scope in recent decades. The hypothesis of primitive unconscious layers (whether or not accounted for in terms of a ‘collective unconscious’), which find expression in myths, ritual, and social patterns, has made ethnology, mythology, folk-lore, comparative religion, history, pre-history and countless other fields of research, all tributary in various ways to psychology, while psychology in its turn has given to them a new stimulus and orientation. The breakdown of the post-Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter, with its restriction of psychology to the former, has also added increasingly to the psychologists’ concern with the biological and physical sciences, while the treatment of psychological phenomena in dynamic rather than purely mechanistic terms has opened new horizons to the theoretical psychologist which are as yet too indistinct to be accurately defined.
Saunders Lewis
Authors: Foster Idris
Published: July 2007

In ‘A note on Welsh Education’ which he contributed to Blackfriars for March, 1948, Mr Saunders Lewis has described how, in the nineteenth century, ‘nonconformity became the very nationhood of Wales’. ‘Its entire cultural life’, he wrote, ‘was centred in the chapel. . . . Religion was three-quarters of life; it triumphed in poverty and over poverty and ennobled the bitter, ill-requited toil on land, in quarry, mine ... The education of this people was rooted in its religious and social life: its content was its evangel, its medium the Welsh language. While the society lived and kept its unity, these two were safe. During the past sixty years, however, that unity has gradually been breaking down; the ‘ideal and authority’ of the society have been destroyed. ‘Middle-class, worldly ideals, the impact of a wider, modern culture, conquered the religious unity of the Methodist peasantry.’

It would be difficult to disagree with that analysis. Wales is now going through the final stages of the disintegration of its nonconformist nationhood. Mr Saunders Lewis is in many ways the most influential personality in Wales today. The names of the contributors to a recent volume on his work are a clear proof of the extent of this influence. The editor, a Congregationalist minister, reminds us that Mr Lewis has enthusiastic disciples, ardent admirers, loyal friends—and enemies. For at least a quarter of a century he has been, to quote the words of the seventeenth-century writer Morgan Llwyd, ‘dirgelwch i rai i’w ddeall ac i eraill i w watwar, he has indeed been a disturbing mystery to many and to object of myopic scorn to others.
The Tradition of The Maries in Provence
Authors: Girdlestone C. M.
Published: July 2007

The frequency of the name Martha in Provence from the eighth century onwards, as well as its rarity elsewhere in the West, is an indirect but significant indication of the cult of the saint who first bore it in those parts. Moreover, two charters of 964 and 967, now in the archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône, mention a terra of St Martha near Tarascon.

It is also alleged that there exist no other traditions concerning these saintly personages (Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary Magdalen, Mary Salome, and Mary the mother of James), and no other church has ever claimed them. This has been contradicted by the original opponent of the tradition, the seventeenth-century scholar Launoy, and more recently by Mgr Duchesne. The latter brought forward a number of texts to show that Mary Magdalen, regarded as distinct from Mary of Bethany, had her tomb in Ephesus in the sixth century, and that Lazarus, whom certain traditions also connect with Ephesus, had a tomb in Lamaca, then called Citium, in Cyprus, in the ninth century, and that in 899 his body and that of Mary Magdalen were transferred to Constantinople by Leo VI.